Yes, this is the third Cadeaux song I’ve posted this year. There’s a good reason.
In a couple of days I’m gonna start the whole self-wank best-of-year thing again. It’s starting earlier than last year because I have holiday songs I want to put up, and holiday songs don’t work if you post them in January, unless they’re songs about the feast of the Epiphany. (I know of exactly zero pop songs about Epiphany, but if you happen to know about one, feel free to send it over and I’ll have a listen.) Anyways, as is always the case with best-of-year lists, you inevitably miss something. Generally the release schedule slows down when you get to December, but there’s always an album you didn’t know existed until the year after its release, or a record you come back to and re-examine after initially writing it off. Then you spend some time kicking yourself because it turns out to be much better than the other albums you put on your list last year.
Physical City is one of those albums. Sure, Joel Plaskett, Petra Haden and Bullette put out some fine albums last year, but to be honest Cadeaux completely blows them away. In the first few months of 2006 things looked dismal, with a couple of early albums leaving much to be desired; I honestly wondered if I’d ever be as interested about music as I was when I was still in college. Physical City was the first album I bought this year that I was genuinely excited about, to the point where I was not only kicking myself for not discovering them earlier, but also kicking myself for not seeing them live while I was in Vancouver. I swear I passed a hundred gig posters for them without ever realizing the bounty I was passing up—songs that made you want to dance and shout and thrust your fists in the air. It’d been a long time since I’d heard an album that rocked as hard as Physical City, and it’d be a while again before I found another one with the same propulsive energy and infectious enthusiasm.
To make matters worse, it turns out I bought Physical City only months before the band broke up for good. So not only did I miss my chance to see them while I lived in the same city, I missed my chance to see them—full stop. All I have left is this one album—a stunning explosion of deliciously noisy post-punk that will be forgotten all too soon. If you like what you hear, pick up a copy at your local record store, or the Vancouver-based Scratch Records if you can’t find a place near you that stocks semi-obscure, dearly departed Canadian indie bands. I loved this band and this album; hopefully you will too.
Stay tuned; review 2006 is coming up next.