Week of September 26th 2022

Here we go!

Oct 01, 2022

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 in our print newspapers. - Dave Bidini

Status/Non-Status

Surely Travel

This a gorgeous and heavy fall rock album, best listened to with the windows slightly cracked, and the dog at your feet (note to reader: get a dog). There’s a deceptive simplicity to Adam Sturgeon’s chordwork and a straightforwardness to his lyrics, but the whole of the band moves around the songs like a storm throwing leaves and bending tree branches, giving them play and colour and tone. The album’s first track-- “Blown Tire”-- deserves to become a northern classic, but the album recommends itself through its midriff: the beguiling instrumental “Travelogue,” which sounds like a lost Stray Gators track; the Matt Maysesque “When They Were”; and the down-in-the-chair acoustic beauty of “What Am I to Do.” Over the length of the record, the band opens every cabinet in the room, impressing the listener without flexing. The last song tells us in its title and lyric, “I will surely travel,” but the band has proven its value as a moving companion: steady on the road in all weather, but good on the rubble and in the ditch.

Buy it on bandcamp

Arkells

Blink Twice

So here’s where the hard work starts. The hog is fat-- arena-sized following, penetrative cultural presence, radio caramel, excitedly famous live shows, political/social/social media positions on the proper and good side of the times-- but after a gate-busting musical statement of intent on impressionable Canada, we’re now able to measure all sides of the pop animal, one that’s passed through enough time for us judge whether we still like having it around. It’s become a thing: furtive discussions of whether the excitement was actually because of the group and their records, or because it was something that was deeply needed to fill whatever hole Pop Canada-- okay, Alternative Pop-- demanded. Or whether that even matters. If people are so into a thing is it wrong to haul down that thing? In this way, Arkells are kind of post-critical, not only because there are hardly any critics any more, but because even at their most predictable, their attitude-- positivity wreathed in young drama-- diffuses the energies required to be too hard on them, the way one might have felt like a jerk for saying Kristy McNichol or Ron Howard were poor actors. Hell, this is a band who sold t-shirts to support journalism, which is either the most deviously perfect ploy to bring all writers on side or a literate and caring band that still loves to read newspapers.

But if Arkells, and their craft, are now staring us in the face, they should be staring at each other too. The band hasn’t moved off their strengths in awhile, and while this makes decent artistic and commercial sense-- what person wouldn’t want to simply keep being good at what they do?-- it dulls it for those who are still trying to decide whether they’re worth following along. The Tragically Hip aren’t a great comparison, and every rock band in Canada remains doomed to be held against them, but it was a paradigm shift in their approach that opened entire new audiences, and “Blink Twice” doesn’t move the music to any new neighbourhoods, which isn’t the same as saying it won’t or can’t. The problem is that “Alternative” or “Indie” music assumes that it’s already a distance down the road from everything else when it’s really mostly just Malibu Stacy in a new hat, and so going from here to way over there will require tearing down the family home and living in a swamp for awhile. So here’s where the hard work starts.

Read more at the bands website here

Panic at the Disco!

Viva Las Vengeance

Enjoying this band is a little like enrolling at ESA as a mature student: you’re too old for the rallying youth nature of the lyrics, and distrustful of music that goes back for seconds and thirds at the desert wheel, resulting in a creamy musical theatre stupor. But despite the gulf in attitude and perspective, it’s hard not to love this record’s heart, even if it’s sometimes the cutting edge of a butter knife. A lot has been made of “Viva Las Vengeance’s” 70s thrift shop egg hunt-- writer Brendon Urie freely quotes Thin Lizzy and The Hollies’ with a pinch of Steve Miller and Slade, and press bumpf has gone to lengths to stress the band’s live-to-tape recording -- but I never felt like I was being antiqued to death or that someone was stealing the old K Tel records that, like cockroaches, still live in the frames of my record racks. It’s a shame that a song like “Sugar Soaker” arrived in late July-- and that, musically, it was the most crowded summer in recent memory-- because it’s a perfect road trip anthem, and it’s an even greater shame that there’s no modern AM rock station left to play it, because it’s big rock made perfectly small: everything pressed into the same hot and compact sonic space (also see “Star Spangled Banger” and the album’s title track). Pop/Rock will always flirt with the retro, but it takes a particular kind of musician to know that if the world were forty years younger, their work would stand with their heroes, instead of living today in their perpetual shadow. Panic’s sense of adventure has always been fudged with their Broadway confidence. No one could imagine them blithely giving it all away.

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