The Boston Phoenix talks to Tanya Donelly about how the state of her personal life informs her latest record, Whiskey Tango Ghosts. This album has gotten some lukewarm reviews for being so quiet and spare and such a departure from the buoyant pop with which she became an alterna-icon in the early 90s. True, it’s less poppy than anything she’s done in the past, but it’s also not as MOR mom-rock as Beautysleep was. Tanya’s voice is lovely as always (the a capella untitled closing track is stunning), but there’s an undercurrent of somberness and unease that’s more prevelant in this record than in the past (reasons for which are alluded to in the above-linked article). Tanya’s work has always had a degree of darkness in it, but it usually manifested itself in slightly off-kilter but charmingly whimsical imagery. This time, it’s much starker and more intimate affair that has an extra emotional depth, making it that much more resonant for the listener. I’m quite pleasantly surprised by how much I’m liking this record. However, if angsty Tanya isn’t to your liking (and she’s not really angsty), she’ll have another record out sooner rather than later. The next album will consist of songs that didn’t fit the mood of WTG and be recorded live in front of an audience at the end of the month during a couple shows in Vermont.

An excellent bootleg of Wilco’s show this past Tuesday in Toronto has surfaced. You’ll need a Bit Torrent client (I recommend Torrent Storm) and something to uncompress .FLAC files (I use FLAC Frontend), but the net result are lovely uncompressed audio files of the whole show, courtesy of local show-taper extraordinaire David Klein. David – if you read this and want some pics for CD artwork, shoot me a line. Thanks to Another Frank for the tip-off yesterday. And as a postscript, I heard from a dude who heard from a dude that Wilco would be back sooner rather than later at Massey Hall. Just. As. I. Predicted.

Nerve solicits some lists of favourite summer albums from a smattering of indie rock glitterati. From Traveler’s Diagram.

Some concert news – It’s like a freaking UK invasion this Fall. To begin:

After opening for Ted Leo back in March, Electrelane will headline their own show at the Horseshoe September 4. Not long after, Neil Hannon and The Divine Comedy will play the oh-so elegant ‘Shoe on September 15, tickets $13.

And on the market saturation end of things, The Delays (who were here barely two weeks ago) have been added to the Franz Ferdinand show at the Docks October 1 (their third in Toronto this year) along with The Futureheads. And only three months after their debut show at Lee’s Palace, Hope Of The States is coming back to play the Opera House on October 4, tickets $15.

And finally, non-British citizen Jon Spencer is in town November 9 at the Phoenix to explode some blues all over your asses. $20.

And now I’m off to a wedding… which I just realized will be a Catholic service. Oh maaaaan. Is it bad form to bring a book? Or a pillow? Why can’t everyone just have United Church weddings? They’re like the McDonalds drive-throughs of matrimony. “Do you? Do you? You’re married. NEXT!”

R.E.M are touring this Fall in support of their new record Around The Sun and will two nights at the Hummingbird Centre in Toronto on November 10 and 11. I’m curious who the openers will be – they’ve had a habit of bringing very good openers with them on tour, so good that it makes going to the show worthwhile. Not that R.E.M. on their own aren’t worthwhile, it’s just that their ticket prices will no doubt be fairly steep. More than the last time I saw them, anyway – their free show on Yonge St. in Toronto back in May 2001. 10,000 people in a canyon of glass, stone and steel, it was fantastic.

REM and I go back a long ways. I first started getting interested in music back in 1991, and when everyone else was singing the praises of Nevermind, I was wearing out copies of Out Of Time and Document (literally – I borrowed the Out Of Time CD from a friend at school for months on end, making more than a few cassette copies on better and better quality tapes. In hindsight, I shoulda just bought the damn thing). It should be telling that while most others were unleashing their suburban angst to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, I was ruminating to “Country Feedback” and “Texarkana”. Yeah, even then I was a freak. They probably weren’t very cool thirteen years ago and almost certainly less so now, but REM were the first outfit that could unequivically lay claim to being my favourite band. I read every news article, bought every magazine, caught every television appearance. I stole a copy of Musician from the public library with Peter Buck and Neil Young on the cover and read it over and over again (two very very large guitar influences for me, it should be noted. And I still play “Driver 8” when I’m just messing around). It was my first experience with pure, unabashed fandom and while my tastes and scope of music listened-to have expanded exponentially since then, the band remains a watershed for the evolution of my musical tastes.

