Top 50 Canadian Albums Of The Decade, 44-40

44. Lightning Dust - Lightning Dust

Probably the best orbit band of the Black Mountain/Pink Mountaintops' crew (though I still really want to hear Sinoia Caves' album...and now that I'm thinking about it, that first Ladyhawk album was pretty great...) Lightning Dust found Amber Webber and Joshua Wells writing a bunch of homey, psychedelic pop songs and recording them kind of mid-fi. It was totally unambitious - apparently they never even intended to release the album while recording it - but ended up being just really, really good. Like my old bandmate Adam Helfand-Green's game, it manages to be great without ever really trying or apparently intending to...

43. Joel Plaskett - Three

As far as I'm concerned, this is the best Plaskett album I've yet to hear. Ashtray Rock just didn't do it for me, La Di Da is inconsistent, and In Need Of Medical Attention just isn't as honed as his later works. But with Three, Plaskett's ambition payed off beautifully, with an album that is as long as it is excellent. Though perhaps a little more eclecticism would have been appropriate for a triple album (see Sandanista!), it's clear that Plaskett has found his niche as the Springsteen of Canada's East Coast. Lyrics and composition are at an all-time high, especially in songs like "Through And Through And Through" and "In The Blue Moonlight". In the most Canadian terms one could use, this album was a serious hat-trick.

42. The Hidden Cameras - Awoo

The flowering of all frontman Joel Gibb's beautiful ideas, Awoo was the album where The Hidden Cameras truly found themselves. It's a shandre that a still haven't seen the band live, but I'd imagine that the bouyant joy of these songs would be nothing short of elevating live, especially with all the crazy shit I've heard goes on at a Hidden Cameras show. A key band in the rise of Canadian indie-rock this past decade (they were the first Canadian band to be signed to Rough Trade and their ranks have featured the likes of Owen Pallett, Laura Barrett, Patrick Wolf and The Phonemes), Awoo is the Hidden Camera's most essential album.

41. Crystal Castles - Crystal Castles

The explosive, corrosive Toronto electronic duo Crystal Castles found international fame pretty much immediately, which is ridiculous. But with music this good, it really isn't. Crystal Castles' incredible dance music incorporated elements of chiptune and noise to arrive at their brilliant sound and all the controversies they've ran into in the last couple years only makes me love them more. Their album wasn't the most well-constructed album in the history of the world, but there's no getting around how strong the music is.

40. Chad Vangaalen - Soft Aeroplane

In 2007, Patrick Watson said that Chad Vangaalen should have won the Polaris Prize and not him. He may have been just being modest, but seriously, Chad Vangaalen would've been a better pick. Though Soft Aeroplane, his 2008's follow-up, was actually a far better album. With an array of cool little musical toys like drum machines, samplers, synths, etc., Vangaalen sounds like the 21st century version of Neil Young, except way fucking weirder and kind of morbid...great album though.

This Song Is Gonna Haunt You One Day In Your Life...

I interviewed Danny Fields a couple months ago (the interview will be up soon, I've just been sitting on it) and he was very, very admiring of Jonathan Richman, so much so that he wouldn't even allow there to be anything bad so much as suggested about him.

Well, Danny Fields was pretty right about most of the acts he supported in the last 40 years - Velvet Underground, Stooges, MC5, Ramones, etc. - and he was right about Jonathan Richman.

After talking to him, I started digging more into Richman's more recent stuff and it is indeed quite excellent. This song in particular, though not too recent, is phenomenal.

Listen to it. Sorry about the stupid video.

Top 50 Canadian Albums Of The Decade, 50-45

So it's December now and that means it's list time. But this year it's not just time year end "Best Of"s, this year we get decade end "Best Of"s! So here's the second list (of many) I'll be posting this month.

The 00's have been an incredible decade for Canadian music. In fact, it may have been the best ever, as bands from Vancouver, Montreal, Toronto, Halifax and even Calgary got huge in the spheres of indie rock and gave Canada a bit of a rep as a cool place to start a band. Since some other Toronto blogger(s) decided to make this list and his differed big time from mine, I've decided to make my own. Check it muthafuckas. Here's 50-45:

50. Dog Day - Night Group (2007)

This great Halifax band has released two stellar albums this decade and their first just narrowly beat out their second for placement on the list. Night Group is a glorious feast of post-punk hooks but with only a touch of post-punk moodiness and atmosphere. In it's place is a kind of too-cool-to-bother-getting-excited version of colorful indie-pop.

49. Constantines - Tournament Of Hearts (2005)

An incredible live band goes into the studio and decides to take its time with more challenging arrangements and song-structures and the result is one of their greatest albums, the incredible Tournament Of Hearts. They didn't have to make an album like this, but they did, and we're all the better for it.

