The Sad Tax

RPM TIME...
New name THE SAD TAX it's the new thing I'm doing. It's a lot like the last thing only a little less.
62 minutes, pretty experimental, maybe a bit more focused on mood and a bit more song based then SUPERGOD!. I think of it as a transitional album, I guess. What I'm transitioning to I'll leave that up to your imagination.
It's listed on bandcamp as "name your price" which means you can pay nothing for it if you are inclined to being a cheap bastard. I would recommend downloading it from bandcamp because when you stream it off the web player you miss out on how awesome the track transitions and segues work and each track has it's own special artwork. And I learned some basics on Blender to do the album art and I have to say without a doubt it's my favourite part of the project.
Anyway, giver a listen. I think it works really well as an album listening experience as opposed to an individual track experience. So clear an hour off your schedule and wrap your ears around The Sad Tax "Red Pearl Mountain"!

SUPERGOD! THE MOVIE

Alright folks, after almost a year of work I'm ready to début this sonnavabitch to the world in Youtube form! This Christmas I spread it around as a DVD (which makes a lovely present for a loved one and can be easily purchased through my Bandcamp page here) and had a couple of small screenings but now it's time for the internet to get it's chance at it.

The movie is a strange little experimental thing I got the idea for last January while I was musing about what I was going to do for the RPM Challenge. I wanted to do something more ambitious. So I decided to actually do it and throw myself into this album length video project I've had in the back of my head for a long time, for my RPM project. I figured I would film most of it during January and do the music and editing in February. After about a week into February I realized that I was never in million years going to be making that deadline. So instead of killing myself to get a really shitty film done by the end of the month I decided to concentrate on making the soundtrack album first and then try to make the film as best I could afterwards.

When figuring out the plot and concept of the film there were three things I had to keep in mind, for one I knew it had to be something that I could do all by myself or otherwise it wouldn't get done (anyone who has experience organizing volunteers knows this to be true). For 2, it can't cost any money (I'm poor). And for 3, the story has to be something that can be expressed without dialogue because I am not an actor and I am not a fan of my speaking voice. While I was in Hava Java's on my Christmas visit last year I had some inspiration while recalling a short British film from the 60's I'd seen a few months earlier (I've been trying to find the name of it for the last 4 hours without any luck, if after my description you think you know what it's called please tell me). The film was about an intellectual and sceptical man on a sabbatical retreat to a coastal village who after an argument with a local resident about the nature of the universe goes on a walk and finds an ancient looking flute thing in an exposed grave site on a cliffs edge, and after picking it up and trying to play it without thinking much of it, is then followed by an apparition of some sort that in all a flurry appears in his room at night (which ends the film). I thought something like could be evocative and could be done by one person essentially and not need much or any dialogue. The perfect plot! But I had to screw around with it.

The movie was definitely a learning project. Pretty much every scene of the film involves some sort of fairly complicated effect that I had to figure out.from scratch. The movie was definitely influenced by (and I'm going to make the bad decision of comparing the works of proper masters to my cheap and shitty student film) the work of Svankmajer, Lynch, Tarkovsky and Maddin and it features many loving shots of food, random music videos, vaseline lenses, triptychs, moody drone pieces and a drawing that is either 1.21 billion miles across or 1 millionth the size of an atom depending on how you view it (it starts about 34 minutes in if you're curious). If you are curious about how the drawing sequence was accomplished then check out my entry on the Vicar Ouroboros video as it's pretty much the same method only slightly more elaborate and using 32 panels instead of 9.

Anyway, I'm pretty damn happy with the film and I guess the challenge now is to figure out what I can do with it since it's finished. I'm gonna try getting it into some festivals (possibly as a much shorter edited down version) and see what else can happen with it, but I'm the type of creative dude who as soon as I finish a piece I don't want anything more to do with it and only want to move onto the next project. And I gotta lotta ideas for new projects I wanna jump on. So I hope you all like it and don't just watch the first few minutes and move on to some other youtube piece of crap. You can buy a copy of the DVD or download the Score from me from my bandcamp page here. Enjoy!
Cheers!

Here Stands Your Lover - Another new video by me!

I have a weird way or procrastinating where if there's a project that should be taking priority over other things (let's say it's a short film project you have about 25% finished and promised everyone would be done by May) and I find myself not wanting to work on it for some reason I end up doing every other project I can think of. I guess that's not really a weird way of procrastinating, more like the definition of normal procrastination. Anyway, I made this video instead of working on my movie (or finding a job or doing my taxes) it's a dark and moody performance piece for a dark and moody song from my still new "Let's Celebrate With Blood" album. This came together a lot easier then I thought it would. 

My original idea was to do a really fuzzy experimental piece. It would start with a simple lip sync that I would edit it into a sorta finished piece, I would then point the camera at the monitor and re-film the initial edit and then dump the re-filmed version onto the computer and then film that version and repeat the process x amount of times. I was then gonna layer all the re-filmed videos on top of each other until it made an interesting mess of computer screen textures and hazey feedback, but when I tried it I realized it wasn't gonna give me the effect I wanted. So I went with just one of the layers (it was re-filmed four times) which I placed over top the original lip sync and carefully moved it around and scaled it to fit the composition from scene to scene. Since the song is about a car crash and a drunk driver I then layered in some footage I had lying around that I took from the window of a Megabus ride I took from Toronto a couple months ago. All in all I think it's one of the better looking videos I've made which is pretty good considering all it took was a camera, a flashlight, a dark room and bottle of red face paint. 

I've been spreading around the youtube version but I think I'll put the vimeo version up on the blog since I think the vimeo compressors did a nicer job on it and youtube's view counters seem to be all fucked up and not giving me accurate numbers lately. It's hard to get people to watch your videos when they think that nobody is watching your videos. People are dicks like that. Anyway, enough of that petty bickering, here's the video, enjoy! 

