I watched the much-acclaimed Brazillian film City Of God last night, and was mightily impressed. It’s the story of rival gangs in the slums of Rio De Janeiro in the 1970s and the divergent paths of two boys, one of whom grows up to be a drug lord and the other an aspiring photojournalist. It’s marvelously shot and has a real kinetic energy running throughout it while maintaining a very human dimension. The violence is plentiful and graphic, but never gratiutous or glorified – it’s portrayed very matter-of-factly as if to say, “this is the reality, nothing more or less”. Particularly effective was the closing scene, which was simultaneously hopeful and hopeless. It’s an intense film and worth seeing if you’re in the mood for such a thing.

Curious as to the universality of classic rock, The Guardian sent a 17-year old correspondant to a series of concerts by artists he’d never heard of – dudes like Brian Wilson, Paul McCartney and The Who, among others. The results will shock and amaze you. Well, not really, but they’re interesting and well-written. From The GPC.

Califone got all their gear ripped off in San Francisco this week. If you’re in the Bay Area, keep an eye out for their stuff – Largehearted Boy has a complete list of the goods.

Wilco didn’t waste any time filling in some of the holes on their tour calendar left by Lollapalooza. August 6, the day they were supposed to be kicking out the jams in Toronto, they will instead be in… Maine. MAINE. Sigh. There’s always the Fall, I suppose, though the word is they’re planning on playing larger venues on that tour than they ever have before. Last year they played the Kool Haus, which is 2000 people, so the next logical step would be someplace like Massey Hall, which has a capacity of about 2700 and would sound great. The next illogical step would be someplace awful like the Hershey Centre or Arrow Hall in Mississauga which hold 6000-9000 people, and I don’t think they’re nearly that big – or at least I hope they’re not.

Initial impressions of A Ghost Is Born – while I like to love pretty much all the songs on the record, I’m not sure that it’s come together as an album for me yet. Maybe it’s because I’d heard the material as individual live tracks for so long that I can’t yet consider them in the context of an album, or maybe there’s something about the pacing or the sequencing is still keeping it from fully revealing itself to me, but I’m sure it will eventually. And aren’t records that require some effort the ones that we end up loving the most in the long run?

So I’m spending most of today not only outside of the 416, but the 905 as well – that’s right, I’m going to be out in the wilds of the 519! If I don’t post by noon tomorrow, send out a search party. While our five-year university reunion earlier this month held no appeal for myself or my collegiate friends, we did decide to get together for a barbeque back in Waterloo to quietly mark the occasion. Five years out of school. Egads – people have started and completed entire undergraduate degrees in the time I’ve been out of school, how scary is that? Not as scary as the fact that every one of the attendees to today’s get-together will be doing so as part of a married couple, and all but one are bringing their children. These were my classmates and in several instances, my housemates for Pete’s sake. I can’t believe I’m going to be feeling at least a little self-conscious about showing up single and childless. They’re bringing their babies and I’m bringing a two-litre bottle of Coke.

np – Emmylou Harris / Stumble Into Grace

Merge has announced details on the new American Music Club album, their first in over a decade. Montovani’s Breath will be out October 12 and you can see the tracklist is as follows:

Ladies and Gentlemen (view a live Quicktime video here)

Another Morning (download the mp3 here)

Patriot’s Heart

Love Is

Job To Do

Only Love Can Set You Free

Mantovani The Mind Reader

Home

Bookstore

Minstrel Show

Your Horseshoe Wreath Will Bloom

Song Of The Rat Leaving The Sinking Ship

The Devil Needs You

Okay, that line break is kinda funky but what can you do. There will be touring to support – September in Europe and October in the US and by US I hope they mean US and Canada.

A disc of demos and unreleased material from the album sessions recently found by Mick Jones as well as a 45-minute documentary DVD will be the bonuses accompanying The Clash’s London Calling: The 25th Anniversary Edition, out September 21 as part of Epic’s Legacy series. This is in addition to the typical remaster job, expansive liner notes, fancy packaging and hefty price tag.

Another classic (though more recent) album getting the deluxe makeover is Pavement’s Crooked Rain Crooked Rain, which will be coming out as a double-disc set on October 26, just like the Slanted & Enchanted: Luxe & Reduxe set a couple years ago. No specifics from Matador as of yet, but a release date is a good start.

One of the consequences of Lollapalooza going tits up is that a whole lotta bands have to find new Summer plans. Billboard checks in on some of the bands who had been slated to be part of the festival and what their contingency plans are.

