Cass McCombs Hates Me.

Cass McCombs - Not the Way

Mellow, ya know. It's humid and hot here in Montreal, one of those days where pre-fixing "hot" with "oppressively" makes complete sense. I still want a coffee, though. Here are a couple of tracks to tide you over. If you live near a lake, use it!

Dead Meadow - Stacy's Song

Aaron Maté, my running drunken debating partner on the Israel-Palestine issue, has his hands in another political battle right now... He's organized a Bring Back Dylan petition and is looking for your support to pressure the higher-ups at one of Montreal's two English-language alternative weeklies, The Hour, to allow Dylan to return to writing about music. Considering the current state of their music coverage, (that is, dismal) they might as well give him a shot. Maté knows more about the twisted inner-workings of the cabalistic group that is currently mismanaging and running that publication into the ground, so I don't feel qualified to do more than maintain the same standards of objectivity that have won this blog world-wide recognition and call for the immediate re-instatement of Mr. Dylan Young. With benefits, too! How can you raise kids on that pittance, O'Meara? SIGN HERE

Chrome - TV As Eyes.mp3

Chrome's great.

The unashamed enthusiasm that T.dotters show for music that comes about kinda close to getting it right and then squandering it all in a fit of redundant revivalism n' , that is, the lack of bad conscience they seem to exhibit has always been a bit of a bone of contention between me and the Torontonians. Not that they're aware of it, of course, but nonetheless, I wage the battle in my own mind, paranoid and frantic and concerned. I mean, hey, what will I be like at 32?

Anyway, a little taste of that (not a lot, mind you) can be found here - maybe it's good, maybe it's terrible, I'm not judging, just sayin'.

Are You Familiar Blog

Jetfighter!

There's a rather brief piece on Vancouver's The Book of Lists (real website here) available on the Terminal City magazine website. The EP on Global Symphonic has just been released, I may post a song in the next little while if I can find the damn copy of it I lost a couple of months back. The Montreal Mirror's resident Anglophile, Lauren Carpenter gave it a positive nod in their most recent issue.

And to people who've been searching for Daddy's Hands info to no avail, I've heard a rumour to the effect that Global Symphobic is planning on releasing something by the now Vancouver-based group, and another label might be dropping a 7" at some point. I'll try to confirm that as soon as possible... (Anybody compiling a Dave Wanger box-set? I've got that Moral Decay tape!)

UPDATEAccording to Sean from Global, they aren't putting out anything by Daddy's Hands. Alas!

Warrior Magazine Launch Party

The loveable psychonauts at Warrior Magazine have another issue out, their fourth, and they're launching it tonight with a party in Montreal at the SKOL Gallery (located at #314 - 372 Ste. Catherine Ouest)... Christopher Taylor, who apparently busted his arm up last night on the Victoria ex-pats annual Tour De Beer (bikes and binge drinking, lovely combination) and spends some time plucking strings in AIDS Wolf has a piece in it, and I've even got a terrible interview with the tempermental, but immensely talented Cass McCombs and a brief paragraph about Oneida. It's free! For BC dwellers, the mag's only available at Zulu in Vancouver, though. That needs to be rectified, given the amount of ethneogenic explorer beardos that live in Strathcona, though.

Attendees are encouraged to bring 3 records which will be filed for later playing by resident DJ Mark Slutsky (who helped fill the dancefloor at last night's St. Jean Baptiste night shindig at the Mile End Cultural centre, along with Ghislain Poirer (sp?) and that Sixtoo character).

John Lennon - Remember.mp3 from Plastic Ono Band
The New Pornographers - Jackie, Dressed in Cobras
Here's a track for the Bejarians amongst the Goldkixx readers - from the just released New Pornographers album Twin Cinema, the Destroyer original Jackie, Dressed in Cobras primed up. Listening to this is the aural equivalent of watching an ex-girlfriend work the pole in a strip-club - you recognize that body, but geez, she looks gross and tarty. Get off the stage, Jackie!

Glass Candy: Life After Sundown

Glass Candy: Life After Sundown

This sort of thing has been to death, right? Chic-esque basslines with disco beats and what not, post-punk approach wed to dancefloor shuffles and all that. But being Glass Candy means doing it before a lot of people did it, continuing to do it, and doing it a hell of a lot better. There's something slightly late-70s Yoko Ono about Ida's vocals on this track, and the echo-boxed saxophone and synthesizer bits (fuck ethereal swoop, noodly leads!)... Anyways, I just got this track, and I'm deeply, deeply impressed with it...