Vicar - Ouroboros (How I made the video)

When Tyler Lovell asked me to do the album art for the next Vicar album I had to say yes and not just because he used an image of mine for his last album but because Vicar is one of the most interesting bands to come out of St John's ever (IMHO) I want to contribute what I can. When he told me the concept for the album I got even more excited. 

Ouroboros is an album designed to be played on random and repeat, it is one long 6 minute song and forty five 16 second "chunks" each chunk is a different chord that segues into the next chunk seamlessly, listening to it on random mode makes the song it plays different each time but it never feels "random". The albums theme is infinity so it only fits that you listen to it on repeat until you are sick of it, it's so hypnotic I ended up listening to it for about three hours the first time I tried it. 

When discussing the album art Tyler said he wanted something that evoked an infinite void, while sketching out ideas for it I came up with something, but soon realized that it would work best as a video piece as opposed to a simple image, but it was compelling enough (to me anyway) that I wanted to try it. Here, just watch the video I made to see what I came up with:   

The video ended up being a lot trickier then I thought as I had to figure out the process while I went along. The process for making the cover image was pretty simple though (simple but lengthy). First I started with a simple ink drawing of my interpretation of a black hole (you can see it at the very top left hand corner of the image below) I then took the drawing and scanned it into the computer. Then I took the scanned image and printed it off at 60% the original size. I then took the smaller printed version of the image and drew around the outside of it until I get to the outer edge of the paper (this is the drawing directly beneath the first drawing on the picture below). I then take this drawing and scan it into the computer and print it off at 60% the original size. I repeated this process four times until I got a shape I was satisfied with and the rich density of thin thin lines towards the centre that I like. This is the final cover image. I then went back to the first drawing and blow up the tiny hole at the very center of it until I can print it off at a decent size. I then take my sharpie and fill in the hole a little bit (this is the drawing at the top right hand side of the image below). I then scan this in and enlarge it by 60% and print it off again and repeat. I do this a couple times and then take the final cover image and shrink it down and place it in the center of the hole and print it off. I then take my pen and fill in the spaces between the inner edges of the hole and outer edges of the final image and scan it in. I then go into photoshop and start crafting the master image.
For the master image that I use in the video I took a very high resolution scan of the cover image and blow it until it's about 56000 pixels wide (any larger then this and my computer freezes up, I find this out the hard way). I then take the scan of the drawing that came before that one (it would be the second one up from the bottom of the first column on the picture below) and blow it up and tweak it until it fits in where it's supposed to in the last drawing. I keep doing this process until it reaches a point where I have to shrink down the scans to fit it in, at that point I realize I would be sacrificing resolution and I start a new image from an appropriate cropping of the master image where I continue this process of blowing up drawings and fitting them into one another.  

The final video uses three master images that are around 50000 pixels wide. Making them this large allows me to zoom in on them without losing any resolution or have it get pixel-y. This process might sound kinda complicated but it wasn't that hard, but getting everything to work in the video editing programs was a whole other ordeal in itself, and that proved to be the hair pulling experience of this project. I won't get into that since I've bored you enough as it is and I tried so many things in After Effects and Premiere Pro that I can't remember how exactly it all worked. But anyway, I'm pretty happy with the final product, I can't find any other examples of drawings mimicking fractal zooms anywhere on the internet and I think it matches up with the atmosphere Tyler's sounds pretty well. I think I'm gonna try this process again as I know more or less how to do this now and I think I could make it much deeper and more bizarre. I'd love to see it projected up on a wall really huge somewhere.
Suppose I should go work on my movie now.
Give Vicar some friggin' money, they deserve it!

SUPERGOD!!!!!! The Motion Picture Soundtrack: Rainbows, Piss & Meat

Well another February has came and went and that can only mean that now the deluge RPM Challenge albums will now start raining down from the heavens like hastily made indie manna. Here this years entry from me "SUPERGOD!!!!!! The Motion Picture Soundtrack: Rainbows, Piss & Meat". As you can tell from the title this is a soundtrack album to a movie I am currently working on. The original plan was to complete a short movie in the month of January, or at least get enough done so that I could start scoring, and then do a score during RPM month. This plan failed... It's not that I didn't get enough done to get started, I had about 15 minutes or so past the editing stage, I just realized fairly quickly that if I pushed myself to get this movie and score done by the end of February I'd just end up with a totally unwatchable movie with a shitty score. As much as it would've been awesome to pass in a finished DVD this year instead of a lowly CDR I didn't think it would worth it if it ended up looking like shit. So I swallowed my pride and just worked on getting some decent music down all the while thinking "cinematic" in my head. About 10 minutes or so of this album is actually scored to some scenes, which is trickier then I thought, but I'll leave it up to you to figure out what parts will make it into the movie or not.
This is without a doubt the most minimal SUPERGOD! album I've made yet, my whole focus this last year of music production has been trying to get more from less, while some parts are quite layered (there's about 20 guitars at the end of "Training bra stapled to a prison shed") most tracks have around 4 or 5 instruments instead of 20 or 30. I also took this project as an opportunity to try out some new software, I was sorta forced into this decision as I discovered that the software I've been using was giving me latency issues on this new computer I'm using with the fancier soundcard. This new program (I'm using REAPER by the way) took awhile to get used to but ended up winning me over with some nice features (or at least nicer features then my outdated version of Adobe Audition had) and it allowed me to come up with the loop studies on tracks 7, 9 and 16 that I'm quite pleased with.
I'm pretty happy with this years RPM, some songs like "A cage match with benefits" and "Don't listen too carefully to what the gunman says" got the atmosphere I was going for just right. Of course this wouldn't be an RPM without a few concessions: If I had more time I would've probably changed the vocal or pretty much all the lyrics on "Training Bra..." I'm not very satisfied with the transition between "The world is smiling now that I have no legs" and "A cage fight with benefits" even though I worked on it forever (the bandcamp player fucks up all the transitions anyway by adding the pause between tracks)  and the album as a whole could use more RAWK (although it has a bit here and there) and a bit more silliness. But y'know, deadlines make things happen.
I can't wait to hear what everybody else came up with this year!

