The year in review

Whenever I come home from a show I take the ticket stub out of my pocket and tuck it into my whiteboard. Needless to say, there were a lot of stubs this year.

No. of acts (not including the huge lineup at Jazz Lives): 57
No. of shows: 32
No. of times I got carded: 28
No. of times my old, expired driver's license wasn't accepted as proper ID: 1
No. of times I saw Joel Plaskett this year: 3
No. of times I saw the Grates: 2
No. of times I blacked out at Lee's Palace from the poor air circulation: 2
No. of band T-shirts bought: 4, but only 2 bought at shows
No. of Keiths and rye-and-gingers consumed (but not necessarily at the same time): unknown

Best show of 2006: Tied between the Yeah Yeah Yeah’s for the raucous crowd and the Flaming Lips for the trippy, totally immersive experience.

Shows that just plain rawked: The Dears, Hot Chip, Joel Plaskett Emergency, Les Breastfeeders, My Brightest Diamond
Shows that went on too long: Band of Horses, Cat Power
Shows at which I nearly passed out: Band of Horses, Cat Power
Shows that won me over: Camera Obscura with the Diableros
Shows that overwhelmed: Ladytron, Flaming Lips
Shows that underwhelmed: Band of Horses, Calexico, Cat Power (sorry, she's very lovely but she tends to pick two or three chords and stick with them)
Shows that traumatized: Kids on TV, Fiery Furnaces
Shows that grated on the nerves: Fiery Furnaces, Spiral Beach
Shows that surprised me by how much I liked them: Classic Albums Live does the Beatles
Shows that I really enjoyed at the time but have since faded from memory: The Rapture, Belle & Sebastian, Stereolab, The Futureheads, Wolf Parade, The Strokes

Coming up in 2007: Peter Appleyard, Golden Dogs, Jazz Lives, Sebadoh, Sonny Rollins, more free indie acts at Nathan Phillips Square, and word on the street is that Dave Frishberg might be coming to town. Yeah!
Bands I hope are coming (back) to town: Final Fantasy, Gogol Bordello, Les Breastfeeders, My Brightest Diamond

Also planning a trip to Seattle in the spring. I'm bound to catch some good acts there (hopefully including the Trucks and the Earaches).

Major discoveries of the year: yéyé (French pop from the '60s), the Beatles, live opera

Favourite albums of 2006: Aberdeen City - The Freezing Atlantic, Final Fantasy - He Poos Clouds, Found - Found Can Move, The Grates - Gravity Won't Get You High, My Brightest Diamond - Bring Me the Workhorse
Honourable mentions (all good stuff by favourite bands, but these albums didn't resonate with me as much as their previous ones, or as much as the ones listed above): The Dears - Gang of Losers, TV on the Radio - Return to Cookie Mountain, Yeah Yeah Yeahs - Show Your Bones
Guilty pleasure: Justin Timberlake's Futuresex/Lovesounds. I'm so ashamed.
The album on top of everyone's Best of 2006 list that I didn't check out: The Decemberists - The Crane Wife.
Anticipating albums in 2007 by: The Bravery, Hexes & Ohs. And PJ Harvey is apparently working on new material, but no word on when that'll be released.

Happy new year!

Here comes the jackpot question in advance

"What Are You Doing New Year's Eve?" - Ella Fitzgerald

(From one of my favourite Christmas albums ever, Ella Wishes You a Swingin' Christmas. And it does swing, baby.)

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It's a song you know well

Because nothing says Christmas like -- unh! -- James Brown.

Well, not really. But when you've had enough of sterile studio recordings of pop and jazz divas warbling carols, you can count on James Brown to spike your egg nog. Get down!



"Santa Claus Go Straight to the Ghetto"
"Sweet Little Baby Boy"
"Christmas is Love"

And there's no need to fight last-minute shoppers at the mall. The Best of James Brown: The Christmas Collection -- 17 funky and festive tracks -- is available on iTunes for $9.99.

Addendum: RIP, Mr. Brown. I feel inexplicably responsible, having posted about him the day before.

Bonus track: Animaniacs, "The Noel Song". Best. Noel. Puns. Ever.

