“We’ve got a runner!”

Today, I mark the end of my third decade and start the fourth. Which now that I read back over it, makes me sound even older than I am. But yeah, it’s my 30th birthday and I’m surprisingly okay with it. If you talked to me about it four or five months ago, I was damn near freaking out. I was making all these absurd, “things I must accomplish before I turn 30” lists that, well, I didn’t really get anywhere with. I was certain that a full-on third-life crisis was in the offing (I’d already had a quarter-life crisis a few years back) and that I’d have quit my job to go work as a distant early warning station janitor up on Baffin Island or something (while still managing to blog daily).

And yet here I am, same job, new old apartment, bascially staying the same course as I’ve been on for the last few years. Am I at peace now or have I just given up? Not sure, but I sleep fine at night so whichever it is, it can’t be all bad. My life is completely unlike what I would have imagined it to be ten years ago, but then again I probably wasn’t very imaginative. No, again you can probably take that in both a positive and negative sense. Things I had taken for granted have turned out to be far more elusive than I ever would have thought, and yet I’ve also done things I couldn’t have even imagined in my salad days. Overall evaluation at the three-decade mark? Not bad, much room for improvement. Possibly a social idiot savant. Poor penmanship.

Anyway, this is turning into a LiveJournal entry so I’ll turn the naval-gazing off for now. Henceforth, I will concentrate on perfecting the various “old man” personas. Grumpy old man, dirty old man, etc. “You damn kids and your music!” Yes, that’ll do nicely.

And I know that in the original Logan’s Run the cut-off age was 18, not 30. Screw you, man.

Oh, and if anyone wants to come out, I think I’ll be heading to Pop Noir this Saturday night at Lot 16 out by Queen and Dufferin. I’ve never been but I hear it’s a good time. Not that it really matters as I intend to be moderately drunk off my face.

The used CD gods were smiling on me yesterday as I turned up copies of Husker Du’s Flip Your Wig, which I’ve been looking for for well over a year now, and the first British Sea Power album which I’ve only been seeking for maybe a month, but was happy to find damn cheap. And I picked up Explosions In The Sky’s The Earth Is Not A Cold Dead Place new for good measure, ’cause a friend lent it to me for a week and damn it’s good.

The not-so-secret history of Doves, as told to Paste. Doves are at the Kool Haus next Monday.

Another day, another Mountain Goats link from Largehearted Boy (Thanks for the birthday wishes, David!). Today, a piece in New City Chicago and a Q&A with Nerve. They talk about sex, pornography and children (but not in combination with each other!). It’s kinda weird. Come to Lee’s Palace tonight to see the Goats make their Toronto debut! And buy me a drink. It’s my birthday.

Pitchfork has an interview with John Vanderslice about what we can expect from this next album, Pixel Revolt, due out August 23.

Some show announcements – miserablist popsters Eels will be at the Phoenix on June 25 with a string section in tow to plug their latest double-album opus, Blinking Lights And Other Revelations.

And if you like your 70s revival to be equal parts prog and Southern rock, then the Secret Machines/Kings Of Leon tour should be as much fun as, um, some suitably relevant 70s reference. I was working on something involving the General Lee and the Starsky & Hutch-mobile, but it just didn’t come together. That tour hits the Kool Haus on August 3.

Natalie Portman is bald. Darlin’ don’t you go and cut your hair, do you think it’s gonna make him change?

np – British Sea Power / The Decline Of British Sea Power

So here’s the official lineup for that show on Olympic Island June 26:

Modest Mouse

Broken Social Scene

Metric

Do Make Say Think

The Most Serene Republic

Triumph Of Lethargy

Keren Ann*

* – Keren Ann is a maybe. If she does appear, Keren Ann would be the odd duck on this bill. I guess they figure since she’s in town the for the Jazz Festival the day before, why not? I wonder how her stuff would go over a) in a big open field, and b) to a crowd of Modest Mouse-loving indie kids.

Early bird tickets go on sale today at 10AM with a CFNY password (you’ll have to look up the specifics elsewhere) for $36.50 and regular tickets go on sale this Saturday for $42.50 at Ticketmaster, Rotate and Soundscapes. There’s also an extra $6 surcharge per ticket that covers the ferry ride and a charitable donation towards island improvements. While it’s a perfectly solid lineup, it’s not enough to get me to shell out the $50 to go sit in a field. I don’t know what the bill would have had to be to persuade me, but this isn’t it.

Do you like my badass Photoshop pic of the two headliners? They look like they’re ready to throw down. Broken Social’s got the numbers and Andrew Whiteman’s got the muscle T, but Modest Mouse have that crazy-ass look in their eyes. I bet they fight dirty. Isaac Brock would probably bite your ear off so much as look at you.

