Sets the Body Free, Baby, You and Me

• Neuseiland, “Underwater Sunlight”
• The Soft Boys, “Underwater Moonlight”

Thought of Neuseiland tonight – an eponymous album by a Halifax band, a record I somehow acquired years ago and have enjoyed many times since although I remain almost totally ignorant about band & record. The thing just lurks in the shelves like a party guest that no one seems to know or remember inviting but nobody minds anyway because he’s funny & charming & cute. “Featuring members of Thrush Hermit & Super Friendz,” reads the lo-tech promo label on the plastic CD sleeve. And is it Neuseiland as in “New Zealand” or as in “Noise Island”? I would be pleased with either, I think.

One reason I started up this here blog is that I missed writing about music, which I hadn’t really done for years even though my listening habits never really fell off (or at least not much). And one thing that’s struck me since I started up is how much of the music writing I used to do was simple reportage – imparting information about Band X or Album X that readers weren’t likely to know. Not that I wasn’t opinionated, too (and some of my opinions make me wince to remember), but it’s refreshing & daunting to be writing in a format/venue where I feel no need to process raw data & pass it along. What else I have to offer I’m still working out, I suppose.

Anyway, this Neuseiland track is a very lovely one. True, not exactly one of a kind: to me it recalls Bandwagonesque-era Teenage Fanclub more than anything else, and of course Fanclub weren’t exactly ripping it up & starting again themselves. But that keening synth sound keeps pulling you in giddy loops, and the chorus is a real soarer.

Is it just a coincidence of song title that makes me think of the Soft Boys at this time? I don’t think so – both bands/songs seem to self-consciously nod to Byrdsy chiming pop & back away from it at the same time. The Soft Boys do their backing away with Robyn Hitchcock’s vocals & lyrics, Neuseiland does theirs with all the glitchy art-rock noises. There’s a lot more sonic flotsam floating in Neuseiland’s water than in the Soft Boys’. And that’s a value-neutral statement, I think, just an observation. (I like flotsam.)

I’m always a little startled, in fact, when I go back to Robyn Hitchcock’s stuff or to other “weird” music that I listened to a lot more in my youth, by how straight it sounds – how clean & classicist in structure, sound, etc. Stuff I remember as askew & loopy often sounds almost calculatedly straightforward to me now. Which is cool too.

(Buy Underwater Moonlight here and some Neuseiland I don’t know where. Sorry.)

Fables of the Reconstruction

Saw this movie C.S.A., a mock documentary based on ye olde “what if the South had won the Civil War?” alternate-reality premise. The idea is that to this day slavery continues in the “Confederate States of America,” which is a military superpower but a cultural and social backwater. (All the good & interesting folks live up here in Canada.) The film is presented as a controversial British documentary that’s airing on an American TV station, broken up by phony commercials about controlling runaway slaves and the like.

Sounds thought-provoking & potentially sharp, but I was quickly irritated by the movie. I’m no military expert, but I have to think that for the vastly outgunned & outnumbered South, “winning” the Civil War would have meant fending off the armies of the North long enough and discouraging them with enough casualties that eventually the Union would lose its appetite for battle and decide to leave its former states alone. At which point, it seems likely, more states would have begun seceding in turn from both the CSA and USA. Which, you would assume, would quickly lead to a collection of tiny feuding nations and a fragmented, anarchic, manifestless destiny.

Which is kind of interesting to think about.

But no, C.S.A. has it that with the teamed-up help of both Britain and France, the Rebs rout the Yanks at Gettysburg and in short order subdue the entire Union territory, sacking Boston and New York and pulling the whole country into the Confederacy. I suspect that would have required rather a lot of help from those European allies. (And after the Confederacy crushes the Union – with the help of Britain, remember – Abraham Lincoln flees and nearly escapes to … Canada. Or, as it would have been more commonly thought of at the time, “Britain.”)

