[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

Easy analogy time: if Funeral was the one-room churchhouse in the middle of the Québécois hinterland during the dead of winter, then Neon Bible is the towering cathedral with giant stained-glass windows, the only material deemed suitable enough to allow the light of God to shine in. It’s an easy analogy not just because of the Arcade Fire’s resemblance to a religious experience distilled into band form, but also because the fucking pipe organ is right there on “Intervention” for all to hear.

Strangely, Neon Bible doesn’t seem to invoke the same sort of feverish devotion Funeral did. I may never have been a true convert myself, but I could understand why you’d lay down your life for songs like “Rebellion (Lies)” and “Wake Up.” Of all the tracks on the new album, the only one that could inspire that same adoration is “No Cars Go,” which is actually one of the band’s earliest songs, re-recorded for Neon Bible. And re-recorded in sufficiently grand fashion, too: for the first time the Arcade Fire has a song that sounds as though it could move heaven and earth on its surges of emotion.

But you can understand why the entire album isn’t just twelve carbon copies of “No Cars Go.” For one, the Arcade Fire can’t simply re-record all their old songs. Putting the entire album into emotional overdrive would be exhausting as well—you can only muster up so much enthusiasm and devotion so many times before you’ve literally got nothing left to give. Pacing, people, pacing. And in fact some of the album’s best songs are the low-key ones, like the title track and “Ocean of Noise.”

Unfortunately there are times when the luminescent quality of all good Arcade Fire songs disappears, and everything falls flat. “Intervention” is the most obvious example, its pipe organ a hugely unwelcome intrusion that turns the first half of the song into an overwrought, flatfooted mess from which the band never fully recovers. Album closer “My Body is a Cage” is a valiant attempt, too, but that doesn’t mean I ever want to listen to it again.

To close with a slightly less obvious analogy, if Funeral was the cult, Neon Bible is the theology—a time for building on the initial religious upswelling with mythology and commandments and all sorts of other celestial housekeeping. Neon Bible is an epic album, more complex and far more ambitious than Funeral ever was. And there is a certain joy in the cathedrals Arcade Fire now seem intent on building. But unless you were already utterly convinced by Funeral you may find Neon Bible a bit of a cipher, and anyone who didn’t like the first album will just feel more like the outsider looking in.

[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

If there’s one thing that was slightly frustrating about this year from a writer’s perspective, it’s that even the bad albums weren’t all that bad. It’s hard to rip apart an album that you dislike mostly because it’s not good enough to love. And so even though I’m writing about Kristin Hersh’s sixth album right after Rilo Kiley’s unfortunate mess of genre experiments gone awry, Learn to Sing Like a Star is really quite a bit better than Under the Blacklight. Maybe some explanation is in order.

A lot of my favourite artists put out new albums this year, and if you’re like me your relationship to each artist is at a different stage in the life cycle. Maybe you’re still in the honeymoon phase for some; for others, it’s more like a steady marriage; and then there are some where you’re about seven seconds from admitting you’re no longer in love. So it’s entirely predictable that some of those albums by some of those favourite artists of mine will end up falling flat, even if they’re perfectly serviceable records. Maybe you’ve moved on, or maybe they’ve moved on, or maybe it’s a combination of both; whatever the case, the two of you are no longer right for each other.

And so, while Kristin Hersh has made a perfectly serviceable album, with a couple of very fine songs in the mix, it’s apparent to me that I will never enjoy Learn to Sing Like a Star the same way I did Strange Angels or Sky Motel, or even Sunny Border Blue. And though Learn to Sing Like a Star is an admirable return to form after The Grotto, it’s just not enough for me any more.

This is especially odd for me to say, considering that the last Throwing Muses album and 50 Foot Wave’s first album, Golden Ocean, are some of my favourite Kristin Hersh releases. In fact, if either band decides to put out another album—though I don’t expect one from Throwing Muses ever again—I’ll be right there to let Hersh and company rock my face off. Maybe the reason why those harder-rocking albums sit better with me than Hersh’s recent solo output is because no matter how the albums change, I can’t shake the feeling that it’s all been done before. With Learn to Sing Like a Star Hersh mostly ditches the electric guitar but keeps the more vigorous songwriting. The result is a sort of acoustic-guitar rock album, with a string section and a piano backing most of the tracks. Actually, it might even be more accurate to have it the other way around: a cello-and-violin rock album, with an acoustic guitar and a piano backing most of the tracks. It’s the string section that gives the album its particular character versus the rest of Hersh’s catalogue, at least.