Next New Video! "Hope is Fleeting"

I didn't lie, here is the next video off "Let's Celebrate With Blood" for a song called "Hope is Fleeting". I worked on this thing on and off for a few months, I wanted to try my hand at some animation. For some reason. I'd frigged around with the animation tool in photoshop a few times in my "Crutches" video a couple years ago but this is the first time I used it to animate something frame by frame instead just selectively adding filters and crap to some footage. That being said; this is really basic animation stuff, I pretty much used the smudge tool exclusively for 90%  of it. But I think it's got an interesting atmosphere to it. I was watching a lot of old NFB classics when I got the idea to start this project and I'd like to think some of it rubbed off on me a bit. "Hope is Fleeting" is kinda a weird track and it's not at all what you would call a break away hit or even slightly indicative of what the rest of the album sounds like, but I made the  visuals first and none of the other songs came even close to synchronizing as well as that one. Anyway, here it is.


I know I said I didn't lie at the beginning of this post, but I did lie a bit last week when I said three videos in a row. Due to some shitty personal shit going on in my life right now I don't think I'm going to have a video ready for next week. In fact I don't think you'll see a new video from me until the end of February when I debut my dvd that I will be filming and scoring for the rpm challenge next year. So look forward to that, when that happens.
I hope you enjoy my video, spread the fucker around if you got a chance, I need some viral action working for me.

New Video! "These Hands" from my new album "Let's Celebrate With Blood"

The album is at the printers right now getting all printed up, I got a CD release show booked at CBTG's for January 1st and I'll somehow get my band, who haven't played together in almost a year, on the stage playing with me. I am excited!

So to hopefully get some other people excited I'm gonna release a music video every Monday for the next three weeks until I have to leave Kingston and do some Christmas stuff.

This here is the first of the three, a video I made for the song "These Hands" off the upcoming album.  The video is the first time I tried any kind of lip syncing, I thought it would be interesting to take all the different takes and layer them over top one another and then find an effect that would make the differences between them really pop out and become dynamic. The end product is a little ridiculous and my Bono poses might give people the wrong idea about me (or maybe the right idea!) but I think it does a pretty good job bringing out the mood of the song.

Anyway, next weeks video is way stranger, and loads more labour intensive. Stayed tuned!

Vicar - Moment

If you're looking for proof that I'm biased in my blog content you might want to pay attention here since that's my painting on the cover of Vicar's new album "Moment". And to be fair I am biased as all hell, but I also don't do album art for bands I don't think are absolutely awesome. Vicar are absolutely awesome.
The brain child of Tyler Lovell bass player for one of my favorite bands going AE Bridger, the guys are real  young but they know what they're doing. Vicar are easily the most experimental and sonically confrontational band that can also call themselves "rock" on the east coast. The sound is DENSE, the drums and vocals march like the gestapo and the guitars perform fine needlework on your brain. Listening to the album is like watching a Max Ernst collage violently destroy a car park. There is not much tranquility on this release, Orwellian death marches are broken up only by the voice of Tron-like demon gods operatically pummeling a theatrical Einstürzende Neubauten chorus into your chest plate. Look at me, the hyperbole is spilling from me like tropical geyser. Anyway, it's real good. 
It got nominated on The Scope's long list for the Atlantis music prize, it's not gonna win, but give this album some friggin' attention anyway.   


Giv'er a listen in the player below.

Hunting Winter

Before I start flooding this blog with vile self promotional nonsense I should talk about some of the cool stuff my friends have been doing since I went on blogging hiatus.

Justin Mahoney is one of my oldest friends/most talented musicians I know. He's the first of a few of my Corner Brook friends who went from playing BRUTAL technical death metal in highschool and naturally transitioned into jazz and then of course to country music. For the last few years he's been working as a genuine, fer reals professional musician in Toronto backing up mainstream acts such as Brian Byrne and Tara Oram while also working the underground in acts like North Amorica, The Evelyn Room and The Coastguard. Over the years we have been bugging the crap out of him to get on the go recording his own material and this year he is relenting in a big way.

Under the moniker "Hunting Winter" Justin has come up with a haunting and dramatic short player with bare boned but exquisite guitar playing and aching close knit vocal harmonies. The songs express a certain kind of sorrow with a simple poetic understatement that doesn't beat you over the head with any trite sentimentality. If you are the type who needs a list of similar artists to compare to before you listen to anything, I'd say you wouldn't be too far off comparing Hunting Winter to Bon Iver mixed with a bit of the more polite John Frusciante. The songs are a more direct and a little less "precious" then a Bon Iver or Fleet Foxes but have a similar direction towards the transcendental despite the homespun quality of the recordings.

Anyway, give the EP a listen to yourself in the player down below if you're curious. And if you like it GO BUY IT.

ZOMBIE BLOG COMING BACK FROM THE DEAD SOON!! as soon as my new album is done...

