i (heart) music

As much as I liked Hvarf/Heim, I wasn't quite ready to get back on the Sigur Ros bandwagon quite yet. After all, it was basically a collection of material from back when they were great, and while it was great to hear how they used to sound, their most recent outing was substantially less interesting.

Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust, however, is probably enough to get me back on board. While a lot of the elements that made the band so distinctive in the first place are still present, at the same time there are enough subtle shifts here and there that make the whole thing sound a lot more vital and alive than they've sounded in years. Case in point: "Inní mér syngur vitleysingur" has a much more traditionally "rock" structure than anything Sigur Ros has done before, and its use of horns and acoustic guitars gives it a warm, organic feel that (unless I've missed something) hasn't been present in the band's sound.

The band hasn't wholly abandoned their old sound, of course. Frontman Jónsi Birgisson, for example, still sings a combination of Icelandic, gibberish and English, and the latter half of the album isn't that far removed from what populated previous albums (see "Straumnes" for proof). But Með Suð í Eyrum Við Spilum Endalaust is still a big enough break from the past that it's possible to imagine that Sigur Ros still have at least a few tricks left up their sleeve, and that's enough to keep me interested for at least another few albums.

I'd never heard of Brooklyn Cannon before receiving the self-titled EP from Total Bummer, but all it took was a quick glance at the press release accompanying her album to make me excited. After all, she was in God-Shaped Vacuum with Carey Mercer and Dan Boeckner and in Atlas Strategic with Boeckner; with credentials like that, I figured she'd have at least a modicum of talent.

The EP reveals that she does, though anyone searching for something in the vein of Frog Eyes, Wolf Parade or Handsome Furs will be a little let down. Rather, songs like "Song For You" and "Long Winter" show that she specializes in sparse, ghostly piano-folk that falls squarely between Newsom-esque little elfin girl lost and the pounding doom that defines the subject of this week's feature. It's not going to set the world afire, but if you're into girls with pianos, it's definitely worth checking out.

Today I've found myself in the mood for The Weakerthans. There's no underlying reason for it; I'm not going through anything that makes me feel nostalgic for six to eight years ago, back when they were my favourite band in the world. I just woke up this morning and found myself really, really wanting to listen to Left and Leaving (still one of the finest albums ever, in my opinion) and, to a lesser extent, Reconstruction Site.

I'll have a proper, more relevant-to-today post up later today, but in the meantime, I just thought I'd say that, and share the feeling by posting a session they recorded for CBC Radio 3 almost a decade ago.

1. History to the Defeated
2. Left and Leaving
3. My Favourite Chords
4. All of our Answers Sound the Same

Enjoy!

Another holiday today, so another day where I don't feel like putting much effort into a proper post. As such, here's a concert Buck 65 recorded earlier this year with Symphony Nova Scotia. It's ostensibly tied to the release of Situation, but it's probably the best set I've ever heard on any of the CBC sites. It ties together hip-hop and classical in a truly transcendent way, and it's absolutely a must-hear, regardless of whether you're a Buck 65 fan or not.

1. Surrender to Strangeness
2. Roses and Bluejays
3. Cries a Girl
4. All There is to Say About Love
5. Feels Like
6. Hymnpeace
7. Misdeed
8. The Floor
9. Heather Knights
10. Devil's Eyes
11. Way Back When

Enjoy!

Katie Stelmanis, Join Us (Blocks)

WHO

One-time punk rocker going it alone.

DISCOGRAPHY

Join Us (Blocks, 2008)

IN A NUTSHELL

Join Us is very, very weird and very, very good.

THE STORY

Writing about music is hard -- and more than a little pointless -- at the best of times (hence this site's subheader), but it's artists like Katie Stelmanis who make it especially difficult. Case in point: listen to "In My Favour", the opening track from her debut, Join Us. Now try to describe it. Better yet, try to describe it without invoking one or two vaguely similar artists (that is, Kate Bush or Nico).

You could certainly mention those two, and most people writing about Join Us have chosen to do so (and I count myself among that number, since I lack the kind of musical vocabulary necessary to break down what's happening here). But it still seems like you're doing Stelmanis a huge disservice when you do. After all, on that track -- not to mention the other nine that follow it -- she's off doing something that's uniquely her own, and she's doing it in a way that's not only creepy and cold and scary, but also totally riveting and accessible.

That last part is relative, of course. You're not going to hear Stelmanis on the airwaves outside of certain blocks of college radio programming any time soon. But still, there aren't many artists who could include a wall of dissonnant noise right in the middle of their album, and and then keep going right into the next track as if nothing had happened (as happens here with the closing thirty seconds of "You'll Fall"). Then again, you're also not likely to ever hear as chilling a rendition of "(You Make Me Feel Like A) Natural Woman" as Stelmanis closes out her album with.

