One for any collectors/diggers out there this week: the opener of the third B-52’s LP, Whammy!. A lesser-known cut, but a sure-fire dance floor winner. B-52’s fans, stay tuned for the next Over the Wall column!
The Cuban Assassins
Instead of me rooting around in the milk crates in my living room for this week’s vinyl download, it’s something brand new. So new, in fact, it’s not even officially out for another couple of weeks.
Halifax bands Myles Deck and the Fuzz and The Cuban Assassins are collaborating on a split 7″ being released later this month via From Here To There Records.
Myles Deck and The Fuzz
Both bands do that swaggering MC5-style rock and roll thing pretty well. The Assassins wear their punk rock influences on their sleeve more so than The Fuzz, but both bands are worth a listen if that’s your style.
Myles Deck and co. head out on tour to Ontario and back starting next week, with stops in Montreal, Toronto, Peterborough, Windsor, London, Burlington, Kingston and Quebec City. There are so far two shows scheduled later this month with both bands to celebrate for the release of the split, November 26th in Moncton and the 27th in Halifax.
Download the tracks from the Myles Deck and the Fuzz/Cuban Assassins split single from AQuietRevolution.com:
Tracklist:
- Myles Deck and the Fuzz – Lights Out Electric Co.
- Myles Deck and the Fuzz – The Healing Power
- The Cuban Assassins – Money
- The Cuban Assassins – Dead Dead Dead
Guys, we all hate November. I don’t mean to be month prejudiced, but November is typically the worst, especially now that Maine has just broken our hearts. Granted, there are things like Mo’vember and Remembrance Day (woo paid holiday) to make it all a bit easier, but November is the month where my furry bathrobe is the best thing ever and it is hard to get me out of that thing. Anyway, here are some things I might do if my bathrobe catches fire or something.
The Most Serene Republic are playing at Hunter’s Ale House on the 25th. Another Wednesday, fuck! Yeah, I usually try not to let weekdays stop me, but my office job requires me to look half-presentable, so these days are tough ones. But I love this band. “Present and Future End” from their 2007 album is such a fantastic song, but I have yet to find a song that strikes me like that on their newer album. Although, I’m a bit bummed that the Meligrove Band won’t be joining their east coast leg of the tour. Mardeen are a great band, but I always seem to have an opportunity to see them, you know?
I am happy happy Shotgun Jimmie is coming back! He is playing with BA Johnston! This will be the happiest show ever. I had been spying their tour dates and noticed Charlottetown wasn’t on there for the longest time, so I’m glad Baba’s stepped up and booked them a show. Either way, this show is on a Tuesday (fuck) but I won’t miss it. Jimmie’s Close to the Coast set was probably my favourite of the festival. Bring your snot shield for the BA set!
BA Johnston!
Another Hamilton pal is coming east and his name is Wax Mannequin. He is playing at Baba’s Lounge on the 19th which is a Thursday (fuck) with Rae Spoon (who I have yet to see, yay). Wax will be releasing a new CD! I don’t want to get too creepy here, but I have a crazy crush on this man. I find him both funny and enchanting and his Twitter updates are always incredible. He gave me a rose once, would it be weird if I gave him one back?
Over this past month I’ve been a busy girl, but luckily I was able to catch a handful of goodness. My favourite October surprise was seeing The Zolas at Timothy’s coffee this past Saturday. Although they could come across as being very college-rock-radio, they stood out to me as being playful and sweet. I was having a sickpants afternoon and they certainly cheered me up.
The Zolas, from Vancouver
I was also fortunate enough to catch Emm Gryner in Charlottetown last night. She was lovely, charming and way too patient for the crowd that kept trying to talk over her. Luckily, I didn’t get all drunk and ask her what it was like to kiss my great Canadian crush (Pacey Witter) so I deem the evening a success.
Other junks:
- Catherine MacLellan is the winner of PEI’s part of the Great Canadian Song Quest, and will thankfully NOT be singing about either Cavendish or Anne of Green Gables. Phew.
- A bit bummed that not a single PEI band made it into any categories in the CBC Radio 3 Bucky Awards. So how about voting Damian Abraham (from Fucked Up) for Sexiest Musician to ease your sorrows?
- From 2007: Video of Dog Day playing at Reading Well bookstore. RIP great little venue.
- If you want to be in a music video and are comfortable with fake ejaculate on your face, call these guys.
- Elliott Fuckin’ Brood is playing on the 12th at Baba’s. I hear they’re a pretty big deal.
Although November is synonymous with boring, I think I’m going to tell my pessimism (and student loan payments) to take a back seat for this month. There are at least four fun shows I’d like to witness, so I will come out of hibernation with rummy egg nog in hand.
Alrighty, this week is part one of the Iceland Airwaves reports. Next week, in the interest of timeliness, we’ll be pre-empting the scheduled Over the Wall article in order to post up the second part.
