Thank You, Jim Flaherty, For Thinking Of The Banks

Lately, I've been losing sleep, worrying about the well-being of our precious banks. Luckily, I'm not the only who cares. The good ol' Harper gov't has been caring about banks too, why they must have worked through Remembrance Day figuring out this one. Well, back to bed, Canada!

mp3: "The Bank" by Louis CK
mp3: "End of Bank" by Louis CK

P.S. Louis CK is in Vancouver on Friday at the Vogue.

Great Shadows: great song

Josh Reichmann used to be in Tangiers, a kick-ass Toronto band that had one or two former players from the Deadly Snakes. Tangiers released three excellent records of fraught, garage-y soul rock between 2003 and 2005. That's, like, one record a year. Now Josh Reichmann's got a sweaty new band, an Oracle Band, and they've just released their first EP, Life Is Legal, out now on Paper Bag Records. If you were on Paper Bag's mailing list during the week of Oct. 7th, you woulda got a free download of the whole EP. Which is a great reason to sign up now, just in case there's more goodies to come (not necessarily an endorsement)!

Josh Reichmann/Oracle Band is in Vancouver tomorrow night, Nov. 11, at the Media Club.

mp3: "Great Shadows" by Josh Reichmann/Oracle Band
mp3: "Bones to Match the Heart" by Tangiers (from their middle album, Never Bring You Pleasure)

Vancouver City Limits

Went down to watch the brother rock the house at Vancouver City Limits last night. Hosted at the Beaumont Studios at W. 5th & Alberta (incidentally, that's nowhere near the actual Vancouver city limits) every Monday night, VCL is an intimate mostly roots and singer-songwriter music showcase series worth checking out. It's in a rehearsal space with soft seats, and only holds about 50 people. Each show features three acts, and the folks who put it on take video of the concert and then post one nicely edited song from each performance onto the Youtube.
I haven't heard of any of the other performers, and a lot of them seem to be a little outside of my particular tastes in music, but in terms of live music settings, Vancouver City Limits is one of the best venues.

A Bulldozer With Apocrypha: Part of What it's There for is to Make People Stupid

Between the Augusts of 1997 and 2006, the main thing I did was write record reviews. I wrote 'em for free and I wrote 'em for pay, and I wrote 'em still when I had nothing to say*. It was, at first, good training for writing. I mean, it was writing, but it was also a bunch of other things. Mainly, it was me teaching myself to write. I've had no instruction in composition since high school, and what mentorship I've had has been indirect. For a long time it felt like I had to rediscover fire with each piece I did, and I wasted a lot time at the top of a hill with twigs in my hands, screaming for the lightning to come.
Eventually, I got pretty good. As a writer. I'm not so foolish that I don't recognize the progress I've made, and I'm not so smug and condescending that I'll pretend otherwise. But I don't think I was ever that good as a reviewer. I don't know that a reviewer who glommed on to Richard Meltzer so early in their career ever really had a chance. I was only just starting to make a little coin from the hustle when Meltzer told me, "I think a lot of work has to be done in ignoring the immensity of it and writing about any little particle of it. It's a big monster, rock. And it exists for certain pre-ordained reasons that were not part of the package once. Part of what it's there for is to make people stupid. To make people cease to resist. It's crowd control."

mp3: "Goodbye Pork Pie Cravat" by Richard Meltzer (last known sighting)

So I pretty much started off wrong. I mean, aside from Meltzer, I barely read any music writing before I started doing it. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn't really care, just as long as I was doing. Along the way, though, I did start reading other rock-write, and along with the Hemingway, Brautigan, Kerouac, Thompson (both Jim and Hunter S.), Richler, Tosches, and Doestoevsky I was reading back when I was still soft and malleable, it creeped into my own writing and I eventually started to recognize my stuff as actual rock-write, or at least wrock-rite. And then I started doing interviews and profiles and the odd feature (like when I was Santa!), but record reviews were always my bread and free CDs were my butter.
I pretty quickly got to the point where I was getting about 10x more CDs every week than I could ever hope to review, never mind listen to. Most of the time I selected which CD would get the honour of 150 of my words by no less arbitrary means than do I have a good joke I could hang around the album?
I had a lot of good jokes, and probably would've been better off writing record reviews disguised as comedy routines than vice versa, but no one was offering me 10-to-25 cents/word for comedy routines four-to-eight times a month. Do the math, in Regina, in the early 2000s, you could almost pay your rent on that. You couldn't eat or turn on the lights, but you could pay your rent. Wait a minute, I just did the math, you couldn't pay your rent on record reviews, but you could probably pay one bill. Like maybe your phone bill, if you didn't have any friends.
Anyway, good times. I wrote for dailies, weeklies, bi-weeklies, monthlies, bi-monthlies, and I even did one assignment for a quarterly, though I never got paid for it, even though the peice ran (minus my byline, which is why I missed it for over a year, which kinda makes it my fault for not getting paid--well no, it's still Mr. Campbell's fault, and I'd still like the money). And for all the money I wasn't making from my writing (or a variety of dayjobs), I always had a giant box of CDs to sell at the end of the month.
But I also had an ever-growing number of boxes full of CDs that I hadn't yet reviewed for whatever reason, but still loved and intended to review someday.
SOMEDAY = TODAY!