It all goes together to create an album that doesn't really sound like anything else. I'm sure a lot of people will listen to Join Us and be immediately turned off by its sonic harshness or by Stelmanis' teutonically cold vocals. But at the same time, if you give it a chance and you're in the mood to hear something totally unique, Join Us should be exactly what you're looking for.


Want to win Join Us? Thanks to Blocks, i(heart)music has a copy to give away. To enter to win, just e-mail me your name and address, and I'll pick a winner randomly!

Adam C. wins a copy of The Constantines' latest. Thanks to all who entered!

Tomorrow's Canada Day, so today seems like a good time to take it easy and post something that's not too taxing to write. As such, here's a Radio 2 concert from The Constantines, recorded in Toronto a few months ago to celebrate the release of Kensington Heights. As you can see in this week's feature, that's an album of which I have a very high opinion, so check the songs out, and if you like what you here, enter!

1. Hotline Operator
2. Working Full-Time
3. Lizaveta
4. Hard Feelings
5. Young Lions
6. Million Star Hotel
7. Little Instrument
8. Time Can Be Overcome
9. Thieves
10. Soon Enough
11. Justice
12. Arizona
13. Do What You Can Do

EDIT: "Soon Enough" is now uploaded. Apologies to all the completists!

Enjoy!

My expectations going into These Electric Lives' remix album (imaginatively titled TEL Remixed) were a little low. After all, even though I was a huge fan of the band's debut EP, the thought of those five songs being remixed into an hour-long, twelve-track album seemed like overkill.

Then again, pretty much every remix album could be described as "overkill", and there's nothing about TEL Remixed that makes it a particularly egregious offender. In fact, coming as it does from a band that met in sound engineering school, the album is actually a neat look into all the different directions in which the band's five members and their friends are able to take TEL's sound. OPOPO, for example, shows that "Wake Me Up" could've gone in a much more Death From Above 1979-inspired direction, while "Soda Water (Delete Remix)" is much bouncier and more playful than the original. Even when the remixes don't stray that far from the originals (on frontman's Mark Stanfield takes on "Keep Love Safe" and "We Should Be Believing", for instance), they still introduce enough new elements that the tracks don't seem entirely redundant. TEL Remixed isn't quite an argument for the idea that These Electric Lives chose the wrong path when they decided to focus on making catchy, inspired dance anthems (as anyone who checks them out tomorrow night at Zaphod's will be able to see), but it certainly suggests that the band has a lot more in them than their one EP has shown thus far.

I'll say this for Ghostkeeper: regardless of their other merits, perhaps the nicest thing about Children of the Great Northern Muskeg is that it actually surprised me. There aren't all that many albums that I start listening to expecting one thing only to hear something else entirely, but this one did exactly that.

In my defence, this wasn't the craziest thing to expect. The picture above is also on the back of the CD, and the band hails from Calgary, so it seemed reasonable to anticipate some sort of alt-country act. At the very least, I figured that the accompanying press release would have it right when they called the band "blues-rock".

In reality, the band is neither twangy nor bluesy. There's a few moments of guitar picking at the beginning that sort of hints at country music, and there are a few riffs whose spiritual home in in a blues tradition, but neither of those things really reflect Ghostkeeper's esence.

A better description for the band would probably be that they sound like a rural version of The Libertines. Frontman Shane Ghostkeeper has the same sort of slurred delivery, and when he howls over top of some of garage rock-ier tracks (such as "Skippin' Church" or "The Introduction"), it's as if you're hearing what Up The Bracket would've sounded like had Pete Doherty and Carl Barât grown up on a Métis reserve in Alberta. Even when those rural roots show through, on a song like "Three More Springs", it still sounds sort of like The Libertines doing their best Kings of Leon impression.

And by no means is this a bad thing. Children of the Northern Muskeg may lose a few points on originality, but it more than makes up for that in terms of its style and its substance. Every single song here is phenomenal, even when Ghostkeeper hands the lead vocal duties over to Sarah Jane Houle. Every one of the tracks are catchy and fun, and overall, it's a very strong album, and it makes Ghostkeeper one of the most exciting new bands I've heard so far this year.

As any blogger will no doubt tell you (in aggrieved, annoyed tones, for some reason), bands and publicists are constantly sending out song streams and access to singles. Most of the time, I disregard those, -- nearly every band is able to come up with at least one good song, and I prefer listening to whole albums.

On occasion, though, bands I really like send me sneak previews, and in that case, I can't resist at least giving them a mention. So here goes...