Through the 90s, my interest in them held for a while, but inevitably began to wane as my musical spectrum grew. Automatic For The People cemented my devotion to the band (and pegged me as a sucker for slow, sad songs) while Monster was and still is a disappointment (guys, you’re not a rawk band). My faith was renewed with New Adventures In Hi-Fi but that would but prove to be the last hurrah. Maybe it was to do with Bill Berry leaving the band but I just lost interest after that. Up and Reveal had a couple decent songs a piece but couldn’t compete for rotation time with the stuff I’d discovered more recently. The first time I got to see them live was in August of 1999 at the Molson Amphitheatre. It was a big fancy stage show in support of Up and while I’m sure I enjoyed the concert, I couldn’t really connect with the arena rock show laid before me. But the openers that night? Wilco. Call it a passing of the torch, perhaps. I’ll no doubt be picking up Around The Sun eventually, completist that I am (though I still don’t have Dead Letter Office on CD. Even if I don’t listen to them much anymore at all, they’ll always be an incredibly important band to me. And yeah, I’ve only talked about their Warner Bros output. Of course critically speaking the IRS stuff was much better, but I wasn’t there for that, I was there for this. But now I do want to go listen to Murmur again.

Oh, and have you noticed yet that when I get on extended tangents about things not topical at all, like bands I listened to religiously in 11th grade, it means that I can’t find any other content for the day? Think of it as one of those ‘clips’ episodes TV shows do to fill up episodes. Except it’s nostalgic to me and me only.

Everyone’s favourite musical soap opera The Libertines are going to try their damndest to be at the Opera House on October 15. I don’t really follow the band so I don’t know if that Pete fellow is technically in the band or not, but I wouldn’t put money on him being there, either way. It sounds like the boy has some issues.

ESPN has the answer to why the Blue Jays’ season has been such utter crap this year – their at-bat music sucks. Creed? Someone trade Chris Woodward now. From LHB.

Spent about four hours last night recording a 25-second passage for our slowly yet steadily forthcoming record. I’m not the most efficient player when the tape is rolling to begin with, but this time the excuse was that we tried three or four wholly distinct ideas before settling on something. And technically, it was 50-seconds of music – we double tracked. Either way, I’m just thankful we’re doing this digitally. It would have cost about $500,000 (give or take) in blown takes if we had done this to tape.

np – Bob Dylan / Bringing It All Back Home

I apologize for my site going AWOL for about four hours yesterday afternoon. I think a server in Pennsylvania blew up.

The Neko Case live album recorded back in March and April in Chicago and Toronto (the pic is from the first Toronto show) whilst backed by The Sadies will be coming out November 9. It’s entitled The Tigers Have Spoken and Billboard has details while Pitchfork reports the tracklist as follows:

01 If You Knew

02 Soulful Shade of Blue (Buffy Sainte-Marie)

03 Hex (Catherine Ann Irwin)

04 Train From Kansas City (Shangri-La’s)

05 The Tigers Have Spoken

06 Blacklisted

07 Loretta (Townes Van Zandt)

08 Favorite

09 Rated X (Loretta Lynn)

10 This Little Light (Traditional)

11 Wayfaring Stranger (Traditional)

These were amazing shows, this will be a great record. They were also shooting video footage ostensibly for a DVD but there’s been no word on that coming out yet. Hope it comes to pass. There will also be new studio album due out in the Spring.

