I can’t count the number of times I’ve had this conversation:

Random person: “Blah blah blah like in in Nightmare Before Christmas blah blah blah”

Me: “I’ve never seen Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Random person: “What are you, a crackbaby?”

But truthfully, I’ve never seen The Nightmare Before Christmas. I’ve been advised many times to remedy this, and people have even offered to help, but it hasn’t happened yet. Dunno why, just hasn’t. But now, at least, I have seen Corpse Bride.

First off, Corpse Bride is amazing to look at. I couldn’t believe it was all stop-motion clay animation (remember, I’ve never seen Nightmare so my best frame of reference for claymation is Gumby and Rudolph The Red-Nosed Reindeer). The Gorey-gothic visuals and character design were wonderful, as was the animation. The whole thing was a feast for the eyes – at a few points, I even stopped listening to the dialogue so as to concentrate on taking everything in with my eyes. Which is just as well, because the story, while sufficiently cute and charming, is kind of rote and uninspired. A film that looked as good as this really deserved a script up to the task. Furthermore, I wasn’t sure if it was supposed to be a musical or not – there were only a handful of songs, and none were especially good at all, some were actually bad. But despite these reservations, it’s still a fun (if short) film – just not a classic.

Paste has an interview with Mike Johnson, one of the animation gurus behind Corpse Bride.

Christmas comes early for shoegazers this year. On November 14, Sanctuary will be reissuing all three Slowdive albums, including the long out-of-print and expensive Pygmalion. But that’s not the best part – both the Souvlaki and Just For A Day reissues will come with bonus discs chock full of rarities and EP-only material. This is the treasure trove of stuff that people were hoping would have appeared on the Catch The Breeze compilation earlier this year. The tracklists are as follows:

Just For A Day:

1. Slowdive

2. Avalyn 1

3. Avalyn 2

4. Morning Rise

5. Morning Rise

6. She Calls

7. Losing Today

8. Holding Our Breath

9. Golden Hair

10. Shine

11. Albatross

12. Catch The Breeze (Peel Session)

13. Song 1 (Peel Session)

14. Golden Hair (Peel Session)

Souvlaki:

1. Some Velvet Morning

2. So Tired

3. Moussaka Chaos

4. In Mind

5. Good Day Sunshine

6. Missing You

7. Country Rain

8. In Mind (Bandulu Mix)

9. In Mind (Reload Mix).

Half of the Souvlaki bonus tracks appears on the North American SBK edition, so that’s not quite as exciting (I still have to have it, of course), but the Just For A Day material is pretty much worth selling a kidney for. I don’t know if the albums themselves are getting any sort of remastering spit-and-polish, nor if there will be new liner notes, but either way – my cup runneth over.

And an extra early Christmas gift for me and me only – I finally got a copy of Ride’s Going Blank Again on LP. It’s en route from the UK right now. Double vinyl, baby. Sweet.

Carl Newman wonders to eye if maybe starting an east coast/west coast feud with Broken Social Scene might not be a solid career move for The New Pornographers. PopMatters also has an interview.

Pop (All Love) quantitatively and conclusively determines that Franz Ferdinand are the best band in the world. QED.

The week in shows at Torontoist. I was exhausted when trying to write this last night. It took forever and it shows.

np – Slowdive / Souvlaki

Check out the minisite for The Cardigans’ new album, Super Extra Gravity. There will eventually be song samples but for now, you can see the sass-tacularly sexy video for the first single, “I Need Some Fine Wine And You, You Need To Be Nicer” featuring a blonde-again Nina Persson. Yeah, you need to register to see it, but come on – a big multinational conglomerate like Universal? They already know who you are. There’s no point in trying to hide. Or you can just watch the whole thing anonymously here. There’s some behind-the-scenes photos from the making of the video here.