I mean it! I am gonna start blogging again (eventually), and I won't stop for it awhile. I will do this as soon as I am finally finished this friggin' bloody album, which I have been slaving over since January of this year. It is just about at the stage where I can no longer make it sound any better without scrapping the whole thing and starting over again. I've been so deeply entrenched in the production of it I've basically forsaken all other aspects of my life such as this blog and my reviews for The Scope. It's gonna be friggin' good though. At least I hope it is, I listen to all the songs about 4 times a day and tweaked and re-tweaked them to the point that I have absolutely no idea if they are any good or not. Sometimes when I listen to it at night I fucking LOVE it and sometimes when I listen to it in the morning I fucking LOATHE it. I've heard other people talk about how they can only hear the flaws in their own work when they listen to it, and I definitely have a bit of that on the go (not that other people won't find flaws in it, they are plenty of obvious ones just littered all over the place). But I have got to get it done soon as I have a CD release show booked at CBTG's for January 1st (more details on that to come as I get shit organized).
The album will be under the name of my band "Patrick Canning & the Suffering Mothers" and will possibly be titled "Let's Celebrate, With Blood!". It will be 65 minutes long with 14 tracks which a lot of people will say is stupid because audiences barely have patience for a 4 song EP nowadays. But fuck those people, I still like my albums the way they're supposed to be: long and meandering with a ton of filler. You can listen to it in installments if you are too lazy or impatient to sit through the whole thing, but hopefully that shouldn't be a problem.
I've already made two fancy shmancy videos that are sure to shock ya eyelids but they won't get uploaded until I have the thing ready to sell. One of them is a fully hand animated thing I made frame by frame in photoshop that I think worked out pretty good, but you have to tell me what you think of it when I finally get it revealed.
Anyway, I gotta finish up and start the promotion train engine up to full throttle until I inevitably run it off the tracks in a few months. Make sure you got me on your RSS feed as new non-self-promotional posts are coming at you in the very near future.

Review Round Up! ~ Puddle of Mudd, Bon Jovi, Slayer, Ke$ha, The Disengagement, Bob Dylan, am/fm dreams, Pathological Lovers, Dead Language,

Whoops! I haven't done this in awhile. Here's all The Scope music reviews I've done since the Last review Round-up. I'm starting with this review of Puddle Of Mudd's horrible new album: "Volume 4: Songs In The Key of Love and Hate". This was rejected by The Scope for being too obscene or something. Whatever! Pansies! Onward the reviews!

Puddle of Mudd
Volume 4: Songs In The Key of Love and Hate
Oh God... So it's come to this? This is what mainstream modern rock music has come to? This despicable 36 minute audio tumor? Puddle of Mudd have sold 7 million CDs! In this day and age that's equivalent to around 70 million 1980's albums. Their horrible song "Blurry" is one of the most played songs on the radio of the last 10 years! Wes Scantlin's voice is like shitting sandpaper. Listening to his strained nasal mewl spew out poetry like "Let’s get it over and just get naked with sweat dripping down your little back" is enough to make your genitals recede all the way back into your body. This album is like a hundred screaming colonoscopies in a building on fire. It's like having a catheter inserted in you and ripped out again over and over and over by a very angry orangutan, or maybe a very angry Fred Durst.

Bon Jovi
The Circle
Jon Bon Jovi is here to help you America! His grand ageing carapace keeps his hand on his heart (which is swaddled in the American flag) while he Rides into town on the back of a majestic unicorn soaring through the sky on clouds formed from the purest, gossamer nebula of cheese. Jon Bon Jovi woke up from his giant platinum bed in the sky and through the power of his magic douche goggles he saw that America was in trouble. Instantly he knew that only his retarded over produced power balladry could save the day for all the soccer moms out there in desperate need of his ridiculous, grandiloquent, throat-ripping choruses. With anthems like "Work for the Working man", "We weren't born to follow" and "Brokenpromiseland" he clearly is at heart a true working class hero and clearly not a vapid, ultra-processed, piece of auditory vomit with a thousand dollar hairdo and cadre of image consultants.

The Disengagement
Masters in Escapism
You ignore the west coast long enough and eventually they try to sneak some awesome albums by you without you noticing. The sophomore release "Masters in Escapism" from Stephenville native band The Disengagement is a tasty slab of guitar driven rock with a distinct 90's indie throwback edge to it. The album is busy with the sounds densely layered with great inventive guitar lines and rambunctious drum work throughout. The songs are full and rich but are thankfully left natural and unpolished with the just right level of murk present to ease your head in pillow of guitar fuzz as you listen through your headphones. If I had to be a boring music reviewer and compare them to other bands I'd say their kinda reminiscent to a poppier sounding Built to Spill with some "Washing Machine" era Sonic Youth thrown in for good measure. A thoroughly enjoyable hard plastic disc from out of left field.

Slayer
World Painted Blood
What's wrong with prepositions? Why couldn't they call the album "World Painted in Blood"? All their other album titles make sense grammatically. But I digress. Slayer, if they didn't invent the genre of thrash metal they certainly perfected it 23 years ago with 1986's Reign in Blood and their fans have pretty much looked disapprovingly at everything else they've put out since then. But metal fans are mostly assholes when you get down to it. Slayer's signature sound and quality haven't really changed at all in the 9 albums since "Reign" and when your catalogue is that consistent or in other words totally interchangeable, fans will always value the first album they got into above the others. Pretty much every Slayer fan starts out with "Reign in Blood". So is World Painted Blood heavy? Hell yes it's fuckin' Slayer! Is it identical to every other album they've put out? Hell yes it's fuckin' Slayer!

