Say hello to All My Friends, a UK band with a penchant for quietly charming, jangly guitar pop with a 60s touch. All Music Guide named the band one of their post-Valentine’s Day crushes, and “crush” is exactly the sort of word you want to use with a band like this. “People Like This,” from the band’s MySpace site, has the all-important boy-girl vocals that make twee pop fans swoon, with a bit of swirly organ thrown in to make things interesting. “Theme From All My Friends Get Hung Up,” an instrumental that wouldn’t sound too out of place on an Essex Green record, refers to the band’s as-yet-unreleased album. Actually, the band haven’t released much of anything just yet, though they’ve been putting out cover tracks for a while now under a project they call Pop Explosion. For a while it looked like an EP release via Spanish label Tragadisco Records was in the works, but now it looks like the EP might be shelved in favour of just releasing All My Friends Get Hung Up instead, which already includes all the tracks that were going to be on the EP. Unfortunately this means a bit of a delay, and as a result we’re stuck with MySpace posts for a while yet.

Whatever they decide to put out in the next couple of months, though, it’s worth keeping an eye out for new All My Friends material. The world can never have enough gentle indie pop.

I’ve always had a soft spot for Brittle Stars, a late-90s indie pop band from Gainesville, Florida that broke up far too soon. With just one album and one jumbo-sized EP (twice as long as the album!) under their belts, Brittle Stars don’t have a lot of material out there, and their former label, Shelflife, is going through a reogranization that may have thrown both those releases out of print. But should you manage to track them down, you’ll find some classic indie pop tracks, well before indie meant Bloc Party and Interpol. For starters, the name Brittle Stars perfectly describes the delicate, spacey, synthesizer-driven sound (though in fact it’s a reference to a type of marine life resembling a starfish). On some of the louder tracks there’s a distinct lo-fi shoegazer vibe, though the wall of sound appears to be more like one overdriven, fuzzed-out guitar. But when the band tosses out the guitars altogether, something special happens—they give us a glimpse into a spaced-out kind of indie pop that comes pretty darn close to pure euphoria. “So Unfair” is a case in point: riding on waves of soft keyboard notes and Estelle’s hushed vocals, “So Unfair” is two minutes and twenty-one seconds of bliss—the sort of bliss that conjures up in my mind the feeling of floating in outer space.

Estelle left Florida in 2000 for greener pastures, and by that point another member, Josh, had already filed his two weeks notice. After a couple of farewell shows the band drifted apart. Dan Sostrom (finally a last name for someone!) is still in Gainesville, running the dream-pop label Clairecords with his wife Heather; Estelle, meanwhile, has ended up in New York City playing in a new band called Elephant Parade.

So yesterday I did the thing I told myself I would never do: I stood outside with a bunch of friends in the freezing cold to buy a Wii. I think my voice is gone, for reasons unknown to me; I guess the cold really doesn’t like me. So in lieu of a really detailed and well-researched post about an obscure Greek calypso song about chinchillas, today you get the first song I could find in my music collection whose title vaguely resembles my plight from this morning.

Yes, I can buy you. And unlike Nina Persson, I can damned well make you do whatever the hell I want. Except figure out how to box properly. What the hell.

I’m going back to sleep downtown to play on my friend’s Wii now. (He has Warioware, Zelda and Red Steel. I do not. Also, there will be pizza. Bitchin’.) Enjoy the dulcet tones of everyone’s favourite Cardigans singer!

Once upon a time, there was a very lovely couple known to us only as A and R. A and R were very much in love, and knew the best way to commemorate that love was to get married. Having been to a couple of weddings before and known the DJs that prowl the wedding circuit—the ones who were always ready with a flexidisc of “Macarena” whenever the oh-so-hilarious spectacle of old people and little kids dancing presented itself—A and R decided their wedding would be different. Enter Robbie Fulks, a grizzled alt-country veteran with a sizable catalog of albums on Bloodshot Records. A and R decided Mr. Fulks would play at their reception in Vermont, and provide their guests with a truly spectacular, “Macarena”-free performance.

So Fulks and his band show up and proceed to tear everybody’s faces off musically. Well, I’m just guessing based on the songs A and R posted to their website, presumably some time after the honeymoon. Anyways, the happy couple have brought in a somewhat eclectic performer, and it seems the crowd’s a bit eclectic as well, because somehow Fulks and the band get on the topic of song-poems.

