Or maybe not so almost. A couple of unidentified members of Broken Social Scene (or their entourage) spent their Central Park Summerstage show in New York City on Thursday in a jail for trying to buy some pot in Washington Square Park (as well as assaulting an officer?!?). Further info at BrooklynVegan and Central Village, and The Village Voice talks to the guy who got arrested alongside the BSSers for dealing the dope (note: may be satire!). The I Love Music peanut gallery provides commentary and scorn, as well as some more info on the identities of ther perps. Pop (All Love) is tracking the scandal. Man, what a tough week for the Scene – first accosted by giant red giraffes, and then by the NYPD.

Meanwhile, in non-felony related band news, MTV News talks to Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning about the typically dramatic making of Windsurfing Nation, out October 4. And Westender has a piece on Feist (via For The Records).

Apologies to Donewaiting, but here’s a couple more Sufjan Stevens links – one from The Onion AV Club and one from SF Weekly (Via Largehearted Boy). Hey, just being thorough.

Stream “Soul Meets Body”, the new Death Cab single, at their MySpace page. Plans is out August 20.

Billboard reports that Billy Bragg has pushed back the release of his remastered early albums and the corresponding box set till next year, citing lack of time to give them the attention they deserve. He has, however, promised a North American tour to support including next year’s SxSW. Like I needed another reason to go next year… And also, Billboard has news of an Elliott Smith tribute album in the works featuring The Decemberists, among others. Nice.

TV On The Radio will be opening for Franz Ferdinand on October 18 at the Ricoh Coliseum, and presumably their other North American tour dates. Tickets for the show will run $36 to $42 and are on sale August 20. Also, Embrace have cancelled all dates on their North American tour, including the July 26 show at Lee’s Palace. Via Torr.

Last night was part one of my brother’s bachelor party, and was mainly a big Texas Hold’Em tournament, something I’ve never played before. Naturally, I was the first one eliminated – if only I’d actually read the helpful links in all that comment spam I was getting a while back. Alas. Anyway, I am going out of town for the rest of today and won’t be back until sometime tomorrow. An update will happen, but it will likely be much later in the day than usual. FYI.

np – Spoon / Kill The Moonlight

I’ve been absorbing Manchester’s Nine Black Alps in pretty much every format imaginable. First with their “Cosmopolitan”/”Over The Ocean” 7″ (which was sent to me as a promo), then their full-length UK debut Everything Is in MP3 format and their self-titled EP (which came out this past Tuesday and was also sent to me as a promo) which collects a couple of UK singles as their introduction to the US market before the album is released here in the Fall. On top of all that, I was offered the opportunity to see them make their Toronto debut at the El Mocambo last night. Yes, someone wants me to like Nine Black Alps. Did it work? Let’s find out.

Already rising stars in the UK (for whatever that’s worth), Nine Black Alps don’t really bring anything new to the table but thankfully for them, lack of originality never stopped anyone from being a rock & roll star. Named for a line from a Sylvia Plath poem, this recent Spin Band Of The Day trade in fairly generic though of-the-now-sounding garage/punk rock that stands out for its occasionally irresistable pop hooks and relatively sophisticated lyrics, overall reminiscent of a less ambitious Idlewild. This is especially evident in the single “Cosmopolitan”, which is a ragingly infectious rant against the titular fashion magazine and the damage it does to the female self-image. No, really. However, it’s telling that I enjoyed each of their releases in amounts inversely proportional to their length. The 7″ was great, the EP was alright but less impactful and the full-length definitely sports some filler. You can judge for yourself – the EP is currently the record du jour at Filter’s MySpace Booth – you can stream the whole thing there.