That instrumental difference aside, however, I’m hard-pressed to say what differentiates this particular set of songs from the other Hersh albums. And perhaps, in lieu of any other good reasons, that’s the problem with Learn to Sing Like a Star. Sky Motel I remember vividly, even if it’s only got about as many good tracks as this album does. Maybe Learn to Sing Like a Star just needs some time to soak into my consciousness, to take its rightful place besides the other albums. But right now, the album just feels a bit too cluttered and a bit too bland to leave much of an impression.

[review 2007: crimes and misdemeanours]

When Jenny Lewis tried her hand at a psuedo-solo album (hey, the Watson Twins don’t show up on the album cover for nothing), she seemed to have an idea of how it was all supposed to work out. I still have mixed feelings about Rabbit Fur Coat, but there’s no denying that a lot of people liked it—people who’d maybe never heard of Jenny Lewis before but decided they wanted to subscribe to her newsletter. And though minor elements of the album still feel a bit calculated (”let’s get my other indie friends to sing along on Handle With Care!”) Rabbit Fur Coat has done just as much for Jenny Lewis’s career as her years of service as the frontwoman for Rilo Kiley, if not more.

Not that Rilo Kiley was suffering from a lack of attention. Under the Blacklight may be Rilo Kiley’s biggest push into the major leagues—and the one with all the pressure, thanks to the band’s success and Lewis’s rising star—but it’s not their first. That honour goes to 2004’s More Adventurous, a Warner album in all but name (the band’s own imprint, Brute/Beaute, was used as the label of record instead). And though it wasn’t a tentative move away from Rilo Kiley’s landmark album The Execution of All Things, More Adventurous didn’t divide or alienate the band’s existing audience, either. The 50s genre exercise of “I Never” and the heightened melodrama of “Does He Love You?” and “Love And War (11/11/46)” were slicker and more ambitious songs, but they felt like natural products of a band attempting to leave its midwestern twenty-something perspective behind. More Adventurous, in other words, was the product of Rilo Kiley aging gracefully.

Someone else attempted to age gracefully not that long ago. Her name was Liz Phair. I thought I was pretty clever making this comparison, but then I read the Stylus review and they said the comparison was obvious, so I’m going to switch gears and suggest that the real analogy isn’t between Under the Blacklight and the awful Lavigne-lite Liz Phair, but rather between More Adventurous and whitechocolatespaceegg, Liz Phair’s often-overlooked third album. There are plenty of similarities. whitechocolatespaceegg was a joint venture between indie label Matador and major label Capitol, designed to put some distance between Phair and her Exile days by polishing the sound and throwing in a number of tracks written from a more mature perspective. The result was a more adult album with a bit more conventional pop sense. In other words, More Adventurous.

Under the Blacklight is nowhere near as embarrassing as Liz Phair, but they also share some similarities—mainly that both albums seemed to be the product of artists looking for a big play but uncertain of their direction now that the first phase of their career had ended. With Phair it translated into a giant “fuck you” to years of heightened expectations. With Rilo Kiley it seems instead to translate into a big genre quick-change act. No longer willing to return to the days of Execution, no longer satisfied with the apparently slow evolution as depicted on More Adventurous, and no longer able to ignore the increasing attention from the mainstream, Rilo Kiley had to go big or go home. Thus the teflon production and the streamlined lyrical content.

Though Liz Phair’s metamorphosis into a teen punk-pop goddess wannabe scared the living daylights out of most of us, such titanic shifts in sensibility are still quite rare. Rilo Kiley is in no danger of turning into the Pussycat Dolls, and even behind the gloss and the genrehopping you can sense the Rilo Kiley of old. But Under the Blacklight does the band few favours. The disco glam of “Breakin’ Up” is way too cheesy, “15″ sounds less like countrified strut and more like the Hollywood-approved version thereof, and “Dejalo” is about as worldly as Santana featuring Matchbox 20’s Rob Thomas. All of this is the sound of Rilo Kiley going camp, with predictably embarrassing results.

Moreover, the meditations on sex and its associated industries, especially in the full-length video to first single “The Moneymaker,” suffer the same problem as the songs: it all just feels a bit too cliché. Even at its most melodramatic (hello “Does He Love You?”), the lyrical content of Most Adventurous never seemed to rely on overused tropes. “A Man, Me, Then Jim” was full of little illuminating details that highlight the benefits of Rilo Kiley’s previous tendency towards verbosity. In contrast, listening to Under the Blacklight’s “15″ is both an aural and lyrical assault.

