It’s hard to distill Stereolab’s history into a set of releases—between EPs, singles and compilations, there’s probably more Stereolab material that doesn’t fit into the context of an album than material that does—but if we’re strictly talking album output, I actually came to Stereolab a little less than halfway through their career. This is staggering when you consider that most critics tend to divide the band’s history into a pre-Emperor Tomato Ketchup period and a post-Emperor period. The former is marked by drone-like rock compositions peppered liberally with Farfisas and assorted vintage accouterments; the latter has been described disparagingly as easy-listening AM radio free jazz lite. Some old-school Stereolab fans consider the likes of Cobra and Phases Group Play Voltage in the Milky Night as latter-day abominations that saw the Groop fall too much in love with the retro jazz-pop sounds they were playing around with earlier in their career, and it’s hard to deny that there isn’t a sense of complacency in the band’s later work. Saying every Stereolab album sounded the same was never a particularly risky position to take.

As someone who only really became a Stereolab fan with Dots and Loops, then, I’ve had the dubious fortune of sticking around for the majority of the band’s album output—but at the same time only hearing them “after the fall,” so to speak. Which isn’t to say I don’t love the band anyways, curmudgeons be damned; but even I have to admit that Stereolab’s uniquely chipper sound loses its charm after years of minor variations. So after Margerine Eclipse, an album I never bought but heard a couple of times, I officially exited the land of Stereolab and struck out for greener pastures.

If all goes well, however, 2008 could be the year Stereolab returns with a bang. You see, since Margerine Eclipse—the band’s first album without the late Mary Hansen, who was killed when a truck collided with her bike in 2002—Stereolab has also been mostly quiet. Fab Four Suture came out in 2006, but is best described as a compilation of prior EPs rather than an album proper; other than those six singles, there’s been little coming out of the Stereolab camp. If you’re willing to stretch your imagination a little (and I mean just a little), though, Stereolab have never really left; the Groop’s spirit has just jumped ship temporarily to Monade.

Stereolab singer’s Laetitia Sadier’s solo project started in the late 90s but didn’t release an album until 2003—probably because at that point Monade was still little more than Sadier’s home recordings. By 2005 and A Few Steps More, Monade looked a lot more like a real band. That band, though it shares no members with Stereolab besides Sadier, sounds a whole lot like the Groop, making A Few Steps More a bit like an alternate universe Stereolab album. Aside from compositional differences that may or may not reveal themselves in casual listening, Monade have been able to get away with sounding like Stereolab partially because Stereolab have been mostly dormant as of late.

Expectations will be different for Monade’s third album, Monstre Cosmic, however. Due out today, Monstre Cosmic will no longer have the playing field all to themselves; latest word from the Stereolab camp is that they plan to release an actual album this year. Not that the two bands are exactly competing against each other, but Monade may have an edge here: “Regarde” seems to follow the general Monade trend of sounding a lot like Stereolab minus the hermetically sealed atmosphere that occasionally suffocated the former’s sound. Perhaps even with Stereolab re-entering the picture, the future may still belong to Sadier solo, instead of Sadier and Gane. Stay tuned.

Thanks to Saint Etienne’s recent fanclub-only limited edition boxset release, I now own almost eight solid hours of Saint Etienne music. Not a full day’s worth of pop pleasure, sure, but more music than any other artist in my collection—by quite a wide margin if you include all the stuff I don’t have on CD but have, erm, acquired by other means. (Hey, you try tracking down an inexpensive copy of The Misadventures of Saint Etienne. It took me a year to finally justify the purchase of the only Japanese album I own.) Boxette contributes a solid two and a half hours’ worth of material to my collection alone. Considering that it cost me about $55 CAD when all is said and done, that’s not too bad. But I almost didn’t pick it up.

Last year, Saint Etienne and I had a bit of a falling out. Still giddy off my new fanclub membership (which, granted, consisted of me signing up on a web form and receiving an e-mail, but hey), I proceeded to buy all the fanclub-only releases I could get my hands on. It had been a year and a half since Tales From Turnpike House and the desire for new material couldn’t be silenced. Generally speaking, the veteran British pop group have been quite good with b-sides; the Way Out West mix of “Angel,” “Stormtrooper in Drag” and Misadventures‘ “The Way I Fell For You” are some of the band’s best songs, and you won’t find any of them on any of their proper albums. But the 2007 crop of fanclub releases had me rethinking this stance. Nice Price was nice enough, but because it consisted entirely of outtakes and alternates of songs we’ve already heard, it wasn’t exactly new material. And as soundtrack albums go, What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? isn’t bad or anything, but it’s definitely no Misadventures and it’s almost completely bereft of Sarah Cracknell’s vocals. Plus the main theme of the movie is repeated three or four times in various guises. In the end, it’s less than essential listening for anyone but the most diehard Etienne fan or soundtrack aficionado.