So how did the live show compare to the recorded versions? Wish I could tell you. Conventional wisdom dictates that the headlining act goes on last, right? Last night – not so. I showed up in time to catch some of one of the opening acts (Jack & Ginger), but since the ElMo isn’t air conditioned and was fifteen kinds of stifling, I went to take a walk outside for what I assumed would be the second opener. Couldn’t have been gone for more than 20 minutes or so, but when I got back, there was a band onstage playing what I could only describe as reasonably tight rock of an early-90s, Pacific Northwest persuasion. Sounded alright and kind of familiar, but since it was barely 10pm at this point, it couldn’t have possibly been the headliners. Well actually it could have, because it was. Yeah. I caught maybe three songs of their set before they packed it in but I didn’t realize I’d missed them until the final band came on and they most definitely were not from Manchester (nor, I determined after one song, anything I needed to hear more of)… So yeah, this was their first North American date. I hope it went well, ’cause I certainly didn’t catch it. I hope the rest of their dates go better, though. Who puts the headliner in the middle slot? I mean really. Whoever organized this dropped the ball – if I’d paid for a ticket, I’d be cheesed. Obviously, no pictures.

But I can offer some impressions based on what I did see – I can say that while I don’t get the Nirvana comparisons that I’ve seen in record reviews, it does come across live. They are channelling the Grunge with a capital G, which I find a little disappointing. Not mad for that sound. I still think that they’ve got potential, but whether or not they realize it in a way that I like remains to be seen.

And while on the topic of British buzz bands, in a coincidental sort of corrolary to Wednesday’s post, Stylus has an essay on BritPop’s evolution into what would become known as “indie” in the UK, using Placebo, Catatonia and Belle & Sebastian as case studies/cautionary tales.

Lucinda Williams will be at Massey Hall on October 3. From what I’m hearing, October is going to be a great month for shows – hopefully it will make up for all the stuff I’m missing in September.

From the ‘Fork – some details on the next release from Grandaddy, the eight-track (as in eight songs, not the archaic audio media, though I wouldn’t put it past Grandaddy to do that) Excerpts From the Diary of Todd Zilla EP. Due out sometime in the future.

Billboard has the full tracklisting for the seventh volume of Bob Dylan’s Bootleg Series, out August 30. Once again, an amazing trove of classic stuff.

Know what’s fun? Riding your bike home in the rain and catching the front tire in a streetcar track and totally wiping out. That’s fun. But that’s okay, I didn’t need that skin on my elbow anyway. I’m generally sore all over and you should see the bruise on my thigh – truly a regal shade of purple. Majestic, even. On the plus side, however, the spill seems to have sorted out some issues I was having with my gears. It shifts like a dream now. Go figure.

np – Trespassers William / Different Stars

So Pitchfork is first out of the gates with tour dates for current hipster darlings Clap Your Hands Say Yeah which include a September 18 date at the Horseshoe. Incidentally, that is the date I will be living it up in Tallinn, Estonia. I’m not so upset about missing the CYHSY show – what I’ve heard is alright but hasn’t really set my world ablaze – but I am mighty sore about missing out on their tourmates The National.

Since taking a flyer on their Alligator album in the used bins last week, I’ve been absolutely LOVING the album. I don’t know if I’m as frothing at the mouth as Stylus (more reviews at Metacritic), but I am wholly impressed. It’s moody, haunting and weary but pulls itself up of its barstool for episodes of anthemic glory at just the right moments. I am reminded of a gentler Afghan Whigs or an American Music Club reared in Gotham instead of Frisco, maybe even a little bit of Interpol if they were beatniks. Singer Matt Berninger possesses a baritone like a parallel dimension Leonard Cohen and a charming lyrical fixation with girls named Karen. Safe money puts Alligator on my year-end list. God, I hope they keep touring this record, I really want to see them.

You can stream Alligator here, courtesy of Beggars. Maybe it’s a grower – I was pretty much hooked after two listens.

That weekend I’ll also be missing the The Ear To The Ground festival, which takes over the Exhibition Place grounds September 16 through 18. They’re holding a launch party at the Gladstone next Tuesday night and will feature musical performances from Frontier Index and The Old Soul. A limited number of early bird passes for the festival will also go on sale ($40 for the whole weekend).

Show news – The New Pornographers show on October 9 really is at The Docks, tickets $22.50. Hear that? That’s the sound of that show being taken off my calendar. Regretfully, yes, but definitely so. Docks my ass. Trinity-St Paul’s turns into a full-on cabaret on October 1 when it hosts Antony & The Johnsons and CocoRosie, tickets $21.50. And finally, Ted Leo and his Pharmacists return for a show at the Mod Club on September 29, tickets $15. Ted is always a great show, I will be in attendance for certain. Oh, and Built To Spill are coming… to Rochester. Too bad that’s a Tuesday night otherwise a jaunt on the resurrected ferry might be in order. But no. No BTS for us.

