Bob Dylan has always been an enigma to me. I only recently really got into his work, and what with his notorious reticence with the media, his work has been the only insight I’ve had into the man. In fact, last weekend’s 60 Minutes interview was the first time I’d ever heard his speaking voice. That’s why reading his Chronicles was such a revelation – it was pretty much my first look at the man behind the music, if I may use such a hackneyed phrase.

Split into five sections, the first two chapters of the memoirs start off in New York City, circa 1961. Dylan has just arrived from Minnesota and is starting to make a name for himself in the folk clubs around Greenwich Village. It then jumps ahead to the late 60s as he tries to escape his fame by moving out to Woodstock, and details his attempts to alienate his followers by making as many self-destructive career moves as possible – to almost no avail. The fourth part recounts the troubled and often frustrating first steps of his late-era creative rebirth, starting with the making of Oh Mercy with Daniel Lanois. He admits he was spent as an artist and was considering hanging it up but eventually realized he still had more left in him, though the process of extracting it and rekindling his creative spark took its toll. Finally, he comes full circle in recalling his discovery of folk hero Woody Guthrie as a young man in Minnesota in the late 1950s, ultimately leading him to New York and to sign with Columbia Records.

Dylan possesses remarkable powers of recall – he paints scenes from forty years past with such detail that you feel like you’re in the room with him. His writing style is unmistakably him – this is no dry, ghost-written piece, it’s pure Dylan in tone, phrasing and style. The only thing that’s not typical is its openness – the memoirs are amazingly frank. He seems perfectly willing, maybe even eager, to de-mythologize himself and his work and he does it without being self-deprecating or diminishing the importance of his work. He claims he was always aware of his destiny, but doesn’t get caught up in hubris or false modesty. Until this point, he’d seemed almost a mythical figure to me – someone upon whose shoulder giants stood. Chronicles reveals him to be much more than just that – somehow, little details like his taste in John Wayne movies or the fact that he played ice hockey as a child do a lot to fill in my impression of the man and put me even more in awe.

I was amused watching the 60 Minutes interview, as Ed Bradley tried mostly in vain to get Dylan to open up. Mostly, he repeated portions of the book and got Dylan to reiterate what he’d said. And the editing of the segment made me believe that there were a whole lot of long pauses cut out of the original footage. His attitude seems mostly to be, “You read the damn book, you already know the answer”.

Obviously, Chronicles is recommended/required reading for Dylan fans. I’m very much looking forward to the two planned follow-up volumes. And while I’m on the topic, does anyone know if the reissue of his remastered back catalog is going to continue, or if they’re done? The sonic improvement on a lot of the albums is quite noticable, and I still need to get The Times They Are A-Changin’, which was inexplicably left out of the lineup. If I’m waiting for a reissue that’s not going to come, I may as well get the regular edition and be done with it.

See the Jonathan Demme-directed video for Steve Earle’s “Rich Man’s War” here. Sorry – RealPlayer only. It’s not a bad video, it actually fits the tone of the song quite well, but I don’t really see how/why a big-name Hollywood director was needed to make it. There should be explosions. And fast, sensationalistic cuts of war footage and mothers crying and politicians lying and — oh wait, sorry, I was thinking of Michael Moore. You can also hear some of Steve’s archived The Revolution Starts Now radio show on Air America here.

Each Note Secure points out that Glide Magazine has a complete Wilco show from DeKalb, IL in May of this year available to download. This was their first Ghost show, and it’s a good one.

Posters, shmosters. Gimme a Batman Begins trailer.

Hold My Life’s best albums of 2004. Quick, concise, to the point.

Goddamn! I’m getting comment spam. I guess I’ve arrived.

np – Neko Case / Blacklisted

Terry Bickers-ified for the first time since their debut release in 1988, The House Of Love will release their first album since 1993’s Audience With The Mind early next year. NME reports that Days Run Away will be out on February 28 in the UK. I expect to have to play the import game for this one.