So dropping $55 on a limited-edition boxset did not exactly seem like the best idea come Christmas time, especially after a bevy of large purchases that had critically wounded my savings account. But the band kept sending e-mails: “hey, um, sorry about the delays, we’re having troubles with the store because of the demand” and “ack, shipping delays, we’re really sorry, the early orders will go out soon,” and “another delay, really sorry but the packaging’s mucked things up, there’s only a few sets left so act quickly.” In the end, I caved, and a week and a half ago I received my shiny white Boxette: 2975/3000. Boy is that ever cutting it close.

And my goodness is it ever fantastic. Though three of the set’s four discs are remastered versions of old fanclub albums, I’d never heard any of them, so they all sounded new to me. And unlike the band’s studio albums, which all stand very well on their own as self-contained entities with purpose and progression, Boxette largely feels like the musical equivalent of one of my favourite lines from “Finisterre”: “I like the feeling of being slightly lost.” Built on Sand and I Love to Paint in particular are infused with a sense of pleasant aimlessness, like one long string of tangent after tangent. Asleep at the Wheels of Steel is a bit like the downbeat depressive of the group, but new disc Eric Random wraps things up nicely with a mix of unreleased material and fanclub EP tracks.

I’m pretty sure the first two discs are my favourite but haven’t quite decided which one. Early-era disc I Love to Paint splits its time between misfit dance-pop diamonds in the rough like “Everything I Touch Turns to Gold” and “Flight to Tashkent,” and breezy electronic instrumentals like “Fife Coast” and “Schroeder.” Built on Sand, compiled during the lead-up to 2000’s Sound of Water, leans more towards a mix of darker instrumentals from the band’s so-called “wilderness years” and more organic material that wouldn’t sound out of place on Good Humor, Fairfax High or Misadventures of Saint Etienne (and indeed, were recorded for and left off Misadventures). There are gems all over the set, though—even one or two on Asleep at the Wheels of Steel—and overall it’s hard to believe that I almost missed out.

Of course, if you’re reading this and you don’t already have a copy yourself, then you definitely have missed out; as you might’ve gathered from the number on my boxset, Boxette is sold out. But apparently Saint Etienne have plans to remaster and re-release all their old albums in expanded form, with extra b-sides and whatnot attached, plus another greatest hits with “This is Tomorrow” attached as a single. Oh, and there may or may not be a secret project in the works. Really, it all sounds like a smashing year—now, if only the band would get back in the studio and record an actual album…

Most bands that manage to become media sweethearts for a week or a month—you know, bands that pop up out of nowhere with reviews and bon mots all over the place—usually get filed under “stop paying attention because they are worthless.” As an example, this pile is where I’m keeping Vampire Weekend until someone manages to write a review of the band that doesn’t include the term “afro-centric.” Seriously, where the fuck did they come from and why am I seeing them everywhere all of a sudden? Such overnight success is suspicious to say the least.

But sometimes I hear just enough interesting tidbits about someone to keep them just on the edge of my radar. If I keep hearing little things here and there that sound vaguely interesting, I might even graduate them to “cautiously optimistic.” This is where Annie Clark, the mastermind behind St. Vincent, sat in my mental framework by the time I’d actually gotten around to listening to the title track off her first album, Marry Me. Having since concocted a whole music video in my head for the song, I think it’s safe to say that St. Vincent is one of the very few artists that managed to survive the initial flurry of offputting hype and actually make it into my record collection, and possibly my heart.

Marry Me appeals for several reasons, not the least of which is that she outdoes Feist in the charismatic singer-songwriter sweepstakes of 2007 by virtue of being more interesting; where The Reminder was shockingly pretty but felt a bit like treading water, Marry Me is more dynamic and varied. But I think the biggest reason why I like this album is Clark’s penchant for playful throwaway lyrics. You may or may not already know that I’m pretty horrible when it comes to hearing lyrics in music, let alone remembering lyrics, let alone analyzing them and figuring out a song’s meaning (”wait, Jack and Diane is about a couple named Jack and Diane? No, really, I had no idea! I just clapped along when I heard handclaps!”).