The Toronto Star previews Sunday night’s Dinosaur Jr show at the Phoenix.

Speaking of which… here’s the Torontoist week in shows. Whee. Don’t forget the Torontoist party this Friday at the Embassy in Kensington. Unfortunately, I will not be able to attend but many other lovely -Ist people will be there to entertain you with their witticisms. Because everyone knows bloggers are FAR more charming and clever in real life than online. Ahem. Yeah, that’s going to be a train wreck.

Brian K Vaughan is feeling the love. The newest trade paperback for Y – The Last Man came out yesterday. Some people are wetting themselves for the new Harry Potter on Saturday – this is what I’ve been waiting for for months. Sooo good, but even at eight collected issues, too short! Need more! Nurrr nurrr.

Check out this Globe & Mail article on music blogs for a couple of quotes from yours truly. This interview was conducted about a month ago and was considerably longer than what they’ve used in the piece. I’d like to say that they excised all the really good and clever stuff, but they didn’t. Pretty much everything I had to say was inconsequential – perfectly in character. Globe staffer Zoilus seems to find great amusement in the fact that if I happened to miss a day’s post, there would probably be good cause to send out police dogs in search of my corpse. I actually found that fact rather comforting when I was living alone, actually. It was like my own personal Lifecall service – “I’ve fallen, and I can’t get up (to blog)!”

np – Crooked Fingers / Dignity And Shame

This Village Voice article about the demise of BritPop ten years ago did two things for me: One, made me feel really old. Two, made me realize that while I’ve mentioned my falling out with BritPop before in passing, I’ve never really gotten into specifics. I guess now’s as good a time as any.

Using the timeline in the Wikipedia, it seems I actually missed out on practically the whole first half of the movement when things were actually fresh and exciting, instead only getting on board for the bloat and decline of it all. The first time I heard Oasis was in first year university and I recall being thoroughly underwhelmed and disappointed by “Supersonic”. Everything I’d heard about this Oasis band made me hope that they’d alter my reality… Not so much. I hated Blur, too, because the guy who lived next door to me in residence developed a real hard-on for “Girls & Boys” and insisted on playing it almost 24/7, really really loudly. The walls there were thick, but not thick enough to stop the sound of Damon pogoing like a jackass. But despite this distaste for the alpha and omega of the movement, I bought into it hook line and sinker anyway.

With the benefit of hindsight, I can admit that I probably wanted to buy into the culture of it all as as much as anything. For someone looking for some sort of musical identity to get through university with, it seemed a natural fit. It was a haven for someone of the skinny, geeky persuasion and anyway the girls were cute (emo hadn’t been invented yet – god, if I were five years younger… shudder). Toronto in particular was/is especially conducive as a city to Anglophilia – Britpop nights at dance clubs were and still are commonplace and if nothing else, they offered something to do on Thursday and Saturday nights. While I didn’t necessarily look the part (I had no interest in the fashion aspect of it and my hair wouldn’t do that mod cut thing anyway), I ate up everything from a musical perspective. Even if I didn’t particularly like it, I would probably buy it anyway, either to hopefully grow into it or at the very least, maintain appearances of being completely in the know.

The thing is, after a while I realized I wasn’t really enjoying it all that much. More and more of the acts the British press was trying to convince me would be the next saviours of music turned out to be, well, more than a little bit crap – you can only recycle the same influences so many times before it all gets excessively generic and creatively stagnant. Which isn’t so much a problem if you just want something that sounds like the last thing you liked, but if you wanted something more, it was sadly deficient. By this point, my CD collection was overflowing with the latest “next big things” as decreed by Select, NME, Q, etc – Shed Seven, Sleeper, Echobelly, Kenickie, Embrace, Ocean Colour Scene, The Bluetones… Not inherently bad, some of it quite passable, but not really stuff that stood up especially well outside the Britpop bubble. Instead of renewing my passion for the genre, it only reinforced how disillusioned I was with it all. Combine this epiphany with my discovery of far more interesting and adventurous music from what would soon be known as indie rock originating from this side of the Atlantic and you were looking at a complete sea change in my musical tastes. And it turns out those cute girls were only interested in tall skinny dudes with lame-o Anglo affectations. Bitter? Me? Nah.

