Yuck is the self-titled second release of the British indie rock band. When I first started listening to this album I silently compared what I heard to the indie rock legend Pavement. Very high praise indeed. The album has some quality of pace or vocal style that I couldn’t quite lay my finger on. Not to say that I think this band has achieved the same level of genius as Pavement, yet they approach it on the last couple tracks. At times Yuck employs a wall of sound, and rough sounding guitars. On tracks like “Sunday” the guitar comes out more clear and melodically focused. Not surprisingly I found myself much preferring “Stutter” or “Holing Out,” the songs that showcase the grungy sounding electric guitar and tinny-far-away vocals. Still, Yuck maintains a very accessible rock sensibility throughout most of the album. My favourite track by far is “Rubber,” which is a full on shoegazing trip, with downplayed melodic vocals and the electric guitar a mess of noisy trebly awesomeness. This track is a slower pace but it feels like a solid insurmountable rock anthem, with the drums picking up at the end crashing symbols and snare. (Fat Possum, www.fatpossum.com) Kyra Leib
Pac Div – Mania
In Mania, the California trio come together once again to produce another summertime soundtrack. Opening strong with “The Mirror,” the three emcees trade introspective verses, “I like to get high but its great to be sober / Yesterday was hard but it made me a soldier,” over a joyful string section sample before jumping into a plethora of songs with their distinctive blend of braggadocio and playful misogyny. Like, Big Mibbs, and Be Young switch up the mood for a bit with “Nobody’s Perfect,” reminding us to keep our head up over an irresistible piano-laced backdrop and soothing female chorus. After that, its back to regular business for a while as the trio rips apart Lords of the Underground’s “Chief Rocka” instrumental before going in on the minimalist “Your Fucking Song.” “Saved” brings the mood back to uplifting with its bouncy piano and a chorus that hearkens back to their Church League Champions days, “Man I just got paid / Put your hands in the sky like you just got saved.” Mania mixes the playful sound Pacific Division is known for with a few tracks with a distinctive West Coast Bay Area bounce that adds a welcome freshness to their repertoire. Their album, Grown Kid Syndrome, may not have a release date just yet, but Mania should hold you down for the summer. (2 Dope Boys, www.2dopeboyz.com) RB Beniza
Jonnies Sticky Buns: Tunes for your Sweet Tooth
By Taylor Burgess
Jonnies Sticky Buns is the hippest new eatery in Winnipeg, with a rotation of funky original cinnamon buns ranging from the classic, to the carrot ginger, to the limited edition specials (like a Guinness bun for St. Patrick’s Day). And when you enter the little storefront on the north side of Portage, between Lipton and Ruby, you know there’s some creative juices flowing around there, with collaged-over benches, the Rachel Schappert mural on the wall, and old windows used as a chalkboard and a bulletin board. So it’s probably of little surprise that the two people behind the store (and behind the counter) are established Manitoban musicians.
The two in question are Rheanna Melnick of Feed the Birds and Jon McPhail of Jon McPhail and his Family Band. They met a couple years back at open mic nights at Charlie O’s Lounge. Continue reading “Jonnies Sticky Buns: Tunes for your Sweet Tooth”
Who Are The Suburbs and Why Have they Stolen Slim’s Grammy?
By David Nowacki
When Barbra Streisand stutteringly and with contorted effort announced Arcade Fire to be the recipients of the Album of the Year award at the Grammys, her seeming ignorance of who the evening’s winners were, let alone how to pronounce their name, seemed demurely aged but reasonable for a near-septuagenarian who seemingly spends most of her time waxing nostalgic and eyebrows rather than paying attention to what the kids are listening to.
Her reaction, however, was facsimiled across the faces of the general viewership, who inevitably took to that bastion of unrequited fury that is the Internet. Social networks, most visibly Twitter, were instantly peppered with CAPS LOCK’d and profanity-laden tirades of unimaginable fury directed at the quiet Canucks who had obviously stolen a coveted Grammy from right under a formidable group of Billboard-dominating heavyweights comprised of Eminem, Lady Gaga, Lady Antebellum (who had already won five of the six awards they had been nominated for that night), and Katy Perry. There was such an outpouring of abject and violent rage that an amused looker-on was quick to open a Tumblr account as a forum for the previously uncollected outbursts, which read like an irate fifth-grader’s account of how his best buddy was horribly jilted at the most recent school talent show.
Continue reading “Who Are The Suburbs and Why Have they Stolen Slim’s Grammy?”