48. The Weakerthans - Reconstruction Site (2003)

The Weakerthans haven't aged all that well in recent years, mainly because they refuse to age or change at all in any way. Every single Weakerthans album is full of the same hyperliterate lyrics and the same standard late 90s college radio indie-rock/pop changes, but it's hard for me to say that I really dislike any of them, or that I don't enjoy listening to them a least a little. When Reconstruction Site came out it was a bonafide instant-classic and it would be unfair of me to deny it a place on this list, even if it's just for the line, "And you might roll your eyes at this/But I'm so glad that you exist."

47. Wolf Parade - At Mt. Zoomer (2008)

Okay, so it wasn't as good as Apologies... because 1) Isaac Brock didn't produce it, 2) it contained none of the brilliant social commentary of its predecessor. But it was still a Wolf Parade album and the songs were still pretty damn good. I mean how can you not enjoy the beautiful clash of the titans that is Dan Boekner's shredded vocal chords and messy guitar vs. Spencer Krug's yelps and his spacey keyboards? It's not possible. And though none of the songs were classics like "Shine A Light" or "I'll Believe In Anything", just try not enjoying the eerie "California Dreamer" or getting into the swampy groove of "Fine Young Cannibals". Just try.

46. Gonzales - Solo Piano

The nice Jewish boy who moved to Berlin to rap but then came back only to make a shit load of cash producing Feist's last two albums decides to make an album of...solo piano compositions. Gonzales is nothing if not an artist who follows his own ridiculous muse wherever the fuck it takes him (his last album was a 70s soft-rock throwback). But the man is ridiculously talented, there's no way to spin that otherwise. Solo Piano is an amazingly pleasant surprise, as Gonzales plays a collection of original compositions that wouldn't be out of place played at a fancy cocktail party, but for some reason, probably also ended up on a lot of hipsters' iPods because of the man's rep. But regardless of who's listening to it, I think it would be hard to deny that Solo Piano is a beautiful album.

45. Hylozoists - La Nouvelle Gauche

C'est un travail de geniu avec la zylophone. Un album tres bien, tres bien. Mais mon francais n'est bien :( This Toronto group led by the incredible Paul Aucoin (Rich Aucoin's brother for my Halifax readers) sounds at times like Pink Floyd crossed with Stereolab if they just really, really liked zylophone. Great stuff.

Awesome Album Covers!

"What? They already made a Catwoman movie and it bombed? With Halle Barry? Well obviously, bitch is old!"

Nietzsche Was An 80's Punk Rocker (And Would've Totally Dug The JAMC)

Okay, so I'm not really a Nietzsche scholar or anything, but this thing isn't about Nietzsche really, it's about why us damn kids are so crazy about all this "noise-pop" stuff. You might say, "well, that's not really punk", but it came out of punk and it's all very up to debate. Was the Velvet Underground punk? Well, they definitely laid the groundwork for punk. The Ramones supposedly invented it, and what did they do other than write snappy girl group/Spector-esque pop songs and play them hard and fast. In 1985, The Jesus And Mary Chain released Psychocandy, on which they wrote snappy girl group/Spector-esque pop songs but played them really slow and softly but with a shit load of feedback. That's kind of like out-punking punk. And that is soooo punk. So now that that's established, here's the deal...

Nietzsche had this idea that the human constitution was made up of a Dionysian element and an Apollonian element. The Dionysian element is what makes us want to fuck and drink and party and shit. It's like our id, and I'm also going to throw in (perhaps injustly so) our "death drive", which Freud believes was this drive that humans have which makes us inclined to destruction and aggression. The Apollonian element is what makes us want order, unity, cohesion, form and such. It's like our superego and our eros drive (opposite of the death drive, makes us like all the Apollonian things, eg. order, cohesion). So every human being has these two elements within them, although some constitutions lean more to one element than the other. If they do this to the extreme though, it's not good, as someone overtaken by their Dionysian element is just going to go nuts and end up killing themself, though they might have a lot of fun in the process, while someone who's overly Apollonian is just going to go nuts because they'd be like OCD and they'd never have any fun.

Apollo

Pretty much all art falls within these terms as well, though we refer to them differenty, eg. hard rock vs. soft rock, classical period vs. romantic period, metal vs. twee, etc. So what's the deal with noise-pop? Well, noise-pop (and one could extend this to classic punk-rock, shoegazer and maybe even grunge) is interesting because it manages to be both things at once. It's very Apollonian in that it's tightly and simply constructed with sharp melodies and hooks. True, metal and emo are tightly constructed, but they're still Dionysian because of the aggression of the music, while much of noise-pop isn't played aggressively, but calmly, composedly. However, by smothering everything in feedback, it's at the same time hard, aggressive and Dionysian.