Once again referring back to the Wikipedia timeline, by the time BritPop was officially declared dead, coincidentally the same year I graduated university, I was completely over it. Granted, it took a few years to clear out the corpses to the local used CD shops, but when I did, it actually felt good. I didn’t need to keep these reminders of my more musically gullible days around… I think there’s still probably a few stragglers that I’m hanging onto for whatever reason – Charlatans, I’m looking in your direction, but the culls are mostly complete. It took me a while but I was eventually cleansed.

These days, most of the stuff I listen to tends to be the forebears of the Britpop movement (The Chameleons, House Of Love, Echo & The Bunnymen, etc), those who never quite fit in (hello shoegazers) or the bands that were good enough to transcend the “scene” (Pulp, early Suede, Manic Street Preachers and I even got past my Blur aversion). I dont indulge in much nostalgia for the mid-90s. My college years aren’t necessarily ones I wish to relive – they weren’t especially traumatic or anything, just excruciatingly dull. Things are much more interesting now. Live in the past, die in the present, dontcha know.

Furthermore, I’ve only recently gotten over my intense suspicion and cynicism about anything the British press fetes. Once bitten, twice shy and all that. I’d like to think that I’m more resistant to the persuasive powers of hype and am able to make more judicious decisions on what is and isn’t good. Less gullible, older and wiser, etc. I am again starting to discover there are still good acts from across the pond with substance beyond all the hype and hyperbole that makes it so easy to dismiss them as more effective soap opera stars than musicians. I rather like that though there are more UK acts finding success in North America now than there have been in years, they’re doing it on their individual merits rather than riding the coattails of any media-constructed movement. But I still absolutely refuse to listen to a note of The Libertines or Babyshambles on principle alone. And you know what? Over all those years, I still never warmed to Oasis. What can I say.

I would, however, still love to have a Gibson ES-335. Someday, my pretty. Someday.

Just this for today. Back to regular scattershot posting tomorrow.

np – Okkervil River / Black Sheep Boy

Dinosaur Jr tells The Village Voice why they were so dysfunctional the first time around – “We were all socially retarded” (Via Brooklynvegan). And in the “ad nauseum” department, the band recounts over and over again how much they hated each other when they were younger but how much better it is now to The Tampa Tribune, The Washington Post, The Shepherd Express, Revolutions Live and Creative Loafing. EQ doesn’t care about the drama, just the recording secrets. Most links and photo via the Freakscene.net message boards.

The Dino Jr reunion tour hits Toronto this Sunday night. To my moderate surprise, even with it less than a week away, I’m still not feeling any sort of overwhelming desire to get a ticket and go. If someone wants to GIVE me one, that’s cool, but if not? I’ll find other ways to occupy my time. Actually, now that I think about it, I’m out of commission for most of this weekend anyway, so perhaps my indifference is for the best.

The Daily Bruin talks to Sufjan Stevens about his ambitious 50 states project.

Bradley’s Almanac has MP3s from Bettie Serveert’s recent Boston show available for download.

The Big Ticket relives Feist’s recent Minneapolis show complete with a video of her performance of “Inside & Out”.

New York’s Stellastarr* (yes, the asterix is necessary) are at the Horseshoe September 10. Good luck drawing the hipster crowd away from the Sufjan show that night.

Tuscon Weekly looks at the Neil Young influence in Kathleen Edwards’ work. Via Thrasher’s Blog.

Aversion and Largehearted Boy offer some suggestions for albums released in the first half of 2005 that are worth your attention.

Writer Dwayne McDuffie tells Toonzone what viewers can expect from the season finale of Justice League Unlimited and some teases about what’s coming next season. Since YTV was weeks ahead of the Cartoon Network in showing new episodes of JLU, the season has been over for a few weeks now here in Canada. But for those south of the border who don’t do the bit torrent thing, I won’t spoil it for you…

…Everyone dies! Hahahaha. No, not really.

np – The Replacements / Let It Be