Though mostly a footnote in the history books, The House Of Love’s jangly, atmospheric rock made them UK indie darlings for a brief period in the late 80s, essentially filling in the space between the end of The Smiths and the rise of The Stone Roses. Constant lineup shuffles and the fact that Guy Chadwick didn’t exactly have a face made for the cover of the NME kept them from becoming much more than cult favourites, though. Everyone goes on about the eopnymous debut record (often referred to as Creation after their label at the time), citing Terry Bickers’ guitarwork as the cornerstone of their sound. While I love Bicker’s playing as much as anyone (check out their John Peel Sessions disc – stripped of the rather dated production, these songs and performances are glorious), I think the songwriting on their eponymous sophomore album (generally referred to as Fontana, again, after their label) is my favourite of their releases. It, plus the Peel Sessions, get the most spins.

Sadly, neither of their last two albums managed to recapture those heights. Babe Rainbow was pretty solid, if lacking that je ne sais quoi, while Audience With the Mind was as good a sign as any that it was time to disband, which they did. Chadwick put out an alright solo record, Lazy, Soft and Slow in 1998, but has been quiet since. While I don’t think House Of Love have ever quite gotten the respect they deserve, they have been getting a much-deserved critical reappraisal over the last few years. With the Peel sessions disc, a best-of, and albums compiling all their Creation-era and Fontana-era material, the vaults have been pretty much cleared. It may be more wishful thinking than anything, but I’m hoping that the new material is respectable if not a complete return to the glory days of 1988-1990. That’s probably a little much to ask for, but I’m anxious to hear the new stuff regardless.

I’m a little surprised to see The Cardigans releasing a DVD from their “Lovefool” heyday with The Cardigans: Live In London, coming out in North America on February 8 (it’s already out in Europe). Taken from two First Band On The Moon-era concerts at the Sheperd’s Bush Empire in Londontown in 1996, it sort of goes against all their efforts to distance themselves from their undeserved ‘one-hit wonder’ status. While their early stuff is far more sophisticated than first impressions might imply, I really like how much they’ve grown since those days and find their current sound just as interesting. At any rate, besides the live show, the DVD features a couple videos – including versions of “Lovefool” and “Been It” rarely ever seen in North America – and a short film about the making of First Band On The Moon.

Click here to watch the video for the Stars’ “Ageless Beauty”, the excellent first single from Set Yourself On Fire (From Pop77). Their December 18 show at the Mod Club is now pretty much sold out (though Soundscapes apparently still has some tickets), but tickets remain for the all-ages show there on the 19th.

You can pre-order the new Magnolia Electric Co. release, the live Trials and Errors, at Secretly Canadian. The formal release date isn’t until January 18 but it appears as though they’ll start shipping pre-orders today.

The Telegraph introduces the UK to Nellie McKay. From LHB.

More year-end lists: Glide Magazine, Kathryn Yu, Insound (sales rankings). Last two links from LHB.

Another Batman Begins poster.

np – The Fiery Furnaces / EP

Here’s one for the ‘Great injustices in music’ files – Nottingham, UK’s Six By Seven. I first came across them during one of my previous “shoegazer phases”, this one in the Fall of 1998. A Beggars/Mantra compilation of new artists featured a track from their debut album The Things We Make that was actually more Charaltans-y than anything, but a little research yielded reviews that indicated their sound was more in the droney/spacey vein. It took me some doing to find a copy of the album, which contained several extended, taut and tense pieces (“European Me”, “88-92-96”) punctuated by shorter, punchier numbers like “Candlelight” and “For You”. The acclaim in their native UK was impressive and they seemed to be well on their way to “next big thing” status. In 1999, they released the surprisingly delicate Two And A Half Days In Love With You EP, which was the result of sessions with legendary producer John Leckie. Leckie would go on to produce several tracks on their follow-up record The Closer You Get.

The sophomore record was quite a departure from the gauze of their debut – what was kept under tension on that record exploded off this one. The screaming vitriol of songs like “Eat Junk Become Junk” and “Sawn Off Metallica T-Shirt” set the tone for the record, which still contained a number of more meditative, atmospheric pieces and beautifully grafter their shoegazer roots with righteous punk fury. Even their love songs seethed with gorgeous intensity. An underrated monster of an album, the promotional duties saw them travel to North America for the first time (though I missed their half-attended show at the Horseshoe in Summer 2000 on account of being out of the country, NME reviewed the gig) as well as lose co-founding guitarist Sam Hempton. Undeterred, they carried on and went back into the studio as a four-piece.

