A couple of things have happened in the past few days. The two-year anniversary of this site passed on the 22nd; a friend of mine returned to Canada two days ago, and wants to go to Chicago to see one of the big festivals in August; and earlier today, Sleater-Kinney announced they were going on indefinite hiatus. Chances are we won’t hear from them again.

Dig Me Out was a turning point for my taste in music, almost as drastic as the summer before I started high school, when one day I was listening to the easy listening radio station my dad always listened to (”All your favourites! Rod Stewart! Celine Dion! Phil Collins!”), and the next I was buying Garbage albums and listening to Alanis Morissette and the Smashing Pumpkins. I have the internet to thank for introducing me to the trio from Olympia; without the internet it’s entirely possible I could’ve looked to Nickelback as the be all and end all of good music. Thankfully, a little webzine called Addicted To Noise turned me around. Back when people downloaded 112kbps MP3s from closed-membership FTP sites with ratios (some things never change), the internet had already proven its worth to thousands of music fans who were discovering that people had new and interesting things to say about bands and CDs they’d never heard of. A prescient ATN review of the first Elastica album claimed that even if Elastica never made another album, the half hour of buzzing ear candy they’d produced in 1994 would still represent a monumental piece of work. And, of course, Elastica almost never did make another album. For years I cursed out ATN for making such a prediction, as if Elastica would’ve avoided the drug abuse, the failed A-list relationships and the celebrity-fueled craziness if only the words in some internet review had never been committed to a hard drive.

ATN was also responsible for turning me on to Sleater-Kinney, who apparently shared some musical similarities with Elastica—loud, fast, and out of control. Only Sleater-Kinney also had a female lead singer that could shatter glass at 40 paces. Considering this was around the time I was picking up the likes of PJ Harvey, Bjork and Tori Amos—three women with fairly unconventional singing styles, compared to most radio-friendly fare—Corin Tucker seemed like an ideal addition to my record collection. Browsing through the shelves at the Toronto Tower Records location (a store that has long since disappeared, replaced by a sporting goods store), I saw the cover of Dig Me Out sitting by one of the listening stations set up around the store. I had just enough time to take in the full force of the title track before I had to head home, but I bought the album the next time I was in the store.

Sleater-Kinney was my gateway drug. In search of more music like the ferocious “Dig Me Out” and the infectious “Little Babies,” I found Pussycat Radio, which morphed into indiepopradio: all the best music coming out of the basement studios and garages of the Pacific Northwest, and then some. Everyone from Mirah to Built To Spill to the Bangs was on that station, and then a universe beyond: Versus from New York; Helium from Boston; Rainer Maria from Madison, Wisconsin; Saint Etienne and Heavenly from Britain; Solex from the Netherlands; the list went on and on. The first concert I ever went to was a plodding Radiohead concert where Thom Yorke pulled a “rockstar” moment by slapping away his mic in frustration (oooh, so bad, Thom), but the first real show I went to see—the first show I really enjoyed—was Sleater-Kinney with COCO from Olympia and the White Stripes from Detroit. Never again will you see Janet Weiss and Meg White selling their own merch at a show. I made an utter fool of myself in front of Corin Tucker that day. Sleater-Kinney is probably as close as I’ll ever come to the whole celebrity fandom thing, with the swooning and the autographs and the like.

But as the years went on, the cracks started to show. The band is very sensitive to crowd reaction; if the audience isn’t into the show enough—a common complaint bands have of Toronto crowds—then Sleater-Kinney begins to flounder. Just before The Woods came out, they did a show in Vancouver and it was great. All the pent-up energy from not performing live for a year and a half, plus the bonus of a lovable quasi-hometown crowd, and finally the enthusiasm of being able to play new songs no one had heard before—it all came together in the Commodore Ballroom, and if you were there, you know how fantastic it was. Fast forward to five months later, when Sleater-Kinney hit the Phoenix (strike one) after releasing their much-hyped album (much hype = many semi-interested hipsters = strike two). It was an all-ages show, which usually helps, but the Phoenix does all-ages shows badly: they split the room into two halves, so all the drinkers stand far back, meaning they become even less interested in things like dancing and having a good time (strike three). By the end of the show, Sleater-Kinney looked like they wanted to leave Toronto and never come back; but moreso, they looked like they were tired of playing on the road in general. Even the usual favourite of “I Wanna Be Your Joey Ramone” was tired and unenthusiastic; Carrie Brownstein’s bridge verse was cut completely, which is akin to holding out a giant banner on stage saying “This crowd sucks, I want to go home.”

