Now, very little is exciting to me in music these days.  I’m not sure if it is a product of getting older and generally musically cynical, but it seems I’ve heard it all before and not a lot is filling my fancy box.

Used to be (adopt cranky old man voice if you like for much of this post) I watched release dates of bands carefully and entered record stores with the same excitement as reaching the end of the line for the Mine Buster at Canada’s Wonderland – here we go, this is going to be awesome!  Not so now.

ChadVanGaalen is one of the few releases I’ve been looking forward to for a while now.  He’s a singer songwriter from Calgary and there’s something very authentic and heartbreaking about his work.  His frail yet purposeful vocals, his dark, storytelling lyrics, his rootsy instrumentation mixed with whatever fucked up sounds he blends in – it works.  This is his third record and here’s a track.

Here’s a track from his last album

I saw My Morning Jacket at the Kool Haus (shity-est name of a club ever) and a flood of thoughts struck me – hence episode 1: the video camera.

I’m now old enough to have recognized a significant cultural shift in concert going – the evolution of the camera. It used to be that cameras weren’t allowed into venues altogether. Now, they’re so pervasive I suppose it just got too hard for security to stop them all. The ability to film the experience we are having has become so much simpler than before.

It used to be kids held lighters up until their thumbs were sore and dangerously hot. Now, this is only ever done ironically (I actually saw some at MMJ). Now, the lights you see dotting the crowd are from cell phones and digital cameras. The first reason for the video below is to show you what I’m talking about. The second reason is to show you how bitchin’ that show looked. Watch it now if you haven’t yet, and imagine being there and getting properly pumped up.

Something I found interesting when I first saw this video was the comment left by the person who had posted the video, “shoegazzzer”. He said, “The opening to their amazing set. After about a minute the curtain draws and near the end of the video the audience went mad so i had to turn the camera off and get into it! The build up was so drawn out they really wound us up.”

Watch when the song finally kicks in at about 3:01 – look at the cameras. All those steady spots of light can hold themselves properly still no more, and the urge to dance kicks in. Fuckin, eh. It should. If you watch the video again you notice that the camera through which you are watching the video does not start dancing at the 3:00 mark. But, as he says, “I had to turn the camera off and get into it!” As much as I as a viewer may want the video to continue after this point, the fact that the guy was incapable of recording further is proof of how good it must have been.

Were he to hold on to the camera longer, it would only be because whatever he was in the process of recording were not sufficiently forcing him to do otherwise – i.e. dance. Shouldn’t that be the goal of any show you go see – that it is so moving that doing anything other than giving it the full attention of your entire body is impossible? Imagine how long a camera would last in the pit at a hardcore show; people are definitely committing their entire bodies there.

This leads me to an apparently clear conclusion – if you are filming a show, you can’t be really be getting into that show. Either that or the camera itself is preventing you – holding you back – from getting into that show. Think about it – how could that “shoegazzzer” not start to jump after that build up? I’m sure he wanted to, but he felt an obligation to what he was filming. I’m glad he did because now I get to see it, but him filming played a role in holding his body back. Do this enough and I’m sure you wouldn’t enjoy the show as much as possible. There’s reason being the camera man is a job: it’s something someone is paid to do while everyone else just gets to enjoy the show.

I’m not suggesting people put down their cameras – that’s like trying to stop a tidal wave with your hand – they are here to stay and I don’t think they’re all bad at all. This observation does not require a conclusion in which I tell you how to feel about all this. But is recording an experience something done at the expense of experiencing it as thoroughly as you could be?

P.S. The irony here gets thicker when you consider the show in the video itself, daft punk’s whole robot persona thing, and that the “lyrics” of the song building and crashing together are “human” and “robot.” I just blew my own mind, by the way.

And the song really kicked ass.  It’s on In Utero but I can’t remember the title right now.  Add a comment to tell me if you know.  

It made a very effective point about the state of typical rock radio: really truly great rock music will rarely get played on it.  This has not changed as far as I know.  What gets played on the radio (and by extension played in movies, and car commercials, wins Grammy’s and winds up judging “Who Wants to be a Rock Star?”) is not as good as 90% of the music that’s out there.  Anyone who really cares to know about music will probably agree with this.  

Why? It’s pretty simple I guess, radio doesn’t want you to turn the dial. It doesn’t want to jar its listeners too much with anything that sounds too much unlike the last songs that were popular, so they maintain a certain homogeneity. This leads to a molasses like evolution in music when so much else in the musical landscape is evolving like fire.  

Typically, something breaks through.  A song that blends a style that has gotten popular despite having no radio play with an already accepted rock radio style and its a hit.  “Bring the Noise” – is that spelled with a “z”? – is the quickest example. Maybe “You gotta fight for your right to party” and some of that crap by Moby counts too. 

Or you get Nirvana, the kind of band that shouldn’t get played, but it’s just so good it somehow does.  This is why people celebrate this band so much.  I don’t listen to them much anymore because it’s a bit too much for my sensibilities these days (fancy way of saying I’m becoming a wuss), but when I was into them, they devastated me – in a good way.

I think of all this now because of a recent visit to the library.  (The library is the best place in the world, but more on that for a later post).  I took out a slab of radio rock that I thought would be that rare stuff that is both on the radio and good.  I’d heard good things and most were bands that I used to love.  I got “American Idiot” by Green Day, “Echoes, Silence, Patience, and Grace” by The Foo Fighters, and “Era Vulgaris” by Queens of the Stone Age.  I used to love both Green Day and especially Foo Fighters more; there would have been a time that I would have raced to get their albums a lot faster than a year or two later maybe picking them up at a Library.  Queen of the Stone Age, not so much but I’ve always known they’re cool.  A quick rank on quality: Queens is best by FAR, then Green Day then Foo is worst, also by far.  The thing that determines the scale is very simply blandness.  But why is it that now that The Foo Fighters have become the most oatmeal-bland of their career, they are selling the most amount of records.  I’m not blaming them in the slightest.  Well, maybe the slightest.  