It’s only when Lewis and company avoid the temptation to toss in easy genre clichés that the album comes closest to success. “Silver Lining” and “Close Call” lean a bit on Lewis’s alt-country material and Rilo Kiley’s More Adventurous sound respectively, which is at least comfortable territory. “Dreamworld” is the highlight of the album, though, in that it’s a departure from the usual Rilo Kiley sound but remembers how to be a good song. It might also explain why Fleetwood Mac comparisons are flying fast and furious these days. Finally, it hopefully proves to the naysayers that the Blake Sennett song isn’t automatically the worst song on a Rilo Kiley album (though if you’ve seen Sennett and Lewis perform Execution’s “So Long” in concert, you already know this).

So where does Rilo Kiley go from here? If we stretch the Liz Phair analogy well beyond the breaking point, the next album will be a tepid retread of More Adventurous (Less Adventurous?). Or maybe Rilo Kiley will drop the camp and settle into the role of a neo-Fleetwood Mac, effectively putting themselves beyond critical reproach in the way all broadly popular bands are. One thing’s for sure, though: whether Rilo Kiley sink or swim probably won’t be decided with this album. For this they should probably be thankful.

last.fm is a statistics nerd’s wet dream. The ways in which it lets you slice and dice your listening history are fantastic, and my only wish is that there were even more charts and graphs for me to stare at, staring at reams of data to divine some greater truth about Rainer Maria versus Versus. (If you’re like me, then you’ll find unofficial last.fm data-slicing sites like the fantastic Lastgraph a real treat.) One of the things you can do is sort the last year of your listening history by album. last.fm will give you a list of albums sorted by number of track plays; once you divide by the number of album tracks, you have a rough figure of how many times you’ve listened to the album over the past year. This year’s winner for me isn’t a 2007 release, but one from last year. Closing the unofficial “make up for stuff I missed from 2006″ series is the little band that could from Montreal, Land of Talk.

Applause Cheer Boo Hiss simply refuses to die. It’s been released several times in Canada alone, and several more times for international markets. The latest release, more than a year after the mini-album’s initial street date, is a UK version with new tracks that have previously only popped up live. Land of Talk, too, is band that refuses to die despite numerous setbacks. Entering the year on a wave of good American press, the band lost their original drummer to tour fatigue not long after SXSW. Then the band finds itself opening for several higher-profile bands, a spell of good luck that leads into an opening gig with the Decemberists in Europe—only to discover on the first day of the tour that the Decemberists cancelled the tour. Colin Meloy and company told everyone involved except their opening act (classy), leaving the band stranded in Britain with non-refundable plane tickets and time to kill. Then, upon their return to North American shores, Land of Talk close out the year by having their equipment stolen in the States.

All this explains why interviews with frontwoman Elizabeth Powell occasionally dip into the melancholy. Whether it’s not feeling Canadian enough, not feeling particularly appreciated in Montreal, or just generally being down and out in Britain, you always get this sense that not enough people are giving this band their richly deserved due, and that at any given moment, Land of Talk is held together with twine and Scotch tape. Maybe the Decemberists just make a habit of abandoning all their opening acts in Britain, I don’t know.

Not that everything has gone wrong for the band, not by a long shot. Applause Cheer Boo Hiss came out in March in the States, and in September in the UK; they got a new drummer who’s more suited to the rigours of non-stop touring; and the long-awaited second album is in the works for next spring. If it’s true what they say about what doesn’t kill you making you stronger, then Land of Talk should have a scorching second release on their hands. I can’t wait.

Almost two years to the day after I first posted this song, a postscript of sorts. Under the Radar tracked down Miki Berenyi, who’s been rather scarce for more than a decade now, for an enlightening and bittersweet interview that wraps up some of the loose ends about the end of Lush. And it truly is the end, as Berenyi says she has no wish to remount Lush in any form, or really attempt any sort of musical project.

I’m glad that she sounds relatively happy, and I’m perfectly okay with her just wanting to lead a normal life without all the drudgery of the music industry. What’s sad for me is how Berenyi, who probably put more of herself into Lush than any of us, and was more devastated by the events that brought the band to a quick end, has apparently moved on while parts of me still haven’t. For her, Lush seems pretty clearly to represent not just the past in general, but a specific era in her life now long distant. Meanwhile, I can still put on “Olympia,” imagine it was 1997 all over again, and pretend the intervening decade never happened. And sometimes I wish I didn’t have to just imagine.