The Onion AV Club interviews Nellie McKay. From Zoilus. Zoilus’ Carl Wilson also wrote this critical piece about her in yesterday’s Globe & Mail, recommending you go see Nina Hagen at Lee’s tonight in lieu of Nellie next Wednesday to satisfy your cabaret diva fix. He relents somewhat on his position on his own website, acknowledging her potential when she gets out of her teens. The National Post’s Aaron Wherry offers colour commentary from his own corner of the Blogosphere. Someone get The Toronto Star’s Ben Rayner to weigh in. It’ll be like a Toronto music critic pow-wow.

A couple of interviews with Stephin Merritt – one straight and one snarky.

The San Francisco Bay Guardian bids a fond farewell to Beulah and worries about the inevitable graying of the indie rock nation. From The GPC.

I somehow missed this interview in The Toronto Star yesterday with Iron & Wine. Not that it’s any more out of date 24 hours later.

What do you get when you cross the old Spider-Man newspaper strip with Photoshop? Hilarity, that’s what. Keep hitting refresh, a new strip will load.

For your gawking pleasure – The Onion’s pocket guide to celebrity blogs. From Poptart.

My site is being pokey today. Please bear with me.

np – Velvet Crush / In The Presence Of Greatness

I am calling next week “Crazy string of shows week”. Here’s a preview:

It starts Sunday night at the Rivoli with Sea Ray. I’m tingly in anticipation of this show, but am concerned that there’s not going to be much of a turnout – there’s no press on the band in either eye or NOW, I don’t think you can get the album locally and I’m not hearing anyone (except me) in the city talk about them. So I’m going to formally plea with any Torontonians reading this and who don’t have plans for Sunday night to come down and see the show – it’s $8 at the door and I guarantee you a great show. Not a money-back guarantee, that’d just be silly, but a guarantee with absolutely no real value whatsoever. But if you don’t like it, you can… I dunno, yell at me or something. Need a taste? Here’s some sample MP3s from their Stars At Noon album – “Revelry” and “Quiver”.

Then after a Monday off, I’ve got Iron & Wine at the Horseshoe Tuesday night. Advance tickets are all sold out though you’ll be able to get some at the door. And don’t forget the in-store at Soundscapes that evening at 7pm. If you need a Sam Beam fix before then, NOW has an interview and you can check out the lovely video for “Naked As We Came”. From Pop77.

Then the night after that I’m going to see Nellie McKay at Lee’s on Wednesday. Local songstress Jill Barber will be opening.

Next Thursday is Canada Day and thus a holiday and I’m also getting Friday off, making it a four-day weekend. Which is good because it gives me a whole day to prepare for The Magnetic Fields’ show at Trinity-St Paul’s that evening. And by “prepare”, I mean sit around all day eating Fritos and reading comic books.

Four shows in six days. That’s pretty hardcore, ain’t it?

The Black Table lists off what they consider to be the defining moments of humour for our generation. I confess I haven’t seen most of these, or even heard of a lot of them. I guess that’s why I don’t understand you damned kids these days.

Last night’s Lake Holiday show went pretty smoothly – there’s something to be said for intense regular gigging to polish out the performance. Of course, we’ll now probably take a couple months off before the next show, but whatever. Curious lineup with us, a five-piece with a slew of instruments, sandwiched between two solo performers. Dan Gorman was on first and impressed me with his soul-folk material. A shame his electric guitar was giving him technical difficulties after one song and he had to go acoustic as it gave his material a distinctive dimension. His vocals were really strong and soulful and the material quite strong. And he’s a really nice guy. Wax Mannequin, I didn’t really know what to make of. A guy with a guitar and a drum machine playing prog-arena rock anthems in leather pants and a wig. His fans ate it up though – it was like the most earnest joke act I’ve ever seen. Whatever floats your boat.

A nice touch on the evening was the number of unsolicited compliments we got on our set from people we don’t know. That’s rarely happened. A not-so-nice touch was some guy stoned on an unwise combination of chemicals going backstage during Wax’s set and stealing my camera and guitar strap from my gig bag. Thankfully, he had made a bit of a spectacle of himself earlier in the evening, so I had a pretty good idea of who the culprit was. Didn’t help his case that he was standing in the middle of the Rivoli fondling my guitar strap when I came looking for him. I browbeat him into giving me back my camera and he came by a little later and apologized, which was fine, and then he hugged me, which was a little weird, and then he tried to lick my ear, which was simply NOT on. Yeesh. Anyway, no harm done overall. No pictures from last night, which is a shame because we were all looking dead sexy, but we do have an mp3 of our cover of New Order’s “Love Vigilantes” if you want to hear it. I think the recording sounds pretty good and it’s as tight and clean as we’ve ever played it. Really freaking fast, though.

Also sad was that this was possibly/probably Five Seventeen’s last show with us, on account of him moving out west at the end of the Summer. It’s possible we’ll schedule more shows before he goes, but we’re already working on getting a replacement so we’ll have to cut the cord sometime. Sniff.