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This isn't music-related, but it is audio- and Christmas-related: on the latest episode of CBC's Quirks & Quarks, an engineering professor explains that it is possible for Santa to visit all our houses in one night with jetpacks and a relativity cloud. Awesome! A guest also discusses the virgin birth of komodo dragons. My favourite part is him pointing out that if Mary had conceived through parthenogenesis, Jesus would have been a girl. I think there's an untold story in that.

I just bought these albums

I lucked out and found a CD that had both Beatles For Sale and Rubber Soul on it. (The disc says, "For sale in Russia only." Oops.) Just missing Help and Yellow Submarine.

I think the used CD store man is going to have a very nice Christmas.

Beatles Marathon @ the Phoenix

So last Sunday at noon-ish my posse and I joined fellow musical masochists for the Classic Albums Live Beatles Marathon at the Phoenix. 211 songs, from "I Saw Her Standing There" (Please Please Me) to "Get Back" (Let it Be). 12 non-stop hours of live music, with only one break for dinner. More Beatles than I've ever listened to in my life. It felt a little bit like a Celtic folk tale in which a poor fool unwittingly puts on magic shoes that force him to dance for eternity. I crawled into bed after 1 am and I swear my feet were still tapping.

Highlights:

• The first "George" hopping happily about the stage with his bass. He had the head shake and the scream down pat.
  
• German versions of "Can't Buy Me Love" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand". (As K. pointed out, these were songs he thought he would never hear performed live -- and would likely never hear performed again.)
  
• The groovy sitar player.
  
• The spot-on vocal harmonies during "Drive My Car".
  
• The rip-roaring performance of "Helter Skelter".
  
• The supporting percussionist belting out "Why Don't We Do it In the Road?" I thought he was going to burst a blood vessel.
  
• Hearing a really good song that I'd never heard before, which happened a lot.
  
• The hipster jocks in the audience. Now I know where all the cute young guys in Toronto hang out.

Lowlights:

• The frightening, aged rockers in the audience.
  
• "Eleanor Rigby", unfortunately. The strings got ahead of themselves and "Paul" had to work to catch up.
  
• Hearing a not-so-good song that I'd never heard before, which happened a lot.
  
• Realizing I should've worn comfortable sneakers instead of knee-high leather boots.
  
• Realizing, during "Lovely Rita", that no one writes songs about web designers. I may have to get on that. ("Lovely Deb, web designer", anyone? It'll sell a million records, I swear.)
  
• The woman who was a bit too excited to meet Andy Frost of Q107's Psychedelic Psunday. (He was broadcasting from the lounge.)

Undecided:

• The long-haired fellow who probably stands in for Robert Plant during Classic Albums' Led Zeppelin performances. Good vocalist, but there was one song in particular in which his hard rock stylings totally brought down the mood and gave it a sinister edge that had never been there before. (For the life of me I can't remember which song it was -- one of the early ones, when the band was still in their mop-top phase.)
  
• The group in the audience who was either a blended multi-generational family or a cult patriarch with his many wives.

In the end, the band outlasted us, as we limped away at the end of Abbey Road at 12:30 am with Let it Be still to go.

The next day I had a medley of their songs running through my head and I had to exorcise it with Ladytron's Light and Magic. Still, the concert did the trick, and now I'm thinking of getting hold of the Beatles' entire oeuvre. Checking my iTunes library, I only have Abbey Road and half of the White Album (long story). To the used CD store!

The Beatles official website
Classic Albums Live website
Classic Albums Live promo on YouTube (That's "Paul" singing Pink Floyd's "The Wall". Weird!)

Escape from New York

Sorry again, kids -- duty called and I was dispatched post-haste to the city that never sleeps. Am back but exhausted from the trip and yesterday's Beatlemania staged by Classic Albums Live. Will file my report soon.

Notes from the field:

• Baroque folk sibs Rufus and Martha Wainwright played Carnegie Hall the night I got into New York, but I figured that since they were Canadian, they would pass through Toronto eventually. (And I've seen Rufus before.) Later I found out it had been a Wainwright family and friends Christmas show -- including Wainwright mom and aunt Kate and Anna McGarrigle, Lou Reed, and Jimmy Fallon (?!) -- and I kicked myself for not hunting down a ticket.
  
• Classic Albums Live does U2's War at the Phoenix in February. Is it cool to see a tribute when the band is still around performing?
  
• On Janurary 6, Emily Haines plays the Danforth Music Hall, which is a much more appropriate venue for her introspective solo work than when I saw her at the Kool Haus. No word if anti-depressants are included in the price of admission, or if you have to bring your own.
  
