Vanity Fair, or, The Year That Was, or, They Are All Equal Now

Well, for what it’s worth, and for the sake of my own vanity if nothing else, these are the records I liked a lot this year. This comes with all the usual qualifications & caveats – I don’t really cover the waterfront musically any more (if I ever did), there are plenty of interesting things I’m still digesting or haven’t gotten to at all, I’m often a year or two or three behind on lots of cool stuff, there might even be other records I loved that are plumb slipping my decaying mind, etc. etc. But there you go, and here they are, roughly in the order of my affection. Notes where the spirit moves me.

Albums (“these go to 11”)

• Glissandro 70, S/T (my #1 for sure, and I believe I’ve gone on about it enough and enough)
• V/A, Tropicalia: A Brazilian Revolution in Sound (a reissue of old stuff, which I know is a bit of a cheat, but the comp bears a 2006 time stamp & I enjoyed it more intensely & more often than almost anything else this year)
• Yo La Tengo, I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass (their best in a while, I think, and they are the band of all bands in my heart, at least of all bands still going)
• Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, Ethiopia Song (Ethiopiques 21) (it’s all solo piano, and unlike most in the series this is a single-artist volume – I find her style fascinating, what with the flutters & the chords all rolling & swelling & such)
• Howe Gelb, ’Sno Angel Like You (this one was a late addition – I’ve been listening to the record all year & liking it well enough, but seeing Gelb live with the Voices of Praise gospel choir a few nights back really brought into focus how good all the songs are)
• Destroyer’s Rubies
• Final Fantasy, He Poos Clouds
• Feuermusik, Goodbye Lucille
• Sloan, Never Hear the End of It (as I wrote in a poll, I’m a sucker for overstocked White Album-style grab-bags)
• Belle & Sebastian, The Life Pursuit (feel mixed about this one – I find I don’t really care about it much, for some reason, but I can’t deny having listened to & enjoyed it lots)
• Kaki King, ....Until We Felt Red (I haven’t really wrapped my head around this one, so I’m not sure I know it well enough to justify including it here, but I find I want to keep getting to know it)

Songs/singles

• Glissandro 70, “Portugal Rua Rua” (in general I’ve avoided overlap between the two lists, but I had to make an exception for this double #1)
• Amerie, “Take Control” (man, I cannot stop listening to this, #2 for sure – I also like how her man is not just a stud who kisses her neck in public, but also, like, an empathetic communicator who takes the time to break it down when an argument comes around)
• Gwen Stefani, “Wind It Up” (impressively nuts, or should I say B-A-N-A-N-A-S, even if at one point the vocal stylings edge a little too close to that “My Humps” song for comfort)
• Hello Saferide, “The Quiz” (ah, new romance! love the words)
• Republic of Safety, “Vacation” (actually kind of inspiring, & I’m a pretty passive, hard-to-inspire guy)
• The Roots, “Don’t Feel Right” (that’s the human condition right there in three words, man)
• Lily Allen, “Smile”
• Amy Winehouse, “Rehab”
• Nelly Furtado, “Promiscuous” (shoot, baby, we can keep it on the low!)
• Cat Power, “Lived in Bars”
• Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, “Every Night I Die at Miyagi’s”
• Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “The Signifying Wolf”
• Cadence Weapon, “Black Hand”
• Ghostface Killah, “Shakey Dog”
• The Essex Green, “Don’t Know Why (You Stay)” (I find the lyrics, about how cities are soul-killing places, to be nigh-reprehensible, but I do love those power-pop chords)
• Danielson, “Did I Step on Your Trumpet”

(Update: Jeez, I keep remembering songs that really need to be on the singles list! The latest additions are the Lily Allen and the Amy Winehouse. We’ll see how long this goes on. Also, I’ve now gone crazy and added YouTube video links for all the singles, where available.)

And yes, I suppose you may want to just listen to some music while you’re here. Here’s the leadoff track from the Ethiopiques record.

• Emahoy Tsegué-Maryam Guèbrou, “The Homeless Wanderer” (buy here)

And because this is a season for reflection, let’s shout it out for Arthur Lee and Syd Barrett and Billy Preston and Grant McLennan and Ali Farka Toure, and all the other lost souls of 2006. As Thackeray had his narrator write in Barry Lyndon: “It was in the reign of George II that the above-named personages lived and quarrelled; good or bad, handsome or ugly, rich or poor, they are all equal now.”

That’s some food for thought. Happy holidays!

Like the Thackeray bit, this song is only tangentially appropriate, but here goes.

• Jim Carroll Band, “People Who Died” (buy Catholic Boy here)

The Carroll song came up at work the other day (OK, I brought it up), and I learned that if you quote from it while talking to someone who doesn’t actually know it, you sound kinda callous.

Anyhoo, I doubt I’ll be posting much more in the tail-end of 2006; I reckon I’ll be back in January. Thanks for coming.

Black Monk Time

• The Monks, “Boys Are Boys and Girls Are Choice” (buy here)

A colleague pointed out this recent column by Peter Duffy of The Chronicle-Herald in Halifax, and thank you, thank you, thank you, colleague. I haven’t laughed this hard since Borat. In short, Mr. Duffy devotes an entire column to a vivid dream – or was it? my God, it was real! – in which he was visited and sodomized by a cowled, monklike ghost.

That’s all I really want to say up front. Before we go any further, you need to go read the piece in its entirety. Here.

No, seriously. What are you waiting for? Right here.

