If I wasn’t stranded on an island at the time, I would have made every effort to get to Wrongbar to catch Les Savy Fav’s NXNE performance. Of course, being on dry land wouldn’t have increased the odds that much, as the venue was filled instantly. Presumeably, the lucky few who got in were treated to at least a few tracks from Root for Ruin, Les Savy Fav’s latest album. While 2007’s excellent Let’s Stay Friends featured guests spots for everyone from Fred Armisen to Emily Haines, Root for Ruin remains an in-house affair. This back to basics approach lets the band members’ individual talents shine through.
To the uninitiated, Tim Harrington would appear to be a strange, balding, and bearded fat man. To everyone else, he’s one of the more engaging and eccentric frontmen in modern rock. While there is a notable visual component to his madness, his enthusiasm shines through on record, particularly on album standout ‘High and Unhinged’. While songs about gods from a forgotten age are less common here, Root for Ruin continues to deal with aging and altered paradigms, as on ‘Excess Energies’. This world-weary attitude recurs throughout the album.
Root for Ruin rocks. It’s not quite as exuberant or forceful as Let’s Stay Friends was, but it shows that Les Savy Fav has a softer side to their typically hard-edged post-punk leanings, and that they still like to party, even when a little bummed out.
Les Savy Fav – High and Unhinged
Les Savy Fav – Let’s Get Out of Here
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Photograph by Caleb Beyers
As the newest New Pornographer, Kathryn Calder faces a special hell of a challenge in dropping her solo debut, Are You My Mother?. It never was going to be easy to stand out among the sea of side project jewels that emerge with welcome regularity from the individual members of that West Coast indie pop institution. A.C. Newman’s The Slow Wonder and Neko Case’s Middle Cyclone, to pick a couple, have earned sales figures and critical fawning that set the bar in the stratosphere for any solo New Pornographer project, but especially so for Calder.
Hired by the New Pornographers to replace Case’s yowling vocals on tour when her exploding solo career often left her otherwise engaged, Calder missed out on some of the band’s most productive years in the first half of the 00s, though she does appear on each album since 2005’s Twin Cinema. What’s more, she’s Mr. Newman’s niece, and you couldn’t fault her for her being a little intimidated at the prospect of having her own project stacked up against those of her uncle and the indie Goddess Queen she was hired to understudy for — not to mention the catalogue of terminally hummable New Pornographer hits that has built up over the last decade largely without her.
It’s probably more fair to compare this project to her own, earlier work than that of her current supergroup mates — to ask how far she’s come and whether she can make it on her own and all those lovely questions. In this she succeeds to a reasonable degree. Are You My Mother? is possessive, intimate, warm and cold by turns. It measures up to the better work she’s done with New Pornographer label/tour mates Immaculate Machine. It offers hope that she’s not doomed to be “the girl in the New Pornographers who isn’t Neko Case”, at least not forever.
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Photograph by David Black
There’s something about the summer that makes me moody. For that reason, I’ve been listening to a lot of “deep” music lately, or at least music that attempts to be deep. Eventually, it gets tiresome to hear affected poets grasping at straws to make their longwinded similes function with musical backing. Sometimes, pop music is too complicated for its own good, or capabilities.
In contrast, Bethany Cosentino of Best Coast doesn’t write deep lyrics. She pens one-sided conversations about heartbreak, happiness, and laziness in straightforward American youth prose. A sample from ‘Bratty B’: “I wanna see you, but I know I can’t / ‘cause you’re not home, you’re never home / I can’t remember why you left and why you took back all your stuff.” No extended metaphors, no literary devices, no choruses with more than 20 words in total, no rhymes in this example, even. And that’s what makes it so great.