I don't know much about the status of Glass Candy right now - a couple of years ago in Victoria I did a show for them and a couple of friends and I formed a band for the occasion, and I missed them the last time they made it to Montreal (their drum machine apparently broke halfway through that tour, putting them in a pretty perilous situation), but hopefully they'll be out this way again sometime soon.

Glass Candy and the Shattered Theatre - Life After Sundown.mp3

Traces. Tracks.

Satisfact Demonstration

from their self-titled album.



Satisfact - Demonstration.mp3

Satisfact was a pre-Mocket band fronted by cherub-cheeked Matt Steinke, who went on to self-made robot-programming with Tassy Zimmerman in Octant. Modest Mouse-r Jeremiah Green handled the drums on this, their debut album, and Dave Schneider of Love As Laughter joined for following albums, The Third Meeting At The Third Counter and The Unwanted Sounds of Satisfact. This is the second track on the album, an upbeat track with those heavily affected vocals, familiar Juno-synth stabs, and great bass work.

Now this stuff seems a bit old-hat - new-wave revival stuff, but when Satisfact and Radio Berlin started, people weren't as keen on Gang of 4 re-issues as they would be a couple years later, and certainly not very much in the Pacific Northwest.

Radio Berlin Aftermath from Glass

Radio Berlin - Aftermath.mp3

I'm sure I've written about Radio Berlin before, Vancouver's oft-o'erlooked new-wave band. They're still around, though members are involved in a
variety of other projects - Jack plays with Primes, Chris is in dream-poppers Book of Lists, Lindsay's a busy, busy filmmaker, and ex-FuckMeUSAer Brad's in Bakelite. Previous members of the group have included Joshua Wells, who's now in Black Mountain, and Warren Hill, who's living in Montreal, DJs old soul and R&b and found a little acetate record that's piqued a bit of interest. The old Black Halos drummer had a brief stint with the group as well.

This is the sixth track from the album, and one of the strongest, starting out strong with Frey's recognizable bass-playing, a memorable synth-lead, and Frey's lyrics all melancholic and regret-filled - far more humanity and less posturing than most of the bands who crowd the genre. And damn, listen to Wells' drumming!

Radio Berlin deserves a lot more substantial of a summary than I'm up to delivering right now, but as they're on hiatus (re-tooling the band, this has happened to great effect before - usually prior to each album's release), I'll put it on hold and come back to assess what their previous releases in light of what they've come up with now. Maybe some of those early demo tape tracks? (Keeners might note that frequent Goldkixx comment-leaver Steven Balogh's mug can be spotted on the back of the Glass album booklet...)


Some gossip: Flaxxen-haired Norwegian sugah-pop sensation Annie will be doing a couple of select DJ gigs in the States (Chicago, Boston, LA, and 2 in New York) to promote her new record Anniemal, which just dropped today. Rumours abound that she might show up in Montreal later this summer, performing, with a backing band...

Weekend Mixed Bag

It's finally enjoyable to be outside in this god-damned city, so I don't have the patience necessary to sit around in front of a computer and type out a proper blog (next week, though), so here's a mixed-bag of mp3s for your weekend listening pleasure. BBQ something, designin' man Jay Delmarr is pushing the backalley BBQ as the hottest summer BBQ trend, hot on the heels of Orchid burgers.

House of Love - Salome.mp3

My girlfriend and I hit up a vernissage at the Skol Gallery earlier this week, and while waiting around for the French theorist to finish delivering his paper, we popped into Mars... I picked up a copy of the self-titled House of Love album for a decent price. I'd listened to the album over and over in Vancouver, but it was Duckworth's copy, so it was great to find a copy of it. This songs a particular favourite.

Sarah Vaughn - The Smiling Hour (Abre Alas).mp3

Last night I came upon some people preparing for a garage sale and managed to snag 15 or so great albums (including Dylan, CSNY, bizarrely a Mike Oldfield album, a tonne of Nina Simone, the Big Top Pee Wee soundtrack, etc.), and one of them was a 1979 Sarah Vaughn recorded called Copacabana that she had recorded in Brazil. The chorus is great! (Factory Records' Kalima did a cover of this that I'm trying to track down, too.)

Nina Simone - In The Morning.mp3

Nina Simone had a magnificent relationship to headwear (particulary wraps and turbans) that must be revived by young women today, and rescued from the gritty and grubby hippies. I found this LP last night, too. The song reminds me of Donovan's Colours. "That's the time, that's the time, I love the best!" wailed the dimunitive little Scot, and that's all good, but Christ, Nina Simone!


NEXT UP: Soft Machine, Etta James, maybe a return to the current decade?

I Have Been... And Returned!