Exclaim’s cover boy for this month is Joel Gibb of The Hidden Cameras. The piece talks about the history of the Cameras and new album Mississauga Goddam.

NOW profiles Rogue Wave, in town Sunday opening for AC Newman at Lee’s Palace.

Death Cab are putting out an iTunes-only EP comprising tracks from a ‘Studio X Session’. Bummer that it’s iTunes only, but I expect the tracks will be available on your friendly neighbourhood P2P network within, oh, 12 seconds of release.

Everyone’s favorite Nebraskan disco-new wave outfit The Faint are going to be at Lee’s Palace October 10 to promote their new album Wet From Birth, out September 14. New Yorkers TV On The Radio and some group called Beep Beep (YOU do a google search on “beep beep”) support. I suspect there will be much dancing that night.

That French Kicks show at the Guvernment on September 21 isn’t theirs – they’re opening for Keane. Ah.

If you’ve got a lot of time on your hands and feel like reading some Wilco press, this site has gone to the trouble of transcribing as many magazine articles on the band into HTML as possible, including pictures. Whoa. The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Sun and The Toronto Star all have reviews of Tuesday night’s show. And The Montreal Gazette has a profile (from LHB).

The Star also has a piece on Montreal’s Arcade Fire, in town Saturday to play the Olympic Island concert. I heard a couple tracks off of Funeral, out September 14. They were good.

The Milwaukee Journal Sentinal talks to Old 97’s frontman Rhett Miller about their new album Drag It Up and the band reaching the decade mark in age.

Low Morale has a lovely and sad Flash video for an acoustic recording of Radiohead’s “Creep”. While it’s fan-made, it could easily fit in with any of the Radiohead’s more recent videos. From Morecowbell.net.

Whew.

np – The Sleepy Jackson / Lovers

I’m not really one given to hyperbole, so you’ll appreciate that I mean it when I say Wilco is the best fucking band on the planet. And that that was the best show I have ever seen. Swear. To. God. I don’t even know where to begin. Okay, we’ll start with pre-show. I had intended to get in line right early, like before 7pm for 8pm doors. Unfortunately, the worst restaurant service in the world (it was a night for all-time records) kept me from getting to the Mod Club until about 20 after 7. There wasn’t a huge lineup ahead of us by that point but enough that hopes of getting right up front were dashed – I spent the night about three rows back. Not the best, but a good enough view.

Opener Jim White took the stage promptly at 9:15 with his five-piece band. I’d been told that he was really good, but I hadn’t gotten around to listening to any of his stuff beforehand, so I was going in a complete tabula rasa as far as his work was concerned. So what’s the verdict? Pretty damn good, I say. An entertaining and engagin performer, his songs ranged from raw gutbucket country to hypnotically quiet folk songs. Some of the more deliberately quirky numbers seemed a little too forced, but there was a lot of quality material in the man’s repetoire. His between-song banter was priceless, too. “I know you’re all here to see Wilco. I raised those boys myself, you know. Found them with a basket of kittens”. He had to cancel a local headlining date for tonight to swing the opening gigs for Wilco through Canada, so hopefully that means he’ll be back sooner than later to make it up to those who missed out. I’m going to be seeking out more of his stuff.