• "Cool swingin' machine" Peter Appleyard plays the Harbourfront Centre in January. Eeeee! I know it's perverse to get excited about a septuagenarian vibes master, but damn it, I don't care.

That's it for now. Later, kids.

Tokyo Police Club with Hexes & Ohs and Spiral Beach @ the Horseshoe

Damn, I'm getting old. It's gotten to the point at which every new band I see looks like they're straight out of high school. But I guess like most fields that rely on innovation (e.g. art, math, science), the best work is done when the person is young. Not that any of the bands at the sold-out Horseshoe last night were particularly innovative, but they were all a lot of fun and were accomplished performers.

Well, except for Montreal electropop duo Hexes & Ohs. I still maintain that they need more confidence in their singing. I suspect that it's part of their charm, though. They're very wistful and earnest, and a full band and better singing chops would change their sound entirely. Perhaps for the better, because I do like their songwriting, but it would make them an entirely different band. At the moment, it's only the two of them on guitars and synth and their hardworking MacBook.

They only played two songs that I recognized off of Goodbye Friend, Hello Lover. I hope that means there'll be another album soon as I liked all the new material. Set highlight: Edmund Lam suddenly dropping to the floor to play a guitar solo on his back. We didn't see that coming at all.

NOW Magazine cover children Spiral Beach got a mixed response from my posse. We agreed they were good, but not original. We all heard different influences, ranging from Kate Bush to Garbage to Bjork to the B-52's to '60s psychedelia and '70s prog rock. Me, I had terrifying flashbacks to last month's Fiery Furnaces' show. I thought they were an impressively tight band, and the obnoxious theatrics amused me, but the songwriting was harsh to my ears. As K. pointed out, they were best when they had a melody to play with.

Set highlight: what seemed to be Ma and Pa Beach standing on a bench just to the left of us, filming the show and dancing.

By the time Newmarket post-punk-rawkers Tokyo Police Club took the stage, I was tuckered out and I suspect that everyone else was too. It was really hot, and there was more than one person who was a little smelly. Set highlight: none, really. They rocked out pretty well, but there wasn't any one moment that stood out for me. I was likely distracted by the number of people who kept squeezing by me as they were coming or going.

So despite TPC's strong performance and the appreciative audience, this was the first show I've been to at which the people didn't clap for an encore immediately after the band left the stage. (Although considering that the A Lesson in Crime EP has seven songs and is only 20 minutes long, maybe no one thought there was any more material to play.) I felt a little bad about joining the mass exodus -- it was TPC's last show of 2006, and they'd probably hoped to go out with a bang -- but damn it, there were people crammed into every nook and cranny in that place and I wanted out.

Hexes & Ohs website
Hexes & Ohs on MySpace
Spiral Beach website
Spiral Beach on MySpace
Tokyo Police Club website
Tokyo Police Club on MySpace

No, I won't sit and be quiet

Speaking of DIY bands as an excuse to have fun with your friends and impress girls, I present the Trucks as Exhibit B. Despite this Seattle quartet being all-female, I imagine several tracks off their self-titled debut will hold a special place in girls' hearts. These tracks will have you singing drunkenly with your gal pals on the dance floor while all the straight males in the vicinity look on in confusion or terror.

Their MySpace page claims, "WE ALL HAVE SWEET MOVES AND ROCK THE HOUSE!" Translation: collaborative synth-pop that's a cross between Peaches and Luscious Jackson, with a dash of Le Tigre's grrrly flair. Peaches probably inspired the raunchier lyrics, which is disconcertingly incongruous with the Trucks' girlish singing and harmonizing and catchy melodies. You will likely find yourself humming the most inappropriate tunes in the most inappropriate places. I unfortunately had the chorus of "Why The?" ("Why the f*ck won't you go down on me?") cycling through my head yesterday, which made for an entertaining day at the office.

But don't let that turn you off (or on, depending on your tastes). This is still a debut album; they haven't settled on a sound and schtick yet. Some tracks are nicely crafted alt-pop songs. Others will have you dancing in your pyjamas. And a couple will have the men in your life blushing with shame. All in all, the Trucks sound like good fun, and they're on my list of bands to see if I make it to Seattle next year.

The Trucks website
The Trucks on MySpace