The new official bio makes it sound like Super Extra Gravity is going to be all over the map in terms of sound and style, quite a contrast from the consistently lovely melancholy of Long Gone Before Daylight. As Nina puts it, “Compared to our mature last album this is an obnoxious teenager”. Sounds good to me. The new album is out in Europe October 17 and in Canada on October 25. Keeners should know there’s a deluxe edition being released overseas that comes with a making-of documentary DVD. Each international edition will also haev exclusive bonus tracks. Completists weep. CDWow has both UK editions available for pretty reasonable prices, though. There is no current planned release of the album for the US. American fans get the shaft again.

JAM! thinks The New Pornographers are an excellent example of the musical socialism that defines so many current Canadian collectives, but Carl Newman prefers to think of them as “a benevolent dictatorship”. The Pornos will rally the faithful to their cause at the Phoenix this Sunday.

Delays delays delays. Wilco’s Kicking Television double live album has been delayed a fortnight and will now be coming out November 15.

Check it out – I am linking to Bob Mould, who is linking to me, who is linking to him, who is… whoa. Heavy. And here’s an interview with Bob from EQ, courtesy of Bob.

Lee’s Palace will host a fairly buzzy bill on November 12 – West Yorkshire (that’s in the UK, kids) family act The Cribs are in town with Brooklyn space-rockers Longwave and Los Angeles stoner rock duo Giant Drag. Eclectic? Very much so. Tickets are $13.50. I saw Giant Drag at SxSW this past March, and they were… entertaining. Not so much musically but I’m pretty sure singer-guitarist Annie Hardy was one something (or several somethings) because her between-song banter was totally out there and fairly hilarious. And she rates rather highly on the “cute girl with a Gretsch-o-meter”.

And speaking of SxSW – who’s going next year? I’d like to, but am contemplating costs, logistics, arrangements, etc etc. Anyone from around T.O. got any interesting ideas for getting down there? My wristband hookup from last year now has little itty bitty babies to tend to, so I don’t think I’ve got anything covered on that end either. And if anyone would have a spare photo pass… Huh. That looks like a lot of work. Maybe I’ll just stay home.

I believe I’ve identified the source of those goddamn annoying flash ads that have been showing up on my site lately – I used to use Nedstat for a site counter, and they’ve recently become WebStats4U – that’s fine. What’s not fine is THIS new policy of serving up ads on top of sites running their meters. I agreed to nothing of the sort, and maybe they think they’re doing a favour by saying “nothing will be implemented directly into your website like banners, buttons or links”. Hi, fuck you. You paste a goddamn ad across the face of my site and then act like you’re respectful of my property? Go to hell. I’ve removed the WebStats4U counter from my site and recommend that anyone else who has one of these things on their sites either a) remove it posthaste or b) demand a cheque from them for using your site for advertising.

np – My Morning Jacket / At Dawn

I’ve been living with My Morning Jacket’s Z for some time now (it’s in stores today), though it hasn’t gotten as much rotation as some stuff simply because the security on the promo copy won’t allow it to be imported into iTunes, thus limiting the amount of spins it gets at work to approximately zero. I could use the player that the disc itself installs, but nuts to that. Anyway, that there? Digression. Back to business. I have still managed to spend a goodly amount of time with the new album and you know what? I still don’t know what I think.

It’s quite a departure from both the southern rock of It Still Moves and the reverb-drenched atmosphere of At Dawn – devotees of either record will probably find something to like and dislike about the new record. It’s certainly a bold move on the band’s part, thanks at least in part to some personnel turnaround and the addition of two new memebers since their last studio record as well as working with legendary British producer John Leckie. An eclectic record to be sure, it sounds like a stylistic dog’s breakfast but somehow very right at the same time. Individually most of the songs are good to excellent, but as a whole I can’t tell if there’s no flow or if it’s so deep that I just haven’t tapped into it yet. There’s little doubt this album is a grower – it just hasn’t hit full bloom with me yet, but I’m willing to bet that it will, sooner or later. Whether it’ll be soon enough to convince me to shell out the $30 to see them at the Guvernment on October 19? Magic 8 ball says: unclear.