The feminist in me wants to deride the simplicity of the lyrics; surely, us females think about more complex topics than how boys make us unhappy sometimes and happy at others. Also, there is repetitive use of crazy/lazy and friend/end to rhyme. But on ‘Goodbye’, Cosentino sums up adolescent confusion and dependent love: “My highs are high / my lows are low / and I don’t know which way to go / I don’t love you / and I don’t hate you / I don’t know how I feel.” It may not be cleverly expressed, but her words are so blunt that they are relatable. Her simplistic words speak to the Twitter masses. Maybe that makes her the Mark Twain of Generation Y? That’s certainly taking it too far, but it just goes to show, lyricists: if you don’t have much to say, don’t try to make it flowery. Say it, then go smoke some pot and chill with your cat.
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Photograph by Giulia Mazza
Hailing from the burgeoning music scene in Calgary, Alberta, Women’s 2008 self-titled debut impressively harmonized tunes the likes of the Velvet Underground, Pavement, and the Zombies on a boombox like outback wilderness to deliver a well-received album. Recorded with fellow Calgary native Chad VanGaalen, its lo-fi quality was in part cultivated by an interesting blend of recording spaces, apparently ranging from a crawlspace to a culvert. Patrick Flegel, Matt Flegel, Chris Reimer, and Michael Wallace have returned with much of the same bravado to hammer out their second album, Public Strain, out September 28 on Flemish Eye. While their first album smashed nostalgic good vibrations with a ravaging brashness, Public Strain takes a few steps away from this juxtaposition, focusing on a heavier, darker sound.
Women often shift tempo to create dynamic highs and lows within individual songs. ‘China Steps’ opens with urgency then mellows into a gentle close. ‘Drag Open’ delivers similarly; a crash of guitars burst out of the gate and trot to the finish. Contrasting these more aggressive moments are the softer ‘Penal Colony’ and the minimalist ‘Bells’, which blends an electronic sea with distant operatic church bells. The Beach Boys vibe from the debut is not lost on Public Strain, as evidenced by ‘Eyesore’, a smooth tapestry of 1960s Venice Beach with a Canadian roughness, a trend appearing in several young bands.
Those unfamiliar with Women’s style may have to listen with patience as the harsher guitars often overpower the vocals, requiring several replays to catch the lyrics. While Public Strain is more cohesive than Women, the album as a whole will still be difficult for the average radio listener to appreciate. Nevertheless, it is a solid round two for the group and will be perking a few ears very soon.
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Photograph by Eric Kayne
Perhaps as a result of the build-up and massive amounts of hype, I approached my first listen of The Suburbs with a bit of caution and cynicism. Right around ‘Deep Blue’, after questioning why a chess-playing computer was being name-dropped, I was feeling a little unsure of the album. Whereas Funeral and Neon Bible strived for an anthemic sound, The Suburbs takes a more low-key approach. While not as immediate as its predecessors, The Suburbs is likely the band’s most cohesive album to date. Going beyond the mere mention of the suburbs in nearly every song, the recurring themes of growing up and looking back on your childhood prove remarkably resonant on subsequent listens. Learning to drive is referred to several times. It’s one of the first true examples of independence from our youth, and even if the end result is just driving around and around and around, as vocalized by Win Butler on ‘Month of May’, that small taste of freedom brings back pleasant memories.
The record is largely based on Win and Will Butler’s childhood growing up in Texas, and though it acts as a criticism of suburbia and fond remembrance of the past, the latter is favoured, even idealized. The cliché “You can’t go home again” comes to mind. ‘We Used to Wait’ serves as a commentary on the fast-paced modern world, offering letter-writing as something we’ve lost to technology. Taking the metaphor even further, how many people waited until the release date to listen to this album? Coming to grips with the modern world is another recurring theme, notably the modern kids of ‘Rococo’. ‘Sprawl I’ and ‘Sprawl II’ take aim at the encompassing problem of urban sprawl. As Régine asks for darkness, I have to smirk, as there’s a RONA down the street from me that completely flushes out the night sky.
Arcade Fire – We Used to Wait
Arcade Fire – Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)
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