First up, The Rest. Even though I was a huge fan of their last album, Atlantis, Oh Our Saviour, I definitely didn't give it as much of a listen as it deserved. Based on "Walk On Water (Auspicious Beginnings)", I'm hoping I don't make the same mistake with their next album, Everyone All At Once. It's got all the elements that should've made them a band I loved last time around. Frontman Adam Bentley has some crazy vocals, recalling how Alec Ounsworth sounded back when everyone cared about Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Even more importantly, the band has retained (for this one song, at least) its sense of grandeur. The track may shift around in all sorts of ways, but whatever direction it goes in, it always remembers to bring listeners along for the ride. Hopefully it's a sign of things to come.



By contrast, hopefully "Antique #1 - Zoë Montreal" is a sign that anything at all will be forthcoming from These Hands. I've been waiting for a full-length from him for over two years now, and every so often he'll put a new song with the promise of a larger album attached. He so far hasn't done that, and a song like this one only makes that fact a little more frustrating. These Hands -- otherwise known as Michael Hanson -- is an incredibly talented songwriter, and like those other songs before, this is an intriguingly fresh take on folk music. At the very least, it's enough to make me willing to wait for his new album a little longer, which really says more about the track than anything else I could possibly say.



Lastly, anyone who reads this blog with any regularity may have noticed I absolutely love Woodpigeon. Consequently, I'm extremely excited by the fact that this summer will see not one, nor two, but three new albums from the Calgary collective. They're releasing a show/internet-only album (which I'll feature as soon as I can get my hands on a copy). They're releasing a UK edition of 2006's Songbook. And they're packaging that with a companion EP.

Somewhere on one of those albums will be "Matty John Chyzyk", a gorgeous slice of orchestral pop. The track shows that the band still does that sound better than anyone this side of Sufjan Stevens, and if everything else matches up to its beauty, one -- if not all -- of those three albums are going to bring the band the widespread fame they deserve.

Lily Swings, the newest album from Lily Frost, had the potential to be a disaster. After all, it's a collection of Billie Holliday covers; given that Holliday is one of the best singers to ever grace a stage, most people will come off looking lesser by comparison, no matter how talented they may be.

Frost, however, had the right idea with Lily Swings (which is streaming in its entirety right here). Rather than trying her hand at standards like "Strange Fruit" and "Lover Man" -- which would lead to comparisons to Holliday that couldn't possibly be favourable -- for the most part she's elected to record some of the lesser known songs from Holliday's songbook. Thus, there are songs like "Solitude" and "Lover Come Back To Me", on which Frost succeeds by taking the words of Oscar Hammerstein and Duke Ellington, respectively, and making them sound like her own. She's helped immeasurably by the fact she has a pretty strong voice on her own, though its light breeziness basically makes her Holliday's opposite. The only place where Frost can't quite measure up is on "I've Got My Love To Keep My Warm", but that still leaves another ten songs where Lily Swings lives up to its title extremely well.

Alternatively, if you're in the mood for something a little more modern from Frost, I'd direct you to the CBC Fuse session she recorded with Hilotrons late in 2006. Her voice is basically the same, but placed with the Ottawa band's space-age dance-pop, it takes on a completely different, slightly more rocking tone.

1. I Called You
2. Up In Your Space
3. Enchantment
4. Psychic Cat Fight
5. Pink & Gold
6. Oh My
7. Silver Sun
8. Look Wow

Enjoy!

The Constantines, Kensington Heights (Arts & Crafts)

WHO

Former Guelph post-punkers, now scattered up and down the St.Lawrence corridor.

DISCOGRAPHY

Fits and Starts (Self-released, 1999)
The Constantines (, 2001)
Shine A Light (Three Gut, 2003)
Tournament of Hearts (Three Gut, 2005)
Kensington Heights (Arts & Crafts, 2008)

IN A NUTSHELL

Kensington Heights shows that one decade in, The Constantines are still rocking as hard as ever.

THE STORY

After ten years and five albums -- give or take a year and a few EPs -- there are a few things about a new Constantines album that you can basically take for granted. For instance, you can pretty much guarantee that at least a couple of people will mention the vocal similarities between frontman Bry Webb and Bruce Springsteen. And you can also safely bet on the fact that the band will, at some point, turn the lead vocal duties over to Steven Lambke, and that this song, in turn, will be the album's weakest track (with all apologies to Baby Eagle fans). And, of course, you can look forward to the album being strong from top to bottom (even with the Lambke track), with a couple of tracks being really exceptional and the rest being solidly above-average pieces of punky, aggressive rock.