Linkage – You can see an electronic press kit which includes an artfully-presented look at the making of the album. Reviews are starting to trickle in and they’re pretty positive so far. On the press side, Reuters has a short-ish piece on Z, PopMatters has a more expansive feature and Velocity Weekly gets them to play dress-up. They’ve also gone to the trouble of scanning a feature story in the new issue of Filter and they like R Kelly.

Ben Gibbard of Death Cab tells Exclaim! that “indie” ain’t nothing but a word.

Free Williamsburg talks to Mac McCaughan of Portastatic, who says Superchunk isn’t dead yet. Via Largehearted Boy.

All the Bob Dylan hoopla has resulted in a tenfold increase in sales, at least in the UK. It’s interesting to note that HMV in Canada made good on it’s promise to remove all Dylan stock from their stores in protest of him giving Starbucks exclusivity rights to his Live At The Gaslight album. Funny they’d make such a stink over a record that you can now find in every used CD shop in the city for $10.

NME has soundbites on what to expect from a couple of 2006’s most-anticipated albums, new releases from The Flaming Lips and The Arcade Fire.

Apologies to anyone who was hoping to find a review of the Posies show at Lee’s last night. I had some other stuff to take care of and really, I just wasn’t feeling up to it. And if you’re thinking I’m too old to handle two shows in two nights, talk to me after this weekend – three in four, yo. Yeah, two are early shows – what of it?

np – The Cardigans / Long Gone Before Daylight

There’s not too much to be said about Bob Mould’s return to the world of touring rock music that the media hasn’t already covered (and which I haven’t already linked – like this Pulse Of The Twin Cities piece). Sufficed to say that for me, personally, this would be my first time seeing Bob since Sugar played an incredibly improbable show at my university waaaay back in 1994 (it was one of two Canadian shows on the File Under: Easy Listening tour – one in Toronto, one in Waterloo. Whoever was booking shows for the university back then, I still owe you a beer), so I was fairly excited about it.

Even though that Sugar show is eleven years into the past, it’s still the best point of comparison I have for last night’s show. For starters, a lot of the material was the same – Copper Blue formed a pretty large bulk of the set list. True to his word, Mould’s setlist drew on all periods of his career, starting out with Sugar’s fuzzed-out power pop, segueing into his more contemplative recent and late-80s solo material and of course, those Husker Du songs which hadn’t been played in so very long (in Toronto, anyway). When the Huskers portion of the set arrived, it opened not with a rush of punked out fury that some might have expected or hoped, but instead with the Candy Apple Grey dirge, “Hardly Getting Over It”. THEN came the punked out fury as “Could You Be The One” whipped the entire crowd into an instant frenzy.

The crowd was an interesting one – as you might expect, it was definitely an older bunch who had probably grown up with Bob’s music. One fan whom I talked to seemed shocked I’d only seen Bob live once before and never with Husker Du, for which my excuse was that I was in grade school at the time and probably wouldn’t have gotten in the clubs. I still don’t think she was satisfied with that answer. Another guy decided that it would be punk-appropriate to start spitting geysers of beer onto the audience during “Hoover Dam”, to which Bob responded quickly by spraying a mouthful of water right back onto him. He seemed tickled by the gesture.

It was interesting to be able to compare and contrast the different phases of Mould’s musical career all played together like that – though all stylistically distinct, they’re still remarkably consistent. Of course, it helps that they were all delivered at absurdly high volume via Mould’s intense, buzz-saw guitar. Mould himself was also looking impressively lean, fit and quite happy, often wearing a big grin on his face and he playing and moving with an energy that would put many younger artists to shame. He even talked to the crowd – saying “thanks” a few times and introducing the band. Eleven years ago, I think he said “thanks” once, and sullenly at that. His band definitely deserved props – bassist Jason Narducy did a fine job of covering the vocal parts for Grant Hart/Greg Norton/Dave Barbe and locked in super-tight with drummer Brendan Canty, also of Fugazi. If I’ve any complaint, it was that it was SO loud up front that sometimes it would take me a goodly portion of the song before I caught a familiar riff or lyric that allowed me to identify it. I suspect I was in the minority there, though, as most of the crowd roared with approval with each opening note.