Of all the British bands that made it to Canada this year, the one I was most surprised and excited to see was the Long Blondes. Partially this is because as the year went on, Pipettes shows in North America became all but a certainty (I have tickets to see their third show in Toronto this year, happening in exactly a week’s time), taking away their “most anticipated” status, whereas the presence of the Long Blondes was anything but assured. Though Someone to Drive You Home was released in North America earlier this summer, most audiences have seen fit to ignore it in favour of newer, fresher obsessions. It seems almost like anyone who was going to hop on the Long Blondes bandwagon did so back when the import version surfaced last year (though if you haven’t picked up a copy yet, find yourself a North American pressing, as there’s a bonus EP containing the lovely “Fulwood Babylon”).

But another reason why the arrival of Kate Jackson and company to Canadian shores was so exciting was because the band itself is exciting. Stylish, poised and polished in almost every way, Someone to Drive You Home is enough of a spectacle on record; one could only imagine what the live show would be like, and my imagination ran wild for weeks before the show. More than anything this year it was the show I was most looking forward to seeing, and the Lee’s Palace show didn’t disappoint. They even pulled out two of my favourite songs off the album, “Swallow Tattoo” and “Separated by Motorways,” and played them back-to-back for a fantastic encore. It’s like they arranged the setlist specifically for me.

Every year, I put together a list of albums from the past twelve months that I thought were fantastic. And every year, without fail, I miss a couple of albums entirely that should’ve made that list. Last year I missed an album that would’ve been near the top of my 2005 list; this year I missed several that would’ve beaten everything from last year. This album is one of them. If I’m lucky, I’ll get a chance to rectify that mistake next year; the band is currently in the studio recording their second album, so chances are we’ll see new material in 2008. And if they decide to return to Toronto, I’ll be there.

It’s almost time for everyone to start unveiling their multiple-page dissertations on the year in music, with lists and analysis and probably gorgeous x-y scatter charts waiting for us in about a month. For me, November signals a chance to look back at the year before. Inevitably, in the flurry of not-exactly-almost-barely post-game writeups every December, a couple of albums fly under the radar; November has always been a good time to look back and go, “gee, I listened to this album way more than the album I thought was the best last year! I’m an idiot!”

If there was a single phrase I could take back this year, it would be the introduction to my post on Charming’s 2006 album, Turn Down the Lights. Something about that album didn’t sit well enough with me, even though by all measures it’s a decent, occasionally outstanding, pop record. But maybe the words “peculiar, slightly chemical taste” were just a bit too much artistic license. The regret set in almost immediately: right after writing that post, I left town for a weekend to watch a couple of draws in the Canadian men’s curling championships, and the first night in the hotel I sat wondering if I’d been too harsh to Charming. Oh, and it didn’t help matters that upon returning home, I discovered one of the band members had left a sweet comment on the very post where I’d ripped out their heart and tossed it on the ground.

You see, I really liked Champagne and Magazines. “Guilt by Association” was one of my favourite songs of the year: a giddy indie rock song sprinkled with garish keyboards and the singalong factor turned up to 11. And then I discovered the band’s first, then out-of-print album, Giant, and found a collection of heartfelt college rock gems like “Ritual,” one of my favourite sadsack songs in university. So to talk about Charming the way I did earlier this year felt almost perversely like jilting a former lover, someone I maybe didn’t love anymore but didn’t wish any ill will, either. Maybe we should just call my relationship to Charming “complex” and leave it at that.

So in terms of the 2006 album most rehabilitated in my eyes, I think that honour would go to Turn Down the Lights. I still can’t come out and unabashedly declare my unconditional love for the album, because like it or not there’s still times when it gets a little too bland or drags too much. I still don’t really enjoy “Working Man,” though it’s probably the closest the album comes to Charming’s most popular song to date, “Downtown.” I still think the last quarter of the album is forgettable, and I still don’t understand why the band felt the Sunday suite was necessary when really “Sunday Afternoon” is the only part that qualifies as a song.

But on other elements I’ve come around. The more I listen to the title track, the more I love it. The working-girl-soul vibe works really well, and has pretty much become the song I think of whenever I think of Charming these days. And as for Nicole St. Clair Stoops not having enough brass to sing “Stranger (I Will Never Be)” effectively? Maybe I was wrong on that too—I mean, we can’t all be Aretha Franklin, right? And actually, once you stop trying to pretend it IS Aretha Franklin behind the mic, it turns out Stoops does a pretty good job with the song. Strange how you sound a lot better when people (i.e. me) stop comparing you in their head to the queen of soul.