Delete This

Your weekend record reviews from Dave Bidini

This newsletter is an extension of the 2022 Summer Album Guide, and will evolve to include writing about the community, the city and the world in areas other than hot vinyl and vital music. But for now consider it a gesture to continue the art of the album review, forever disappearing from our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini

NOBRO: Set Your Pussy Free

“DELETE DELETE DELETE”

An ideal “Hey, listen to this!” track, especially for people over 40 who remember these kinds of songs regularly flaring over the alternative FM. It’s strength is partly the song’s whipping speed and partly a lyrical sentiment (“I don’t wanna be on the internet”) that proves that not everyone under 20 is racing to become a robot, despite what doomscrolling the tech feeds might suggest. There’s a certain amount of goo at the heart of NOBRO’s Easter Cream anthems, but sometimes their chocolate hints at bitter. Here, the singing screams into a generational vacuum of invasive digital identity and wearying social media expectations, spiked with Canada’s hardest-charging rhythm section: drummer Sarah Dion and bassist Kathryn McCaughey. On their latest record, the band seizes modern complications, cracks them open, melts their guts. Then they post it on, well, the internet, but let’s not quibble. This is a dynamite song and album.

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BLACK PUMAS: Chronicles of a Diamond

“Rock and Roll”

This is very much an album about music-- singer Eric Burton quotes “Sweet Soul Music” in the album’s opener, “More Than a Love Song”— and its destination and landing point is the last track, “Rock and Roll,” which is unlike any song I’ve ever heard. The cooly-delivered mantra in the title could be what you mutter before flicking away your cigarette butt and hopping into your car after leaving a party you didn’t want to go to in the first place, two and half words whispered under your breath after a bad diagnosis or job displacement or shitty date, a slogan of resignation or disappointment, or a failing incantation meant to summon a sense of defiance that was never there to begin with. The song clops along in an almost stilted groove before becoming entangled in guitar fuzz and texture with voices rising from the purposefully mucky mix; the White Stripes suffocated by Jabba the Hutt’s greasy ass. There isn’t any air here but still the songs fly low to the ground. If this is the end of fun, it doesn’t get any more artful. The rest of the album is just as smart and creative and may it fill your cars, beds and kitchens as the days grow dark. 

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THE BEATLES

“Now and Then”

Jews and Arabs murdered. Global warming. The Ukrainian invasion. Covid and long Covid, and golden age artists slipping daily off the mortal coil: if we needed The Beatles then, we need them even more now. They’ve been on a run, too; the delicious tedium of the Peter Jackson Apple series Get Back, then the fine 2020 McCartney record, and in between, a surfeit of good podcasts, from “I am the Eggpod” to “The Walrus was Paul” to “Nothing is Real,” where two Irish broadcasters — one from Belfast, the other from Dublin — banter on about Beatles history. We play the game about whether a surviving John Lennon would have slouched over a laptop or hammered at a metal wall or plucked his guitar to make music, or whether he would have given way to a lake or stream, a retired angler in a cardigan on his estate with grandkids at his feet, the very model of Paul’s “64" protagonist. This unearthed track offers few clues — it’s solid, if standard, late-era Lennon fare — but his voice, and the musicians’ performance, soar both as a work of art and a work of connective tissue, reminding us that music is part of the blood-spidered body, too — maybe the best part — and how, when we’re not razing cities or poisoning the world with our own desire for excess, we’re capable of this: a legacy of sound and melody that draws millions to it nearly 60 plus years after it was born. The Beatles were a band but they were also a symbol. It can’t ever shine too hard.

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