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
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Ben Folds
What Matters Most
I saw Ben Folds throw a stool at his piano, but because it didn’t make the sound he desired, he picked it up and threw it a second time. This was at a Lollapalooza side stage, the only time I attended the festival, headlined that year by Metallica, Soundgarden and Rancid, but featuring the Ramones, which is why I went. Ben Folds’ — Ben Folds’ Five’s — set had been going well until it didn’t, and I wondered if there was something about a long overnight van ride or hospitality tent shortfall since the next act, Cornershop, chucked a similar fit, one of the two people on stage leaving before the set ended. Ben came back to play Lee’s Palace and things went much better, although it’s the fraught and violent show I remember more clearly. Funny how that is, eh?
This latest record by Ben Folds — he’s since lost the Five (who were, technically, three) although maybe they lost him — comes at us like a bit of a wobbly frisbee, his recent classical work not quite measuring up to the success of his early years, although What Matters Most makes me want to go back and study those albums. Ben’s voice has aged well — less frat squeak, more mature rumble — and here it journeys through the frailties of the world while continuing to use the musician’s best card trick: dressing trouble up in Broadway horns and cabaret-style kick. If there was always a little too much suburban irony imbedded in his work, Folds has shed that attitude for songs about aging, mortality and the collapse of American hope, staring reality in the eye without trying to bend it into a wry or cynical take. The album’s opening track, “Wait, There’s More” finds the lounge singer at the Titanic’s bow while “What Matters Most” has him looking through old sad boxes of worn and useless keepsakes in a public storage unit. I appreciate that the condition of the world has affected Ben Folds so that he no longer has to prove how clever he is, or how much more uncool he was growing up than anyone else. How he’ll write at 60 is a nice thought to tease.
Purchase on Bandcamp HERE
Skydiggers
Hide Your Light EP
You should really hear “My City is Gone,” the second song on this EP by Toronto’s venerable Skydiggers. It’s a rollicking anti-corporate-urban-control anthem, fat with a roaring brass section and Big Brother and the Holding Company organ, and the exact thing that fortunate middle-aged musicians should be singing about. Popular Toronto bands of my era — the 90s — never made much money, but rent and housing prices were low, and, for a moment there on Dovercourt, Gord Downie, Stephen Page, Andy Maize and myself all had great apartments in the same few blocks, from Hepbourne to Bloor. We were lucky that every dime we made didn’t go entirely to living expenses — this was also an age where breakfasts and pizza slices were still only $2.99 — and instead of working to live, we found time to bash away at the craft, not having to wake up and crack rocks at three jobs every morning. Musicians should pass on what they were given, and “My City is Gone” is a perfect example of city and scene self-awareness; acknowledging how hard it is to be living in a place where everyone wants to be. Cities change and change is often necessary, but you wonder if, in forty years, bands we love today will be able to survive in an economically hostile climate long enough to build a legacy on par with this band. We support music by paying the 20 dollar covers and buying t-shirts, but that won’t be enough. Once a city is drained of music, it’s drained of life. Toronto will become a place where no one wants to be.
Purchase on the bands website HERE
Thanks DB for sharing your wonderful brain & the thoughts that come out of it! Always giving us cause to pause ...