I should acknowledge again that the movie is a political satire, which means that complaining about its historical implausibility is admittedly akin to griping that there’s no scientific basis for the light-speed properties of the dilithium crystals on Star Trek.

But my irritation would have faded quickly if the jokes had been more than just a succession of broadly overplayed clangers & thudders. (Haw-haw! The woman on that mock commercial just said “It’s a good thing!” Like Martha Stewart!) The jokes don’t hold up as comedy or as satire, and whenever they do threaten to actually draw some blood – as when CSA president Jefferson Davis restores slavery to the northern states, the citizens of which are in fact not all that displeased – you’re quickly brought back around to the film’s slapdash ahistoricism.

Ah, well. Here’s a thought-provoking & visceral Matmos piece from their 2003 album The Civil War (which I think refers in its title to conflicts both British and American, though obviously the latter was on their minds for this track).

• Matmos, “Reconstruction” (buy The Civil War here)
  

Caught in the Grip of the City

“You’re all alone when you’re a writer. Sometimes you just feel you need a humanity bath. Even a ride on the subway will do that.”
– Saul Bellow

I moved to Toronto 10 years ago next month. When I first arrived I enjoyed a few weeks of not working, not studying, settling in. One night S and I slept in her tent on the back deck of my second-floor apartment, much to the goodnatured scorn of Rocker Dude, the guy who lived upstairs. I hung out with S and my new roommate, E, borrowed many books from the library branch around the corner (I especially dug André Alexis’s Despair, I remember), walked a lot. Sometimes I walked for hours. The Fugees’ cover of “Killing Me Softly” was everywhere – coming out of cars, out of storefronts, out of the windows of houses – and that was cool with me because I loved it. That spring I had bought the Fugees record or maybe gotten it to review, lost it, and bought it again because I liked it so much.

I find something reassuring about being around so many strangers, people who expect so little from you and know so little about you even as all of us strive & scrabble along. What that says about me I don’t know, and I suppose some people find the little disconnections of city life creepy or depressing.

These days I don’t walk much at all, for a few reasons, and Lord knows the urban drudgery of Toronto gets to me sometimes. But I still get some kind of – charge? nourishment? – from being out in the city, one of countless swimming organisms. Staring at people & wondering what their story is, looking away before they notice. Overhearing their lives in shards.

Today at College & Yonge I was waiting for the streetcar, the music in my earphones (Culture Club, “The Church of the Poison Mind,” which I can’t get enough of lately even though you could call it a straight Smokey Robinson rip & I couldn’t disagree) blending with the warm, calm, patient, insistent voice of the guy behind me on the sidewalk who was engrossed in some quietly urgent conversation, when the song ended and as the streetcar pulled up I caught a bit of what the guy was saying and glanced back and realized he was speaking warmly & patiently to nobody and to everybody: “...as a warrior. They actually did believe in cannibalism. In fact, the first McDonalds....”

• Deltron 3030, “Madness” (buy it here)
• Republic of Safety, “Vacation” (go to the band’s website here)

Like me, Republic of Safety live in and love Toronto. Unlike me, they appear to be energetic & activist by temperament rather than reserved & watchful. I’ve somehow never managed to catch one of their shows, but that must change, I feel, since I dig what I’ve heard of them. (I say somehow like I’m out in the clubs every night, but fact is my bandseeing days have been on the wane for a while.)

Thanks to Sandy for hipping me to the Deltron 3030 record a few years back. This track is a mad stew & that chorus line stabs at me. It screams sample, but if it is, I’ve never been able to place it.

Foursquare

I’ve been feeling a little burned out on rock & roll lately – the rhythms have been seeming clunky, the instrumentation same-old same-old, the march from verse to chorus predictable. But I was thumb-wheeling around the iPod today and passed this –

• Alex Chilton, “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” (buy 1970 at out-of-print prices here)

– and went back to it & listened again & loved it. Which is funny, because it’s pretty much emblematic of all those above qualities. The Stones’ original always seemed to me to slither in the shadows; there was something blurred & hard to apprehend about it. (And I mean that as highest praise, not as criticism.) But the Chilton version announces that THIS is the tempo and THIS is the end of the bar and THIS is the one-two.