Joel RL Phelps The Downer Trio
Customs
Moneyshot Records
2004
4 stars

Phelps used to be in Silkworm, who may have opened for Shellac in Regina in 1999. But at the time Customs came out, I kept getting Silkworm and Spoon mixed up, so don't count on it. Phelps left the band, moved to the Kootenays or somewhere, and started the Downer Trio. Which is exactly what it sounds like, ie, not a band for your wedding. I mentioned Shellac earlier and now I'm gonna call back to that, because they are/were(?) also a trio that specialized in downers with monstrous percussion. So if you like that, you'll like this. But if you prefer the brutally exposed emotional honesty of the Mountain Goats, you will also like Customs. Phelps treads both the power-rocker and the troubadour (seriously, there's some non-hyphenated folk troubadour stuff on this alb) paths, usually at the same time, and usually with a sense of macho grace that thoroughly distinguishes him from either of the bands I just compared him to.
Customs, like the rest of Phelps's Downer Trio stuff, is currently out of print, which is a fucking shame. Phelps seems to have disappeared from the music bizz altogether in the last four years, which, y'know, good for him/bad for us.

mp3: "From Up Here" by Joel RL Phelps Downer Trio - This is the first cut, and it starts off so tough and crunchy, but then a steel drum comes in doesn't change the tone or tenor, but gives it something unexpected, something perfect.

mp3: "Kelly Grand Forks" by Joel RL Phelps Downer Trio - My parents lived in Grand Forks, BC before I was born. Then, after I was born, I lived not all that far from Grand Forks, ND, though I never went there. This song also features amazing percussion, but I like it even more for the cutting lyrics like "you can freeze your faith and loyalty because that's what winter's for".

*You too can write a country & western hit!

Need vs. Want

The good people of Shazhmm look at Herbie Archives Vol. 1 and make my mouth water. The Fat Fury! Frankenstein! Possible multiple Frankensteins! Hubba 2x.
Of course, the last thing I need right now is $50 collection of comics from the 60s. But a boy can dream, can't he?

mp3: "Sweatshirt Cowboy" by the Woodsmen
mp3: "I Been Rich All My Life" by the Woodsmen

don't talk to me about 2.0

A little over a month ago I went to a party. I know, bad idea. It was mostly okay, work-related, lotsa people I actually like, etc. But somehow I got cornered into a conversation with a fella who seemed intent on impressing me with the fact that he works in "Web 2.0, you know what that is?"

"Um, that means you're on Facebook?"

I spent the next 25 minutes in the year 2006. And yeah, basically the dude sets up Facebook accounts for businesses. Which is fine, but the guy had that evangelical zeal for "interactive online community" that inevitably trumps content or even function. Which is, like, at the corner of Nowhere Street and Whocares Avenue. My unwelcome Ajax tutorial finally ended when I admitted to having a blog but not having a solid SEO strategy.

mp3: "Narrow Minds" by Angil and the Hidden Tracks

A little late, but still ahead of the release show!

So our ol' pals the Neins Circa have a new rekkid out, and it's a concept EP devoted to the one and only C.S. Rippen, best known as the boffo guitarist of the Tin Cup (as in Roger Dean Young & the...). As you can see, the EP was in stores over a month ago, but I was not in a store until Saturday, so whatcha gonna do?

But the Neins Circa themselves were out on tour across the country all fall, so the CD release show hasn't even happened yet!
You can be a part of the magic on Friday, November 28 at the Western Front, 303 E. 8th. Word around town is that the Ripper himself will be there and will be a solo set. NICE.

mp3: "Little Chris" by the Neins Circa