Song-poems? Song-poems. Back in the days when you could order pretty much whatever your heart desired from the magazine classifieds or the back of a comic book, there were a lot of new music studios sitting around and going unused. A recording studio without musicians is a recording studio that doesn’t pay the bills, so they had to come up with some way of generating income. The solution? The music industry version of vanity publishing—pay us $500, send us a poem you’ve written, and we’ll set it to music with professional musicians and everything. The studio gets paid, the musicians get paid, and the poor sucker that wrote the poem gets delusions of top 40 success and a piece of vinyl containing the unholy marriage of poem and song.

Well, I shouldn’t say unholy; some of the songs are actually really damned good, good enough that some of them made it onto compilations produced years after the fact, like the American Song-Poem Anthology. “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” is one of those songs, a hopelessly naive and optimistic song about superman/President Jimmy Carter’s dedication to government reform. In its original funk incarnation by Gene Marshall, “Jimmy Carter Says Yes” ain’t bad. But thanks to A and R and the internet, we have Robbie Fulks performing “Jimmy Carter Says Yes,” a truly inspired combination that’ll stick in your head for weeks.

Can a marriage reception totally rock? Can a song-poem endure through the ages? Can a government be competent? Jimmy Carter says yes!

Looking forward to the new year in releases, it looks like former Velocity Girl singer Sarah Shannon isn’t done with us yet. Her self-titled solo debut, a drastic chamber-pop departure from her Velocity Girl work, looked very much like a one-off project after Shannon basically dropped off the face of the planet after 2002. The pattern isn’t exactly uncommon, after all—a lot of band leaders, ready to spread their wings as solo artists, make a huge effort to distance themselves from their previous, more famous work. Sometimes the result is a major failure (cf. Travis Morrison of the Dismemberment Plan). More often the tactic works all too well, leaving the solo artist to languish in willful obscurity until they eventually give up.

Luckily, Sarah Shannon falls into neither category. It turns out her time away from the music world was well spent in the land of domesticity. Now that she’s got a young family established, Shannon has returned for a second go-around. If the title track to her next album is any indication, we can expect material very similar to her 2002 debut, which means lots of AM-radio horn flourishes and breezily effervescent throwback pop songs. Not a bad way to begin 2007, really.

City Morning Song should be out some time next month, but you can preview the whole album on the Flash-smeared Minty Fresh site, under the Bazaar section. Try to pay no mind to the unfortunate cover art.

Every holiday should be a slight bit ghoulish, and none more so than Christmas—you need something to cut the overwhelming sweetness, what with all the “peace on earth” and “birth of a holy figure” and “man do I ever love candy canes” and “omg I got a Wii!” Of course, you can go too far; Silent Night, Deadly Night didn’t go over so well in 1984 with its portrait of a serial killer that dressed up as Santa. But there are plenty of ways to add some tang to the holidays without resorting to gruesome violence. Instead, let’s skewer some old-time classics that’ll creep out small children a bit instead of terrorizing them.

Once upon a time, probably a long time ago, someone with some knowledge of audio recording techniques watched an episode of Alvin and the Chipmunks and thought, “oh, that’s just someone’s voice played really fast.” Not long after that, someone else probably got the bright idea to slow down the recording to see what would happen. It turns out it’s not very difficult to recover the original, normal-sounding voices from any Chipmunks recording. Most of these experiments have gone down the memory hole, but now that we have the internet this need never happen again, for the MP3 evidence is available to all. And so I bring you Alvin, Simon and Theodore—the real voices— and a creepy, Jabba-like Dave, singing the classic “Christmas Don’t Be Late.”

[review 2006: the best of the year]

After years of releases with several prominent bands in the Pacific Northwest, Rose Melberg disappeared. The Softies released and toured with their final album, Holiday in Rhode Island, and then Melberg and co-conspirator Jen Sbragia went their seperate ways. Sbragia went on to play with the All-Girl Summer Fun Band, but from Melberg nary a peep was heard for four years. As it turns out, Melberg also happens to have a child that’s about four years old.