In the end, Sleater-Kinney was battling their own history when they put out The Woods; it was intended to be a clean slate, a restatement of purpose, and above all an attempt to have fun again. It’s disheartening but not incredibly surprising that they failed. The band has other obligations now; Weiss has Quasi, for example, and Tucker has a son she would no doubt like to spend more time with. With every passing year they’ve resembled less and less the fresh-faced twenty-somethings on the cover of Dig Me Out. Whether they reform in the future or not is somewhat moot; what’s important is that they need to leave music for a while, to see if music still runs through their veins.

I can sympathize; over the past couple of years I’ve grown increasingly disenchanted with music today. Am I really so old, at 23, that I can’t appreciate what the kids are listening to these days? It started with the whole Interpol mess—a less interesting indie band I haven’t heard yet—but now I hear what the kids are listening to and I find myself more and more playing the old curmudgeon. At this rate, I’ll cease to find anything worthwhile about music in another year or two. This can’t be allowed to stand.

And so I’m taking a break from regular posts on angels twenty. I hope it won’t be a long one, but at the same time maybe a couple of months will do me good. I’m going to take the next little while to stop forcing music down my own throat, in the hopes that I’ll start to seek it out again without it feeling like a chore. Consider this a summer holiday.

In the meantime, I have some ideas about what to do with the site. Of course everything will stay up; angels twenty won’t disappear. And there may be sporadic posts as something catches my fancy; I’ve got a post on Nous Non Plus planned that I’d still like to write up. But perhaps that friend of mine who wants to go to Chicago to see Lollapalooza (incidentally, the last concert Sleater-Kinney will play) might be interested in taking a shot at the whole writing thing…

I was going to post this earlier, but I didn’t manage to fit it in before the month of cover songs in May. I haven’t been buying many records as of late for various reasons. An important one is that I just don’t know what the kids like these days; I’m in my early 20s and I’m already out of touch, but that’s another story for another time. Anyways, nowadays my record purchases come in bunches. The last big bunch came two months ago, when I picked up a bunch of albums in the record store and then came home to discover more in the mail. The album I liked most, though, was the album I picked up on a whim. The Rainer Maria album is middling and vaguely awkward; the new Built To Spill is boring when it should be anthemic; there ain’t much wrong with the new Magneta Lane but that doesn’t make it great, either. But thanks to some conveniently prominent placement at Sunrise (which could have been a pay-for-placement issue, if the record industry is anything like the book or grocery industry) I noticed that the Essex Green had a new album.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the Essex Green; they made nice little songs, but for whatever reason I could never quite make the jump from appreciating their charms from afar to embracing them wholeheartedly. Maybe it was because I’d bought a Ladybug Transistor album and found it charming but not exciting. The 60s throwback motif is great if you’re a garage band or a Motown revivalist, less so if you’re a fey pop band (this is your cue, fans of Camera Obscura, early Belle and Sebastian, Ladybug Transistor, etc., etc., etc.). But I bought the album anyways, maybe because I was already ambivalent about the rest of my purchases and thought, hey, what’s one more possible failure?

But Cannibal Sea is far from a failure and far from fey. Much has changed since I last heard the Essex Green, around the time of their debut album in 1999. They sound more upbeat, more confident, more assured, more everything—no longer the quaint little sister of Elephant Six, but one of the best indie pop bands in business today. Sasha Bell in particular has really come into her own, and is possibly the best thing about this album. So here’s the opener to Cannibal Sea, a song I imagine will end up being one of my favourites of the year.

The issue of Western musicians taking cues from Eastern music has always bit a tiny bit controversial. Usually it doesn’t amount to much more than giving Eddie Vedder or Alanis Morrisette a playful jab when they release an album with a sitar or two. But occasionally, the weird post-colonial backdrop is more obvious. Dengue Fever is a throwback Cambodian retro-pop band with a bonafide Cambodian pop star, but it was born in LA and the band is made up almost entirely of American musicians with no connection to Cambodia.