And now, once again, I am tired at work from having been up far too late the night before. I’m telling you – rock’n’roll is killing me.

np – Lambchop / Aw, C’Mon

So everyone’s playing the blame game over the demise of Lollapalooza – and don’t think that this is just for this year, it’s dead for good. Tell me what person in their right mind would lay down cash for tickets for this festival ever again? They could trot out a reunited Beatles with zombie John and George and people still wouldn’t go. It’s over. Now while I had hoped for the best – I did buy a ticket after all – I can’t say I’m surprised things ended up this way. I had my doubts about the viability of the whole festival from the get-go, but gave the organizers the benefit of the doubt that they had done their due diligence before embarking on the venture. After all – they were professional concert promoters and I was just a monkey with a blog. What did I know? Well, while I’m sure more specifics will come to light as the fallout from this continues, but it’s pretty obvious someone horribly misjudged their market. Information Leafblower, The Black Table and Zoilus have some solid thoughts as to what specifically might have gone wrong and I’ll reiterate what I would consider to be the key reasons in addition to the obvious ones of high ticket price and lousy venues.

First off, there was no slam dunk headliner. Though his disciples may say otherwise, Morrissey is not the act to anchor a tour of this size. His fans are devoted, but they’re not that numerous and don’t forget this is a guy who couldn’t get arrested a few years ago. I don’t know who would have been a better choice though maybe a reunited Pixies headlining every date might have done it? Probably not, actually. It’d likely take someone on the scale of a Radiohead to ensure success. But not the Moz and the String Cheese Incident. I mean come on. As Carl Wilson put it, even in Lollapalooza’s heyday, the headliner had radio hits and video play. We’re talking Pearl Jam, Soundgarden and Smashing Pumpkins at the height of the alternative/grunge explosion, not cult favourite veterans with solid but not huge fanbases. The music scene has gotten a lot more polarized in the last decade and there’s simply not the same amount of crossover between the underground and the overground anymore. The lineup put together this year certainly appealed to the indie cognoscente, but how many records have they sold? Even collectively? There’s only so many hipsters in the world, and when you factor out the ones who are utterly cynical about anything stadium-sized or corporate-scented, and you don’t have a crowd that’s going to fill the stadiums. You need to appeal to the mainstream for that, the people who attend maybe a half-dozen concerts a year and for whom shelling out $30-$40 to sit in a big outdoor venue is the norm. Not the scenesters who are accustomed to $10 shows in dank clubs. Coolfer succinctly put it in Leafblower’s comments, “the promoters were going for cred over fans”. And that thinking ain’t putting asses in the seats.

Secondly, scheduling it as a two-day events was pretty dumb. If they’d trimmed the lineup to include just the cream of the crop for a single day, they probably would have done alright, not to mention they would have been able to hit more cities. But trying for the two-day setup introduced a host more problems. First, if your city got the tour on weekdays you would have had to take days off work, at least if the punter wanted to catch the whole show (scheduled to start at 2 in the afternoon). Of course, this applied mostly to the 9-5 working stiffs – you know, the ones who’d likely have the scratch to shell out for the expensive seats. So in addition to the high ticket prices and convoluted pricing structures, you had to factor in the time off of work and if you wanted to go to both days, that’s times two. I can’t speak for anyone else, but two vacation days are worth a helluva lot to me. If Toronto’s day two had fallen on a day that I didn’t already have off, I probably wouldn’t have bothered getting a ticket.

While the demise of Lollapalooza, the fiasco of Field Day last year and the quiet disappearance of All Tomorrow’s Parties on these shores puts a question mark on the concept of huge festivals in North America (Europe seems much more receptive to the format), it’s important to note that there are still successful festivals going on in North America – witness the longevity of Ozzfest and the Warped Tour, and Curiosa seems to be doing well. Similarly, by all reports Coachella, Austin City Limits and Bonnaroo were pretty damn successful (people dying notwithstanding). I think the fault is lying more on the shoulders of the organizers (using the term generously) rather than the festivals themselves. It’s just that for the amount of money you have to invest to make something like this happen (I imagine the overhead and logistics are staggering), you can’t take a gamble on the goods. Ozzy and Black Sabbath are a sure bet. Morrissey is not.

In the end, though, I feel bad for the bands. While they will still get a percentage of their fees, they’re still pretty much fucked for the rest of the summer. They’re in tough to book shows of their own for July and August this late in the season, so that’s a couple months they won’t be making the money they had budgeted on. I do hope that some of the acts on the bill will manage to find their own way into town, but it’s a raw deal for everyone involved, any way you slice it. Lollapalooza, RIP.

Postscript to this screed – It occurs to me that I may come across as slagging on the Moz for not being a good enough headliner. I’m not, really – adding him to the bill was inspired. It just wasn’t enough. No hate mail, please, but if you’re going to send it at least come up with some clever epithets.