Mother Mother – Eureka
I’ve travelled to B.C. a couple of times, and it’s always been a pleasant experience, but I must’ve been missing something. It seems to be home to some of the happiest bands on the planet. Birthplace of power-happy power-poppers the New Pornographers, and now ultra-smilers Mother Mother. And it’s a very specific brand of happy. If you’ve heard the New Pornographers before, you have a pretty good idea of what Mother Mother sounds like. Synth-tinged power-pop jams that pretty much necessitate moving your hips or torso in a silly fashion. One of the catchier tunes on the album, “My Baby Don’t Dance,” is a bit of a paradox, because any Baby not dancing would simply need to listen their eponymous song. It’s like a logic loop. Don’t think too hard about it. Mother Mother seem to thrive on dance-worthy beats, because when it’s time to make serious-face serious music, such as “Simply Simple,” they seem to falter a little bit. The slower jams seem to stretch, but are mercifully few and far between. They’re not terrible, but after the first half of the album, their cliched melancholy is a bit of a bringdown, and not in the way they were intending. It’s just plain old boring music bringdown. So don’t let the New Pornographers references lull you into thinking this is a successor to Mass Romantic. Mother Mother still has some practice to get in at balance and consistency. Still, despite the old second-half blues, this new Mother Mother joint is a hand-clappin’, knee-slappin’, toe-tappin’, happy-happenin’ good time. Just turn it off after “Born in a Flash.” (Last Gang Records, http://mothermothersite.com/) David Nowacki
Gary War – Police Water EP
Slip on your headphones, my dears, sit tight… and now we enter hyper-space. The journey starts out with the sound of liquid swooshy happy heartbeats on “Born of Light.” Laser guns enter, blazing the way for the galaxy, decked out in its best ’80s night outfit, to strut its stuff against a background of singing. I have no idea what the echoing lyrics are going on about, but this isn’t so bad – War’s voice is just one of what seems like hundreds of effects and experiments, and as a whole, Police Water comes off as dizzyingly instrumental. “On Its Head” again features indecipherable urgent whispering amid a whirling, colourful soundscape built with lashing drums and rapidly squiggling synth. We don’t see any melodies, just a stream of the same glittering ether leaking out into formless forms, layered over at the end of the track with cacophonous chords, what sounds like a plane taking off, and dashes of microphone feedback. As we approach the centre of the EP, things start getting a lot more dancey with a great squeaky interlude on “Grounds for Termination.” And then there’s the heavy, repetitive, exhilarating “Sirens.” This is where our voyage ends if you own the vinyl, but the CD offers two bonus tracks, both of which are, as always, hypnotic, high-energy, and much more accessible than you’d ever imagined from the start. (Sacred Bones Records, www.sacredbonesrecords.com) Adrienne Yeung
Julianna Barwick – The Magic Place
Abandon all sense of normalcy: Julianna Barwick is her name but a choir of wordless voices is her music. Well, it has been, anyways. On her EP Florine, the Brooklyn-based performer made a distinct sound for herself by looping her vocals with lots of reverb. With a select few instruments on The Magic Place, her first for Asthmatic Kitty, Barwick has made nine songs that are multi-layered loops of pure bliss—echoes of choirs for contemplating the church of the Self. A language constructed is simply destructive. Barwick is true to what sounds right. With her voice, and without her words, it’s impossible to misinterpret her intentions, and what she sends out into the world. Pure, pure, pure. (Asthmatic Kitty, www.asthmatickitty.com) Taylor Burgess
Cluster Festival Fries your Brain and Lightly Sautés your Ears
So, you think that you have it tough, loading up your drum kit, your Marshall stacks, and oh-so delicate guitars, and driving them off to some venue? Well, you’ve never heard about sonic cuisine.
“Sonic cuisine one of the things that gave us confidence to do Cluster Festival,” says one of the festival’s co-founders, Luke Nickel. While he and Heidi Ugrin were attending the University of Manitoba for their music degrees, they were also members of XIE, the eXperimental Improv Ensemble, and wanted to organize a fundraiser for Amnesty International. “We cooked a meal for something like 60 people. And we cooked it for them, in front of them, live on microphones, while making music,” says Nickel. “Which is kinda crazy. Three of us cooked a meal for 65 and had a convincing performance of music at the same time.”
“Yeah, just think of all the onions you need to cut for 60 people,” says Ugrin. “We made a three or four course meal.”
“And the fact that the place we were in didn’t have a kitchen. We had to bring the entire kitchen,” says Nickel.