Bob Dylan
Christmas In The Heart
I'm pretty sure Bob Dylan could record himself raping a llama for 45 minutes and a certain ageing section of the population would hail it as "an amazing display of evocative and confrontational songwriting prowess". I know it's not really kosher to be overly critical of charity albums (all profits go to help the World Food Programme which sounds like a fine charity) and I know you gotta set the bar lower when criticizing Christmas records and I've had a long history of barely tolerating mister Dylan; but honestly, was anybody (not obsessed with irony) really begging for 45 minutes of Bob gargling his intestines through 15 ancient, cornball Christmas standards? Everything on the album is so syrupy and over produced Dylan's presence is like throwing a dying horse into thedebutante's ball. Hearing Dylan sing Hark the Herald Angels Sing is like listening to a pit-bull choke on a bag of marbles, it's totally hilarious.

am/fm dreams
Whistle and Sing
With this being their third full length release this year I don't think anyone will call am/fm dreams a lazy band anytime soon. Maybe lazy in terms of gigging and promotion but certainly not in terms of writing and recording. On Whistle and Sing am/fm dreams change stylistic gears again turning away from the retro grunge of last February's "Plaid Album" and the synth-pop of January's "Suburban Teenage Riot". This time around they opt for a stripped down, strictly acoustic sound with 17 short and sweet, banjo and harmony rich tunes all concerned with mortality and matters domestic. The recording and production is as tasteful and rich as always with delicately balanced arrangements that are simple but inventive and really help to highlight the songwriting which is some of their strongest yet. And Just think, the February RPM is just 2 months away, that ain't much time before they kick your ass with another full length!
listen to it here.

Pathological Lovers
Calling All Favours
The Pathological Lovers' debut album Calling All Favours is an hour long propulsive blast of high energy rock ambition. Jody Richardson with his miracle pipes (voted best local rockstar two years in a row don'tcha know) sounds as passionate and powerful as he ever has and the production sparkles and snaps as it should. The thing is The Lovers seem to be suffering from a bit of ADD nowadays. Very few songs are played straight. Big left turns, sudden change ups and complicated wordplay are paramount throughout a lot of the album and can make it a bit of a challenge to absorb at times. It would risk being too much to take if it weren't for the fact that everyone involved is givin' it their all and playing at the height of their game. But when Jody hits on the vocal hooks and keeps everything as direct as possible like on songs "Wednesday", "Change is Good" or the beautiful closer "Parking lot in life" the album really soars.

Dead Language
s/t
Local pickers and crooners the Dead Language's debut self-titled album proves a fine display of their spare and delicate arrangements and a showcase for singer/songwriter Katie Baggs rich and enchanting vocals. The songs have a direct rustic simplicity to them with a surprising amount of restraint shown in the guitar, banjo, mandolin and violin combinations with no one player dominating the spotlight, choosing instead to subtly fill in the empty space with their understated pluckings while Katie's voice seduces you. Obvious standouts are the ballads "Breath by Breath" and the album opener "The Dance" which are just total heart rippers. This is a CD that falls into the rare list of albums where the hidden end track is one of the most compelling on the record, the sprightly and energetic instrumental would've been better placed somewhere in the second half where the pace starts to drag. All in all a truly lovely set of ballads and lullabies.

Ke$ha
Animal
Am I a 14 year old girl?
Not the last time I checked.
I have no business listening to this album. Mainstream pop music has always been run by an evil consortium of Hollywood Svengali, Freemasons and Swedish engineers but now in 2010 it's reached the point where I feel like I'm reviewing a Reebok sneaker. No there's definitely more honest artistic expression in a typical sneaker then what I hear here. The Milli Vanilli scandal would never have happened nowadays, why bother hiring nameless studio singers to cover up for your VH1 drone's total lack of talent when you can just drench a shit ton of autotune over every worthless syllable they drunkenly mutter? I guess all the stupid Hot Topic kids who grew up watching "The Hills" or "Paris Hiltons New BFF" looking for role models need something to reaffirm their worthless lives before the real world inevitably crushes their dreams. I've always hated teenagers and I always will.

On Christmas Day The World Ended

Last year I started a tradition of writing the a Christmas song and making a video for it just before Christmas day. This year's song "On Christmas Day The World Ended" is my second Christmas classic, it is destined to be played in preschool Christmas pagents and Christian Bookstores across the nation for decades to come.
If you're so inclined you can buy the tracks from my Bandcamp page Here.

Merry Christmas! Thanks for your support. Cheers for the New Year!


Oh and here's last years Christmas video "Everyone Cries at Christmas" if you were at all curious..

Review Round-up - Creed, Do Make Say Think, Lightening Bolt, YSP!WSD!, Hellothisisalex, Daniel Johnston, The Idlers, The Flaming Lips, Chris Kirby

It's that time again. Here is a round up of all the CD reviews I've done for the Scope over the last couple of months. Enjoy.


Creed
Full Circle
Has it really been 8 years? Wow. It's seems like just yesterday when Creed were the biggest, shittiest, 5th generation grudge band dominating the radio with their tasteless, overblown, chest-thumping power ballads. But it's been 8 years since Creed put out their last album "Weathered" and left the modern rock world with nothing but Nickelback to fill their void. Now *Finally* they have reunited and delivered "Full Circle" which is "probably" their best album (I wasn't curious enough to actually re-listen to any of the previous ones) with Creed giving a more concentrated effort to appear to be "Edgy" and "Metal" (for the first couple of songs at least) and not at all like ageing, washed up bags of sadness. Scott Stapp has the lyrical subtlety of a sledgehammer and a sac of kittens. Regardless if it's Godsmack or R Kelly they're trying to emulate, Creed are the auditory equivalent of a glass of piss warm Red Bull and a bag of Styrofoam peanuts.

Do Make Say Think
The Other Truths
Is it a sign of the times / the failing music industry when more and more modern recording artists seem intent on making movies or at least music that sounds cinematic nowadays? This could always be said of Toronto's premiere post-rock (what an awful genre term! let's never use it again) instrumentalists Do Make Say Think whose long form instrumentals always seem to evoke a strong visual synesthetic sense. The Other Truths is a detour from the direction of their previous album "You, You're a History in Rust" which had them stripped back and recording in a barn to capture a more "authentic" band sound. But this time around they are very much in a studio artist mode densely packing arrangements with orchestras and thickly woven guitars. The four 10+ minute tracks (each titled cheekily "Do" "Make" "Say" and "Think") ebb and flow epically but with much more vigour and exciting dynamics then usual. The final product is a finely crafted and rich audio layer cake from experts in their prime.