And now for something completely different. News that isn’t a eulogy for Lollapalooza!

A new Saturday Looks Good To Me album hits September 14 on Polyvinyl, name of Every Night. You can hear sample unmastered mp3s from the record here. Their last album All Your Summer Songs was easily one of my favorite discoveries of the past year, so I’m quite looking forward to this one. Great indie-pop music done up in that sweet Motown/Spector style. Yessir.

The new Luna album Rendezvous (which seems to have graduated from tenative title to actual title) will be out September 28. Touring to follow in October and November.

Live and demo versions of songs you might be hearing on the new Spoon album. From Catbirdseat.

Thought I was all out of Wilco news? Not quite – you can download a live version of “Hell Is Chrome” from their recent hometown show at the Vic in Chicago here or listen to whole show streaming-like via the enhanced portion of the A Ghost Is Born CD. They just give and they give and they give.

The Globe & Mail reflects on the glory of vinyl. It has long been my secret shame as a music geek that I don’t own a record player. I’m sure I could take the old one from home anytime I wanted – I think it’s a Dual – but I have nowhere to put it and I’m sure it’d need a goodly amount of TLC to get it back into game shape. I think the next time I move, provided it’s somewhere with more room, I’ll inherit myself the turntable and see what it can do. From Thrasher’s Blog.

Anyone planning on coming out to see Lake Holiday wtih Wax Mannequin at the Rivoli tonight, doors are at 9 and cover is $7. Hey, it’s not our show, we can’t do anything about that. I’m also not sure what time we’re on, or whether we’re on first or second. In fact, I don’t know anything. At all.

np – Wilco / A Ghost Is Born

For the sake of brevity, let’s just say everything I wrote about Ted Leo back in March still holds. It was a little bit smaller and probably a little more sedate crowd to see him last night, but come on – it’s a Monday night. Cut us some slack. Thankfully, I don’t think it’s possible to dampen Ted’s spirits. He was in high spirits all night, chatting with the crowd between songs like an old friend, even though his gear was slowly self-destructing behind him. Last time it was his Echoplex that was cutting out – this time, his amp started giving up the ghost about halfway through the set and while he managed to keep it going, his tone deteriorated steadliy throughout and by the end of the encore the guit was sounding pretty crappy. Not that that affected the quality of the performance, of course. There was a hefty amount of new material in the set and I can say with some authority that Shake The Streets is going to be rocking even more than Dokken. Can’t wait till October for that one.

If I have any complaint, it’s the absence of any merch for sale. Alas, no Pharmacists t-shirt for me. Also, I applaud the lighting guy for managing to determine the exact combination of lights that would make the band nigh invisible to my camera. Seriously, I was standing not three feet in front of Ted, yet any flash-less photos just came out black. Amazing. I didn’t want to blind the guy from so close so I held off snapping any shots until he pulled back from the stage whilst soloing (which was a lot, thankfully). You can see last night’s shots here, or the ones from March here.

It’s officially A Ghost Is Born day today! Everything has a ghost theme. I myself and dressed in a white sheet and let me tell you, typing ain’t easy. Metacritic has compiled all the major reviews online (currently sitting at a 79%, which is actually about what I’d expect). Also, interviews/features/stories from MTV, The Associated Press, NPR (in audio!), Pitchfork and Stylus. And no, I don’t have the record yet. Will dash out after work and grab it.

The bad news for the day is that Lollapalooza has been cancelled. After my initial shock and disappointment passed, I can’t say I’m that surprised. The costs of assembling a huge lineup like they did can’t have been insignificant, and they may have overestimated the ability of the acts to draw the necessary crowds – in fact I questioned the financial viability of the festival from the get-go. Sure, it was an amazingly hip lineup but hipsters don’t generally have money. I will blame the Bush economy for this one. So my questions are:

1) How much of my money will I get back from Ticketmaster? If it’s just face value, I will be very unhappy since there ended up being about a 75% markup on the thing. Not that I can do anything about it but whinge.

2) Wilco has shows booked in Montreal and Ottawa on the two days preceding their originally scheduled Lolla date in Toronto on the 6th of August. Will they try to re-book? I mean, they’ll be in the neighbourhood and from what I can tell, none of the larger venues have announced any shows on that date yet. If there’s a silver lining to this, maybe it’d be that Wilco would do their own proper show rather than a festival date. Though missing out on The Flaming Lips sucks.

Rough Trade is releasing a nice little compilation featuring indiepop from yesterday and today and you can listen to a aural documentary about the story of Creation Records here.

My legs hurt.

np – various artists / Wig In A Box: Songs From and Inspired by Hedwig & The Angry Inch