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.

I stopped publishing new posts at the beginning of May. Almost three months have passed since then. It’s 6pm right now, and so far today I have received twenty e-mails from record companies, bands and PR companies, all telling me to check out their latest album or music video or hot club show. I’ve been invited to more club nights sponsored by a Japanese car company than I’ve been to concerts; I’ve had the misfortune to glance briefly at tens of e-mails telling me that some singer named Katy Perry has been on Young and the Restless and is adored by Madonna (which probably means she’s not a singer I should pay any attention to); I’ve had countless e-mails telling me to check out bands and artists that anyone who took a cursory glance at this blog would never recommend to me unless they were basically spamming every music blog with an available e-mail address.

At times I’ve found this amusing; at times I’ve detested it; at times I’ve thought about turning the flood of PR e-mails into a blog of its own, titled “The Music Industry is Shit and Here’s Why.” (On that last point, I decided that I can only ridicule the same name-checking bios and celebrity chance-endorsements so many times before even the most masochistic reader gets tired of them.) Regardless of how I feel about the never-ending flood of e-mails on a given day, it’s clear my perception of music has changed considerably from a decade ago, and not at all for the better.

The Independent in the UK puts up the Fratellis as an example of everything that is wrong with “indie rock” today. Granted, the British definition of indie music is different from ours; the pantheon of influences and record labels is different here than across the Atlantic. The “indie is dead” angle is not particularly new, either; I remember reading articles about how the “indie” charts in the UK were dominated by the likes of Oasis, the Verve, and other so-called independent artists who most certainly were not working day jobs down at the local laundromat or pub. Even so, the critique is strangely dead-on. Designed to be accessible to a fashionable yet insatiable crowd, indie music today sounds a lot like alternative music did a decade ago: far too commercial, far too generic, and far too ubiquitous to be of any use.

It was only upon realizing that music was essentially repeating its own trend progression from eras past that I finally decided it was okay for me to be stuck listening to music not far different from what I liked in high school. A couple of days ago I found a random indie pop station on Live365, figuring there was no way I could relive the days of the late indiepopradio but that it was worth a shot. It turns out that aside from the horrific Live365-injected ads, the experience is eerily familiar. I immediately recognized the toy piano from the start of All Time Quarterback’s cover of the Magnetic Fields’ “Why I Cry,” and suddenly I was seventeen again. It didn’t matter that I had completely forgotten about the band, or that I only discovered yesterday that the female providing the vocals was none other than the very male Ben Gibbard from Death Cab for Cutie (in hindsight it’s obvious); it was like the preceding decade had disappeared and I was back to really liking and enjoying music without worrying about how cool it was, or whether the right people liked it, or whether I’d been sent too many PR e-mails about it already.

Doing that with new music now seems impossible. In high school, I was largely isolated from hype because we hadn’t really figured out as a culture how to use the internet, let alone exploit it for broadcasting reams of PR garbage or canned reviews. Now the hype is everywhere. When the Yeah Yeah Yeahs got tons of coverage just for releasing two EPs a couple of years back, that was seen as an anomaly and perhaps a dark harbinger of things to come. Now it happens almost routinely as a matter of course (Vampire Weekend got a Spin cover before releasing their first album, fer chrissakes). On the one hand, music is more democratic now; it’s hard to arbitrarily shun people that haven’t heard your obscure black label remix single from Germany, because now there are seventeen reviews for that single all over the place and it’s available on iTunes. On the other hand, it means there’s no such thing any more as the gentle discovery of a like-minded band; nearly everything now is preceded by a wall of hype so massive that if you haven’t heard of an album three months before its release, something has gone horribly wrong. As a result, nowadays I judge music not so much on what I’ve heard, but on what PR flacks and reviewers and DJs and bloggers have said about it. I wish I didn’t.

And that, dear readers, is the real reason why I took a couple of months off. It wasn’t to concentrate on my thesis, or feed the cat and water the plants. It was to try and reclaim the old ways I had of finding new music—reading the occasional review from a source I trusted, and listening to albums sight unseen. Because the new ways I have, frankly, suck. When I last left you, music had become as much a chore as anything, and even I can figure out that something is very wrong when that happens. I used to read Splendid on a daily basis (and could’ve written for them had I not been so worried about finding story ideas that I turned them down), but sadly that site died a few years back; the closest I’ve found to a replacement is Popmatters (and lo and behold, at least one Splendid writer works there). If you want an idea of what I’ve been listening to lately, that’s the place to look.

But don’t worry, I’ll post some of my favourites here as well. Think of the upcoming round of posts as “how I spent my summer vacation listening to music.” Hopefully it’ll be more interesting than the relentless search for new and interesting music that nearly destroyed my ability to enjoy music a few months back. And then after I’ve shown you what I’ve liked over the past few months? Well, then we’ll start playing things by ear, I expect. Expect fewer posts, and only when I’m actually inspired to write something interesting. Hopefully that’ll at least up the quality of posts.

Okay, enough navel-gazing. Back to work.

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

[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]

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.

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.