Silver Apples I Have Known Love (1998) & Spectrum/Silver Apples Whirlwind (1998)

New York's Silver Apples duo (made up of drummer Danny Taylor and synth manipulator Simeon Coxe), composers of space-travel soundtracks and unapologetic champions of the banjo. Named after a line in Yeats' Song of the Wandering Angus, the group changed and set the standard by which. There would be no Suicide without The Silver Apples, and without Suicide, there would be no, well, you get the idea... (Seattle's Chromatics covered Program on their Plaster Hounds record (Windy & Carl covered it, too), and numerous groups have done the same, such as Meat Beat Manifesto, John Sims, Jessamine and Spectrum (a collaboration), but not as many as those who've pilfered from them.

Their first album, recorded in a cramped studio for Kapp Records by themselves, with no knowledge of recording technologies, and a producer who bowed out, citing possible mono as a reason for abstaining from the process, they recorded Oscillations, which led to: adding member Eileen Lewellen, an aborted in-store jam session with Steve Winwood (a frightened Simeon, not much of a virtuoso, ran out of the store claiming he was hung-over and going to throw up), sharing bills with The 1910 Fruitgum Company, Blue Cheer, Norman Mailer, Allan Ginsberg, The Fugs, and Tiny Tim, staying with The Dead at their San Fransiscan house (according to Simeon, the Dead didn't do much but smoke dope and noodle on their guitars), the airline Pan-Am suing them for $100,000 for the cover images on their second album, Contact, and having NY mayor Lindsay commissioning them to play and perform a song for the 1969 lunar landing viewing in Central Park. After Kapp Records went belly-up, Simeon returned to Alabama in a sailboat, sold some ice-cream, worked in television and advertising and returned to poetry and painting.

After a couple of one-off gigs throughout the 90s, a transformed and revitalized line-up reprised the whirring and looping oscillations that befuddled as many listeners then as it surprised and enchanted now, with Xian Hawkins (he now records as Sybarite, and has released an album with 4ad) and Michael Lerner flushing out Simeon's unique vision. Simeon dueted with Sonic Boom's (Spacemen 3) Spectrum in Boston and New York, performing the Apple's A Pox On You, which led to a later collaboration with S. Boom, the Apples/Spectrum split A Lake of Teardrops album, released on Space Age Recordings.

Spectrum/Silver
Apples - Whirlwind(1998).mp3

A third album, recorded at the Record Plant while the Jimi Hendrix Experience was recording was lost and disposed of, (probably sitting in someone's garage, waiting for Warren Hill to ferret it out), but a chance encounter with Danny Taylor revealed that he had a copy of those last recording sessions, and it was released in 1998 as Garden. Taylor rejoined the group, but touring was cut short in 1999 after a messy hit-and-run accident in 1999 that left Simeon with a broken neck, ending the Apples' return prematurely. To compound this, sadly, Danny Taylor died in New York on March 10th of this year.

The below track is from their 1998 return Beacon, a re-working of I Have Known Love, written by Eileen Lewellen.

Silver Apples - I Have Known Love (1998).mp3

Unique Cosmos of Sound

Can, Unknown Studio Fragment, 1973

My friend Victoria slags Can off as the quintessential boy band - the appeal of the group being mostly to males, like most other obscure German bands of a certain period of time, or (realistically), any period of time. I can see the argument, it's essentially true, but that's a terrible, terrible reason to dismiss what has to be the best German-Japanese collaboration since World War II!

The date on this song indicates that it probably would have been recorded during the sessions for Future Days, the final Can album to feature Damo Suzuki's vocals, at their own Inner Space studios. The great thing about a Can track like this - jamming, lengthy, is that essentially, one would simply clean up the production, and it could easily appear on a majority of the group's albums. This is what I imagined, before I was introduced to the grim reality of the situation, the Grateful Dead would sound like - 10 minute long songs with psyched-and-fuzzed out guitars, reverbed vocals, LSD freak-out, right? Unfortunately, the Grateful Dead played limp, hayseed boogie rock that only very confused American teenagers (and very stoned) born many years past the eclipse of a youth culture they idolize and pine for could love, and their best song was their only chart-topper, and embarassment to all true deadheads, Touch of Grey. Thurston Moore speaks their praises, though. I have a theory that, given all that time spent in New York at Marc Jacobs' shows and gallery openings, he needed a fairly large stick to weild against the preening and affected elite, and what better than an indigenous boogie-blues ensemble, terrible enough to withstand ironic detournement?

Can - Unknown Studio Fragment 1973.mp3

UP NEXT That new Eno album Another Day On Earth has leaked, we'll take a look!