Lightning Bolt
Earthly Delights
For the last few years there seems to been a weird trend in hipster music to purposefully make music sound like shit. I'm not necessarily saying purposefully making shitty "music" but to make the music of highly regarded and popular acts, who should have access to decent recording gear, sound like it was recorded with the built in microphone from a 1989 Magnasonic boombox and mastered by a living compression pedal. No band more clearly defines this aesthetic then Rhode Island's Lightning Bolt. On their latest album the drum and bass duo turn up the psychedelics, dumb down the riffs and turn the oppressive wall of relentless static way the hell up. The duo's modus operandi has always been total sensory overload and although the album occasionally slows down the onslaught of blast beats and nonsense riffage to fine druggy sludge, on the whole it is near a Merzbow level of audio carnage clearly not meant for those of a milder disposition.

You Say Party! We Say Die!
XXXX
Most people seem to focus on the "Party" part of Vancouver indie/disco/punk band You Say Party! We Say Die! and not the "Die" part. Through all the upbeat energetic club beats and sing/shouting histrionics there is a pronounced dark and gloomy streak. Always catergorized as a band best appreciated live rather then on record, YSP!WSD!'s new album XXXX does a much better job of conveying them as more then just a pile of drunken scenesters. The songs have a deeper maturity then you would expect and work best when mining the lonely nightclub atmospheres. I will say this though: Hipsters nowadays have got to get off the cocaine and stop trying to sound like Berlin or the Psychedelic Furs, the tacky vintage casio tones were a fun novelty four years ago but you can't live in a Degrassi Junior High episode your entire life, even though many people would clearly love that..

Hellothisisalex
The Accidentals
Hellothisisalex is an electronic duo formerly of Corner Brook fame who now live in dirty old Ontario. The duo's new album "The Accidentals" is a light fizzy concoction of 8bit analogue beeps and bloops with playful jaunty melodies. Many of the song titles reference Newfoundland locales such as "On the shore of Walden Pond" or "Blackpoll Party at Lobster cove Head" but the tunes are more prone to elicit images of Konami games rather then lobster pots or heritage sites, although the fog horn sample on "The Paper House" does set a bit of a nautical scene. The retro Gameboy tones are kept pretty dry throughout and the bass deficient buzz of the keys can grate the ears after awhile, especially to those of us who are sick of the ubiquitous 80's Nintendo nostalgia music circuit ala Dan Deacon, but there is enough enthusiasm and invention present on this short offering to make it worth the while.

Daniel Johnston
Is and Always Was
Some people will try to make you feel bad for enjoying Daniel Johnston. While it is true that a large part (if not most) of his fame comes from stories related to his mental illness, this attitude that by listening to him and buying his albums we are taking advantage of his disorder and belittling him or making fun of him somehow is misguided to say the least. Yes, part of Daniel's appeal through the years is in his unusual delivery and his bent ways of writing pop songs that do show evidence that he is damaged in ways that most of us aren't, but that's only part of the equation. The new album is a lushly produced and arranged collection of pop gems that truly emphasizes Daniel's gifts for satisfying melodies and raw heartwarming sincerity while providing the needed variety that has escaped most of his early home recordings. "Is and Always was" is the most accessible and lovely album of Daniel's career.

Idlers
Keep Out!
I've always found the phenomenon of dance bands with overtly political messages in their songs a little bizarre. You'll never find an audience less concerned with the lyrics then an audience at a disco, and you'll never find a singer with a harder job of being heard then the singer for an 11 piece dance band. Is it the fact that people are less likely to be paying attention that gives the frontman more gumption to throw in controversial political statements? Is the idea to subliminally influence the dancers while they're distracted? The idlers new album "Keep Out!" seems to be circumventing these questions by being surprisingly laid back and stripped down and putting Mark Wilson's voice front and center in the mix. Compared to their high energy live shows which are all bombast and over-stimulation Keep Out! is a refreshingly mellower change of pace and the songs seem more like songs rather then musical backing for Wilson's politics. A groovy little album that wants to give a message but not at the cost of a good tune.

The Flaming Lips
Embryonic
The strongest release from the Lips since 1999's The Soft Bulletin, Embryonic finds the Flaming Lips moving away from the overblown grandiosity and fursuit and fake blood shtick that's been their bread and butter for the past 10 years and finds them returning to their experimental roots with some inspired results. There is scarcely a single radio friendly moment anywhere on the sprawling two disc set and the buzzed out confrontational production aesthetic seems to be designed solely for the purpose of dissuading casual listeners. The songs take the form of elaborate jam sessions with an unmistakable love of 70's era German prog with less of the Beach Boy's on space acid pop the Lips have become known for. Wayne Coyne pulls back the melodrama in his voice and the band lock into fuzzy hypnotic grooves with more aggression and menace then they've shown in decades. Not all the 18 tracks are classics but the band hasn't sounded so much like "a band" in ages and the album just gets richer and richer with repeated listens.

Chris Kirby
Vampire Weekend
Chris Kirby is a musician who wears his influences on his sleeve. Drawing a straight line to classic blue eyed Philly soul Kirby's new album Vampire Weekend, with the able help of producer Gordie Johnston of Big Sugar achieves a lush vintage sound with big punchy arrangements, sweet horn sections and a tight well tuned (and this time more keyboard driven) backing band. The songs have a lot of bounce and playfulness to them but if your looking for any kind of lyrical depth or original sentiments look elsewhere. Most of the tracks on Vampire Weekend are of the classic "you-no-good-two-timing-heart-breaker" variety but Kirby's voice and demeanour is way too musical theatre precious and affable to sell any kind of emotional turmoil, not that you'd want much turmoil on a mostly agreeable, breezy pop cabaret album like this. The album has a rich well developed sound but the material is ultimately too light for it's own good.

Halloween Spooktacular!!!