OK, welcome back. We have much to savour. The riot of emotions that must have rocked the copyeditor along the way to the “Nocturnal visit left me shaken” hed; the intriguing stylistic choice of no fewer than 30 one-sentence paragraphs; Duffy’s lingering shock over an elderly woman dying before his – oh no, wait, only fainting; “It was midnight, late for me”; the lush description of the assault; the fact that it’s a “psychic-astrologer” who first tries – and fails – to bring Duffy back to Earth; his tenaciously looney responses to every plausible reality-based explanation that he encounters (“How did this ‘thing’ even find me?”); and, of course, the promise of a sequel column, featuring a priest.

Wow.

Having only been to Halifax a couple of times in my life, I’ve never heard of Peter Duffy, but apparently he’s been writing away for The Chronicle-Herald for years & years. I still can’t quite believe that this is real (surely this is the first draft of a long-lost Mr. Show sketch?), or that this guy is a working columnist for a theoretically reputable daily newspaper.

The raped-by-ghost piece actually got Duffy onto Gawker (here). And then there’s this, which only makes me think all over again that maybe I have slipped down a rabbit hole into some wonderland (one no doubt prowled by priapic phantom monks). Unless it’s just a convincing spoof. Which, come to think of it, is more likely.

I’ve posted this song before, but oh baby, it is Monk Time once again.

• The Monks, “Monk Time” (buy here, and check out the official Monks site here)

Puffy Chairs & Disconnected Dots

If you live in TO you have a chance over the next couple days to see this movie The Puffy Chair at the Bloor, which I highly recommend. I laughed all the way through it – not because there were any ba-dum-bum jokes, but because of the way the characters talked and the things they chose to say and because everyone on the screen totally seemed like a real person and real people are funny things. It reminded me a little of The Squid and the Whale, one of my favourite movies of the past year or so – not in in content or anything, but just in sensibility, and in the nature of the laughs.

What’s it about? Well, if you must know, it’s about a typical NYC smug indie dude (his band busted up so now he’s a would-be booking agent) who’s taking a road trip to see his parents in Atlanta, with a detour along the way to pick up a puffy chair that he’s bought for his father on eBay. And he ends up bringing along his girlfriend, mainly so she won’t be mad at him, and they stop to visit his brother, who’s maybe, ah, not quite cut out for this world, and they end up bringing him along too, and they have various misadventures, some of them relating to the puffy chair, and the indie dude and his girlfriend rub at their troubled relationship until it scrapes their skin raw.

That’s all you get from me. But you should really see it. And this nice Of Montreal song is on the soundtrack. Dig that glam disco hippie indie-pop sound.

• Of Montreal, “Disconnect the Dots” (buy here)
  

How My Life Would Be Better If I Had Backup Singers

SHOPPING
“Do you have this in black?”
– Man wants it in black, ooh yeah!

AT THE OFFICE
“I’m really not sure this lede works.”
– Lede don’t work, baby!

TELEPHONE SOLICITATION
“No, I’m not interested, and please take me off your list immediately.”
– Can you dig it?

ROADSIDE
“You’re absolutely right, officer, I did lose track of how fast I was driving.”
– Smell the bacon, uh huh!

QUIET DESPERATION
“What’s the point of anything? We’ll all be rotting in the ground soon enough.”
– Can’t go on, must go on, you’ll go on. Ooh baby.

THE CAT
“OK, OK, I’m feeding you now.”
– Dig on it, sweet kitty!

CARNAL RELATIONS
“I just wish you’d be a little more open-minded.”
– Gotta be more – oh, come on.
– That’s just gross.
– Seriously.


***


On that note, here’s a great multi-singer soul classic, one of my all-time faves, I swear. If you listen to only one song on this site – well, don’t listen to only one song, but anyway listen to this one for sure.

• The Undisputed Truth, “Smiling Faces Sometimes”

(Buy some Undisputed Truth here. And a nod to this top-notch McSweeney’s bit, which has a backup-singer gag of its own.)

Rock Plaza Central, Rebecca West, Tusks

Been meaning to do this for a while, but better late than never. When I saw Steve Wynn last month one of the openers was a Toronto band, Rock Plaza Central, that I quite enjoyed, especially this stirring, too-brief song.

• Rock Plaza Central, “How Shall I to Heaven Aspire?”

Their latest record, Are We Not Horses, which I picked up at the show in a sign of how much I liked their set, appears to be a concept album about, um, mechanical artificially intelligent horses and the travails thereof. (We sure have come a long way from the days when all concept albums had to be about a future world where rock is outlawed.) They seem to get hit with Neutral Milk Hotel comparisons a lot, which is fair enough, I guess, and there’s also a bit of Mountain Goat John Darnielle’s declamatory singing style in the vocals of Chris Eaton, the Rock Plaza Central mainman. But they do have a sound of their own.

And Chris Eaton is also a novelist, author of The Inactivist and The Grammar Architect (the latter billed as a cover of Thomas Hardy’s A Pair of Blue Eyes – I have a soft spot for literary covers, and musical ones too).

And wait, the associations don’t end there. Playing with Rock Plaza Central that night was one Allison Outhit, who was in a Halifax band called Rebecca West back in the mid-1990s, putting out (I think) only one full-length. It’s called Burners On and I liked it a whole lot, kind of compact-crunchy guitar pop. Eaton writes that Outhit is an old friend and that her current band is called Tusks. So, well, here you go.

• Rebecca West, “Absolute Fact”
• Tusks, “Mothers vs. Sons”

(Go to the Rock Plaza Central site and buy their stuff here, and go to their Myspace page here, and go to the Tusks Myspace page here. And buy The Inactivist here and The Grammar Architect here.)