There's a time in a person's life where they must ask themselves "What is missing in my life?" Is it a meaningful career? They'd ask. No. Emotional commitment? No. Only when the incandescent bulb of sudden realisation flutters alight will the answer reveal itself: "kangaroo leather". That's right, straight from the sunbeaten plains of Australia and right to your door, you too can own a kangaroo pelt of indeterminate size for only one dollar.
"BRAND NEW! Good for a hat, or as a rug."
It's simultaneously a hat and a rug?! What on earth kind of witchy lump of flesh is this? In which case why we haven't been harvesting the sweet, magical, grizzled skins of marsupial for mass order is a mystery to me.
Perfect for birthdays, bridal showers and guaranteed to be the talking-point of every Jehovah's Witness you invite into your home, don't let this one slip you by.
Streaming Audio Killed the Video Star: Spoon Coming to Vancouver!+
The perpetual head cold of Britt Daniels has reared its phlegmy maw yet again, this time in the form of stupid album title of the month Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga. His nasally vocal-designs on rock and roll plod forward, untouched by modern medicine (Benadryl, a Kleenex) leaving “Ga” to dribble along freely only to be restrained with a sniffling inhale. Gentle reader, I know you've been thinking, "What’s a Ga?" "What are multiple Ga?" "Why Ga?" "Where did I leave my keys?" Well, here's my chance to cure you of your ignorance: Just try not to think about it, because they certainly didn’t. And second drawer, bottom right.
Spoon has a few trademarks, not least of which is their meticulous, metronome-like precision which serves as the foundation of most of their albums. They can essentially be summed up as a band that makes use of the standard 4/4 format by merging fairly intricate layering with minimal instrumentation. And they are great at this. But more importantly they are a band who are thoroughly practiced in the mechanics of basic rock and roll, having created a science of making simple, well-arranged songs catchy.
It’s their aptitude for meticulously crafted albeit incomplex arrangements that we should focus on when comparing their past albums to their current. I say this because Ga Ga manages to simultaneously stray from the path they set out within the past few albums while mimicking certain aspects of arrangement specific to both Kill the Moonlight and Girls Can Tell. While it follows the same philosophy of creating a large-scale syncopated percussion backdrop the band obscures this with the occasional brass section and American Bandstand-like Motown inclinations. Instead of his guttural yelps and grunts which made up the majority of vocals on previous albums, Daniels spends the majority of his time crooning over the lyrics smoothly. While the drum and guitar compositions still follow a staccato path, Ga Ga prefers to center its focus on fuller sounding instrumentation than spidery sparse production. But these are only slight deviations in comparison to what Ga seems to lack most essentially: rawly catchy rock and roll.
Spoons stand-out songs of past albums have always been their most minimal. Both The Way We Get By and I Turn My Camera On combined simplistic syncopated rhythms and tidy guitar-plucking which drove the song’s foot-tapping base. Yet with this album, Spoon have decided to play with both instrumentation and production in a way that complicates the music more than it would technically need, making each song on the album come across as a vaguely impressive versions of Spoons less impressive songs from the past ten years.
Ga is certainly not a musical misstep: it follows the core musical habits of Spoon’s past albums while basically fattening the structural elements with more instruments and production value. When not experimenting with Motown-lite brass sections, Spoon takes pages from its past work for influence and tweaks them to fuller production. But in polishing the Spoon formula I can’t help but think that they aren’t so much maturing out of a formula they have cultivated over the years so much as diluting the raw and infective melodic format that they have perfected in the past.
Luckily for you guys, you too can experience the fits of wincing self-hatred and crippling embarrassment on par with that which I felt after reading my seventh grade English poem earlier. Here's a taste: It's entitled "A Poem" and involves the phrase
"Open the doors to the city of your imagination! You can do anything with the power of your mind!"
Proving that I apparently did not understand the concept of rhyming. And tangentially, I can now safely say I forgive the middle school class of 2001 for their collective hatred of me.
How can you do this, you ask? With the aid of http://www.futureme.org ! It's a fairly simple concept. Basically you can write a message to yourself which will be emailed to you at a date of your choosing (sometime between 2007 and 2037). It's a pretty cool idea, though, having the ability to send yourself unadulterated archival pieces from your past. And just think, if you ever are stricken with an incurable disease that will leave you dead within weeks you can send emails to your family members that will reach them ten years later, convincing them that you are stuck in their computer.
Original photo from Flikr user Distracted and Megalomaniacal
Coming to a 4am time-slot near you:
The rumours are all true! The Gods have taken pity on us, parting the heavens to a chorus of a thousand seraphim to hand down true artistic mastery in the form of Flash--a-aah--Gordon. Redux! That's right, they're remaking this baby as a syndicated television show yet again. Only this time it's shot in Vancouver. With an all-Canadian cast. And will be vaguely culturally relevant*.
O the fetid perfume of bad ideas. O my wrinkled nose of disapproval. O Canada. I don’t blame you; you’re just a victim in this too. It’s an American production and you’re caught in the middle, I understand. The X-Files are long gone, Stargate has left your side. How much longer is Gallactica going to stick around for and then what are you left with? Robson Arms and a keg of watermelon sorbet, alone on a Saturday night is what.
This is surely this is a bit of a bizarre piece to put on air again, though. I can understand it's a little gauche not to throw together some sort of Flash Gordon media filler when you can literally set your watch by its revival every decade since '54 at this point. But Brian Blessed is the heart and soul of this organisation, if you don't have him then you don't have Flash! He alone is misogyny in its perfected state! Damnit, Flash begins and ends in 1980's Britain! The epic synth stylings! The "Gordon's alive?!" This is how it's meant to be!