The story starts in the 60s, with Cambodian artists taking American rock songs and bending them to their own ends, creating a Khmer-inflected mixture of surf rock, soul and psychedelia. (On a side note, odd how we generally take a dimmer view of Westerners appropriating Eastern music than the opposite phenomena.) As the Khmer Rouge came to power, the music died out, and for the most part an interesting little slice of music history ended there. Enter Chhom Nimol, a Cambodian singer who has reportedly performed numerous times for the country’s royal family on several occasions. Flush with success, she arrived in Los Angeles on a tourist visa and began singing in nightclubs in the area. Once, after a performance at the Dragon House, she was approached by several men who were astounded by her singing voice, and asked her to join their band. Barely able to speak English, she was reluctant at first, but eventually she became the lead singer for Dengue Fever, singing in her native Khmer and (increasingly) in English as well.

That’s the story as I’ve decided to tell it, but in fact that’s not the way the story generally goes. Most articles about Dengue Fever start in Cambodia in 1998, with Ethan Holtzman hearing that 60s-era Cambodian rock during a trip to the country. One of his fellow travellers came down with dengue fever, and Holtzman returned to the U.S. with a lovely story about jungle diseases and a newfound taste for Cambodian pop. After gathering several like-minded compatriots to fill out the rest of the band, Holtzman went in search of his singer—he figured she could be Thai or Vietnamese, he wasn’t that picky—when he and the rest of the band walked into the Dragon House and discovered Nimol.

In interviews, Nimol is hardly front and center—somewhat understandable considering her limited command of english, but still somewhat unfortunate given her prominent role in the band. And for whatever reason, she’s the only one without a bio on the website. It’s really too bad—I’ve heard plenty of stories about North Americans backpacking around Asia. I want to know more about Nimol.

So the hot new thing everyone’s talking about is Pandora, the latest in a long line of music recommendation services that promises to give you more of the kinds of music you want to hear. Well, I’ve heard that one before, folks, and so far it hasn’t worked out amazingly well. A couple of years ago I tried out a similar service; I don’t remember anything about it except that it no longer exists. And then there’s last.fm, which is a fantastic service for keeping track of the stuff you listen to and finding other people who share the same tastes, but using it to find new music isn’t the greatest idea; social networking apps have yet to figure out how to avoid the echo chamber effect, and that applies equally well to blogging, MySpace and last.fm. I look through the lists of my last.fm neighbours and I’ve already heard most of the stuff they have at the top of their charts. For example, take my first neighbour. His top ten? Broken Social Scene, Metric, Stars, Lush, Ladytron, Feist, Dressy Bessy, Pixies, I Am The World Trade Center, Broadcast. Been there, done that, wrote the screenplay, rolling out the line of merch. This is all somewhat moot, though, as I don’t generally plunge into the lists of my neighbours to find new music anyways. If you think about it, it’s actually a fair amount of work to troll through people’s lists and find stuff you haven’t heard of before, then track down the artist’s songs and give them a listen. Sorry, I’m a lazy ass; I just never get around to it.

Pandora works differently; it’s essentially a radio station you train with your tastes. Most music recommendation apps are actually more like Pandora than last.fm; the difference is that Pandora’s backed by a fair amount of rigorous-sounding classification called the Music Genome Project. But far more important than the specifics of how it recommends music to you is the interface. If you’ve ever rated music on Amazon, you know how Pandora works, and the effects of rating a song you’ve just listened to are immediate; the station changes immediately to play more music like the song you just gave a thumbs up, or stops playing music by any artist you’ve rejected two songs from. I’m still skeptical as to how well Pandora’s figuring out my tastes (umm, Olivia Newton-John? But I did kinda like “Living In Desperate Times,” actually…) but it’s hit at least one home run.

Pandora has decided that I might like Enon, specifically this track from their bits-and-pieces compilation from last year. And what do you know, Pandora’s right! But really what it’s trying to tell me is I should listen to my old roommate more often, because I’m pretty sure she’s got a copy of High Society and extolled its virtues at some point. Well, whatever. The point is, I’ve caught on to Enon’s whimsical brand of ass-shaking grooviness, and the fact that Pandora’s at least as good as a roommate when recommending music is a pretty good sign in my book.