Through perseverance and probably a lot of juggled schedules, she finally managed to write and record new material, her first since the beginning of the decade. Recorded with a few friends in Vancouver, Cast Away the Clouds sounds more like a product of the quiet lakeside town she calls home. Hushed, intimate and organic, Cast Away the Clouds bears a resemblance to Melberg’s work with the Softies and her previous solo album, a 1998 collection of loose ends called Portola, but the mood is subtly yet strikingly different.

The Softies relied on electric guitars and hushed vocals to weave their magic, a simple yet potent configuration. For Cast Away The Clouds Melberg has expanded her repertoire. This is a mostly unplugged affair, with an acoustic replacing the electric guitars (though if you listen closely on “Cold Sea,” you might get a twinge of Softies nostalgia). Melberg also plays piano on several songs, which works so well on songs like “Take Some Time” and “Irene” that it’s a surprise she hasn’t really done much piano work before now (that I know of, anyway). At the same time, her hushed vocals aren’t quite so hushed anymore—not only does Melberg sound stronger and sing with more conviction, she also harmonizes with herself throughout the album to great effect.

Throughout her long and storied career, Melberg has covered a lot of bases. Her work with the Softies consisted of quiet ballads and soft tones, a big change from the more straightforward and traditional indie-pop oeuvre of Tiger Trap and Go Sailor. If those two stages of her career represented emotional extremes, exuberance and heartbreak, then Cast Away the Clouds is perhaps an attempt to reincorporate a tiny bit of the former into her music. The album wavers back and forth between guarded optimism and bittersweetness, a more complex mix of emotions that feels more complete, easier to embrace than the limited palette the Softies used to paint with.

Five years is a long time to wait, but Cast Away the Clouds sounds more intimate and personable than anything Melberg’s done to date. After all these years, she can still put you under her spell with nothing but a guitar and the sound of her angelic voice. Cast Away the Clouds isn’t just an album you can love; it’s an album that loves you.

[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

Finding new music is occasionally a chore. It’s certainly not as easy as it used to be, when I was a teenager and all I did was suck down MP3s from random FTP sites and read the now-defunct Addicted To Noise and Wall of Sound. So whenever I find someone in a place I didn’t expect, it’s cause for celebration. I picked up the latest Essex Green album on a whim and loved it, found Handsomeboy Technique from a single MP3 posted on a message board I frequent, and essentially discovered electronica years ago thanks to a video game.

One of my volunteer gigs was holding a launch party, and we had a couple of bands lined up, as you do for these sorts of things. Some of the names I recognized because we’d seen them before at other launches or in the magazine I volunteer for, but Laura Barrett’s was one I’d never heard before that day, when I showed up to do merch. When I met her I thought she was just someone who showed up really early; someone else who was just a fan of the magazine had already found us about an hour before we were slated to start. I didn’t realize she was slated to perform until she gave us some expert help with the PA system.

Barrett was the headliner for an evening show, and after seeing what she was going to play I was a bit worried: it was a kalimba, basically a very small piano you play with your thumbs. Barrett was going to follow a punk band and a high-energy dance troupe, and she was going to have to compete with one of Toronto’s many jazz festivals just outside the art gallery where we’d set up shop. How on earth was this small woman and her quiet kalimba supposed to keep anyone’s attention after all that? As the sun went down and the outside noise level went up, I started to worry a bit.

I shouldn’t have been concerned, because two songs into her set she had her entire audience sitting crosslegged on the floor in rapt attention. With her combination of charming stage banter, slightly loopy lyrics and breathtaking artistry, she’d managed to cast a spell on the audience that even the flamenco band just outside the doors couldn’t break. She’d brought ten CDs to sell that day, and sold them all in a flash. Luckily for me, she kept number eleven tucked away just in case, its ornate packaging slightly defective but otherwise in fine condition.

I honestly have no idea whether Barrett intends to make her solo career a going concern, as she’s already got a pretty full load; she’s a touring member of the Hidden Cameras and she also plays with Henri Fabergé and the Adorables. If Earth Sciences is all we get, it’ll be a shame—five gorgeous songs just isn’t enough. Barrett weaves intricate songs like musical labyrinths in which you can lose yourself; despite only picking up the kalimba less than two years ago, she sounds like a pro, spinning complex note patterns as if they were nothing. She’s similarly adept at singing, her dulcet tones a lush counterpoint to the music. But Barrett’s music isn’t just beautiful, it’s also just a bit absurd; she covers Weird Al and sings about robot ponies, two obvious nerd pride badges. Is it any wonder that she’s opened for Final Fantasy in the past?