This was the first time I’ve been to the Halifax Pop Explosion since 2006. I think I had way more fun in 2006, but that’s okay. I still had some fun times and spent a sufficient amount of my rent money so I deem it a successful trip.
On Friday night, my boyfriend and I had tickets to see Japanther, Devil Eyes and more at The Seahorse. I am very neurotic about ticket-buying since I am perpetually late and didn’t want to risk not getting in, so we wandered down when sufficiently drunk. I love not being places on time! Woo. My friends (without tickets) managed to get in before a big rush of people so we felt victorious already. I was pretty bummed to find out Molson was sponsoring and thus my only beer options were Canadian (barf) and Coors Light (water), so I took the barf route because I am bad at life. We arrived in time to see Devil Eyes and I wasn’t really feeling it. I admit maybe I am not typically a fan of bluesy-heavy music and maybe I just didn’t get it. I think I am getting too sensible for guitar smashing, too. I just think, DUDE, I COULD PAY MY LIGHT BILL WITH THAT. The theme of this review is that I am poor!
Anyway, I drank some more barf and got up front for Japanther. I missed these guys eight thousand times before, so this was my night. I was up front, with, like, ten bottles of beer in my hand and I actually brought a camera for once. Their performance met my mega-high expectations. My friends all loved them, even though it is totally not their thing. They played most all of Skuffed Up My Huffy which meant I got a chance to scream along to both “$100 Cover “and “River Phoenix”. I got knocked around a bit but managed to keep my legs upright for its entirety. Many dudes kept trying to squeeze their way to the front, but our wall of tough females kept them at bay. We high-fived each other every time we threw down a drunk dude. AWESOME. At one point, the older stage manager tried to take my purse off the stage (which was carefully hidden underneath an unused cymbal in front of me) and I had to fight for it back. Afterwards Ian Vanek from Japanther starts yelling at him to get lost and then proclaims that “old people suck”. More Vanek rants included that musicians suck and they were just artists and bicycle messengers trying to have fun. I left sweaty and bruised up, totally cool.
Japanther. Shirtless.
Payphone microphones for all!
Sweaty drummers are my favourite.
The next day I went breakfasting and to the Zine Fair at St. David’s Hall. I didn’t end up buying much, just a few zines and pins. Highlight being my Halifax Scene Recipe Zine: A\V French Onion Soup, anyone? After that, I bought some much-needed clothing and searched for cigarettes. By the way Halifax, why is it so hard to find cigarettes in that neck of the woods?
That night we prepared for the Girl Talk. For this show, I was prepared for the worst. I like to dance, I like to act the fool but I am a judgemental prick and hate it when spandexxxxed young’uns get up in my dance space. So, I felt making masks would help this? Yeah, I don’t know. But we spent our pre-drinking time making animal masks and I had more fun doing that than at the show.
We were quoting 30 Rock on the walk down Windsor Street when we see someone passed out on the sidewalk (THAT’S A DEALBREAKER, LADIES). After initial jerky jokes, we noticed she was pretty fuckin’ young and was having trouble talking, walking and stating her address. I felt sort of bad and we tried to figure out how to get this girl home, as we were worried she might uh, fall in the street and die. We looked for her phone and found a baggie with plain Tostito chips in it (what?) and a bunch of crushed up Mr. Noodles (double what?) strewn throughout her purse. Although she has trouble talking in general, she did manage to coherently ask my boyfriend if he wanted to go home with her and mention her parents were out of town, all while sort of humping his leg. Thus we learned she wasn’t completely out of it! End of story: Keep in mind we were all wearing animal masks when her friend comes, she was pissed, and then we finally got to make our way to the show.
My superhero mask: saving the world, one drunk chick at a time.
We waited in the line to get in for about 40 minutes. This sucked! It was raining! Once we got inside, I realized I was completely sober, which kind of sucked. I chugged some more barf, and closer we tried to get. Unfortunately, I got separated from my crowd of friends and found myself being pushed to the front by a bunch of crazy dudes. I tried to fight to get out, but it wasn’t happening. So here I am, stuck at the very front, with no chance of moving or dancing and I have to just accept my surroundings. I was then getting elbowed in the face repeatedly by taller folks and thought at one point I was going to pass out. I needed to get out of there so badly but no one would move and let me go. Out of fear of getting pregnant, I acted like a complete asshole and just kicked my way out. Once I was able to breathe, I dry heaved a little, had water and felt better.
End of story: Girl Talk played all of his album songs, which I guess was fun. I was hoping that there would be more new songs that weren’t on his album. I mean, I appreciated that he played Miley’s “Party in the USA” (seriously, awesome song) but he just played it. No fun mash-up or lead-in. My highlight of the night was when Rich Aucoin attached a roll of toilet paper to the end of a leaf blower.
