This recent CBC news report (see clip below) about the downside compact fluorescent light bulbs might cause you to think twice about replacing all of the incandescent bulbs in your home with those energy-saving curly ones. Evidently, the potentially hazardous mercury content isn't the worst of it.
Although singer/songwriter and novelist Joe Pernice has reportedly made Toronto his home for the past five years, he's maintaining a decidedly low profile. In fact, Prince would probably like to get some tips on keeping hidden in the city – if he could only find him. There have been a couple of unconfirmed Pernice sightings in the area of Ossington and Dundas – Tim Hanna swears it was Pernice who walked into Frantic City and signed a Young Accuser single sleeve which he has on the wall as evidence – but whether it was actually him or a bearded look-alike faking a Northamptonian drawl, the fact remains that Pernice isn't in danger of oversaturating the market with local club appearances. He's played fewer shows in Toronto over the past 12 months than Austin's Strange Boys. So even though Pernice's appearance tonight (Monday, September 20) at Clinton's as part of This Is Not A Reading Series will be primarily a discussion of his first novel It Feels So Good When I Stop (Penguin) prodded by Stuart Ross, I've heard from a reliable source that Pernice will have a guitar with him. Good news.
The last time Pernice held a book launch in town, it started with him reading passages from his novel but quickly turned into a solo acoustic performance with Pernice playing more than half of the cover songs from the book's accompanying "soundtrack" album and culminated with a set of tunes from his time with the Pernice Brothers, Scud Mountain Boys and Chappaquiddick Skyline.
Charlie Huisken's literary event at Clinton's may not turn into another career retrospective night, it's sure to make for an entertaining evening and you'll also be among the proud few who can lay claim to observing Pernice in his new habitat. The cover is just $5 and doors open at 7 pm.
Joe Pernice reads from It Feels So Good When I Stop
Tell Me When It's Over (Dream Syndicate) by Joe Pernice
Following the release of the first Grinderman album, the Birthday Party references came quickly and steadily from music critics looking for a place to slot the latest Nick Cave side project which didn't seem to be a natural progression from what he'd been doing with the Bad Seeds. But rather than a regression for Cave as if part of an ill-advised bid to reconnect with his glory days as some have suggested, Grinderman is a bold step forward. He's not aiming to relive his youth, just merely trying to shake out the cobwebs.
Like many artists of Cave's advanced age – he turns 53 on September 22 – he has come to realize that those unequivocally great songs aren't filling up the pages of his notebooks as effortlessly as they once did. Plus, he no longer has longtime collaborator Mick Harvey as a sounding board who announced the end of their 25 year-long creative partnership for "personal and professional" reasons in January 2009.
Rather than settle for recording mediocre material or searching out some worthwhile covers as many of his singer/songwriter contemporaries have done after hitting the wall, Cave commendably decided to try shaking up his tried and true writing process instead. That means no more sitting alone in his office waiting for inspiration to move him over to the piano to plunk out a new idea. With the Grinderman project, Cave is now in a room face-to-face with his musical cohorts Warren Ellis, Martyn Casey and Jim Sclavunous verbally playing off whatever riffs and rhythms they come up with not unlike the way some rappers use a beat to spark their flow. Consequently, rather than the grandly plotted narratives populated with sharply drawn characters commonly associated with Cave's pre-war ballads and blues-inspired work with the Bad Seeds, his Grinderman lyrics are much more impressionistic and abstract as if he's working to reconcile the disparate influences of Howlin' Wolf's Smokestack Lightnin' and Scarface's The Diary while maintaining that delightfully dark sense of humour.
For Grinderman 2 (Mute/Anti-), Cave and crew now have a working methodology solidly in place and better defined roles which shows up in the refinement of the compositions that come off less like extended jams tossed off as part of a one-off studio project and more like actual songs played by a band – a brutally efficient one at that. Of course not every tune on the nine-song Grinderman 2 album is a memorable classic but they've certainly tightened up the wankery while lowering the overall suck-quotient. Perhaps even more important, it rocks and, at times, it's also uproariously funny.
The album's first single Heathen Child is their best song yet with the atypically tender B-side Star Charmer not far behind. Although it's still to early to tell whether Heathen Child and the other arena-ready whumpers they've included on Grinderman 2 (apparently only a fraction of the songs recorded made it onto the album) will connect with an audience beyond the Bad Seeds' loyal following. If it doesn't, it won't be from lack of trying.