Hello poor neglected blog, how are you doin'?

If any of you people out there are confused and still wondering what to do with your Halloween festivities, might I suggest you check out The Levee for a delightful selection of bands such as AE Bridger, Local Tough and Ye-Yeti (plus special guests?).

I did the poster for it, first time in a long time since I've done a show poster, I think it turned out pretty good. Should be fun fun fun fun fun fun fun times.

Go To The Show!

Review Round-up - Amelia Curran, Gwar, Mount Eerie, Spring Breakup, Our Lady Peace, Yo La Tengo, Wax Mannequin, Hidden Cameras, Vicar

I realized that I haven't updated the review section of the blog in a couple of months. So here are all the reviews that I wrote for The Scope since July. Enjoy my godless opinions on other peoples music. Cheers



Gwar
Lust in Space
Recently while watching the captivating Youtube infomercial for "The Tenth Annual Gathering of The Juggalos" (look it up you will not be disappointed!) I came across the shocking news that GWAR Still Exist! The last time I had listened to or thought about Gwar was 1997 when at a house party my friend Trevor borrowed my "Scumdogs of The Universe" cassette tape and never gave it back. Somewhere in my subconsciousness my mind erased all mention of Gwar from of this traumatic experience. But Gwar never ever stopped and with the newly released "Lust in Space" marks their 15Th official album. So has anything changed about Gwar in the near twenty years since 1990's hit album Scumdogs? Hell no.. The prosthetic and polystyrene covered masters of party thrash metal and juvenile gross out humor still pound out the power violence and scatology and dick joke obsessed lyrics with much more ferocity and freshness then I ever remembered them having. So can one go back in time this many years later to when one wanted nothing more then to be sprayed with fake blood and pummeled with foam hammers? No not really. But 14 year old boys will always exist and so will Gwar. Amen.

Amelia Curran
Hunter, Hunter
On her much anticipated new album "Hunter, Hunter" Amelia Curran delivers the goods with her trademark rich sonorous voice and it's cool detached restraint. Restraint is the key word with this album, the arrangements are pulled back to tasteful swells of gently plucked banjos, slow muted trombones, accordions (etc) all making sure to never get in the way Amelia's voice and guitar. Even on the liveliest songs like the Tom Waits inspired jazzy romp "The Dozens" Amelia reigns it in with a smooth composure. While the album is designed for mellow evenings and I enjoy the laid back atmosphere; I feel it needs more of a kick in the pants here and there and seems to drag out a lot in the first half, but the album's standout tracks like "Mad World, Outlive me" and "Loves Last regard" are truly lovely and are the best examples of Amelia's craft. Amelia's tales of bad or doomed relationships wear a strong Leonard Cohen influence placing an emphasis more with metaphor and esoteric imagery rather then spelling out a narrative directly and as a result the album is a bit hard to absorb on the first listen and best rewards those who are willing to give it some repeated turns and it is an album that well deserves it.

Spring Breakup
s/t
Kim Barlow and Mathias Kom are Spring Breakup, a songwriting duo created during a Yukon winter devoted entirely to songs about the endings of relationships. The songs run the emotional gamut of true sorrow and despair, detached indifference, to almost happy and upbeat. The pair of them make ideal collaborators. Both share a sharp sardonic wit, a gift for intricate wordplay and simple but engaging melodies. The album is a bare-boned affair stripped down to just their Ukulele and Banjo and two voices, Mathias' deep baritone well complimenting Kim's rustic croon. The duo keep the strumming light and slow with just the minimum amount of bounce needed to keep the songs from devolving into depressing dirges when the duo croon sentiments like "you said we were Ginger and Fred, we were Sonny and Cher, but it was more like Tina and Ike then Rogers and Astaire". But while the sentiment may be dour at times the album is breezy and entertaining with a palpable charm. Their genuine chemistry when the two of them trade lines like "you're so beautiful I could stareat you all day/ you look strangely like me/ and it turns me on" make The Spring Breakup ultimately much more of a beautiful marriage then an ugly pro-longed divorce.

Mount Eerie
Wind's Poem
Wind's Poem first four minutes twelve seconds opens it's gates to the listener with a punishing rising tsunami wall of impenetrable guitar squall and blast beats coated in a thick lo-fi crust that Phil Elverum's fragile mumbling voice floats over, just barely audible against the violent feedback. On his latest album the prolific songwriter Phil Elverum has finally shed the a lot of the gentle and overly precious balladeering that had gotten a bit ubiquitous and stale for the last few years. "Wind's Poem" has Elverum finding that captivating balance between raw experimental ambition and listening accessibility giving Mt Eerie their strongest album in many years. The pace throughout is glacially slow with styles varying from dark minimal, ambient meditations to several brutally grinding tracks like "The Hidden Stone" and "The Mouth of the Sky" that straddle the line halfway between underground Black Metal and Kevin Sheilds style shoegaze. As always Phil's ear for arrangements is utterly exquisite as his lyrics mine complex narratives on the darkness of nature. Wind's Poem is a rich and uncompromising album that is not intended for casual unadventurous listeners.

Our Lady Peace
Burn Burn
It seems in recent years Raine Maida; leader singer of Canrock staples Our Lady Peace has been taking vocal coaching to tame the adnoidal fury of his yelping weasel voice into a more mid-range modern-rock radio friendly croon. This is unfortunate. While in the early days listening to him sing was akin to piercing your septum with a burning drill bit, at least it made the band a bit distinctive. When their old songs would come on the radio you would say "Oh! it's that heinous singer from Our Lady Peace" nowadays he's been watered down to almost sub-Chris Martin boring, you don't know if you're listening to Our Lady Peace or some new Rob Thomas track. The songs on "Burn Burn" are so middle of the road, so painfully uninspired that desite all the uplifting lyrics about how "the sky is blue" and how "we all have wings" you'd just wish someone would shove him down a flight of stairs just to get some kind of interesting response from him (just for the record I'm not advocating anybody doing that).

