Jamaica To Toronto keyman Jay Douglas is appearing at Sonic Boom on Friday (6 pm) followed by a full show at The Drake Hotel on Saturday (February 15).
Here's the scoop...
Back from a successful west coast swing promoting the great new feature-length documentary Play It Loud! How Toronto Got Soul with director Graeme Mathieson, the film's star Jay Douglas is looking forward to returning to the stage in Toronto – despite the chilly temps – for a Valentine's Day warm-up. While some performers choose to hibernate during the winter months in the Great White North, Jay Douglas is clearly made of sterner stuff.
"We just flew in from the Yukon," say Jay, "where we had a screening of Play It Loud! at the Available Light Film Festival in Whitehorse. It was well accepted by the audience there and other than the bitterly cold weather, everything worked out great!"
Later today he'll be singing a set of lover's rock for a free in-store at Sonic Boom (215 Spadina) starting at 6 pm to coincide with Light In The Attic's timely vinyl repress of the Jamaica To Toronto 2LP anthology and follow it up with a full show at The Drake Hotel on Saturday (February 15) backed by his longtime pal, dynamite drummer Everton "Pablo" Paul and crew. The doors open at 9:30 pm and tickets are $17.31 available right here.
Check out a short clip of Jay's version of "I Wish It Would Rain," the trailer for "Play It Loud!," a video chat about the documentary with Rudy Blair along with some performance footage.
Dean Wareham & Britta Phillips recorded a holiday album 'A Peace Of Us' with Sonic Boom. Listen to "Pretty Paper" below.
Here's the scoop...
In a season where we all seek comfort, tradition, and a return to a home of sorts, a trio composed of indie music’s foundational members are gifting us A Peace of Us (out November 22)—an album of diverse holiday tunes filtered through their musical imaginations. Dean & Britta, well-known from their work defining a genre with Galaxie 500 and Luna, join Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, another bastion of indie’s collective adolescence, to bring to life a collection that draws from early ‘60s pop, garage, country, James Bond soundtracks, Christmas carols, and electronica. Dean Wareham recalls a sentiment from his DJ friend Chris: “You can experience all the emotions of Christmas through music: love and hate, joy and heartache, nostalgia, regret, anticipation, and frustration.”
Their venture into a holiday album was organic, spurred by a few cover tunes over the years, a Christmas special during the pandemic, and finally collaborative sessions between Dean & Britta in L.A. and Sonic Boom in Portugal. The trio all contributed vocals, with guitars by Wareham, bass and keyboards by Phillips, effects, and mixes by Sonic. The result is an album of exploration as well as comfort, “like Bing Crosby...on acid,” Britta adds, the tracklist a reminder that the holidays are complex and tragicomic.
As is often the case with holiday merriment, the album has a soft undertone of the bittersweet. Wareham sings one of David Berman’s final songs, “Snow is Falling in Manhattan,” one Dean believes is “destined to be a holiday classic.” Its lyrics foreshadow Berman’s tragic death: “Songs build little rooms in time / and housed within the song's design / is the ghost the host has left behind.”
The Christmas blues surface again with Willie Nelson’s “Pretty Paper,” rendered here as a duet between Britta and Sonic Boom, their pulsing synth-heavy production updating the song for a darkened nightclub rather than a bright honky tonk. This collection steers clear of the usual Christmas chestnuts, but fans of classic indie haze may find a new favorite in “Peace on Earth / Little Drummer Boy” (created for Bing Crosby and David Bowie’s 1977 TV duet). Wareham notes that “Our favorite version is the German one by Marlene Dietrich, so that was our jumping-off point.” All three sing this one together: Wareham’s tenor, then Sonic Boom’s thrumming baritone, and finally Phillips’ soothing contralto making the plea for peace.
If collaboration is the fuel, peace and mutual understanding is surely the fire, and A Peace of Us has us gathered around it. “Christmas is mostly for children anyway,” says Dean. Sonic adds, “Or the inner child in all of us. Goodwill to all men. Hopes and fears for the year to come. And light in the darkness. Where this festival began.”
You can pre-order a copy of Dean & Britta & Sonic Boom's A Peace Of Us album via your platform of choice right here. Check out the video for "Pretty Paper" following the tracklisting below.
Remixes is a 28 minute Wooden Shjips 12” EP featuring exclusive retouches from the celebrated Andy Weatherall and Sonic Boom (aka Pete Kember of Spacemen 3) along with a hands-across-the-water collabo involving Kandodo (which is really Simon Price of The Heads). The limited-edition release pressed on clear vinyl with fancy black streaks is available now directly from Thrill Jockey or wherever dubby psych remixes are sold.
Andrew Weatherall, long time producer and remixer – who has worked with Primal Scream, New Order,My Bloody Valentine, and Bjork among others – remixed "Crossing" while Sonic Boom of Spacemen 3 fame contributed "Wiking Stew (aka Red Krayola-ing)". When Pete was called in to help master the Wooden Shjips' West, he was so inspired that he made a mash-up on his own. The final track is the Wooden Shjips' sad farewell to the North American polar bear "Ursus Maritimus (Last Bear's Lament)", a long distance collaboration with Simon Price. Shjips guitarist Ripley Johnson (who also plays in Moon Duowith Sanae Yamada) created the bed of the track in Colorado in between tours and sent if off to Simon, in London where he added all the additional instrumentation at his home studio.