But Marry Me is full of choice quotations so insistent that they’ve infiltrated even my thick skull, from “Now, Now”’s “you don’t mean that / say you’re sorry” to “Your Lips Are Red”’s “My face is drawn / My face is drawn on with this number 2 pencil” to “Marry Me”’s often-cited “Marry me, John I’ll be so good to you / You won’t realize I’m gone.” And though I haven’t really been able to figure out what it means, the chorus to “The Apocalypse Song” has burned itself permanently into my head: “It’s time / you are light / I guess you are afraid of what everyone is made of.”

[review 2007: favourites]

Three years ago, I heard the Go! Team album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” And then, in 2005, the Go! Team arrived not once but twice, to waves of adoration.

Last year, I heard the Pipettes album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” And then, this year, the Pipettes showed up not twice but three times, to waves of adoration.

This year, I heard the Lucky Soul album for the first time and thought, “wow, this band is so good, but I’ll never get to see them in Canada because they’re a small British band who probably can’t afford to cross the ocean.” Will my luck hold out a third time?

Lucky Soul’s star is rising. A month ago, the British-based social network last.fm began a campaign to get Lucky Soul’s UK Christmas single to the top of the national pop charts. Whatever your quibbles with the campaign or last.fm’s motives (it’s a marketing ploy for the service! the pop charts mean nothing! why are we validating music-by-reality-show-competition crap by taking part in the same sort of competition but online?) it’s clear that the Greenwich band scored a big boost in profile thanks to the campaign. And why not? The Great Unwanted goes against a ton of popular conventions—they’re resolutely retro without being ironic and devoted to pop at a time when rock and dance music is seeing a resurgence—and yet incredibly catchy and loveable. It’s the great paradox that the band should be gaining so much attention on the basis of songs like “The Great Unwanted” and “Ain’t Never Been Cool,” both of which play up Lucky Soul’s outsider status, but then again most of the kids in your high school weren’t cool either, so maybe it all makes sense in the end.

Another thing that seems a paradox about “Ain’t Never Been Cool” is that the song, like the rest of the album, is actually pretty awesomely cool—there’s poise and charm and heaps of style, and forgive me, but that kinda sounds a lot like cool to me, no? And then there’s the resolute chorus, turned into a rallying cry by singer Ali Howard. The band canon says they found Howard in a bookshop by chance and asked her to join the band; whether convenient fiction or strange truth, Howard is perfect for the role, equal parts shy pixie and sassy revolutionary, able to lend equal charm to ballads like “My Darling, Anything” and dancefloor numbers like “Get Outta Town!” Plus I will never, ever get tired of the concept of small women with big voices—it’s like, how can you contain so much fearsome power in such a small package? It’s like some sort of physical impossibility, and I like it when my music breaks the laws of physics.

Lucky Soul’s music has been described as a sort of distinctly British indie version of 60s Spectorism, which adequately describes the wall of sound pretensions and the lavish horn arrangements that mark nearly every song on The Great Unwanted. But without the heavy reverb, The Great Unwanted feels more down to earth, more cobbled together with love than immaculately produced, and it gives the album a livelier sound that’s maybe easier to love. When “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby” comes on, it sounds like there could very well be a party happening in your living room—an effect I don’t recall ever having from actual material from the 60s. But there is one track that takes a slightly different approach, and comes closest to the girl-group ideal: “My Brittle Heart,” the band’s first single and the most melodramatic by far of The Great Unwanted’s fourteen songs. This is the centrepiece right here, a massive explosion of soaring choruses, weeping strings and heartbreaking lyrics.

When I first heard Lucky Soul the album had just come out in Britain, and ordering it was a pain and a half, so at first all I had were a couple of songs I managed to scrounge off MySpace. And then I found MP3s of a few tracks, which I promptly played over and over for a solid two weeks. After a while you get to know the tracks like the back of your hand—the “it’s your party, you can die if you want to” moment of “The Great Unwanted,” or the trumpet-filled breakdown and bridge of “Add Your Light to Mine, Baby,” or the final chorus to “Ain’t Never Been Cool.” When finally my copy of The Great Unwanted arrived, there were even more treasures in store: the heartbeat verse in “My Darling, Anything,” or the entirety of “Get Outta Town!,” or even the musicbox hidden track to finish the album. There are simply so many things to love about the album that it’d be stupid to list them all. Simply put, nothing else I heard in 2007 did a number on me like Lucky Soul did, so it wasn’t hard to call The Great Unwanted my favourite album of the year.

And maybe, if I cross my fingers, and you cross yours as well, Lucky Soul might make a visit over here one day…

Try this for an experiment. Save this MP3 with a random string of letters as a filename. Wipe the ID3 tags too. Then file the MP3 away for a week or two, forget you read this or downloaded it. Then listen to it. What does it sound like?

Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

Eerie, isn’t it? If you said “the guy from Apples in Stereo doing sunshine doo-wop,” congratulations, you win the “get out of my head please” award for creeping me out. But more importantly, you get an idea of just how far Junior Senior can stretch their raison d’etre. You remember Junior Senior, yes? If not, here’s a reminder:
But that disco synth oddity bears little resemblance to the likes of “No No No’s,” one of the songs on the tail end of 2005’s Hey Hey My My Yo Yo, recently released for the first time in North America with an extra EP of recent material as a sort of apology from the Danish duo for failing to get their act together in a reasonable amount of time.

So what? Plenty of bands take a sharp left turn on their second release, you might say. But chances are you didn’t suspect Junior Senior had it in them to even put out a second album; as great as it was, D-D-Don’t Stop the Beat was kind of a two-trick pony—disco madness raveup and garage rock dance party. But more than that was the band’s attitude, so carefree and happy-go-lucky that it didn’t quite seem possible for there to be a second album, period—who on earth is that happy long enough to make two albums made out of balloon-grade helium and Prozac?

But not only did Junior Senior manage the trick of putting out an album with just as much giddiness as the first (and if you want evidence, I need only point you to “We R the Handclaps”), they even managed to con the members of Le Tigre into putting out the best album they never made. It’s worth the purchase price just to hear Kathleen Hanna as the new girl in town, hopin’ for a little romance on “Dance, Chance, Romance.” Not even “Deceptacon” was ever this fun. Note to Le Tigre: you should try playing against type more often.

As for Junior Senior, the Say Hello, Wave Goodbye EP that accompanies the North American release of the album has the band edging into 80s retro territory, with more artificial synths and fake cowbells in the mix. It’s not bad, but coming off the highs of Hey Hey My My Yo Yo the new songs sound a bit minor league. But maybe that’s just a ploy by Messrs. Junior and Senior to lull us back into our false sense of knowing superiority. Surely they can’t have another album like the first two waiting in the wings?

Can they?

Welcome to September. I’ll kick off not with a song, but with a video:

You may have noticed my continuing obsession with Saint Etienne if you’re a regular reader. You may have also noticed the complete lack of Saint Etienne news this year. The silence is deafening: even last year the band managed to put out two releases, though both were only really available via the fan club and were somewhat less than essential—Nice Price was a collection of castoffs and alternate takes, and What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? is the mostly instrumental soundtrack to the Paul Kelly movie of the same name. The latter release offers a clue to what Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs have been up to lately.

Paul Kelly is one of Saint Etienne’s frequent collaborators. A filmmaker by trade, Kelly’s done several projects with the band, originally culminating in an epic attempt to shoot a video to accompany every song on Saint Etienne’s 2002 ode to London, Finisterre. Unfortunately only “Action” received a video in the end, the record label having nixed the rest due to cost concerns. Saint Etienne’s recent history with record labels has been tumultuous to say the least, and problems with Mantra and the recently deceased Sanctuary have thwarted a number of Saint Etienne projects.

Kelly’s contributions managed to escape the cutting room floor in the end, though; the footage Kelly and the band had shot for the rest of the videos was eventually made into a film, which was screened at various festivals and eventually released on DVD. What Have You Done Today, Mervyn Day? was film number two from the collaboration. And then the Southbank Centre asked Kelly, Saint Etienne and producer Andrew Hinton to become artists in residence for a year as the centre renovated some of its facilities.

The result was This Is Tomorrow, a documentary on the renovation of the Royal Festival Hall. At the end of Saint Etienne’s year in residence, they showed the documentary at the re-opening of the hall and played the score live with a full orchestra and choir, plus a number of student singers and band performers for good measure. That performance was apparently the first of many, as the film (and hopefully the band) will be touring around the UK and around the world in the coming months. Unfortunately, details on the nature of the tour are maddeningly scarce, as is word on the release of the film and the accompanying soundtrack. It’s very likely 2007 will end without any new music from Saint Etienne in the shops—but as the video above shows, it doesn’t mean the band hasn’t been busy.

If you’re ever looking for a fortifying burst of Bacharachian splendor, you could do far worse than the first three tracks of Sarah Shannon’s self-titled debut. The former Velocity Girl singer obviously knew the importance of making a good first impression, especially in light of the new, very un-Velocity-Girl material she’d put together. And so, to win over as many critics and fans as possible, she front-loaded her first album with the best songs of the bunch—or at least, that’s how it all sounds in my head.