As for the headliners… man, words fail. This is the fifth time I’ve seen Wilco live, so you’d think that I’d have a pretty good idea of what to expect from their shows, and I thought I did. Maybe it was the new lineup – the fourth different one I’ve seen – the high-on-life Jeff Tweedy or the electricity in the sold-out, (relatively) tiny venue, but last night they absolutely killed. From the fingerpicked acoustic guitar that opened “Muzzle Of Bees”, the band was in another zone completely. Highlights included the synchronized guitar leads between Nels Cline and Jeff Tweedy in “Hell Is Chrome”, the thunderous breakdown in “At Least That’s What You Said”, Pat Sansone (who looks a helluva lot like Beck) striking every rock star pose in the book on “I’m A Wheel”, Jeff’s dance moves in “Hummingbird”, his sub-orbital soloing through “I’m The Man Who Loves You”, the wall of sound that closed out “Poor Places” giving way to the unbelievable rock stomp of set closer “Spiders (Kidsmoke)”. Anyone who complained about the Krautrock arrangement of that tune on the album has to see it performed live to understand how perfect it is. In fact, almost all the A Ghost Is Born material takes on a whole new dimension when heard live – it gave me a whole new appreciation for the record which I was coming to quite like anyway. They played two encores – the first was the rock encore with Nels and Jeff partaking in ritual Jazzmaster abuse through “I’m A Wheel”, “Kicking Television” and “The Late Greats”, while the second encore was the acoustic encore, featuring older numbers “Far, Far Away”, “Via Chicago”, “California Stars” and “The Lonely 1”.
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Is it troubling that I was able to relate a little too well with Harvey Pekar in American Splendor? Sure, I have better posture, a fuller head of hair and aren’t nearly as smooth with the ladies, but seeing this cranky, obsessive-compulsive, socially maladjusted character chronicling his day-to-day life for the consumption of total strangers hit a little close to home. But besides being a bit of a cautionary tale (yo Letterman, call me!) it was pretty damned entertaining as well. For those unfamiliar with the film, it’s basically a biopic of Mr Pekar, creator and writer of American Splendor, a long-running independent comic that chronicles his life as a file clerk and professional curmudgeon and illustrated by a rotating stable of artists. I’ve never read the comic myself – I have always preferred the more conventional mainstream comics – but have always been very aware of the esteem with which the book was regarded.

The movie is an interesting mix of live action dramatization with actors, some animation and documentary-style interviews with the real Harvey Pekar and his cast of characters. Paul Giamatti does a terrific job in recreating Pekar on-screen, more impressive when you consider that you get to contrast his portrayal with the genuine article over the course of the film. Using the original Letterman footage in the context of the film was also an inspired touch. It’s odd to consider this a comic book adaptation but I suppose it can’t be all costumed crimefighters and such. The balding social misfits need their day in the sun, too.

Stylus has gotten a facelift. It looks nicer now but the usability is still pretty crap, unfortunately. For example, their lead piece is The Producers, Part 2 wherein they profile some of the legendary (and not so legendary but still important) figures behind the scenes. Great idea, nice read. Where’s part one? No fucking idea. (Actually, I did find it here, but it wasn’t easy. Wouldn’t it have made more sense to link it off of part two of the article instead of having me dig through the entirety of the 2004 archives? I certainly think so).

I’ve been commenting on The Toronto Star’s series about growing up in various regions around Toronto, and for the third week in a row I have some connection to the city in question – this week, Scarborough. Scarberia. Land of strip malls and inspiration for Wayne’s World. I lived there from age three to ten and I moved away just before it began its ‘decline’ and earned its rough reputation, so I really don’t have any memories to speak of. I did move back for a four-month stint in 1995, though, and it wasn’t quite as I’d remembered it – hell, I remembered half of the city as it is now being farmland. I used to watch Breakfast Television before I left for work and make a mental note of where all the shootings and stabbings from the night before were in relation to my route to work. Okay, that’s an exaggeration – Scarborough isn’t that bad, I don’t think, though in relation to the rest of Toronto I suppose its earned it’s reputation as “the hood” of the city. Either way, I’m glad I got out when I did. If I was going to be bored out of my mind as an adolescent, I’d choose Oakville over Scarborough.

I spent much of yesterday afternoon playing with a couple of dogs at my brother’s fiancee’s sister’s house, one a corgi-lab mix and the other a hyperactive Jack Russel-chihuahua sorta thing. Talk about your pet therapy – there’s something immensely relaxing about just petting a dog for a while.

Wilco tonight. Am I excited? Yes, I think that I am.

np – Wheat / Hope & Adams