Alan Sparhawk has posted a letter on the Low message board explaining why the band has cancelled all upcoming touring plans – he’s not right in the noggin. Best wishes to Alan and his friends and family that he gets well soon.

Ben Folds, Ben Lee and Rufus “Not Ben” Wainwright are at the Kool Haus on August 9. I’m honestly not sure who’s got top billing on this show. I suspect it’s not Ben Lee, though.

Tiny Mix Tapes has a quickie interview with M Ward.

Stereogum readers play mad libs with the sentence, “I SAW ROCK & ROLL’S ________ AND ITS NAME IS _________”. Hilarity ensues.

So I’m watching the trailer for The Lion, The Witch & the Wardrobe and I’m thinking, man – this looks like The Lord Of The Rings done in all primary colours. I hope that they take some time between now and the Christmas release date to rub some dirt on the digital effects. It doesn’t look very good right now.

24: So this is how I see the end of season 4 – never mind the missile, that’s old news. The US hands over Jack to the Chinese for his part in, um, invading China, and season five is all about Jack escaping from a Chinese prison where all the guards are clones of James Hong (www.jameshong.com). Like Agent Smith in The Matrix, except they’re all dressed as the bad guy from Big Trouble In Little China. Just wait, it’ll happen. I’m surprised the US government didn’t try to pin the consulate ambush on Marwan. After all – he is the man responsible for today’s attacks. But a nice quick takedown of the big bad, glad they didn’t drag that out. Pity about the missile, though.

Today is my last day as a twenty-something. I should be getting drunk or something, shouldn’t I? Yeah, I think I’ll just finish watching Sealab 2021.

np – Godspeed You Black Emperor! / Lift Yr Skinny Fists Like Antennas To Heaven!

I bought a new TV this weekend – nothing fancy by today’s standards, but a huge improvement over my 20-year old set. Hooked it up to the DVD player with high-techy component video cables and the first thing I watched with my grand new entertainment centre? Season two of Sealab 2021! I had a feeling I wasn’t getting the full sensory experience with my old setup and boy was I right. There’s so much detail and depth to the images, it’s like a veil has been lifted from mine eyes. The oranges of the jumpsuits are so much more vivid now! I mean, Bizarro vivid!

Junkmedia interviews John Darnielle of Mountain Goats, who promises that a song about Ozzy may be inevitable. The Kalamazoo Gazette and The New Yorker also have Goats features.

Pitchfork reviews the double-disc rerelease of Elvis Costello’s King Of America and find that it is still a great record. Enlightening.

The Sunday Herald finds out why Teenage Fanclub have decided to go it alone in releasing their new album Man-Made. They get a little help on these shores from Merge who are putting out the record on June 7. Via LHB.

Comics2Film reports that Hugo Weaving, aka Agent Smith and Elrond, has replaced James Purefoy in the title role of the film adaptation of V For Vendetta. I guess they can get away with swapping actors this far into production since the character wears a Guy Fawkes mask through the whole film. Dub new dialogue over previously shot scenes et voila!

The New York Times (bugmenot: iwantnews093/iwantnews) examines the phenomenon of geek films currently ruling the box office. Our time is now!

And this is what we call a slow news day. Hopefully something amazing will happen today.

np – Broken Social Scene / You Forgot It In People

It looks as though New Zealand’s Brunettes will be joining Nada Surf as support for the leg of the Rilo Kiley tour that hits The Opera House on May 19. I quite enjoyed them when they opened for The Shins last month – it may be featherweight, but their giddy pop is great fun. I got their last album Mars Loves Venus at the Shins show and wouldn’t mind picking up some more of their stuff – I don’t think the new When Ice Met Cream EP was out yet when they were here last, hopefully they’ll have some copies available in a couple weeks. Hey Paul – that’s twice in a month I’ll be seeing them. Jealous?

Pitchfork reports that Nottingham’s Six By Seven have signed a deal with The First Time RecordS to release their latest album :04 in North America on August 16. Which is great, except I reported this back in February and the album came out last Fall. Furthermore, :04 will only be their new album for another couple of weeks – then Artists Cannibals Poets Thieves will get a formal release on May 23 in the UK (though it’s been available for sale from the band through their website for a few weeks now). But while PF is hardly on the ball with the news, at least the reporter managed to tell everyone about when he was deflowered, and really – isn’t that the important thing? Eww.

The Boston Globe talks to John Darnielle about putting his childhood on public display on The Mountain Goats’ new album, The Sunset Tree. The Goats are at Lee’s Palace this Wednesday – you should be there. Link from Largehearted Boy, who has been you one-stop Mountain Goats shop for links and reviews lately.