Yo La Tengo
Popular Songs
For the last few years New Jersey critic darlings Yo La Tengo have crossed the line from "introspective and hypnotic" to plain boring. The first half of their new album "Popular Songs" doesn't help much to rectify this. Apart from a few inspired moments like the upbeat rocker "Nothing to Hide" and the stately ballad "I'm on my way" (which is as beautiful as anything they've ever made) the trademark drowsy vocals of Ira Kaplan and Georgia Hubley seem to be struggling to keep awake more then usual. While nothing on the first half is particularly offensive you could call all of it album filler to lead up to the last three songs which make a 35 minute suite of everything Yo La Tengo have ever been good at. The last three songs move from 9 minutes of pure trance inducing fuzzed out grooving to 11 minutes of delicious ambient rumination to 15 minutes of feedback soaked free form guitar histrionics. You could call it a great mini-album within a bloated major release.

Wax Mannequin
Saxon
In a world so filled to the brim, over-saturated and sick to death with acoustic guitar playing singer/songwriter dudes, it's hard to find a character as original as Hamilton Ontario's Wax Mannequin. The gruff voiced, rose covered balladeer's new album "Saxon" isn't much of a departure from his previous albums, maybe slightly sparser and more restrained then usual but it is an further refinement of his Tom Waits psychedelic folk by way of Foreigner sound. Every song bounces to a strange jaunty beat as he skillfully crafts very melodramatic verses around greedy volcano gods, oil barons and an apparent obsession for drowning. The album suffers a bit from a draggy middle section despite the hidden Cyndi Lauper quotes. The song "Treading Water" is a little too aptly titled maybe. But in the final third Wax Mannequin really shines in a strong one-two punch of fist-shakin'-boot-stompers that run his already coarse voice ragged in gleeful abandon. It's a stirring entry in the canon of a truly unique Canadian character.

The Hidden Cameras
Origin: Orphan
One could be forgiven for shoving indie pop sensations The Hidden Cameras into that league of performers like T.Rex or Bon Jovi or Bob Dylan who basically spent their whole careers writing the same song over and over and over again. Previously one could only notice that the CD track changed when the chorus would switch from Ah-wooo-ah's to doo-doo-doo's. But you had to admit it was pretty damn catchy song. On their latest album The Hidden Cameras actually summon the bravery to change it up a bit. The arrangements get much more variety with keyboards and orchestras featured prominently, the tempos shift and slow down occasionally and many more genres and styles are explored. But while it's admirable and totally necessary that they moved out of the signature sound they've been pedaling for 8 years now there is nothing on this album near as catchy and enjoyable as their best earlier material. It's an unfortunate catch 22 where you either tread the same water you always have or move on to different areas you aren't as well adapted to. But it's a step in the right direction at least.

Vicar
YAIC
A solo offering of Tyler Lovell (bass player of local prog weirdos the AE Bridger band) YAIC is a brief but very potent Ep of intense and abrasive experimental rock music. The EP runs heavily on hypnotic rhythms and angular, menacing, repetitive lines which function as a trance inducer while more and more disconcerting and discordant ingredients are poured on top and shift in and out of the mix. The sounds are all heavily manipulated and and very densely layered in a way that recalls old school krautrock pioneers "Can" at their most aggressive or early "This Heat" with sharp piercing guitar lines like rain of needles skirting the edge of the periphery. There's a cinematic quality to the music but it wouldn't be a movie you'd bring grandma to This is not music for everyone, or even most people, but if you are someone who has a need for challenging but rewarding (also violent) music that is not afraid to throw some ugliness into the mix, you should seek this out.
http://vicar.bandcamp.com/

Ultimate Internet Dream Band Addendum: Tonetta777

Most people are boring, some people are prudes, some other people are shameless, and some take shamelessness to a point where it is heroic and sublime. While I was making the previous list I made the terrible discovery that the man who was my first choice for frontman singer/songwriter of my Ultimate Internet Dream Band had his youtube account suspended; in an atrocious act that I can only take as youtube's own personal vendetta against love, life and happiness.
My subscription to Tonetta777 was 90% of the reason for checking my youtube front page everyday. Every week he would upload 5 - 8 videos of him dancing mostly naked to his latest track of catchy, Totally Obscene, creepy as hell, fractured but infectious pop/funk tunes. His profile had no information at all and in all 300+ videos he had up only the byline "MUST SEE..." was written on them. He was a mystery.. I was so sad when I couldn't embed any of my favorite Tonetta moments, but now I happily discovered Tonetta has another account (!) it appears to be an older private account that he switched over to public to host his backlog of videos. How long until youtube suspends this account due to "term of use infringement" who knows? But for now here are some of my favorite Tonetta777 tracks for your delinquent eyes.

This was the first Tonetta video I saw and I think it's still my favorite. Definitely one of his more menacing tracks.


The other favorite of mine..


a couple more..


This one might have gotten him kicked off. I seem to remember this was one of his last that he posted.

The Ultimate Internet Dream Band

I already have an awesome band, but a man can dream can't he?
Lets just pool our Youtube resources and put together the ultimate Internet Dream Music Ensemble right here anyway.

I'll start with this guy as my Drummer:


On Keyboard:


Lead Singer (I might take the bassist as well):


Or maybe this person as Lead Singer? I don't know...


Or Maybe this Woman as Singer/Songwriter? I can't decide.. Goddamn it!


On Rhythm Guitar:


On Lead Guitar:


Every good project needs a Guest Rapper. I pick Eli:


And this other guy as well:


This would be our banjo player and he would repeat this performance every night:


And then there'd be this guy:


If you have any other suggestions for players put them in the comment section below.