2002’s The Way I Feel Today was more stripped-down and straightforward than the previous two albums, but still ferocious. Feeling that their work had been over-produced to this point, they elected to record this album completely live off the floor and with no overdubs. With the absence of Sam Hempton, the band began utilizing more keyboards to fill in the space left behind, resulting in a more textured, haunting feel to much of the new material. Not entirely surprisingly, Mantra dropped the band after The Way I Feel Today failed to set the charts ablaze and to compound the hardship, bassist Paul Douglas quit the band in November of 2002. While the unrelenting string of bad luck would have spelled the end of lesser bands, the three-piece Six By Seven ploughed forward regardless. After releasing almost album-length EP Bochum in 2003 (the title track of which absolutely soars, by the way), the band formed their own label Saturday Night Sunday Morning to release their own music.

After a few singles, they released their fourth full-length, :04, in the Fall or 2004 (Review at Stylus). As a result of both necessity and choice, their sound has gotten less dense, recapturing some of the atmosphere of their debut effort though it makes more use of keyboards and programming to accomplish this rather than dueling guitars. One would never accuse the notoriously grumpy band of lightening up, but the record is decidedly more anthemic and postive-sounding, though that’s a very relative statement with Six By Seven. Moments sound almost Doves-ish, though a lot more abraisive. Though the album isn’t available on these shores yet (my ‘copy’ is an mp3 burn), they just announced that both :04 and it’s companion demos album Left Luggage At The Peveril Hotel will be coming out early next year in North America. Full details to come.

If you couldn’t tell, Six By Seven nearly tops the list of my “Greatly Underappreciated Bands” list. If you want to learn more about Six By Seven, visit your local library – or check out any of these links: Listen to some samples at MP3.com. Watch a live performance by the band at Mantra’s fifth birthday celebrations in 2000, courtesy of VirtueTV. PlayLouder interviews Chris Olley about losing one of their staunchest champions in John Peel. Mantra’s artist page still has loads of videos and audio tracks from the band’s releases on that label. The band’s website has a detailed discography that includes release-by-release discussions of how each record came to be.

Details for The Futureheads’ February 27th show at Lee’s Palace have been announced. Support will be Sweden’s Shout Out Louds and LA’s High Speed Scene. Tickets $15, on sale January 6.

Billboard has some details on Brendan Benson’s forthcoming album The Alternative to Love, due out in March of next year.

The Onion AV Club rounds up their best albums of the year.

np – New Order / Brotherhood

Is Neko Case coming to Toronto to promote a live album recorded in Toronto, or is it to preview her next studio album due out later this Spring? I don’t know, but maybe she’ll tell us when she plays the Phoenix on January 16, backed once again by the wonderful Sadies. As much as I enjoyed the Tigers Have Spoken making-of shows, I’d love to see a proper full show with her and the Sadies. Tickets on sale today, $17.50. Consider me there. Oh yeah, I reviewed the live record for Torontoist last week.

Heraclitus Sayz interviews Richard Parry of the Arcade Fire. From LHB.

Tiny Mix Tapes talks to Saturday Looks Good To Me mastermind Fred Thomas. Their latest, Every Night, may hold the record for traversing the greatest distance between disappointment to beloved this year. I had trouble getting into it at first, but after seeing the live show, it just hit me like a sack of hammers. So good.

24 creator Robert Cochran gives The New York Times (bugmenot: bugmenot02/bugmenot) a sneak preview at season four of the show… He has no idea what’s going to happen! Honestly! They’re making it up as they go, even more so than before. That doesn’t necessarily bode well, considering the trainwreck pastiche that was season three. Season four premieres Sunday January 9 before settling into it’s new regular timeslot on Monday nights. The mid-season premiere means that there will be no repeats and no skipped weeks… it’s twenty-four straight weeks of Keifer looking angry from January through May. Or twenty-three, if the premiere is two hours long. I don’t know if I’ll do the week-by-week episode commentary like I did last year. Maybe I’ll do it… MINUTE-BY-MINUTE. Oh God, that’d suck.

