The Britpop movement had many winners and many losers. As with most of the bands that only found their footing as everyone moved on to other sounds, Dodgy was one of the losers. Which isn’t to say they were bad—several years of success in the home islands and a number of great songs, of which this is their biggest, say otherwise. It’s more that the mid and late 90s seemed to break a lot of artists who’d spent a lot of time paying their dues in small clubs and college radio, slowly building a following until the breakthrough hit—and then found themselves dumped unceremoniously as an apparent one-hit wonder. Some bands manage to put out some of their finest work after that period—witness Imperial Teen—and some bands collapse in on themselves. You could argue it happened to Sebadoh, though they put out an album or two after Harmacy and their one hit, “Ocean”; for Dodgy it happened suddenly in 1998, when singer Nigel Clark left abruptly just as the band was coming off a successful stint at Glastonbury. Though there is another album to the band’s name, 2001’s Real Estate, it was recorded without Clark and gets even less coverage than the rest of the band’s back catalog.

“Good Enough” was a perfect song for the summer of 1996; you can hear the sunshine pouring off the track. And though Dodgy’s oeuvre tended more towards the usual alt-rock melancholy (their previous biggest hit, “In A Room,” is a fine example) it’s the carefree exuberance that wins them accolades here. Little wonder, then, that most people who remember the band at all lists this track amongst their favourites. Ten years later it’s memorable enough that the song gets namechecked in articles about the band’s decision to make nice and reform in November. I guess we’re already at the stage where we’re devouring the cultural remnants of our childhood, so I guess one more reunion makes no difference—if you’re in Britain and you miss the sunny sounds of “Good Enough”, find yourself a music hall sometime near the end of the year and you’re sure to hear it once or twice.

Lunchbox is a duo from Oakland whose modus operandi seems to be running from its past. In interviews the band has claimed their first, self-titled album is best forgotten, a collection of songs created to satisfy their touring drummer at the time—to get an idea of how that relationship turned out, the band’s gone through at least 10 drummers. Lunchbox’s association with twee landmark Magic Marker Records in Portland, Oregon and the relative success of 1999’s The Sound of Music caused further troubles. Though Tim Brown and Donna McKean have made a conscious effort to satisfy their own personal muses and have never shied away from experimental touches, The Sound of Music garnered Lunchbox a reputation for putting out fantastic twee pop. Cuts like “Lotion” and “In My World” are full of cute keyboard effects, winsome guitars and ba-ba-bas—a very friendly sound that Brown and McKean have been retreating from ever since.

Though the band’s next (and possibly final) album, 2002’s Evolver, and companion EP Summer’s Over dive into the tape-hiss experimental waters, Evolver’s title track show that whatever bluster Brown might put up about his band’s image (”You used to get annoyed when people would call us a ’sunny pop band,’ ‘a happy pop band,’” McKean once said about her bandmate), Lunchbox was still interested in putting out good pop tunes. With a blast of mariachi horns that sound ripped from a Price is Right song and groovy guitar riffs opening the song, it’s clear that Lunchbox added quite a bit of complexity to their arrangements. And even with the distortion-laden fade out to static at the end, “Evolver” is very much a fun-in-the-summertime type of song—albeit one that hopefully balances the band’s experimental tendencies and pop heritage more to their liking.

One-hit-wonder Primitive Radio Gods temporarily took the title for longest pop song title of the 90s with “Standing Outside a Broken Phone Booth with Money In My Hand,” which provided plenty of fodder for plenty of drive-time radio hosts everywhere (and also music writer hacks like myself). But I don’t know if anything ultimately tops Beulah’s endearing “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon, Surely I Can Win Your Heart” for length (one character longer than the Primitive Radio Gods song!) or sentiment (compare and contrast: mundane disappointed slackerdom or uplifting heart-on-sleeve confection?).

As a former member of the Elephant Six collective, Beulah managed to incorporate the instrumental excesses of the loose confederation of musicians better than most bands. Bursting with strings and horns and other acoustic wonders, “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon” is still an accessible pop song whose orchestral flourishes impress without overwhelming the core of the song. “All you need is a pretty song,” Miles Kurosky sings just before the first chorus, and it’s that point where suddenly the song isn’t about a guy trying to win a girl, but a band trying to win its audience. But either way you take it, the song is a sugar-sweet, heartfelt ode, the likes of which used to be all over the indie radar in the late 90s. Maybe now the likes of “If We Can Land a Man on the Moon” would seem a bit quaint, but back then, Kurosky was right—a pretty song was what Beulah had, and a pretty song was all they needed.

Apparently they used to call this “continental pop”—in the pantheon of music genre names, “continental pop” must rank right up there with “indie rock” as a descriptor that may have once meant something, and perhaps still points in some general musical direction, but is otherwise completely useless for defining a genre of music. I guess “continental pop” still means something to Americans because “continental” is occasionally shorthand for “European.” (Except notice which one has fewer letters AND the same number of syllables?) That particular meaning of “continental” carries with it other connotations as well—a sort of decadence that is supposedly foreign to our shores, at once appealing yet vaguely offensive in its luxury.

“Sorry Doc” manages to capture a bit of that “continental” feeling—it’s an outlandish and bombastic production, like a jazz orchestra deciding to rock the fuck out at some rich playboy’s penthouse. You can almost see the mad cocktail parties in your head: randy bachelors in crumpled tuxedoes, bow ties askew, chasing debutantes in short black skirts across the lounge while the guitarist plays a mean solo three feet away from two tipsy women with arm-length gloves having a good ol’ fashioned bar fight. Wine bottles everywhere, scattered amongst the platters of fine aromatic cheeses. Drunken smokers setting the beautiful velour drapery on fire while embracing madly on the balcony. Trumpeters playing through the final climax, shattering windows in the building cross the street and setting car alarms off everywhere just in time for the police arriving because of “noise complaints.”