Check out the startlingly demented Heathen Child video directed by John Hillicoat (The Road) which manages to one-up Peter Serafinowicz's similarly laser-enhanced clip for Hot Chip's I Feel Better for sheer bizarreness. We can only hope that Grinderman will be using those nutty Roman Centurion get-ups as stagewear for their upcoming tour which brings them to Toronto for a show at the Phoenix on November 11.
Worm Tamer by Grinderman on Later with Jools Holland
With his new Le Noise album due on September 28, Neil Young has started circulating some interesting video clips online. Check out the creepy black and white time-lapse video for Angry World right after watching Daniel Lanois explain how he encouraged Young to make an album with a relevant message rather than merely a collection of decent songs.
Trying to follow the many Quantic-related recording projects of tirelessly searching producer/bandleader and jet-setting DJ Will Holland can be a difficult task, not to mention all the other ones he drops on the down low.
So when the UK-based Tru Thoughts label released the enjoyable Dog With A Rope album by his Colombia-based collaborative project Flowering Inferno, someone at the label came up with the boffo idea of having KCRW radio host Jeremy Sole (who apparently has been a DJ and record collector for 15 years!) survey the Tru Thoughts back catalog to assemble a mixtape of his favourite moments in Quantic history. While Lo Mejor y Sabor de Quantic: A Retrospective of Will Holland is far from a definitive collection, the 44-minute guided beat tour serves quite nicely as an introduction to what our boy Will has been messing with for those new to the Quantic sound experience. You can download it for free right here.
So much for past history. Those interested in finding out where Holland is at currently and perhaps get a better idea of the route through cumbia, reggae and funk DJ Quantic might take during his guest set with the Turning Point crew tonight (Saturday, September 18) at The Garrison (1197 Dundas West) should check out the Tropicalismo #1 mix which you can get gratis here.
Sorry, diggers, no track listing but I can tell you that it was recorded on a hot night at Mikasabar in Cali, Colombia with Quantic spinning first followed by his Mochilla DJs Eric Coleman, Sabo and Brian "B+" Cross.
For the last couple of years, the Anti- label has been jump-starting the flagging careers of old-school soul greats like Solomon Burke, Bettye LaVette and Mavis Staples with remarkable success. Their strategy is really quite simple and basically involves a bit of studio matchmaking in which a veteran performer with impeccable vocal chops is set up with a fanboy musician for whom the chance to compose songs and produce an album for an idol is a dream come true.
If everything goes according to plan, it can be a cost effective method for a respected older artist to make an album which appeals to a much larger audience than the people who remember their 45s. To date, the series of novel cultural-collision experiments undertaken by Anti- have delighted music critics and award show juries alike. Yet in spite of all the hoopla surrounding the unusual pairings, the resulting recordings from Burke, LaVette and Staples haven't been terribly memorable. They certainly don't stand up well against the artists' best loved work of their peak years, or even the lesser known songs from the same period. That has much less to do with the singer's vocal strength or control than with the selection of repertoire, arrangements, limitations of the session musicians and the production choices.
Furthermore, now that the same scheme has been pulled numerous times, the novelty is wearing thin but that hasn't stopped Anti- from going back to the well once again for Mavis Staples' You Are Not Alone, an album of hymns and spirituals produced by Jeff Tweedy. Even by Anti- standards, it's an odd coupling since the Wilco frontman has never actually produced any recordings of note on his own and his knowledge of gospel music is questionable. Really, the only thing he has in common with Staples is a Chicago mailing address.
As for Staples, she had no idea who Wilco was when Tweedy first met her backstage after a show at the Hideout in the Windy City, but she was willing to give the recording project a shot. No doubt having her touring unit with her in the studio, joined by Wilco keyboardist Patrick Sansone and backing vocalist of the stars Kelly Hogan, raised her comfort level considerably during sessions at Wilco's homey studio, The Loft.
Upon hearing Rick Holmstrom's spot-on recreation of Pops Staples' trademark guitar vibrato on the album's opening reprise of the Staple Singers' fave You Don't Knock, it momentarily seemed like this unusual collaboration might work out after all. Checking the track listing, the third song was another Staple Singers' gem Downward Road which suggested that maybe Tweedy took the time to familiarize himself with Staples' definitive early recordings and would use their entrancingly eerie sound as a jump off point to create an appropriate new sonic framework for her spellbinding voice. But sadly, all hopes of Tweedy building on power and glory of the Staple Singers' Vee-Jay period for You Are Not Alone were dashed with the second track, Tweedy's own strummy title tune which signals the unfortunate descent into a hand-clapping folk mass-style singalong of frightful campfire kumbaya dimensions.