The above statements are all true to varying degrees of Kensington Heights. There are the inevitable comparisons to Springsteen, though this time around, the more I listen to songs like "Time Can Be Overcome" and "I Will Not Sing A Hateful Song", the more the comparisons seem less a copout that an honest assessment of the direction in which the band is headed. And "Shower Of Stones" may try to cover Lambke's voice with a wall of guitars, but it can't hide the fact that it's the weakest of the dozen songs here.

As for the last statement, it's half true. Kensington Heights is -- "Shower of Stones" excepted -- strong from top to bottom, and I wouldn't be surprised in the least to see it make the soon-to-be-released Polaris Prize shortlist. But I don't know that the album has the same sense of urgency that once characterized The Constantines' music. Opener "Hard Feelings" comes charging out of the gate with as much brute force as anything they've ever done, and "Time Can Be Overcome" is followed immediately by a pair of rockers in "Brother Run Them Down" and "Credit River". Beyond those tracks, however, Kensington Heights seems to present a more introspective side of the band, with each of the last four songs sounding like The Cons are starting to feel the effects of rocking as hard as they possibly could for the last ten years.

It's a bit disconcerting to hear Kensington Heights end on such a low note (in terms of energy, that is, not quality). Those who want The Constantines to remain stuck forever at the point in "Nighttime, Anytime (It's Alright)" just after the woman's voice shouts "Turn it up!" will probably find themselves cursing the day Three Gut went under and the band signed with Arts & Crafts. But truthfully, it's hard to imagine that there are many people who could hear Kensington Heights in its entirety and come away wishing that it was harder or louder. It's a very good album from beginning to end, and if it represents the beginning of The Constantines' middle-aged period, then it's certainly a great way to kick off this new phase of their career.

Want to win Kensington Heights? Thanks to Arts & Crafts, i(heart)music has a copy to give away. To enter to win, just e-mail me your name and address, and I'll select a winner randomly!

Jennifer P. wins a copy of Hilotrons' third album. Thanks to all who entered!

Though this is my first time writing about Arkells, it's actually my second time writing about the band members themselves. Up until late last year, you see, Arkells were known as Charlemagne, and I wrote about them when they were under that name, comparing them (favourably) to the likes of Foo Fighters.

After listening to their Deadlines EP, I'm glad to report that even if they've changed their name, they haven't changed their sound. They're still straightforward rockers, and they still sound like they're giving their all, even in the studio. They've even evolved a little, as "Oh, The Boss Is Coming!" demonstrates, with its stops and starts that seem a little at odds with most modern day radio-ready rock. Their may be a nod here and there to classic rock see -- in particular, EP closer "No Champagne Socialist" -- but that's hardly a bad thing. In fact, I'd say that Deadlines is a testament to the fact that Arkells could very well become staples of the oldies stations of 2025 or so.

It's not often that I completely disagree with the fine folks at Herohill (their bizarre appreciation for Justin Rutledge notwithstanding), but I've got to say that their review of The Milwaukee's Best Band's It's All Over But The Crying completely baffles me.

Or, at least, part of it does. I'm not saying they're wrong about it being a fine record -- because it clearly is -- but I just don't see how anyone could listen to this album and say that it's reminiscent of the '50s. It's got a slightly throwback country vibe to it (as a song like "Sad Sad Song" shows), but in no way, shape or form does it sound like it would've had people protesting it a half-century ago. Like Herohill, though, I've got to say that it makes me interested in seeing them live (which makes it a good thing that they're playing Ottawa tonight).


I'm much more in agreement with Herohill about The Cost, the debut EP from HotKid. The band is currently in the studio with Ian Blurton, but if the three songs here are anything to go by, it's hard to imagine how he could make them any harder than they are now. As I said last week, their bluesy swagger certainly brings another rocking duo to mind, but a track like "Counting" shows that HotKid should be all White fine.



I wish I could say that I feel equally enthused for Lara Yule Singh's prospects. After all, her last name gave me an awesome idea for a punny headline ("You'll sing for Yule Sing", though on second thought it's probably better that I didn't get to use it), and I can never resists a good (or even awful) pun.

Unfortunately, there's not quite enough to The Great Divine to merit such raves. She has a nice voice, which makes her Kimya Dawson-eque folk go down pretty smoothly (see "Umbrella Built For Two" for proof), but on the whole, there's just not enough here to merit anything more than a mild recommendation.



I'm much more forthcoming with a suggestion that people go out and pick up a copy of Organs For Sale, the debut from The Human Soundtrack. I know there's a good comparison to be made between them and a much more popular band, since every time I hear songs like "All Those Staring People" and "One Foot First" it comes right to the edge of my brain, but I can't quite seem to figure out who it is they sound like. Regardless, frontman Stephen Haley has charisma that shines through the speakers, and he and his bandmates sound like they could follow Hey Rosetta! out of Newfoundland to become the next big thing from The Rock.