I don’t have a lot of good stories about the Rheostatics. I have never been a particularly good fan, haven’t followed the projects of the band members, don’t even have a copy of Double Live or The Story of Harmelodica. Hell, I bought a ticket to see the Rheostatics in Kingston once, and then forgot to go. (Oddly enough, that wasn’t the first time I forgot to go to a show—I made the same mistake a year earlier with Sarah Harmer. That was a fun Sunday morning in the residence cafeteria.) But even I understand the significance of today’s date: March 31, 2007, our first day in a post-Rheostatics world. Yesterday night in Toronto’s Massey Hall, the Rheos played their last ever show with the original trio of Dave Bidini, Martin Tielli and Tim Vesely intact, thus bringing down the curtain on a storied career spanning three decades.

1996 was the year I started listening to different radio stations, the year I started buying CDs, the year I stopped being that kid that just listened to whatever Dad listened to on the radio because he didn’t know any better. The summer before I’d embarked on a mix tape project to collect all my favourite soft rock hits from CHFI-FM, the adult contemporary station in town. Two months later I bought an Alanis Morrissette CD and never looked back. After spending a couple of months with the likes of Oasis and the Gin Blossoms, I jumped radio stations again, started listening to alternative rock, and suddenly entire worlds opened up. I’d entered the magical era of mid-90s alt-rock radio, a time precious to absolutely no one except the people who were in grades 9 through 11 at the time. And it was in that climate that “Bad Time To Be Poor” entered my musical lexicon, one random song alongside other Canadian semi-classics like the Odds’ “Somebody Who’s Cool,” By Divine Right’s “Come For A Ride” and Treble Charger’s “Sick Friend Called.”

The difference was that where most Canadian alt-rock at the time was pretty breezy and fun—the video for “Come For A Ride” has the band, including a young Leslie Feist, barreling down a snowy hill on inner tubes and dreaming of giant donuts—”Bad Time To Be Poor” had weight to it. Written in response to the administration of the Ontario Harris government that ruled during the latter part of the decade, “Bad Time To Be Poor” was a lament on the plight of the young and impoverished the Harris government had left out in the cold with their cutbacks. Listening to it on many a winter evening trundling home from high school, unaware of the song’s political import or the iron fist of the Harris government, lines like “It is a bad time to be poor, and feeling winter through a crack in the door” still left their mark. “Bad Time To Be Poor” would pop up several more times; the following year a rearranged version appeared on a Toronto compilation to fight the amalgamation of the municipalities that made up the core of Toronto (you can find that version on Sweet Static). The song also appeared on GASCD, an album put out in late 2001 in support of the anti-globalization protests in Quebec City in April of that year.

In honour of the Rheostatics and their impact on Canadian music, a bunch of Canadian artists recorded covers of Rheostatics songs and put out an album on Zunior.com for download. The Weakerthans chose to take on “Bad Time To Be Poor,” a fitting choice for the socially conscious Winnipeg band. It also includes the likes of Weeping Tile, the Wooden Stars, the Barenaked Ladies and Cuff the Duke, among others. $8.88 gets you the MP3s, while $6 more also gets you a limited-edition CD in the mail, and all the proceeds from sales of the MP3s goes to a charity of the Rheostatics’ choosing.

It looks like in 2007, everything’s coming up Brunettes, especially if you’re an American fan of the New Zealand twee-pop band. There’s a new single out (you’ll have to endure MySpace to hear it for now), their third album is getting an American release on Sub Pop, and they’ll be touring North America in June if all goes as planned. The Brunettes are no strangers to the New World, having last come through here for SXSW 2006 after spending the previous summer opening for the Shins and Rilo Kiley. Chances are if you’re a North American fan of the Brunettes, you saw them at one of those shows; their infectiously goofy brand of grandiose twee pop comes off particularly well live, and it’s still one of my great shames that I only managed to catch half their opening set when Rilo Kiley was in Toronto last.

With a domestically released album to support in the near future and presumably a decent push from Sub Pop, the Brunettes could ride an even bigger wave this time out, winning hearts and minds like an Australasian shock-and-awe indie pop invasion. No date yet for Structure and Cosmetics but it’d be kind of weird if the Brunettes came all this way, guitars and keyboards and clarinets and trumpets in tow, without plenty of albums to sign after the show. Maybe this time they’ll even come with Mary Kate and Ashley masks for the rest of us.

Deerhoof is new to me, even though they’ve been around for nearly a decade, so I’m not really the best person to give you a career retrospective—especially since the San Francisco band’s been through more cast changes than Cats. (hiss.) All I can really tell you is that they bear a superficial resemblance to Enon, in that both are fronted by Asian women with cutesy high voices and tend to trade in fractured, offbeat and often loud indie pop. I’m also not the best person to give you an idea of what to expect from “The Perfect Me,” the lead-off track from Friend Opportunity, because Heather Phares at the All Music Guide already sums it up perfectly: “‘The Perfect Me’ kicks off the album with galloping percussion and organs that sound like rays of sun bursting through clouds, two of Friend Opportunity’s main musical motifs.”

