Sound Salvation Army

At various points in 2009 each of these records have been my absolute favourite of the entire year. Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear be damned, these bands have written truly intimate and affecting songs, not dissonant and disaffected studies in sound. These songs have heart and soul and emotion and enlightenment woven into their very fabric. They are indeed my favourite, if not the best, albums of 2009.

05. Polar Bear Club - Chasing Hamburg
This site has taken a big hit in the last five weeks and it has everything to do with this record. I’ve essentially listened to nothing in all of December except for this album. They sound like a pop rock/hardcore punk hybrid band with a bit of Gatsby’s American Dream-style quirk in their songwriting. There is a huge amount of passion at play here, even if their subject matter runs pretty frequently towards being in band and the experiences and emotions that come along with it. I just can’t get over how good this record is. It’s a shame it took me four months to actually listen to the damn thing.

04. Why? - Eskimo Snow
Yoni Wolf’s songs keep getting more and more interesting. He’s focused like a laser beam on making miserable sound as lovely as possible. The complexity of both the sentiment and the mixed meter arrangement of a track like “Berkeley By Hearseback” is not come upon easily. The imagery of “Against Me” is not something you hear or read every day. An acoustic guitar rarely sounds as full when sparingly plucked as it does on the album’s title track. Misery has rarely sounded so beautiful.

03. the Deep Dark Woods - Winter Hours
This band is so good it’s hard to believe they come from this tiny, insular province. Their songs are a slow walk down a back country road, an afternoon spent staring at the sky as the clouds morph into shapes that evoke the old west, a sad story told around a campfire late at night. These are songs sung by drifters on lonely back roads as they lament how everything’s gone wrong while thumbing for a ride. These are songs plucked on a beat-up acoustic guitar on a back porch as faint solace after a lover/dog has left you. These are ramblin’ men playing ramblin’ tunes of lives lived hard and fast and the consequences that follow. Plus the song found below sounds like Neil Young performing a song written by Radiohead. Fun!

02. Strike Anywhere - Iron Front
Strike Anywhere realized long ago that you can’t start a revolution without a hook and they’ve come out swinging harder than ever with this record. In addition to being the most immediately-catchy album I heard all year it’s also the most hopeful. Sure, the songs alternate between despondent reality-checks and desperate pleas for change but the tone and tenor of the album as a whole is at least mostly uplifting; the melodies are too buoyant, too catchy, too (dare I say it?) pretty for it to be anything else. They can keep promising they’ll return to a more hardcore sound but this sure as hell isn’t Black Flag or Bad Brains or the Germs. This is pop music through an activist, hardcore filter. But damn it, it’s good.

01. the Wheat Pool - Hauntario
I am quite confident I didn’t hear another album all year that boasts songwriting as fully-realized as Hauntario. Their lyrics go beyond vivid, reaching an incredibly admirable level of descriptive and evocative wordsmithery. The overarching themes of the album are not heavy-handed, the emotional elements are honest instead of exploitative, and the undercurrent of absolute misery on some (re: most) of these tracks seems absolutely genuine. They even manage to reprise an upbeat song as a morose closing number without making it seem like a cloying re-tread. In every way this is Canadian music and storytelling at its finest.

 

 Polar Bear Club - Boxes: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Why? - Against Me: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 the Deep Dark Woods - the Birds On The Bridge [6:02m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Strike Anywhere - Omega Footprint: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 the Wheat Pool - Italy [3:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Polar Bear Club: Webstore and iTunes
Why?: Webstore and iTunes
the Deep Dark Woods: Webstore and iTunes
Strike Anywhere: Label webstore, band webstore, and iTunes.
the Wheat Pool: Webstore and iTunes.

Pat entries alt country, best ofs, Canadian content, Canadiana, country, indie rap, Polar Bear Club, punk rock, roots, Strike Anywhere, the Deep Dark Woods, the Wheat Pool, Why?, year in review

Super-fantastic news this week, soldiers — Why? is getting set to release another album.

You can stop cheering now.

Yoni Wolf and his band of un-merry men have “just finished up” work on their next piece of genius, titled Eskimo Snow. Wolf told thee Fork this week that the album, which was recorded mostly in tandem with last year’s irreproachable Alopecia, should be out by year’s end on Anticon. He reveals it was actually the album he’d intended to release first, although that decision was obviously reversed at some point in order to facilitate a timeline for the “character” the records center around that made sense.

Which is all well and good, but I really don’t give a damn if its a two-part concept album or a didactic song-cycle designed to explain the electoral college. The stuff he makes just sounds so good.

Wolf also admits that the album will continue to foster his more rock-centric tendencies, moving away from the “art rap” he practiced over the band’s first few releases. I’m okay with that as well; as I stated previously, the prettier he makes his songs sound the more I like them.

 

 Why? - Rubber Traits [4:01m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Do yourself a favour and head over to Anticon, the band’s label, and pick up whatever they have available.

Pat entries Alopecia, Anticon, art rap, Eskimo Snow, indie rap, Why?

Why? is a band that exists in the murky world somewhere in between rap, indie rock, and electronic music.

The atmospherics and textures painted within the songs on their latest album, Alopecia, are a rare and bizarre feat: oddly melodic yet equally dissonant, lovely piano refrains one moment, electric guitar and thick, syrupy beats the next. It’s a bit of a head-trip to listen to.

Lyrically and musically, the album culminates with the triumverance (yes, I know that’s not a real word) of songs you see here. The apex is “the Hollows,” a dark tale of paranoia and uncomfortable experiences in various locales, including the seedier areas of Berlin. The track pulses and throbs (not unlike some of the reference points in the song itself), as frontman Yoni Wolf’s backing band takes centre stage with probably the rockingest song on here. Electric guitar bursting forth, chiming through the clatter of drum rolls, female backing vocals, tambourine, and subtle bass.“These Few Presidents” and “Song of the Sad Assassin” serve as lighter counterpoints to it’s gravity, two of the most beautiful cuts. The former offers a twist on a typical indie-rock tune, making it unmistakably Why? — though that really has more to do with Wolf’s vocals than anything. Moreover, it offers what is unequivocally the record’s most beautiful moment, the lamentageous refrain of, “Even though I haven’t seen you in years/Yours is a funeral I’d fly to from anywhere.” “Song of the Sad Assassin” is one of the more piano-heavy offerings from this album as well as one that sees Wolf singing a bit more. It’s a nice refresher on the sound of previous LP Elephant Eyelash.

Sometimes it’s nice to try out new music that’s more than a sugary confection, something that buries it’s most accessible rewards beneath an avalanche of multiple listens. Alopecia is a left-field treat that offers plenty to someone who doesn’t break out in hives at the simple thought of non-traditional instrumentation and performance

Why? is out on Anticon, and will be for all time.
iTunes: EP’s and albums freely available in a restrictive digital medium!
anticon.: This links to Alopecia but previous releases are linked on the side as well. 

 

 Why? - These Few Presidents [3:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Why? - The Hollows [3:55m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Why? - Song Of The Sad Assassin [4:13m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Pat entries genre-mashing, indie rap, left field, Why?

Like every other blog in the universe, this one frequently gets ignored more than it should due to real life. That may now result in shorter updates, as I swear I’m listening to more music than ever right now but somehow can’t find the time to throw knowledge up on this site.

Anyways, I was inspired to write this entry in the minutes before my morning shower because I was recently working on a rap music mix tape for some nerds to listen to and I had a sort of remembrance for how amazing Busdriver’s Fear of a Black Tangent is.

One of the songs you’ll find below sums up Busdriver’s aesthetic pretty well: basically it’s a twisted, left-field take on traditional hip-hop that is much easier to listen to than to describe. His rapping is frenetic, his words frequently seeming to speed up to a point where they have a completely different tempo than the music.

White people tend to like him because he was part of the short-lived tha Corn Ganng project that emerged after the demise of Montreal’s the Unicorns (an amazing band in their own right). I know, because that’s why I checked him out. That shouldn’t be a good enough reason, but hopefully it’s something. Check out the songs and take some time to find the album. It’s worth it.

 

 Busdriver - Avantcore [2:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 Busdriver - Sphinx's Coonery [4:46m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Busdriver deserves your money! Rent is expensive in L.A.!
iTunes: catalogue-style!
InSound: is pretty much the only place to find physical copies of his work on the interwebs

Pat entries Busdriver, indie rap, mix tapes