Which is maybe why it sounds so refreshing. And while I sometimes wonder if I’d listen to this quite so much without that frisson of playing off the original, it does have its own swamp boogie vibe (which really accentuates the ominous maraca hiss).

In a similar vein, this –

• The Neats “Angel”

– has a little touch of swamp boogie, too. I was looking for this one in the Interether for a long time (pretty sure you can’t buy a “real” copy anywhere anymore), and once I finally had it in my virtual grasp it was a little disappointing – it seems really foursquare – but it still has a great chorus. (Read about the Neats here.)

I Just Wanna Bang on My Drum All Day

Man, workin’ takes it out of you, especially during trade-show season. Let’s just say I’m tired & cranky and leave it at that. And to my friends/neighbours whom I bumped into on the street on the way home last night & treated to a long rant about All That Is Infuriating in My World, sorry about that, & thanks for patiently listening.

On another note, congrats to Elyse Friedman, whose short story “The Soother” I absolutely loved and who just won a National Magazine Award in the fiction category for said story. (I was one of the jurors in the category, so there is some correlation there.)

And speaking of the National Mag Awards, the ceremony’s host was Scott Feschuk, who these days is a Maclean’s columnist but for many years was the funnyman TV critic in the Post. I remember when I first started reading his stuff, it just made me grimace – it seemed so desperately manic & over-reaching. As the years passed, though, I grew to love him, and eventually he had me laughing out loud on a regular basis. (I still remember a piece he wrote about one of Mel Lastman’s lunatic press conferences during the SARS crisis, in which Mayor Mel kept asking “WHO? WHO?” in reference to the World Health Organization. So Feschuk wrote something to the effect of the estate of Abbott & Costello suing for copyright infringement.) After his hosting monologue, I can confirm again that he is one funny dude.

So anyway, getting back to the tired & cranky issue, I’m in a mood to slough my cares & feel good, and this song always makes me feel good.

• Millie Small, “My Boy Lollipop”

And so far this year no record has made me feel more good more often than Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound, a Soul Jazz comp heavy on Os Mutantes, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Caetano Veloso, etc. And this guy:

• Jorge Ben, “Take It Easy My Brother Charles” (buy it here)

I hear there’s a soccer tournament or something going on. Go Brazil!

On a related note, the Seattle label Light in the Attic is now distributing the Mutantes catalogue in North America, which marks the first time in several years that you can get the records at non-punishing prices. Hooray!

And they’re also doing another very cool record that’s coming out soon. The title says it all: Jamaica to Toronto: Soul, Funk & Reggae 1967-1974. And they have a sample mp3 up (which I’ve appropriated below) – this rockin’ maelstrom is as good an ad for the album as anything I can imagine.

• Jo-Jo and the Fugitives – “Chips Chicken Banana Split” (preorder it here)
  

Rain I Don’t Mind

I’ve always loved the hissing sound of light, steady rain outside an open window or windows. Capillaries expanding happily, red blood cells sailing in style, everything quiet & cool.

• Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights”
• Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band, “Sunshower”

(Buy some Allen Toussaint here and some Dr. Buzzard’s here.)

How Come I Love Them Now, How Come I Love Them More?

Let’s go back for some more 1980s-vintage UK pop, specifically Scotland’s Bluebells. They’re probably best-known for the single “Young at Heart,” but they put out a whole bunch of other great sides as well as one solid album, Sisters. (In the early 1990s the main songwriters got back together for a followup, Second, which I’ve never been able to get into.) At their best they threw out effortless McCartney-style tunes – many of them uneasy love songs – that somehow balanced exuberance and melancholy. Perfect for this hot yet rainy summer week.

• The Bluebells, “All I Ever Said”
• The Bluebells, “Some Sweet Day”

(Buy The Singles Collection here.)