Dionysus

See, feedback can be seen as sonically embodying the Dionysian, in that the gain created by it is kind of like sound gone wild. (I checked out the science behind this and it didn't really help my point, so...yeah...) It makes tones sound dangerous and aggressive and it envelopes them with this kind of white noise.

I remember this idea came to me once while I was in an, uh, altered state of mind. I remember wanting to just bury my mind in noise; to reach a kind of nirvana (mental state of peace and nothingness) by blocking out all thought with just pure noise. When I came out of it, this idea of reaching nirvana through noise still seemed quite a sensible idea. This kind of ties into the idea of the "death drive" because that white noise was kind of an obliteration of the senses. It was a void of chaos, and I think something about it was attractive to my "death drive".

The Jesus and Mary Chain were really the first ones to go all out with this idea of noise-pop. Sure the Velvet Underground had noisy songs and poppy songs and sometimes the two intermingled (especially on my favorite VU album, White Light/White Heat), but The JAMC perfected this idea. And what's cool about what they and subsequent noisepoppers like Dinosaur Jr. and My Bloody Valentine did is that they didn't find some kind of point of moderation between the Apollonian/Dionysian, but rather, they were both at the same time and to the extreme. If you don't know what the fuck I'm talking about, then download My Bloody Valentine's Loveless, The Jesus and Mary Chain's Psychocandy, Dinosaur Jr.'s Beyond and Sonic Youth's Daydream Nation and then you'll figure it out. It's just such a shame Nietzsche was never around to hear them...

(btw, if you think what I've written is wrong, juvenile, and misinterprets the philosophies of those referenced, please comment with your argument, as I'd be very interested in learning if I've got something wrong here.)

Beach House

This week's band of the week is a popular indie band with a haunting, minimalist sound. They came seemingly out of nowhere with no hype or anything in 2006 and subtly overnight became a major name in indie rock. A healthy dosage of Pitchfork and blog-love didn't hurt either, and now, according to Wikipedia, this band is cited by MGMT and Grizzly Bear's Ed Drost as their favorite band. This week's band of the week is...

BEACH HOUSE!!!

The guitar-organ duo of Alex Scally and Victoria Legrand is the kind of band that might have been relegated to obscurity in the years before the blogosphere came to power, but in 2009, they're just the type of headphone-bliss band hipsters eat right up. And deservedly so: the band's beautiful melancholic melodies and hazy atmospheric sound are instantly recognizable and just plain great. Admittedly, I'd lodge the complaint that at times, because of their sparse arrangement perhaps, their songs can be hard to tell apart, but even so, it's hard to complain when the songs are as good as they are.

And sign of the times, bitches - because of the friendly communal sphere that the world of indie rock has apparently become, the band's moody siren-voiced female vocalist Victoria Legrand has gotten so far as the soundtrack of Twilight: New Moon on which she guested with Grizzly Bear on "Slow Life". She also appeared on the Grizzly Bear song (and Veckatimest highlight) "Two Weeks".

The band's first album, 2006's Beach House, was a strong collection of songs, bested by 2008's Devotion, which essentially was a slightly better collection of songs with slightly better production values. The group's latest, 2010's Teen Dream, comes out in January, but like most albums these days, it's already leaked. How is it? Pretty much just like what's come before but maybe a little bigger, more ambitious and still very, very good. This is one beach house well worth spending time in.

http://www.myspace.com/beachhousemusic

http://www.beachhousemusic.net/Beach_House/Home.html

Buy "Devotion" on vinyl here.

Shout out: Why Write?

Why Write? is a new musical project of Danish singer/songwriter Jacob Faurholt, who's resume includes an album with the now-disbanded Sweetie Pie Wilber, as well as two solo albums: 2007's Hurrah Hurrah and 2009's Are You In The Mood For Love?. His latest EP, apparently self-titled, is 5 songs of a kind of scruffy indie-pop somewhere between 80's British Indie-Rock and modern Jonathan Richmond-idealizing Swedish indie-pop, characterized by Faurholt's untrained vocals and enigmatic but homey lyrics. And yeah, it's good stuff.

The EP was released on the Candian What A Mess Label last week and was mixed by KRAMER, the dude who mixed albums by Galaxie 500, Low and Daniel Johnston. Check out the video for the song "Burning Holes" below.

http://jacobfaurholt.wordpress.com/

http://www.myspace.com/whywrite