Well, not quite perfectly: turns out galloping percussion isn’t exactly a major musical motif of the rest of the album, nor are the hits-of-sunshine organs. This is a bloody shame, because “The Perfect Me” is a fantastically wild and heady ride that the rest of Friend Opportunity only occasionally matches in pace. I’ve read that previous Deerhoof efforts were, shall we say, less restrained; hopefully that means “The Perfect Me” isn’t a one-time fluke. Not that the rest of Friend Opportunity is bad, but one listen and I think you’ll agree that “The Perfect Me” is a rollercoaster trip that ends too soon.

I don’t care that the temperature drops back below freezing on Thursday, I’m calling it now: spring has finally begun. Thus begins two months of relative comfort before the blast furnace of summer burns your skin to a crisp. So I’m going outside. In the meantime, here’s some Dressy Bessy, who I have to imagine are proud sponsors of springtime and everything that goes along with it.

Except spring flooding from snowmelt. Maybe not snowmelt.

Call it the hipster version of keeping up with the Joneses; call it a need to feel with the times; call it a futile attempt to regain that excitement I used to feel as a teenager when I heard new music. These days I find myself splitting the new music I hear into two groups: familiar, comfortable music; and wild, “difficult” music. And as the years go by and my mental library of sounds grows ever larger, it’s increasingly important to me to maintain the right balance of “comfortable” to “difficult.” Whereas it was easy to dive headlong into crazy new sounds as a teenager—Crazy electronic glitch-sample techno? Sure! Eardrum-tearing riot grrl? Yes, please!—these days it’s harder to find music that seems genuinely new. This is bad. It means I’m getting old because there’s less unexplored territory now than when I was a teenager; it also means I’m getting old because I’m lazier than I used to be, content to wait for the next release from Favourite Artist A instead of taking a chance on someone I’ve never heard of. The result is I occasionally feel my musical universe shrinking, and I worry: is this the beginning of a trend that will see me listening to late-90s nostalgia radio when I’m 50 and telling my grandkids about that one Sleater-Kinney concert where I met Corin Tucker?

So it’s a bit of a victory when I do happen to find something outside my usual comfort zone. It’s like a cup of water from the Fountain of Youth. And today, that refreshing glass of vitality comes courtesy of one Marnie Stern, a woman with the voice of an eight-year-old and the dexterous fingers of a metal guitarist. One review I read of In Advance of the Broken Arm made comparisons to Sleater-Kinney and Mary Timony, which may predict Stern’s eventual impact on music but certainly not her sound. “Grapefruit”’s opening sounds a bit like Erase Errata, but everything quickly gets tossed into a blender and set to puree. The result is something that sounds vaguely like an atonal pop song, but not really; an everlasting metal guitar solo, but not really; cheerleader rock, but not really; a twenty-foot high tidal wall of Amazonian women storming the beaches of Normandy, the air ringing with their crescendoing battle cry, but not really. Other tracks follow similarly fragmented formulas, with similarly exuberantly noisy results.

I still don’t know exactly what this is, or if I’ll like it. But Marnie Stern has grabbed my attention like no one else so far this year, and that can only be a good thing.

January and February are often the months where the music industry takes a nice, big holiday and nothing gets released. I still remember one year where it seemed all there was on the release schedule for January was Victoria Williams’ Musings of a Creekdipper. I’m sure it’s a decent album (I’ve still got an MP3 of “Train Song” around here somewhere) but one album isn’t exactly something to get excited about unless you love Victoria Williams. So I don’t really bother buying any albums or even paying much attention to what’s in the stores in the first part of the year; like a grizzly bear, I don’t come out of hibernation until March or April, at which point I’ll maybe start to think about what I missed last year.

So imagine my surprise when I come out of the cave and realize I’ve already missed a couple of things. I previously posted about the Bird and the Bee; that came out in January, apparently. And of course there’s the massive buzz surrounding the Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible, an album I’ve seen leaked so many times that it feels like it’s just always been around. But aside from new discoveries and old heavyweights, there’s an album I didn’t really expect: a new Kristin Hersh album. And yet here it is, How to Sing Like a Star, with the glossiest looking cover I’ve ever seen on a Kristin Hersh album. It is, apparently, a hint as to what lays inside the packaging.

Hersh’s releases over the past couple of years have split into quiet, folky solo albums and loud, raucous band albums, starting with 2003’s twin release of the last (though perhaps not final?) Throwing Muses album and a solo album, The Grotto. Since then, Hersh’s quiet side has stayed noticeably quiet, while her loud side has all but taken over; with the Muses reunion sufficiently sorted, Hersh went on to form 50 Foot Wave and attempt to destroy her voice through artful yelling and screaming. Perhaps it makes sense, then, that as 50 Foot Wave got louder and more aggressive, so too should her solo work; How to Sing Like a Star leaves The Grotto and Strange Angels behind for a dynamic more closely approaching the Muses. If leadoff track “In Shock” is any indication, Hersh has also polished things up quite a bit, with an elaborate arrangement including a string section.

Anyways, I’ve got some catching up to do; Learn to Sing Like a Star came out at the end of January. Me, I’m just happy to hear there’s a Kristin Hersh album that veers away from the occasional self-parody of The Grotto. If you’re a fan of the Muses, don’t let this sneak under your radar.