Give Laura Barrett half a chance and she’ll put you in a trance. Earth Sciences is an intimate and alluring listen, flawed only by its brevity. Apparently there’s a second EP in the works. One can only hope.

(more…)

[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

When I first heard this album, performed live at a small back room in Toronto this past January, I could already tell where Neko Case was headed—further from the honky-tonk of her early albums, down the road she blazed when she unleashed Blacklisted in 2002. But if Blacklisted’s best tracks recalled the deep, dark night, then Fox Confessor Brings the Flood is the cold morning after. The difference in atmosphere is subtle but tangible nonetheless, but thankfully Fox Confessor is just as good an album as its predecessor, even if the emotional thrust is different this time around.

I don’t know where exactly I got this idea from, but several tracks on Fox Confessor evoke images of bare trees and icy rushing rivers with snow-covered banks. There’s a frigid air throughout the album; the sound is crisper, the passion muted, the lyrics less direct. Whereas Blacklisted had genuine moments of drama (”Pretty Girls” and the title track) and longing (”Tightly” and “I Wish I Was the Moon”), Fox Confessor is less of an emotional rollercoaster ride. When Case does approach those previous heights, as on “Hold On, Hold On,” there’s still an element of distance not present on previous albums.

But to appreciate Fox Confessor is to understand that Case no longer seems to be working with quite the same template. The late-night confessional lyrics of songs like “Tightly” are gone; in their place are beautifully told stories with Case as narrator, not protagonist. As I’ve never been one to focus very much on lyrics except the most obvious, I’m not the person to do the deconstruction; I’ll leave that to people like the fine folks at cokemachineglow. In any case, the same thinking carries over to the production and arrangements, carefully crafted to create more subtle and complex effects than any of Case’s prior albums, but also less forceful and direct.

The unfortunate part is that the added complexity and distance makes Fox Confessor Brings the Flood a less immediate listen, and so even though certain songs grab you and never quite let go (”Star Witness,” “That Teenage Feeling” and “Maybe Sparrow” are some of my favourites), it’s harder for me to figure out how it all comes together as an album. So right now this is not an album I love, but more one whose charms I can appreciate. I can imagine myself turning the corner one day—but not just yet.

[review 2006: the honourable mentions]

Since the dissolution of Cibo Matto in 2001, Miho Hatori has been on a bit of a journey. Between a bossa nova excursion as one half of Smokey & Miho and a guest spot on the Gorillaz’s first album, Hatori has kept making music, though with a much lower profile. Notably, while her Cibo Matto partner Yuka Honda put out two solo albums, Hatori remained silent on the recording front until recently. Released over a year ago in Japan, Ecdysis has only made it across the Atlantic recently—a strange twist, considering Hatori has lived in New York for over a decade and has largely collaborated with American musicians. (To be pedantic: yes, technically this means Ecdysis shouldn’t be on this list, as it’s a 2005 release. For the two of you that care, I hope you’ll forgive me.)

From the opening track it’s clear this isn’t your usual indie album; more than anything else I heard this year, Ecdysis sounds genuinely exotic. It’s an organic, intimate affair, slightly reminiscent of some of the quieter moments on early Bjork albums. In fact, if you put “Human Behavior” and “Headphones,” you might start to get an idea of what Ecdysis is all about. The first three tracks set a relaxed pace and a chill vibe that carries through the whole album, even when the beats pick up slightly on standout tracks like “Barracuda” and “Sweet Samsara Part II.” For the most part Ecdysis is content to lull you with its low-key nocturnal lullabies.

If there’s a downside, it’s that none of the songs are absolute stunners, though each one is pretty good. But really, to concentrate on single songs is to lose the forest for the trees; the impact of any single track is nothing compared to the lush, inviting soundscape you enter whenever you put on this album. For forty minutes you can be somewhere completely different from your usual existence; Ecdysis is an album that rewards the wanderlust of your imagination.