As a producer, Tweedy has the good sense to keep the arrangements spare and give the genuinely gifted singer room to move. However, many of the song choices – including album highlight tunes from Allen Toussaint and John Fogerty (either of whom would've made a better producer of this album incidentally) – don't seem to have any real connection to Staples or the furtive Chicago gospel scene from which she arose. That's a problem for a stand-up belter like Staples who relies so heavily on the power of her conviction to connect with an audience.
You have to wonder how Tweedy and Staples arrived at the seemingly random repertoire selections. The old Episcopal hymn In Christ There Is No East Or West for the album might appear to come totally out of left field but the choice is a telling clue which may help solve at least part of the mystery of how this whole strange project came together.
The song's lyrics were written by William A. Dunkerley (aka John Oxenham) back in 1908 for the Pageant of Darkness and Light at the London Missionary Society's exhibition "The Orient In London" and has appeared as such in various hymn books ever since. My guess is that Tweedy didn't learn In Christ There Is No East Or West in church while growing up in Belleville, but rather, the John Fahey fan probably first heard it hauntingly interpreted by Fahey on the Blind Joe Death (Takoma) album. Of course, the Fahey connection could be just a coincidence. But then, Blind Joe Death also includes Fahey's finger-picked version of another hymn called Uncloudy Day.
Originally titled Unclouded Day by it's composer Josiah Kelley Allwood, an Ohio-based minister in the Church of the United Brethren in Christ when it was written in 1879, the song later became more commonly known as Uncloudy Day and became a gospel hit when it was revamped in 1956 by – you guessed it – the Staple Singers who turned it into their signature song.
Tweedy is sharp enough to know that turning You Are Not Alone into a Fahey tribute album wasn't a surefire recipe for commercial success – however delighted his pal Jim O'Rourke would've been with the concept – but coming up with other suitably churchy numbers could be a challenge for a rock-schooled heathen out of his depth.
That is, unless you happen to have access to a copy of Lance Ledbetter's Goodbye, Babylon (Dust-To-Digital) six-disc compendium of vintage spirituals and sermons. Among the mammoth anthology's 135 songs are I Belong To The Band – Hallelujah! by Rev. Gary Davis, Creep Along Moses by the Taskiana Four and Found A Wonderful Savior by the Golden Gate Jubilee Quartet each of which appear in revised form on You Are Not Alone. To her credit, Staples knocks them out with such confidence and control, you'd think that she'd been singing them since childhood.
Thanks to Staples' supremely soulful voice and exceptional interpretive skill, what easily could've been a confusing hodgepodge of random Jesus-free spirituals has turned out to be an engaging showcase for an artist who, at 71, remains one of the truly great singers of our time. And while You Are Not Alone doesn't come close to Staples' finest work – for that you need to go back to the Staple Singers' Uncloudy Day and Swing Low Sweet Chariot albums for Vee-Jay along with the Stax recordings Soul Folk In Action, Staple Swingers and Be Altitude: Respect Yourself – it still makes for a more enjoyable listen than either of those two forgettable albums she did with Prince.
Wrote A Song For Everyone by Mavis Staples with Jeff Tweedy
Contrary to what their misleading group name might suggest, Brazil's Garotas Suecas – who've unfortunately had to cancel their Silver Dollar show Monday (September 13) – has no female members of Swedish origin. Sorry. It's just the new Tropicalia threat's wiseass way of commemorating the numerous Scandinavian hook-ups enjoyed by their soccer-playing countrymen during their World Cup winning trip to Sweden in 1958.
In any case, judging by the jubilant sound of the group's long overdue debut album Escaldante Banda issued by American Dust last week, fans of early Os Mutantes and those who've been wowed by recently recirculated recordings by Loyce e Os Gnomes and The Youngsters will be thrilled to find a like-minded group from São Paolo with not only an uncommon familiarity with their musical heritage but the capacity to build on it in an exciting new way.
So despite the fact that Garotas Suecas happen to be Carrie Brownstein's favourite band of the moment, they're still well worth checking out. The enjoyably unhinged jams on their excellent Escaldante Banda recording very nearly live up to the super dope sleeve art.