At the end of the night, I was mad I didn’t just get tickets to see Dog Day like I wanted. I would have had way more fun at a third of the price. Big shows are consistently a disappointment with me, and I should really know that by now.
That being said, I had a decent weekend. Despite the rain, the line ups for everything, and Girl Talk, I was able to share one of my favourite bands (Japanther) with all of my buds and that was worth the trip alone. But yeah, this was the worst review ever.
Look for Aimee’s review of Pop Explosion shenanigans on Monday, but for now here’s a bunch of video highlights from the festival. Enjoy!
Tomcat Combat at The Toothy Moose:
Dead Wife at Gus’ Pub:
Boys Who Say No at The Seahorse Tavern:
Japanther at The Seahorse Tavern:
The Russian Futurists – The Method of Modern Love & Let’s Get Ready to Crumble: The first two full-length albums from Toronto’s Matthew Adam Hart, released in 2000 and 2002, respectively, were infectious pop gems that took many by surprise. The bedroom-studio production aesthetic, the undeniable melodies, and the energy behind it all still make these records lots of fun. At the time, Hart was working by himself, fully embracing and reveling in the amateurism of it. He spoke in interviews about not really knowing what he was doing, and about not even really remembering what he played on some of the tracks, but listening to these first two albums, one gets his talent for songwriting and arranging full on. These two records are pretty much just a guy having fun and effortlessly putting down some of the finest lo-fi (or otherwise) synth pop ever recorded. Hart received a fair amount of attention in the early 2000s as a result of these albums, both in Canada and abroad, and he released his glossier third album Our Thickness in 2005 to much acclaim. The band and the sound of the music were expanded a bit with that release, and the audience was growing, but apart from some remixing and a compilation release of tunes from the three records mentioned here, Hart has been fairly quiet for the last couple years. From all indications though, he’s still active, and talk of a new record has been circulating for quite some time now. Hopefully it’ll materialise at some point.
This is one of the first recordings Olympia, Washington’s Unwound ever produced, pre-dating their first album Fake Train in 1993. This is the re-issued version from 1996, but the original 1992 single was release #6 from San Diego’s Gravity Records. Carrie Brownstein explains why you should care about all this:
A few days ago, I was having lunch with a friend. He said something I thought was interesting, the gist of it being that San Diego music wouldn’t have been what it was if it weren’t for the influences of Washington, D.C.’s Nation of Ulysses and Olympia’s Unwound. I agreed, but added that without those two bands, the San Diego sound would have still been unique; it just would have been culled from a smaller pool of local influence, specifically from the likes of Drive Like Jehu and Rocket From the Crypt. Nevertheless, there was a time in the early and mid-1990s when a bunch of young San Diego bands — from Heroin to Antioch Arrow to Clikatat Ikatowi — sounded like their DC and Oly counterparts, only sped up (in the screamo variety) or slowed down (in the Black Heart Procession variety). But either way, theirs was the sound of the melted and the sun-weary.
Download Unwound 7″ from Evilmp3.
Tracklist:
- You Bite My Tongue
- Kid Is Gone Chant Of Vengeance
- Understand And Forget
- Google’s music service has launched late yesterday. According to the New York Times,
Google users who put the name of a song into the search engine will get, as the top result, information about the musician and an opportunity to stream the song from one of two services, Lala and MySpace Music. People who click on that link will, in most cases, get a pop-up window that allows them to play the full song once, for free, along with a link to buy the song….Entering an album name or band name into Google yields similar free listening opportunities.
Except this isn’t working for me! I’d really like to hear some Gordon Lightfoot this morning, but when I Google “sundown,” my top results are YouTube videos of live performances, just like it would have been last week. What about something new and hip, say, “party in the usa?” Nope, same thing. What’s the deal, everybody?
- This week marks the beginning of round one of the second edition of the Giraffecycle Mixtape Challenge. For those unfamiliar, Giraffecycle used to be a website and message board for local music in Saint John, but now it’s where people in Saint John and Fredericton go to fight about restaurants, the H1N1 vaccine, NB Power, and complain about inconsiderate roommates, coworkers, and garbage collectors. So it’s just like every other message board you’ve ever been on!
Anyway, each week of the challenge two competitors create a 30-minute playlist (or “mixtape”), record it into a single mp3 file, upload it, and the community votes on which one they like best. Winners advance to the next round, until only the mixtape champion remains. Exciting! And what an awesome way to make sure everybody else knows about your impeccable taste in music. This week it’s users andrew todd and barb. You can stream their mixes from this thread on the forum, but you must be signed in to vote. - Metallica aids search for missing fan, no word on strategy to locate all their other fans.