Locals Uncut have been opening for Bob on this leg of the tour, with this hometown show being their final stop. Though they’ve been around a while and have some profile, I’ve never heard them before. Like, never. Turns out they’re fairly adept at the heavy rock thing. Couldn’t hear the vocals for shit so I could only judge based on the instrumental end of things, but they were alright. They got some moves and some hair. The could go places.

Back to Mould – I was happy to see the Sugar-era Lake Placid Blue Strat Plus still in action. To get the Huskers-era Ibanez Flying V back into service was probably too much to ask for… and it’s probably either been sold or destroyed by now. And on the souvenier front, I got a shredded pick which Bob threw right in front of me. Sweet. And of course, there’s photos.

Exclaim! has a piece on the wealth of high profile Canadian indie releases coming out this Fall. It’s worth noting that the big board at Soundscapes last night said that the Broken Social Scene record was delayed until next week. Is the big board correct? I don’t know, but it wouldn’t be the big board if it wasn’t worthy of the title. We’ll find out tomorrow if and when the anguished cries of the indie kids denied their Broken Social love ring out around town. But they can console themselves with the delayed-from-last-week Metric album. Update: Apparently manufacturing delays have pushed back the release in Canada, but it’s still out tomorrow in the US. Bah.

Quick show announcement – Portland’s Joggers and GoGoGo Airheart are at Sneaky Dee’s November 14. I got an advance copy of The Joggers’ A Cape And A Cane a little while ago and am still formulating thoughts – but I can see these guys getting big regardless of what I think. They’re already getting some buzz, so if you’re all about staying ahead of the cool kid curve, this could be one for your calendar.

One Superman Returns teaser trailer, coming up.

Oh look – the CBC lockout appears to be ending. I’m not surprised – as I’ve been telling everyone who’ll listen (which is no one), there was no way the lockout would continue past the start of the NHL season (aka this Wednesday). No way, not with their biggest money maker coming back after a year away. It’s like the garbage strike a few years ago. They suddenly reached an agreement a couple weeks before the Pope arrived for Pope-fest – just enough time to clear the mountains of trash off the streets before the pontiffs and pilgrims (and their pilgrim dollars) came to town.

np – Sea Ray / Stars At Noon

Grandaddy / Excerpts From The Diary Of Todd Zilla (V2) Some two plus years have gone by since Modesto, California’s Grandaddy released Sumday – since then, there have been some rereleases of old material and one of those weird mixtape compilation CDs, but no properly new material. The Diary Of Todd Zilla rectifies that situation as a stopgap before the release of their next full-length next year. An EP clocking in at just over 30 minutes, Diary is a perfectly-sized portion for those who enjoy their Grandaddy in smaller doses, like myself. I’ve always had some difficulty maintaining interest through an entire album, so the seven tracks here don’t overstay their welcome. Anyone wondering if their sound has evolved at all while they’ve been away need not worry, this is the Grandaddy you know and love. There’s spacey, lightly stoned anthems about technology built on fuzzed guitars and thrift store keyboards, all seasoned with Jason Lyttle’s plaintive whine and served up in both speeds, fast and slow. It’s actually a little surprising how by-the-numbers the material is, you’d have thought that with the time off they’d be trying something new. Perhaps they’re saving the groundbreaking stuff for the album.

Silversun Pickups / Pikul (Dangerbird) Silversun Pickups make their debut with the Pikul EP which marrys tense riff-rock with atmospheric production touches in a manner not unlike fellow SoCal-ers Autolux. Brian Aubert’s hoarse vocals skirt with grating but with further listens become easier to take. Bassist Nikki Monninger’s sweet harmonies help take the edge off and when she takes lead vocals, as she does on the delicate “Creation Lake”, it’s positively delightful. The songwriting is a little too much on the lumbering, dirgey side but lead single “Kissing Families” is quite solid and hopefully proves to be the rule and not the exception. Their debut album is due out next year.

np – Elbow / Leaders Of The Free World