Actually, this “continental” thing doesn’t sound so bad. Where do I sign up?

It can be hard these days to incorporate horns into your rock band without automatically being labelled ska, even if you decide against adding a permanent dancer to the band (hello Mighty Mighty Bosstones!). Even though it’s been years since ska was anywhere near the mainstream, it’s still one of the first things to come to mind whenever someone hears you’ve got a trumpeter in your lineup. And though being a ska band isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it does mean you have to work a little harder to avoid being pigeonholed by people who haven’t even bothered to listen to your albums or anything. Maybe it’s because no one knows what to do with horns unless they’re backed by a rocksteady beat. You got me.

Winnipeg’s Novillero formed out of the remnants of a lounge pop band, but don’t go thinking that you’ll get any stylistic clues from those formative years. (Besides which, lead singer Rod Slaughter was formerly a member of Elevator and Duotang, which you probably recognize if you know your prairie indie pop history.) Nor do they have a dancer on staff. (Or do they?) Instead, for the better part of the decade Novillero have been specializing in energetic indie pop on both the Endearing and Mint labels—a sound that just happens to incorporate a lot of horns. And though none of the band’s current members play horns, the band’s devotion to all things brass is so strong that they even wrote a song called “The Day The Trumpet Player Fell In Love And Learned to Hate Men,” possibly written for then-member and keeper of the trumpet, Rusty Matyas (who now plays with the Waking Eyes, formed after Novillero’s hiatus in 2002).

For their last album, 2005’s Aim Right For the Holes In Their Lives, Novillero upped the ante with an entire suite of horn players and produced “The Hypothesist.” It’s a righteous orgy of shake-your-booty rock n’ roll, with the requisite rock piano and a killer chorus that begs for audience! participation! As for the aforementioned horn section, they mostly lurk in the shadows until the final measures, when all hell breaks loose and everything kicks into overdrive. It’s a solid slice of hard rock candy that hopefully isn’t the last we’ve heard of the band—it’s been two years now and we’re all getting a bit antsy up here.

Every so often, us Canadians will get a bit down on ourselves, a bit self-conscious, a bit low of self-esteem. And that’s when the articles come out—why don’t people like us more than they do now? In the music world, those articles have been scarce as of late, thanks to the likes of Broken Social Scene, the Arcade Fire, and a bunch more lesser-known Canadian indie bands that only the cool kids are supposed to know. But just before the current wave of Canadian success was a long, hard fallow period where the major American breakthrough us Canucks could point to was… Nickelback.

If you look through newspapers, alt.weeklies and music mags from the past decade and a half, no doubt you will find a lot of articles about how the Tragically Hip is the Rodney Dangerfield of Canadian music in America. The breathtaking inability of the Hip’s brand of literate alternative rock to break through Stateside is practically a national myth by now, with accompanying imagery to suit: club shows just south of the border with parking lots full of cars with Canadian license plates, like so many Leaf fans at a Buffalo Sabres game. Because these articles were never very long, and because the Hip have become so intricately tied to the phenomena of “popular in Canada, unknowns in the States,” they tend to gloss over the many similar stories from other Canadian bands that have never managed to take their successful formula and apply them down south. And of those many bands, the next biggest contemporary of the Tragically Hip would probably be Sloan.

“Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” with its jangly pop familiarity and a sunny spread of trumpeters to back everything up, is just one of the many fine songs off One Chord to Another, which represented Sloan’s second major attempt to break into the American market. The Halifax band’s first two albums, Smeared and Twice Removed, represent a discrete era of their own, when Sloan was courted by Geffen and the Halifax scene gained a short-lived reputation as a generator of cool, grunge-influenced guitar pop bands (also see Jale, Super Friendz and Thresh Hermit). With Sloan freshly divorced from DGC and deciding to continue after a short career-examining hiatus, they were ready for another kick at the can on their own terms. One Chord to Another was recorded mostly without label support and released on their own Murderecords label.

If you remember Sloan at all, it’s likely on the strengths of singles like “The Good in Everyone” and “Everything You’ve Done Wrong,” which both charted extremely well in Canada and convinced Sloan that the American market might not be lost. But as with any good story, there’s a twist. Unwilling to try another major label, Sloan instead decided to go with a smaller boutique label for the American release of One Chord to Another. Actually finding such a label turned out to be a bit of a problem, and as a result One Chord to Another didn’t get an American release until well into the album’s release cycle in Canada. A New York-based subsidiary of EMI, The Enclave, ended up putting together a deluxe double-gatefold release and included a bonus disc that has never been widely released in Canada—perhaps a sign of how serious Sloan was about success in the American market, or maybe of how easy success came to them in home territory.

The short story is that the bid failed; people liked One Chord to Another but Sloan remained little more than a curiosity to most Americans. And just like the last time Sloan failed to make a dent in the U.S., the problem may not have been the band itself but their label; shortly after One Chord to Another’s release in the States, The Enclave folded, and with it all promo support for the album. Sloan’s chances in the States were effectively finished for a second time. But unlike the soul-destroying fight with Geffen a few years earlier, Sloan’s second experience south of the border was a much more sanguine affair. Chris Murphy, in a post-Enclave interview, was relatively unbothered by the experienced. “We own all of our own records and just license them to the company,” he said. “I know that’s a boring angle, but not being on a major label really doesn’t affect us.”

Since then, Sloan has released albums on both sides of the border—last year’s Never Hear the End of It was released by Yep Roc—but with the band fairly comfortable in their career position, they no longer seem very worried about the U.S. at all. Much like the Hip, they’re quite content to play their shows up north and be treated like elder statesmen of the Canadian rock scene, always guaranteed respect and adoration from the home crowd.