Needless to say, after that performance, and working together in XIE for some time, Ugrin and Nickel felt pretty prepared to organize anything they wanted to.
Cluster Festival’s second year will host a trio of events at the tail end of this week, on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday.
The bar is set pretty high—last year’s festival included performances in Eckhardt-Gramatté Hall and 290 McDermot, including challenging (yet rewarding) contemporary dance, projections, art installations, and musical performances.
Within the experimental scene in Winnipeg (of which there’s quite a sizable one—what with the WSO’s New Music Festival, send + receive, and Groundswell), they recognized the need for more integrated arts, rather than multiple-disciplinary.
The difference between integrated arts and multiple-disciplinary arts is a semantic one, as Nickel notes, but still an important one. “You’re actually forming relations and collaborations within [the different art forms], and ‘multi-disciplinary’ doesn’t address that.”
Ugrin says that it means the artists are “not trying to slap on multiple disciplines for the sake of it, but only if works organically ask for different degrees of arts. It’s not just music and visual arts,” and she slaps her hands in different places to emphasize her point.
“Freyja Olfason, who is an intermedia artist,” Ugrin continues, “she is presenting her large, wonderful work Avatar, which incorporates dance, live video projection, webcam, Chat Roulette, music—that is basically our posterchild for integrated arts right there. That’s in the middle of our festival on Friday night.”
This Thursday, taking place at Crescent Fort Rouge United Church in Osborne Village, organist Alexandra Fol will be playing a number of pieces, half of which were written for the festival. And for the second half of the evening, Trio ’86 will be playing a set original works by Cluster’s creators. “We’re going to be projecting images all over the pipe organ, essentially the front wall, as our way to transform the space.” Giorgio Magnanensi will also be doing electronic improvisations to start off both halves of the night.
And on this Saturday, the Cluster organizers are promising one hell of a warehouse party, with BLITZ. It’s going to be three open floors of beatnik poetry, DJs, Wallballs, and way more.
So the three nights of Cluster Festival should be interesting, to say the least. And what the festival creators have to share are nothing but thanks, and encouragement.
“I’m 22, and we’ve done this thing,” says Nickel. “People should think to themselves, ‘What does Winnipeg need?’ And then do it. Whoever feels that something is lacking, should go and create that venue for themselves.”
Lost: I Want To Be your Man
First Class Riot: Captain’s first blog
Hey everyone out there in blog land, mark this as another step on our slow transition from the print world to online. I’m going to start blogging about my musical/artistic endeavors, identifying what the fuck I like about music, what I dislike about music journalism, what writers are getting me hot, etc. etc.
So, first up: why did I hate M.I.A. last year? I didn’t buy /\/\/\Y/\, unlike her last two albums, which I ate up. I loved the video for “Born Free,” and I even pitted it against Gaga’s epic “Telephone” in all of their ridiculously epic proportions. I generally hate location sound (or any extra sound) being used for music videos, but still “Born Free” is the shit, a raucous quasi-political shocker. That and a sample of “Ghost Rider” by Suicide go a long way. Checking out other songs on the album off Youtube has been either an earful of gross or great.
And before that, there was the NY Times piece that Maya took offence to, and tweeted writer Lynn Hirschberg’s phone number. The piece had some wonderful background on M.I.A., who was the newest sensation after “Paper Planes” exploded, and her all-too-brief preggerz performance on the Grammys. In the profile piece was a couple of quotes, mostly out-of-context and off-the-cuff, that made M.I.A.’s political stance seem closer to totalitarian. Laaaaaaaaaaaame. In defence of his piece on Billy Joel, Chuck Klosterman said that profile writing is a pretty rudimentary process–you take the most interesting things that people say, and write around them. Still, creative liberties, framing, and a simple sentence can mislead any reader who just accepts an implicit opinion as fact, like hinting that M.I.A. is a self-conscious terrorist. (I can’t wait until someone uses that quote against me.)
Maybe it was some of the bad reviews of the album that kept me away, or maybe some of the negative press. But I think part of it had to do with witch house. Srsly. Maybe the blogs were reposting pictures of ’80s goths, but whenever I would listen to White Ring’s “IxC999”;
That flow? The distorted drum machine tom-toms? The gunshots? This has M.I.A. written all over it. And when M.I.A. zigged and went the way of experimental, I suppose I zagged, and wanted something catchier.
But that’s neither here nor there. I’m going to finally check out /\/\/\Y/\ and counterpart B-side mixtape Vicki Leekx for myself, like any truly discerning person.