Hey gang, long time no see.

It’s been a couple of months, and in that time I’ve been editing my final grad paper, writing some articles for various publications on the side, and generally not thinking very much about music. If I’m to be perfectly honest, I’m not sure the “not thinking about music” part is going to change too much in the near future.

The short story, then: angels twenty will continue on a sporadic basis. I’m no War Against Silence, but I don’t want to say I’m never writing about music again—just not on such a “rigorous” (if ludicrously spread out) schedule. The long story, I hope, you’ll find more interesting.

(more…)

angels twenty will be off for a bit to recharge—water the plants and feed the cat, maybe mail some packages and get ahead on the credit card bills. Back in the summer!

FTP access to the site is down for whatever reason, which means I haven’t been able to upload any music recently. I’m trying to get this fixed (and by that I mean I’m going to wave my arms ineffectually at the webhost support for a bit).

update: Fixed. Suffice it to say I am never ever using PeerGuardian 2 AGAIN. What the fuck.

My computer is currently an amnesiac. For the past couple of weeks I’d been suffering from a bevy of random application crashes and other weird behavior; it turns out it was all due to bad memory, so right now my computer’s sitting dormant while my old RAM, still under warranty, flies out to California and a new set flies back to me. All this takes a while, of course, so the upshot is no new posts for a week or two. Luckily, January’s usually a slow month for music, so it’s not like you’re missing too much. Read a couple more best of 2007 lists and hopefully I’ll be back soon!

And so goes another year. Songs will remain up until about the middle of January, so you can rewind the clock at your leisure. See you next year!

[favourites]
Lucky Soul, The Great Unwanted
Go! Team, Proof of Youth
Charlotte Hatherley, The Deep Blue
Enon, Grass Geysers…Carbon Clouds
Fiery Furnaces, Widow City
Imperial Teen, The Hair the TV the Baby & the Band
Octopus Project, Hello, Avalanche
Marnie Stern, In Advance of the Broken Arm
Nicole Atkins, Neptune City

[honourable mentions]
Mary Timony Band, The Shapes We Make
Feist, The Reminder
Deerhoof, Friend Opportunity
Weakerthans, Reunion Tour
Stars, In Our Bedroom After the War

[odds and ends]
Luke Vibert, Chicago, Detroit, Redruth
Joel Plaskett Emergency, Ashtray Rock
Freezepop, Future Future Future Perfect
C.O.C.O., Play Drums + Bass
Brunettes, Structure and Cosmetics

[crimes and misdemeanours]
PJ Harvey, White Chalk
Arcade Fire, Neon Bible
Kristin Hersh, Learn to Sing Like a Star
Rilo Kiley, Under the Blacklight

[prologue]

It occurred to me around the time all the Canadian university frosh week concerts were being announced that Stars is the new Tea Party, Metric is the new Moist, and Feist is the new Sarah McLachlan. Welcome to bizarro 1997, kids, where your CanCon heroes of old have been replaced with Folgers crystals. Let’s see if anyone notices.

I don’t mean to make those comparisons literally; it’s more an observation that the Canadian music industry has latched on to the new set of indie rock heroes the same way it latched onto the alt-rock heroes of the late 90s, thus completing a cycle that began a couple of years ago when bands like the Strokes, Interpol and Bloc Party first became popular. As a genre identifier, indie rock has never had much meaning; it represented an ethos more than any particular sound, which was why you could include the likes of Sleater-Kinney, Don Caballero and Mates of State under the same extremely large umbrella. But that ethos of independence has moved on, now divorced from many of the bands that used to carry its banner high. This is not a sellout lamentation, but rather a recognition that things change. Eventually your idols, the ones you saw in that dingy little club in Kingston back when they were new and hip and no one knew who they were, they become the next big thing, sell tons of albums, break up, move on, and then reform as Credence Clearwater Revisited and play dingy little clubs in Kingston again. Such is the way of nature. This has all happened before, and it will all happen again.

All that said, 2007 was a surprisingly good year for music in my neck of the woods. I honestly can’t think of many albums that I disliked this year; only one album from 2007 was even close to taking the Daybreaker prize (so named for Beth Orton’s rather unfortunate third album, which should’ve been taken out back along with Ryan Adams and shot twice in the head). The first four months of the year, so often a barren and bleak period for album releases, was chock full of intriguing and exciting records. And if my recent re-examination of 2006 is any indication, there’ll be a bunch of other amazing albums that I’ve missed completely.

But maybe the reason why 2007 didn’t sound so bad has less to do with the amount of really good music and more to do with the number of old favourites releasing decent albums. Ten years ago I’d just discovered Sleater-Kinney and Versus and Stereolab and Sonic Youth and a whole bunch of other bands that eventually came to be my bread and butter. A couple of years later it became so obvious to me that the previous musical universe I lived in—one dominated by the likes of the Tea Party and other alt-rock radio staples—wasn’t actually a universe at all, but rather a very small box containing a few meagre scraps and a whole lot of advertising. I feel a little bit like I’m stuck in the box again, and though I’m content to stay a while, I know that just buying up the new album from my favourite bands every couple of years is a path that leads to disaster—that is to say, growing old.

So if Stars is the new Tea Party, where’s the new Sleater-Kinney? Hopefully I’ll find out in 2008.

Review 2007 is next.

It’s strange to think that the Go! Team is apparently now popular enough to be featured on MuchMusic—sure, no one over the age of seventeen seems to watch the channel any more, but there are a LOT of seventeen-year-olds out there listening to Evanescence—but they’re the ones who are streaming Proof Of Youth a week before release. Initial impressions are that the album is very similar to Thunder, Lightning, Strike in both its general approach—a very good thing—and the recurrence of some familiar melodies and beats—not so much of a good thing. All in all, it’s good enough to make me wonder if maybe I should buy some tickets to that Opera House show on Halloween. Show #1 at Lee’s Palace was a raging success; show #2 at the Phoenix was scattered and generally full of people unwilling to so much as tap a foot. Third time’s a charm, maybe?

Sorry, angels is in a bit of an unannounced vacation mode just now—as much as I tried this year, I just couldn’t avoid the annual August drought. I’ll be back at the top of September.

Without immediate action by Congress by July 15th, new royalty rates for internet broadcasters will go into effect, a move that will likely put the majority of small broadcasters out of business due to massive increases in costs (we’re talking over 500% in many cases) and record-keeping requirements. There’s not much time. And in case you’ve read about SoundExchange’s “generous” royalty relief plan to cap all costs at $2500, forget about it—here are a number of reasons why it’s a non-starter.

Without internet radio, I would never have heard of a huge chunk of bands that now form the musical foundation of my teenage years. As a foreigner, I myself can do very little to keep internet radio alive in the States. I have no senators or house representatives to call and beg. But maybe you do.

I’m in Kingston for the weekend, so no song today. I, uh, kinda forgot to think of something and write it up this morning. Sorry kids—be back after the weekend.