Billboard reports on Drive Well, Sleep Carefully: On the Road With Death Cab For Cutie, a tour documentary on Death Cab For Cutie that follows the band through their 2004 tour for Transatlanticism and will feature live performances, rehearsals and demos. The film will debut at the Seattle International Film Festival next month and come out on DVD from the good people at Plexifilm on July 26. Death Cab’s major-label debut Plans is slated for a September 20 release.

Also not coming to a theatre anywhere near you – Better Off In Bed, a film about rock-n-roll and relationships starring Vancouver’s New Pornographers and The Gay. Sounds fascinating.

The Onion AV Club goes through the liner notes of Elvis Costello’s latest round of reiussues and compiles an album-by-album retrospective, in Declan’s own words.

On my way home from running errands yesterday afternoon, I passed through the Toronto chapter of the Global Marijuana March. There were hundreds of people bumming around in Queen’s Park, the seat of Ontario’s government, handing around bongs, blunts, spliffs, joints, ganja, etc etc, while the cops just stood around and watched. I got a buzz just walking through them all.

np – British Sea Power / Open Season

It was a bit of an Arts & Crafts love-in last night at the Poor Alex for what was essentially a coming-out party for the label’s newest signees, The Most Serene Republic. You couldn’t throw a stone without hitting a member of Broken Social or Stars, assuming you could find room to wind-up – the place was pretty packed.

For my part, I was as curious to see what these Milton-ites were about as I was to see any other act on bill. I found the one MP3 available on their website was equal parts compelling and confounding so I figured the live show would be more revealing. Impressions? They look like they’re barely out of highschool, but certainly seem to have all the right ingredients for Can-indie buzziness. Signed to a hip label? Check. Co-ed vocalists? Check. At least a half-dozen members? Check. Absurdly high-energy, spastic live show? Check.

Unfortunately, the band as really frickin’ loud and the sound was pretty dire so it wasn’t the best environment to pass judgement on their songwriting acumen. If I was to craft some sort of witty one-line description, however, it’d be something along the lines of The Dismemberment Plan informed by the Elephant 6 rather than the DC hardcore scene. There was no shortage of musical complexity onstage, odd time signatures and stop-start dynamics (all anchored by one of the most ridiculously good drummers I’ve seen in a long time – his genome must be mapped and his abilities made available to the masses) but I’m pretty sure there was enough pop sensibility to keep them from getting tagged as too arty/proggy. I was fairly impressed but will wait to see them open for British Sea Power in a couple weeks – hopefully with a better sound mix – before making any final declarations of awesomeness.

I’d seen Jon-Rae & The River’s drunken hillbilly soul revival a few times before and while entertaining, it’s never really grabbed me the way it has for others. I guess I like my alt-country a little more on the whisky-soaked and brooding side. But seeing as how they seem to crop up around town a fair bit, I’m sure they’ll get more chances to win me over in the future. Or not.

Amy Millan of Stars was the headliner on this evening, performing in the all-too rare solo format. I’d seen her doing her own stuff a couple times before, once with a band and once solo acoustic, but this time she mixed it up yet again playing solo electric. Feeling very low key and laid back, Amy played a short set of her own country-flavoured material, much of which pre-dated Stars, as well as a lovely reading of “Look Up” from her day job. The music was interspersed with stories from the road and tributes to her first music teacher who was in the audience. I was a little disappointed there was no mention of Honey From The Tombs, her completed solo record, and a little alarmed when she said she had no album and nothing to promote. Has it been shelved again? Stars-mate Evan Cranley joined her onstage for an encore playing trombone, and the show ended with her singing “Happy Birthday” to the Most Serene Republic keyboardist, and they all went off and had cake. We in the audience went home.

Photos here – there was none of the wonderful lighting love from Thursday night, sadly. Workable, but I was spoiled from the night before.

Still with the Arts & Crafts news, flagship act Broken Social Scene will be headlining a festival at Olympic Island in the Toronto Islands on June 26. So far it’s just them and Modest Mouse on the bill, but they promise many many more acts. And there’d damn well better be if they’re going to justify the $48.50 ticket price. This is a show I’d like to go to – the ferry docks are just straight down my street – but for that price they’d have to have, like God performing with the Funk Brothers and Joe Satriani on guitar. I’ll be watching to see how this bill shapes up and how much rending of clothes and gnashing of teeth there is from the indie kids about the cost of admission. Thanks to Tab for the info.

And finally, Low has cancelled their Spring tour due to health reasons. Obviously disappointed here, I’m digging The Great Destroyer and was really looking forward to seeing them, but mainly I hope that whatever the problems are get rectified quickly and everyone in and around the band is well.

np – Art Of Fighting / Wires