From Love to Hate and Back Again
By Taylor Burgess
They’ve only just released their third full-length, XXXX, but it’s safe to say that You Say Party! We Say Die! will forever live on in our collective 
Canadian consciousness. Yes, there have been the rowdy shows at the now-closed Collective Cabaret, and equally rowdy shows at the Royal Albert, with lead singer Becky Ninkovic making everyone twist and clap and yell “Cold Hands! Hot Bodies!” But Canadian bands, even inciting ones, do come and go. YSP!’s legend has so much more attitude than that.
First, there was the incident at the Canada-U.S. border in 2006, where they matched wits with officials. The Vancouver five-piece had a major U.S. tour booked, starting in Seattle, but they hadn’t received the necessary paperwork in the mail by the night of the first show, so they approached the border, planning to use booked recording time in L.A. as their excuse for crossing. The border officials checked online and came up with the band’s tour dates. YSP! WSD! explained that they had planned to cancel them, but hadn’t yet. Always looking to thwart criminal masterminds like this dance-punk band, the crafty border officials called the Seattle venue, which enthusiastically replied that the band was most certainly playing that night.
When Braxton isn’t completely rewriting the math-rock playbook in Battles, he’s busy composing music for an orchestra and, well, playing with himself. As a solo artist, Braxton creates music using live loops. Handling all the instrumentation and vocal duties, Braxton’s solo work is at once complex, colorful and experimental. Central Market sees Braxton move away from a strictly loop-based, 100 percent Braxton-performed outing, to seven tracks composed for New York City’s Wordless City Orchestra. The combination of Braxton’s electronic tendencies and the acoustic element of the Orchestra makes for a record that is multi-dimensional and varied yet sonically cohesive. The first few tracks are purely cinematic—if the film imagined is a twisted, Technicolor children’s cartoon that takes place on the rings of Saturn. Strings swoop and swirl amidst marching, syncopated percussion, constantly shifting melodic motifs, jagged loops and Braxton’s trademark, pitch-shifted “munchkin” vocals. It sounds bizarre, and it is. Yet despite the seemingly chaotic shards of instrumentation within this album, Central Market is an impossibly interesting, engaging and enjoyable listen. (Warp Records, 
Combining country twang, garage fuzz, and rockabilly squeak, Bloodshot Bill manages to make vintage sound new in Git High Tonite! Montreal’s answer to Hasil Adkins, the one-man band sensation returns with 12 greasy, rockin’ numbers guaranteed to get you moving. Combining crazy barely audible Trashmen-esque voicework, jingly-jangly guitars, and raw classic rockabilly instrumentation, Bloodshot has perfected a sound very few can match. Standout tracks include “Leave Me Alone,” “Outta the Rain” and a great Steve Alaimo cover “She’s My Baby.” The album closes out with a devastating rockabilly ballad “Oh Honey Doll Baby Doll” and a fantastic acoustic bonus track. (Transistor 66, 
BLK JKS hail from South Africa and sing in English, Zulu and Xhosa. They’ve fused together an ambitious rock record from an array of genres. Most striking on the album is the swooping brass and bombastic guitar solos, sometimes reminiscent of Frog Eyes’ best instrumentation and, at other times, the punch-work of Spoon. BLK JKS are often compared by the press to TV on the Radio; the resemblance, particularly in the percussion, is hard to miss. Yet After Robots is cohesive and idiosyncratic enough to resist being pigeonholed. All told, it’s a good album by an ambitious group that shows flashes of excellence in songs like “Skeleton” and “Lakeside.” (Secretly Canadian, 
While I don’t believe any of their subsequent albums have rivaled their 2002 album Amore del Tropico (Tropics of Love), the Black Heart Procession have nonetheless made a valiant effort to reach for those heights. Returning to the counting scheme of their first three records, the San Diego band also retains the foreboding tone they’ve honed through all their prior recordings—atmospheric strings, ominous, impassioned vocals and rumbling bass, all supporting vocalist Paulo Zappoli’s dark tales. Love, death and the intersection between the two have long been lyrical tropes for the Black Heart Procession, and Six finds them digging fresh holes in the same graveyard. “When You Finish Me” speaks of being buried by a lover and “Wasteland” finds the protagonist hearing “ghosts calling me back to the grave.” Things don’t end in the ground though, as characters pursue their lovers through “Heaven and Hell” and burn in flames (“All My Steps”). Clearly this isn’t a voyage for the faint of heart and neither is an album by the Black Heart Procession—though you’d expect nothing less considering their moniker and their catalogue. This is a bleak and troubled listen, but there’s a dark beauty buried in its heart. (Temporary Residence, 
Based on this album’s title, it’s clear that the man behind Pedro the Lion wants to make a break from his past. He carved a niche for himself writing thought-provoking songs that tried to come to terms with the pitfalls of the Bush era by turning to theology. With discs like Winners Never Quit and Control, Bazan articulated a rethinking of what it meant to be a person of faith living in America. They were records that provided the listener with hope for a cure. With Curse Your Branches, the cure is the target. Apparently, Bazan has lost his faith, and wants the world to know it. But in writing about this, he comes off as trite and downright unconvincing. Take the lead-off track, “Hard to Be,” where he challenges the story of the garden of Eden (shocker!) and the fall of humanity, asking, “Wait just a minute / you expect me to believe / that all this misbehaving grew from one enchanted tree?” Or the closing track, “In Stiches,” where Bazan follows the story of Job to paint a picture of a God completely out of touch with humanity, singing, “You sound defensive like you had not thought it through enough to have the answer / Like you might have bit off more than you could chew.” The problem here is not that he’s lost his faith in God, or his faith in humanity for that matter. Rather, it’s that he apparently has lost his ability to articulate this turn to atheism (if that is what this is) in creative and engaging ways, turning instead to clichés and questions that aren’t really that interesting. It really is disappointing, considering recent examples of artists who have used Christian language in thought-provoking and engaging ways (e.g. the Mountain Goats), that Bazan, as a person of faith, has failed to do the same. (Barsuk, 
MAGNETA LANE