The Brian Blessed 'Hawkman' edition of Flash Gordon
* This is the perfection that the 2007 interpretation begs to breach with their dirty, modernising paws.
"The new series, based on the comic strip of the same name and its adaptations, adds a character "called Baylin (Karen Cliché), a bounty hunter from the planet Mongo. She finds herself trapped on Earth and becomes a comrade of Flash (Johnson); his former girlfriend, Dale Arden (Gina Holden); and scientist Dr. Hans Zarkov (Jody Rasciot), who are able to travel back and forth through a portal between the two worlds." In a more subtle change, Ming will not be called "the Merciless" and will exhibit the traits of modern, media-savvy dictators like Saddam Hussein."
Streaming Audio Killed the Video Star: A critical glance at Myspace band The Choir Practice
Alongside such universal facts as 'triangles are three-sided' and 'this post backfired horribly' is the irrefutable truth that when reading reviews of The Choir Practice you will find comparisons to Langley School Music Project, The Polyphonic Spree, The Mama's and The Papa's and The Beach Boys. Everylastone. Actually, Connie astutely pointed out in her live-review. She says that
…Reviews keep touting [The Choir Practice] as the grown-up Langley Schools Music Project (just because they’re a choir?).
To which I reply Yes. Yes, that's exactly why: because that’s the primary basis of their entire identity. They're an indie band who decided to drop the bass and replace instrumentation with vocals on top of existing vocals. They're a band whose clear overriding element is not eclectic complexity but straight forward vocal syncopation.
"But wait!" cry the Choir Practice fanbase of three, lower lip jutting out in consternation "you're ignoring the jangly 1960's atmosphere! the surburban gospel-folk intonations!" Of course I'm not denying any of that, but those elements are by and large bi-products of being a choir. The combination of sing-a-long handclapping and call and reply vocals are hardly a sound limited to the sunshine nostalgia of the '60s. Even while they do have some kind of atmospheric vocal layering, their structural composition doesn't stand out enough to warrant heavier analysis, following the same A B A B musical format of any run-of-the-mill indie band.
It's in their concept that they stay on top as a moderately intriguing band. While we're swamped with second-hand imitations of Broken Social Scene's and DIY party band residue from Toronto, The Choir Practice are a genuine and individual voice (voices?) within Vancouver. Not because of what they're doing but because of how they're doing it.
Introduction: I should have posted this a hilariously long time ago
Blog (Second Online Edition, revised): Emily, meet Grammar
Product Details: Publisher: Mother & Co. (September, 1987) Language: English Product Dimensions: 63.1 x 24 x 6 inches Shipping weight: 1680 ounces Average Customer Review: Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): little brown cat, buffalo man, pale suit
Reviews:
"touted by the author herself as a modern-day portrait of the artist-meets-anne frank, in reality the similarities begin and end with its blatant plagiarism of both books, (p.1-67 of portrait, p. 68-83 of anne frank.) The story begins with incomprehensible third-person narration, and ends mid-sentence, on the topic of zionism. Although not quite original, it fares much better than her earlier work." -Vancouver Sun
"I'm not entirely sure why the last fifteen pages are filled with game cheats for the sims. it was a briliant move on Emily's part, showing her as a man of the people. I'm even less sure how this got published!!." -Writing Weekly
"Every schoolchild in the country should read this journal at least once. Only after sush classics as Portrait of the Artist or Anne Frank is it secondary. Of course writing of this calibre has its flaws, some say that it was "indulgent" or "too self aware", others point out that there is no closure, too many questions left unanswered. However they are all philistines and woudnt understand TRUE ART if it slapped them in the face. How has she not won a Pulitzer?" -not Emily's parents
1. A seventeen piece band, not to be confused with Gogol Bordello. 2. Self-proclaimed "bar mitzvah gone terribly wrong" who seem to serve as part Eastern Bloc rock, all drunken tambourine-ridden post-war party, all the time. 3. Fans of multi-linguism and The Ramones, the two apparently not mutually exclusive. 4. One of those 'party' bands. 5. A Vancouver-based musical troupe that somehow exists outside of the world of Mint Records. 6. Propagators of the Canadian musical Red Shift--Write your congressman!
Vancouver Suburbs Part of Marketting Time-Warp: Lock Your Doors
So what's happening in the world, then? While Lewis Libby is being spared from his prison sentence through some kind of bizarre divine intervention and further inquiries are taking place regarding the failed UK car bombing as the terror threat level climbs to critical, Vancouver does not fail to put its name in the papers: we're getting our one and only Kwik-E-Mart, guys! Just when you thought that thickly accented 'thankyou, come again' jokes were getting a little stale, now you will never escape them as they pull you screaming in to an endless pit of mid-nineties colloquialisms!
20th Century Fox along with the creators of The Simpson's at Gracie Films have combined forces for the up-coming Simpson's movie to create a marketing campaign in which eleven 7/11's in the US and one in Canada essentially transform in to the show's famed Kwik-E-Mart, selling Simpson's products from Buzz Cola to Squishees. So far it sounds as though most of their current products will be simply renamed (their upcoming Squishee "WooHoo! Blue Vanilla" is already existent under a different name) but you may just have the luck of trying out one of the slightly re-priced items that have been around for decades! Canada's only Kwik-E-Mart will be situated just outside of Vancouver, in Coquitlam.
The Simpson's movie will have its theatrical release in Canada on July 27th, if any of you particularly care.
