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
Busty and the Bass
Wandering Lies (3 song single)
There was a time when you couldn’t really trust music school kids. They’d make you play weird jazz chords in odd time signatures, and their version of “free” was based on bebop rather than punk. They showed up to gigs wearing neck ties and fancy shoes and were always more like commerce students than those who studied commerce. They learned notes out of books, which made them suspicious. They were never seen as weird or different until everyone else became weird and different. Today, studying music is maybe the most punk thing you can do.
The heavily diploma’d Busty and the Bass are the Bubblicious of Canadian Indie music, teeming with flavour and bending around genres — funk, jazz, pop, R&B — so that you’re always kept chewing. We played with them last year (two years ago?) at the short-lived resurrection of Field Trip at Fort York, and they reached into the day’s sunshine to give the festival lift while the rest of us were being fanned by towels after sweating in the July heat. This new EP is a brief, delightful recording supported by one spectacular track, “Far From Here,” (with Magi Merlin), a breakbeat epic that sails dreamily along before crowding the boat with a roiling sea of sounds and voices that, in places, sounds like the musical manifestation of “Triangle of Sadness,” minus all of the barf. This is followed by “All the Things I Couldn’t Say,” which sits somewhere between “Talking Book” and Bruce Hornsby. If the playing is steady, smart and fine, it doesn’t pretend to know more than you. Mom and dad might be surprised, here’s where the music lessons paid off.
Glorious Sons
Lightning Bolt (single)
Pity Kingston’s Glorious Sons, having to skate on the frozen track of city-mates The Tragically Hip, to whom they’re naturally compared. But at least they were gifted the curiosity of an audience drawn to the lineage, and if this might have become tiresome for the band, the burden doesn’t show here. I mostly like “Lightning Bolt” for the lovely slide guitar melody in the chorus — echoes of “My Sweet Lord” and The Lawn — but the song’s pure enthusiasm, and pure commercialism, carries élan and unaffected appeal, and sometimes that’s good enough in the summertime when all you’re looking for is a friendly companion on the ride home.
Barbie
The Album
Speaking of pure commercialism, I Barbieheimed (did I get that right?) last week, and after 5 and 1/2 hours of celluloid, the thing I came away with most was how the Pink movie was both the more commercial yet more experimental of the two films, an easy winner in the not-supposed-to-be-a-battle battle of screens. Outside of the first twenty minutes, I thought that The Big Bang movie missed all of its opportunities to live in strange new places — after recently viewing the astonishing “All Quiet on the Western Front,” and hearing its terrifying Volker Bertelmann score, I wondered how Dr. Opp’s story would have been rendered in the hands of, say, a more fearless European director — while the Pink movie leapt on pointed toes, and the occasional flat foot, towards its own kind of pastel weirdness. Musically, there were many opportunities lost by Oppenheimer’s Christopher Nolan — the film sounded most impactful when there was no sound at all — while Barbie, outside of the star-studded pop soundtrack, wrote both The Indigo Girl’s “Closer to Fine” and Matchbox Twenty’s “Push” into the movie’s romping narrative. All of that plus a slice of Tame Impala for all of the young children who will probably favourite this collection into their playlists (did I get that right?)
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