I re-watched Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind last night, confirming that this was indeed my favourite movie of 2004, a fact that will be formally announced when I put up my year-end movie list (yes, there’ll be one of those – hey, end of year is slow news time, I have to fill in the days somehow). Since I’d already seen it, I was able to concentrate more on details like Jon Brion’s wonderful score and Jim Carrey’s terrific performance by instead of trying to follow the twisty plot. It was also interesting to find that the messed up audio effects I noticed in the theatre were in fact part of the film, but the film melting on the projector halfway through was not.

SHOT rings up his best of 2004.

Okay, check out these choice words from American right-wing talking heads Ann Coulter and Tucker Carlson about the Great White North recently, spurred by Bush’s visit to Ottawa. And I thought my head hurt before. Bonus points for maybe the first intelligent words I’ve ever heard out of Carolyn Parrish’s mouth, though she let Canada take way more crap than she should have. From Torontoist.

I have no idea who Kanye West is.

np – Yo La Tengo / I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One

The Fiery Furnaces release an album-length EP collecting b-sides and radio session on January 11 via Sanctuary. Fluxblog has one mp3 and Teaching The Indie Kids To Dance Again has a couple more. The Friedberger siblings’ sophomore effort Blueberry Boat seems to have been one of the most polarizing albums of the year, with folks either loving it or hating it. Me, I’m sort of in the middle (and directly contradicting the polarizing comment, yes). I’m very impressed with the artistic achievement of the record – it’s ambition is pretty damn remarkable in this day and age. That said, I can’t listen to it very often. It exhausts me. I am into it for the first half or so but then my attention begins to drift… That said, I’d like to see one of their live shows – they’re supposed to be quite the spectacles with the band playing the entire set all the way through without stopping.

Support materials: Both Pitchfork and Splendid both interviewed the band a little while back and CBC Radio 3 ran one of their lovely audio/photo features on the band a couple weeks ago. Blueberry Boat is a content-rich fansite for the band.

Following up on the success of their “Moonshot Manny (Pega Luna)” charity single ($1600 raised for Boston’s First Night so far), the Pernice Brothers have opened up the Bargain Centre on their website, where they’ll continue to release downloadable singles in return for charitable donations. The next track is “The Flu”, and it’s inspired in part by the dearth of flu vaccines in the US this season. It’s yours for a small donation ($1 minimum) which will go to DotWell, “a health services partnership of the Codman Square Health Center and Dorchester Multi-Service Center”. On a larger scale, their live DVD/CD Nobody’s Watching/Nobody’s Listening should start shipping this week to lucky pre-orderes like myself, and the new album is still eyeing a March or April release.

Metric are finally playing a proper headlining, all-access show at the Mod Club on January 21. Will this be their first non-radio station listeners only/non-festival/non-surprise/non-supporting crappy band show in Toronto since their Horseshoe gig in September 2003? I think it might. This, of course, conflicts with the Bright Eyes show at the Phoenix the same night, though that one’s an early show so keeners could quite possibly make both. Me, I’m not that keen.

Here are the pics from Sunday night’s Ted Leo cavalcade of stars. I used to love the Mod Club’s lighting, but it’s now starting to annoy me in its persistent over-the-top-ness. It’s impossible to set white balance for and the smoke machines don’t help focusing much either. And as I mentioned yesterday, some artists – like Ted – just don’t fit with big elaborate lightshows.

Daily shoegazing content: Wanna see Slowdive videos? Sure you do.

Donewaiting’s staff of writers have begun compiling their respective year-end lists. Paul from The Rub and Ryan Catbirdseat have put up their lists as well.

Ever wonder what cartoon characters would look like stripped of their skin and organs and hung up on a bio lab hook? Now you can find out… you sick, sick bastards.

I have finally gotten off my ass and started on my site redesign/rebuild. You won’t see anything for now as work is taking place at a remote, undisclosed location. I’m aiming for a January 1 relaunch, but that’s a very very very very soft deadline. Like if you were forced to jump off a building into either a giant pile of down-filled pillows or my self-imposed deadline, you’d go for the deadline without a second thought. But it’s coming.

np – January / I Heard Myself In You