While the rest of Shannon’s first album has its share of delights, there’s nothing like the invigorating horn fanfare that opens “Down,” which itself leads quickly into the glorious AM radio should’ve-been-a-hit “I’ll Run Away.” Follow the suite up with the charming “Call You On the Telephone” and you’ve basically got the start to a lovely retro summer morning. The beginning of Shannon’s first album leaves such a good impression, in fact, that it’s almost a shame to hear the far less enthralling opening to her latest album, released earlier this year; though “City Morning Star” and “Along the Way” are pleasant enough songs, they both completely miss out on the dynamics and atmosphere that make “Down” and “I’ll Run Away” so great.

Sorry for the slight skip in posts. I was busy planning a theme for this month and then kinda spaced out for a bit.

As mentioned last time, the Wild Strawberries split their time between the hospitals and the recording studio; wife Roberta Carter Harrison was a physiotherapist before her two kids arrived, and husband Ken Harrison was still spending part of his week as a doctor at a Toronto mental health clinic after the band’s 2000 independent release, Twist. Since then, the family moved out of the big city to quieter climes and have shown every sign of settling down—though with music still in their blood, as 2005’s Deformative Years and numerous collaborations with German dance producer (!) ATB suggest. So much beautiful noise coming out of such a quiet little town.

“Fine” is a jazzy little number from 1995’s Heroine, the album that gave the Wild Strawberries their biggest audience to date. It’s odd to think about it now, considering how stratified radio is now, but back in 1995 in Toronto it was possible to hear “Heroine” playing on the retiree-favourite adult contemporary station, CHFI, and breakout single “I Don’t Want to Think About It” on the alt-rock channel across the dial, the Edge. Most of the Strawberries’ material fell somewhere in between the two extremes, with the Harrisons specializing in a pleasant, bright style of Canadian alternative pop that sounded like it could’ve been just as comfortable on AM radio.

Though the Wild Strawberries haven’t gone so far as to pull an Everything But The Girl, electronic elements did creep into the band’s sound after Heroine; 1998’s Quiver saw the duo try to jump onto the Garbage/Republica bandwagon forming at the time, and ever since they’ve been incorporating keyboards, samples and drum loops into their music. And though the grittier, louder direction was an obvious one after the success of “I Don’t Want To Think About It”’s tentative steps towards alt-rock, it’s still easy to miss the bright, burbly sounds of “Everything That Rises” or “Pretty Lip.” But that’s what back catalogues are for.

Tomorrow brings the end of an era: Bob Barker, after 35 years as the host of The Price is Right, is finally sailing triumphantly into the seas of retirement. When The Price is Right returns in the fall, it will be with a new, as-yet-unannounced host. Whether the new host will tell us to have our pets spayed or neutered, or whether he’ll handle the wave of snot-nosed college students and forty-somethings with garish slogan t-shirts with the same bemused aplomb as Barker did, we don’t know. But no one can ever really replace Bob Barker, and in many ways the show will always be infused with his spirit.

One area where Barker’s presence can be felt is in the music. As Barker gained more control over the show’s production, he also came to be involved in the selection of the musical cues and themes you hear on the show—he was partially involved in salvaging music from the 1994 primetime version of The Price Is Right and apparently puts in a word or two every so often about musical selections. Early on, though, the show relied heavily on several music packages composed for the show by a company called Score Productions. Somewhere in the studios at CBS Television City, or in the archives at Score Productions, you’ll find the original music library used on The Price Is Right—a veritable time capsule of half-forgotten synthesizer motifs and horn arrangements that’s sure to bring a smile to your face. Unfortunately, no one’s managed (or bothered) to smuggle said music library out to the masses, and in what must be some fantastically colossal oversight, CBS has never commissioned or approved a soundtrack album for the long-running game show.

As a result, the best anyone has to offer is a bunch of old, cleaned-up recordings of some of the music. How these clips were originally acquired, I don’t know; I found the RealAudio clips on a fairly old 80s TV themes site and converted them to MP3s, just so you could hear the likes of “Splendido!”, which sounds like it might’ve been played during the Showcase Showdown. If you’re at all nostalgic for the bright lights and groovy sounds of daytime game show nirvana, check out the RealAudio clips. And if you’re like me, you’re already set to watch Barker’s final appearance on CBS tomorrow, both during the day and again in primetime before the Daytime Emmys.

Tonight is a night for second chances, as the Pipettes return to Toronto with Smoosh, the Portland-based sister trio with a median age of 13, and Monster Bobby, one of the Pipettes puppetmasters doing an impression of Casiotone for the Painfully Alone with fewer vintage keyboards. It’ll be fantastic! Or not. It’ll be something, anyways. Here’s another taste of what I’ll hopefully be grooving to when the clock hits the midnight hour, courtesy of the band’s nighttime Beauty Bar set at SXSW.