It’s no surprise American Idiot did as well as it did. It’s a perfect little piece of rock in the form of catchy pop songs.  I think it might have something to do with the fact that I’m pretty sure I’ve heard a bunch of these songs before.  “American Idiot” sounds like “Leader of the Pack”,   about 2:25 into that big track 2 song sounds just like “Summer of ’69” and by about 6:40 it sounds like “Ring of Fire” by Johnny Cash.  This may be intentional, but it’s just frustrating to me.  

The Queens album is very good.  It’s genuinely groovy and hard.  Also, the band played least of the three on rock radio. I have no facts to back that up, but I’m POSITIVE it’s true.  So sad.

They should be huge.  

Another thing about them – they write HUGE first tracks.  They’ve just released their 4th album and by now it’s officially a pattern.  Each album starts with the kind of track that if you were to listen to it in a store to decide whether or not to buy it, the first song should seal the deal.  That is exactly how I got into them – listening to “Ribcage” track one off their second album “Cast of Thousands”  The unfortunate part of the pattern they’re establishing is that the rest of the album never quite lives up to the HUGE first track.  The rest of the album is always good, but rarely as mind blowing as track 1.  

This is odd considering the lead singer is quite a proponent of the complete album as an art form (as opposed to the single), and is leading the charge to allow artists to choose whether their work can be bought as singles or must be bought as a complete record on itunes.  A noble fight, I suppose – one that other great rock bands suited to FM rock radio from the past would probably understand more than modern ones.

So, keep up the fight, and once you record a whole album as killer as your first track you’ll really have a compelling case.  Their latest is called “The Seldom Seen Kid” and it fits the bands pattern to a T. 

I went looking for an MP3 of one of their songs on line to include here but I couldn’t find one.  

Their MySpace page strangely has only relatively dull songs from each of their albums.  Why?

Failing that option, here’s a link to the media player they include on their web site.   Listen to “Starling” by clicking on one of the white squares on the rubics cube looking thing.  It’s the first track on their new album.

Live music has that same aura. If you’re only listening to songs on CD, ipod, etc. you’ve got a really nice collection of postcards, but it’s time to get to the gallery.

First, let me clarify what I mean by seeing live music. The big stadium shows that cost $50 are fine, but you wind up watching the show on a big screen which, to me, defeats the purpose. The reason I go to a show is to remove all the intermediaries between me and the music. If I’m at a show, I don’t want to watch TV, no matter how big it is. If you’re going to really get that aura from music, you need to be in a small enough place to feel it. A good rule is to never pay more than $30 for a ticket. If you live in Toronto, Massey Hall is about as big as you should ever go.

I know the club show can be a bit of a pain in the ass: you’ve got to stand a lot, you’re going to get bumped into, and a lot of opening bands will make you feel every uncomfortable second of that standing and getting bumped into. A lot of headliners will do the same. But wait for it, every once in a while you’ll get that aura and it’s suddenly all worth it. When a show is good, it’s transcendent. You suddenly feel like a part of something. The people around you are no longer irritating; they’re part of this massive organism of energy the room has turned into. You forget about your sore feet, your heavy coat, your warm beer, and you live inside this moment. You know that this is the best place you could be in the entire world at this particular moment. It’s like being a kid at the playground.

Watch this video, imagine being here rather than watching a screen, then feel inspired, get a ticket, and go see a show. It’s the band N.E.R.D. in Sydney, Australia at the Enmore Theatre. Great venue, I saw “You Am I” there. Later.

CBC Radio 3 – The CBC is really a good thing in the music world. They host great live shows and put the whole show up on line to listen to it. You can choose any show you want here by choosing “Concerts & Sessions” then looking around alphabetically. I recommend The Jim Bryson session. It’s listed under “J” alphabetically.

Barsuk Radio – This is a decent label with some good bands on it (Nada Surf, John Vanderslice, Menomena) and they offer a cool thing called Barsuk Radio. It’s a little player that plays 25 full songs of artists on their label. Click on Barsuk Radio next to the little dog.

Eef Barzelay – He’s a guy who used to be in a band called Clem Snide and now he’s solo. I saw him open for Ben Folds once and he was great. He’s always putting up new songs on his Myspace page and they’re frequently very good. Kind of quiet, folky and lovely.

Three quick ideas – hope you enjoy…

The thing that’s great about Malkmus is that while he has this credibility, his stuff still has the “pleasure” part of the “guilty pleasure” – singable choruses, good hooks, quirky little stories for lyrics, and really impressive playing. He’s finally got a really good drummer in Janet Weiss from the sadly broken up Sleater-Kinney to match his guitar playing.

A quick word about Malkmus as a guitar player: I hate guitar gods. Wanking show-offs on any instrument have always bored me to tears. The Joe Satrianis and Stevie Ray Vaughns of the world have always seemed to be enjoying themselves way more than anyone listening to them ever could. Malkmus is growing into a guitar god and there is a huge amount of wankery here – but it’s good. The difference is that with the Satriani, Vaughn type of guitar god stuff, you get the feeling that they’d like to accompany their solos by ripping their shirts off. It’s self aggrandizing and show-offy. At no point would Malkmus rip his shirt off. He usually wears a lovely collared shirt beneath a v-neck sweater for god’s sake. He’s from the good guy guitar god camp along with Doug Martsch from Built to Spill (we’ll talk about them soon.)

It’s a good album, and a grower so give it time. Listen to the song Cold Sun from the album here: