eighteen

139-146


Bees - Free the Bees (EMI) 2005

I'm usually pretty mistrustful (distrustful?) of current bands who draw this obviously from 70s sources... but The Bees are so fidgety with it, never settling on just groove music or psychedelic exploration or Beatles rip-offs. In a way they're a little like Beta Band (coming to them soon), but much more accessible, less idiosyncratic... except maybe for the song about chickens. There's only room for a few of them on planet Earth.
----------------------

Belle & Sebastian - Fold Your Hands Child… (Matador) 2000

There's an element... even in a collection this large and widespread... of cohesiveness that sometimes shuts off certain avenues of perfectly respectable music. I have nothing against B&S. I find their music pleasant, infectious... toe-tapping fun, really. The word most often used to describe them, and bands from the branch of their family tree, is twee. Twee means precious, delicate, gentle... lots of strings. And again, nothing against that stuff... it's just that there's a LOT of it, both currently and historically, and B&S are excellent at distilling this music down to it's most appealing elements. But I don't have shelf space for the wing it would open up should I delve into this sub-genre. Instead I'll hold onto this playcopy, not one of their better albums, because it has no cover... and save my cardigan for cold autumn nights.
____________________


Bellini - Snowing Sun (Monitor) 2001

In the 90s, with the rise of grunge, there was also the rise of angry girls with guitars... which supplanted then was supplanted again by sad girls with pianos. In that time bands like L7, Babes in Toyland, Bikini Kill et. al. roamed the land with varying agendas and levels of phlegm. Ten years later only a few are still (albeit barely and for the wrong reasons) making news: Courtney Love of Hole no so much for music and Kathleen Hanna of Bikini Kill who shifted gears, formed Le Tigre and proved that growth and change is possible. It's a side effect of the still-male-centric business of music that strong women who break these barriers are more quickly cast aside... or made to remodel themselves (I'm looking at you Alanis). Bellini is a band on a small label with a strong front woman and a sound like Steve Albini's wet dream who, if they had been fronted by Steve Albini or his non-union equivalent, might have generated a lot of buzz... but not so much in reality, though.
______________________________


Belly - Star (Sire ) 1993

Speaking of girls and guitars... Tanya Donnely is someone who's still hanging around and making music for a small group of fans (I'm not sure if I should include myself since I've not heard any new music in the last decade). Starting out as second banana to Kristin Hersh in Throwing Muses she moved on to second banana to Kim Deal in The Breeders (a side project to The Pixies that became full time after their collapse). Jumping off that bandwagon after The Pod, The Breeders first album, Donnely formed Belly... a group that embodied some of the best elements from her two previous bands. Now Star still sounds pretty good... a little dated, a little bland in places... but the standout tracks like "Feed the Tree" and "Star Dog" still kick ass.
______________________

Danny Ben-Israel - Kathmandu Sessions (Locust) 2004

Another realm I wouldn't normally part the beaded curtains and enter into is the world of "lost" 60s and 70s recordings, but it is a realm covered by Destination Out in Exclaim! and that means it is occasionally my duty to essay it. Locust records digs around in the dirt that hold everything from Garage Rock to Psychedelic Weirdness to Leftfield Folk. Danny Ben-Israel covers all three of these bases with a swirly mess that is simultaneously Hippie-like and still manages to call them all dirty bastards. This obviously scores points with me. If you can imagine The Doors where Jim Morrison was less self-constructed and more indebted to Nepal than Rimbaud... that would sound a little like this.
_______________________________


Benoit Pioulard - Precis (Kranky) 2006

Wünderkinds can be pretty annoying. Especially when you're a lazy dude approaching or past the cutoff point where most people would take a "debut" album seriously. Benoit Pioulard is the nom de plume of 20 year-old Michigan upstart Thomas Meluch. With this first official release on tres cool Kranky records he manages to infuse moody ambience (which would be enought to get him noticed on the label) with a melancholy tunefulness that resembles Elliott Smith at turns. That's just overdoing it if you ask me.
_________________________


Dan Bern - Fifty Eggs (Sony) 1998


Dan Bern - New American Language (Messenger) 2001

Fifty Eggs was sitting in the cheapie bin at Digital World and I noticed it was produced by Ani DiFranco so I took it home and gave it a shot. It reminded me a little of Hamell on Trial for it's irreverence and self-aggrandizing gusto. With songs about having very large testicles and about intergalacting procreation of the spaceman/monkey evolutionary nature it was easy to enjoy but hard to take seriously. Sometime between then and New American Language either Bern or someone around him decided to get a little more serious about things and the result is a more mature, less scatalogical album. Instead of Cartman and Kenny groin-level humour we instead have deeper meaning cut with a slightly more crass Freedy Johnston/Jonathan Richman wit.

seventeen

130-138



Beat Happening - Black Candy (K/Sub Pop) 1992

One of the sounds that helped define the now-useless term "Indie Rock" was the kind of childlike approach to songwriting that Beat Happening utilized. Far from being a gimmick, it was simply the noise made by people who loved getting together to make music but were too excited by it to wait until they were really professional. Essentially it was the DIY of punk rock stripped of fashion and posturing (at least overtly). The trio hammered out three chord anti-anthems... and Black Candy was their attempt at darker themes and swampier production in the vein of The Cramps or Deja Voodoo. It never really got that heavy, though... instead you end up with a six-year-olds' version of dangerous rock. The song "Cast a Shadow" has been covered by BMX Bandits, Adam Green (of The Moldy Peaches) and Canada's own West Coast indie pop darlings Cub.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Beck - One Foot in the Grave (K) 1994


Beck - Odelay (Geffen) 1996


Beck - Mutations (Geffen) 1998


Beck - Sea Change (DGC) 2002

OK... I let you in on my non-funk biases when talking about Beastie Boys... so it should come as little surprise which four Beck albums I have in my collection. The first, One Foot in the Grave, comes appropriately right after Beat Happening on the shelf... given that it features Calvin Johnson of that group and it came out on the label run by Johnson, Olympia's K records. The music reflects most starkly what's at the root of all Beck's music: grizzled Folk Blues mutated by the street level Hip Hop he grew up with in California. Mutations and Sea Change are my favourite sides of the Beck coin... downbeat and moody; is it a coincidence his non-smiling face are only on these quieter albums? I will concede that Odelay is a masterwork, though it seldom is the one I reach for when I'm playing a Beck album by myself. All the elements are balanced... the production is, er, slammin' (?)... and his freaky Rorschach test lyrics are at their best. Respect.
++++++++++++++++++++++++


Bedhead - Beheaded (Trance Syndicate) 1996

Middle album of three superlative efforts by this great Texas quintet centered around the brothers Kadane, Matt and Bubba. They play a slightly countrified (i.e. echoes of pedal steel) version of the slow-core dynamics employed by other groups like Codeine and Seam. I was playing this in the store on Wednesday and three young ladies all started grooving to it... always a good sign that an album's worth it's weight. They get the slow dynamic build-up just right, but also infuse it with a kind of vague malaise that keeps it on edge even in the quietest parts. After the dissolution of Bedhead the brothers reconvened in 2001 as The New Year.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Beef Terminal - Grey Knowledge (Noise Factory) 2002


Beef Terminal - Isolationist (Noise Factory) 2003


Beef Terminal - Anger Do Not Enter (Noise Factory) 2005

Beef Terminal is MD Matheson of Toronto, ON... and Noise Factory is the post-rock/electronic label who brought us the first Broken Social Scene album... back when they were merely a duo. Despite the fairly visceral name, BT's music centers around nicely layered and delay-enhanced guitar figures that suggest bleary eyed early mornings and over-heated Summer nights. Of the three Isolationist has the most to offer... introducing some slight force in its rhythms and a live, organic drum feel that buoys the more ephemeral melodies. Anger Do Not Enter relies more on (purposefully?) outdated drum machine sounds that have a little touch of sterility that does the music no favours.

sixteen

122-129


Anandan/Goldstein/Wiens - Speaking in Tongues (Ambiances Magnetiques) 2003

I've been pretty lucky with neighbours for the decade-plus tenancy in my apartment. There was the guy who lived in the basement apartment who fell asleep after tossing frozen pizzas in the oven and letting them turn into charcoal over the ensuing 6-7 hours. There was the guy who lived in the back apartment whose alarm clock wouldn't wake him up so, consequently, it would blare on for 30/45/60 minutes at a time... and he'd set it for around 6am. It woke me up alright. But for the last few years it's been pretty peaceful, and even when there is noise late at night I'm usually pretty understanding about it... I was in my 20s and I made noise and got away with it... pay it forward, or whatever. The only exception comes when a fairly sleep-disrupted week rolls around and the 5-6 hours I have coming to me gets shot down when someone decides that 4am would be the best time to listen to gay-ass RnB... just below my bedroom. More to keep my sanity in balance than any real escalation of weaponry, my response was to get up around 8am the same morning and loudly do my dishes while listening to this free jazz at a "pleasant" volume. You should never use music as a weapon... and in a way I wasn't, because this is a great album from Montreal scenesters using instruments that aren't traditionally linked in improvisation. Seldom abrasive and often sublime. I wouldn't mind waking up to it after a night of drinking... hopefully they didn't either.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++


Angel - S/T (Bip-Hop) 2001

This label skirts the edges of many established genres in electronic music: ambient, microhouse, drone, etc., without getting mired in what turns from genre to generic. Angel is a live entity with two heads: Ilpo Väisänen, who is a member of Pan Sonic and Dirk Dresselhaus, who records as Schneider TM. For the purposes of their live performance the artists combined homemade instruments (typewriter as synthesizer, broken guitar) and wits to explore the point where music becomes chaos theory.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Animals on Wheels - Designs and Mistakes (Ninja Tune) 1997

Of the small but solid stable of artists who inhabited the Ninja Tune label in the 90s (Amon Tobin, Coldcut, Herbaliser), most stuck closely to a turntable/sample based sound that re-imagined 60s/70s jazz fusion as something denser and weirder than it had in reality been. Andrew Coleman was out on his own limb at this time. As Animals on Wheels his music had more in common with contemporary UK Drum N Bass than Bitches' Brew. With a greater emphasis on polymorphous beats and other obviously electronic sounds he crossed the threshold into the modernist stream of synthetic music.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works v.2 (Sire) 1994


Aphex Twin - Drukqs (Sire/Warp) 2001

Richard D. James is one of those anomalies in electronics where he is miles away weirder than your average bear, but still manages to be one of the most recognized names in his field. Whether his eccentricities are contrived or earned is moot, his knack for making music across the spectrum from early Acid House to post-classical composition is inarguable. Selected Ambient Works V.2 is a two disc set that challenges through its sheer simplicity and minimalism. Tracks are often simple loops that repeat as to become hypnotic. His mastery of this is knowing how much work the listener will be likely to invest in either engaging or ignoring the sounds he presents. Drukqs is also a double set that wavers between twisted but concise explorations on prepared piano and more disorienting explosions of digital beats and squelches that verge on danceable before tying together all your shoelaces.
++++++++++++++++


Pierre-Andre Arcand - Atlas Epileptic (Ambiances Magnetiques) 2004

AM is a Quebec label whose sister imprint, Empreintes Digitales, does electro-acoustic music (essentially sound design recorded and mixed from any number of "actual" sources). This disc, which also has a visual component, runs closer to that end of things... though perhaps it is on the more "musical" of the labels for its employment of Max/MSP software in sound creation. Whichever... the result is a crisp and abstract product that I honestly have not yet found a way to fully absorb. As with many artists in this mold the work is dense and detailed and requires more than superficial attention to truly appreciate. So it's something I'll have to return to, later and extract its secrets.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Martin Archer- Heritage and Ringtones (Discus) 2004

Martin Archer runs Discus records and the largest part of its output features his music... a move not uncommon but unavoidably trust-straining. This release is a little gem in his discography... with contributions by such luminaries as Ingar Zach (Huntsville), Simon H. Fell and Rhodri Davies... it combines original compositions (Ringtones) with covers of tried and true themes by folks like Duke Elllington, Bert Jansch and Annie Briggs. A neat blend of jazz/improv and folk ideas.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++


Arkitekchur - Should (tbtmo) 2003

This one really worried me... I mean from the standpoint of pulling out of the envelope and seeing the cover, then moving on to the textual content. I thought I was in for some heavy dogmatic lifting. As it turns out the first piece is very gentle and beautiful delay-saturated guitar piece that stretches out over fifteen minutes of repeating figures... a far cry from the noise I was expecting. Without any overt post-9/11 reportage in the sounds of the album there is an "elephant-in-the-room" kind of paranoia that the listener brings into play, freeing the artist(s) to work from a much subtler distance. It doesn't all work to perfection... some of the shorter pieces lack weight... but the long tracks hit a wonderful balance between beauty and ugly truth.