- The soon-to-be-defunct-because-someone’s-moving-to-Toronto Gideons of Halifax recorded a double LP and are doing a very limited release of 150 copies. However! You can download the whole thing for free here. You will like The Gideons if you like sweaty, 60s-style power pop or Tricky Woo back when they were good. You heard it here first.
- The Gothamist has an interview Guy Picciotto (Rites of Spring, Fugazi, certainly other things), who’s now on tour as part of Vic Chesnutt’s band. The thing that interested me the most about this is that he mentioned how he and the other members of Fugazi are in the process of compiling every bootleg then can find and putting them all online, “…so people can listen to 1,200 Fugazi shows! [Laughter] If they want to!”
- Wouldn’t you want to know if your music was being used to torture inmates at detention camps like Guantanamo?
- Charging cover at house shows: kinda controversial.
- The Jesus Lizard is now Pitchfork-approved.
- Jian Ghomeshi had enlisted Tegan & Sara, Vampire Weekend, and The National to help you get better at guitar. Wait, what?
- Moz collapses on stage, is hospitalized and then released.
- Fargo Rock City: The Movie, penned by a Letterman writer and that dude from The Hold Steady.
You know when you have that one really nice day of fall and you wish so hard that was what fall was like every single day? And maybe you start exploring what climate you’d have to live in to have that nice fall weather be like that year round (I’m guessing Portland, Oregon, maybe)? That was what we had in Halifax the day after the Halifax Pop Explosion ended. It was seriously the nicest day ever. I felt like going to the lake.
Since last month I gave the run down of what I was looking forward to for HPX (I didn’t see it all, though, isn’t that always the way?) I’m going to start with that really nice day and move on. I spent the day nursing a terrible headache (and not even from drinking) and going to the grocery store. The previous two weeks I had been researching how to cure an eyelid twitch that I believe came from spending too many late nights at bars (and working through some anxiety-ridden days). Apparently eating bananas help an eyelid twitch, if anyone else has had similar problems.
Before I move on to Halloween and November, there is one single thing that happened at Pop Explosion that I wanted to address: My very tight wristband (paper wristbands instead of lanyards this year for everyone). It was put on for me by a volunteer and I nearly passed out due to the constriction. I cut it off as soon as I got home and got to feel like a real Agent 99 all weekend because I re-taped it every night. It’s the little things, isn’t it? So, in the end, the tight wristband actually heightened my enjoyment of the festival. I officially have no complaints.
Japanther
We should get back to the perfect fall day: My buddy Mark had a house show that night featuring two Pop Explosion bands still in town, Japanther and Boys Who Say No, along with two of my very favourite local bands, Bloodhouse and Bad Vibrations. Poison Percy Rufus also played, who I haven’t seen before (and unfortunately missed again that night), but I think I would like. The house show was a great way to end that nice sunny day. I was really happy to be there. I choose to believe this night ushered out my painful eyelid twitch (which has since seemed to abate).
The Fat Stupids
Generally, I am always really partial to November because it’s my birthday month, and this year my great pal and bandmate Erica Butler set up the most awesome gift ever, house party featuring a cover set by the (totally amazing) Fat Stupids doing a bunch of songs we like.The Fat Stupids offered their services as a prize that was auctioned off last month for the CKDU Funding Drive (CKDU met their $25, 000 goal, by the way) and she snapped it up like the clever gal she is. The playlist includes songs by The Riverdales, The Bugs, Statues and more. STOKED!
Shearing Pinx
I shouldn’t get ahead of myself, though. Let’s talk about Halloween. My Halloween plan mostly takes place on the Friday before the actual day. I’ve been asked to DJ at the Strange Adventures Halloween party (I’ve settled on playing all the Bananas albums in order, in penance to my eyelid twitch and also because they are the best band of all time. Sort of kidding about playing all the albums, not kidding at all about them being the best), go see the Shearing Pinx LP release with AHNA, Data Cave and Bad Vibrations at Gus’ Pub (Shearing Pinx and AHNA play an all ages show at Lost and Found with Pig on Saturday, October 31, at 7pm). All wearing my fashionable, yet functional, cat lady costume. It’s warm (cat sweater, stuffed cat toys for insulation), gross (bag of kitty litter to carry around. Unsoiled, of course. Who do you think I am?) and scary (it’s surprisingly close to my every day outfit).
A History Of
Aside from my birthday show, the outing I am most excited for in November is the A History Of LP release show at Club 1668 (Saturday, November 14) with York Redoubt, newcomers Cold Warps (featuring Paul Hammond, Dominique Taylor, Ryan Allen, Lance Purcell and a whole lot of power pop) and my beloved Bad Vibrations. The BVs just cannot play enough for me. If I were a millionaire, I would hire them to sit idly in my living room all night and begin playing when I walked out with my coffee in the morning. That wouldn’t be too bad of a gig, right? No, I didn’t think so.
Bad Vibrations
