Jim Noir / Tower Of Love (Barsuk) Jim Noir may hail from Manchester, England but there’s some serious Athens, Georgia informing his latest record Tower Of Love, though considering most of the Elephant 6 drew from the great British psychedelic bands of the 60s and 70s, the turnabout is fair play. Noir cops mainly from the dreamy, pastoral end of the pool though, crafting an exceedingly laid back and mellow record, which like many UK debuts is actually a compilation of three early EPs. But despite its piecemeal origins, it sounds quite cohesive and consistent if a bit cutesy over the long haul. An ideal soundtrack to running through a meadow in slow-motion. MP3: Jim Noir – “Key Of C” Video: Jim Noir – “Eanie Meany” (ASX) eCard: Jim Noir MySpace: Jim Noir

Blood Meridian / Kick Up The Dust (Outside) There is a cowboy on the cover of Blood Meridian’s Kick Up The Dust. He is not lost. He is not there by accident. For this record contains cowboy music. Okay, it’s not exactly the second coming of Hank Williams or even Gram Parsons – it sounds too determinedly contemporary to draw those parallels – but the new album from the Vancouver five-piece does have a distinctive western flavour, and I’m talking spiritually and not geographically (though they are from the west). Matthew Camirand (also bassist in Vancouver’s Black Mountain) sings in a sort of hybrid rasp-drawl and pretty much the whole record moves at a determined mosey, looking for a spitoon. Video: Blood Meridian – “Kick Up The Dust” (YouTube) MySpace: Blood Meridian

Listing Ship / Time To Dream (True Classical) Also hailing from the west coast, though the American bit they call Los Angeles, is Listing Ship. This record is loaded top to bottom with sunshiney sweet chamber folk and serene, sing-songy harmonies courtesy of Heather Lockie and Lyman Chaffee (and occasionally Shawn Lockie). Relying almost completely on acoustic string instruments they craft a sound that’s so organic, it’s… like something really organic. Even a few quirky production touches (like the chugging electric rhythm guitar on “Crooked Teeth” making way for a violin solo) and a consistent, underlying lyrical eccentricity can’t take away from the overall vibe of late afternoon sunshine streaming in through a castle turret window. Not even the murder ballads. MP3: Listing Ship – “Ichabod Crane” MP3: Listing Ship – “Chinese Song” MySpace: Listing Ship

np – Okkervil River / Down The River Of Golden Dreams

I like the idea of power pop – say yes to hooks, harmonies, melodicism and concise, sharp songwriting – but find myself frequently let down by stuff that’s put forward to me as power pop. Too often it’s like swallowing sugar packets – might taste good at first and give you a quick buzz, but ends up leaving you feeling unsatisfied and maybe a little queasy. No, creating pop music that really leaves an impression, that manages to offer more than a transient endorphin rush and offer something of substance, is a much more mysterious, almost alchemical process that few are privy to. John Roderick is one of those lucky few.

The Long Winters’ new album Putting The Days To Bed has been a bit of a revelation for me. I’ve liked what little I’ve heard from them before and almost bought a copy of their first album When I Pretend To Fall after seeing them open for Death Cab three years ago, but didn’t (I may have been poor at the time), but I think I expected to be let down in the long term as pop bands who make good first impressions often do. But having had some time to spend with the new record, I have to say it gets better and more complex with each successive listen while never losing any of its initial charm. A large part of this is Roderick’s lyrics which are grafted to perfect melodies and are wise and knowing but never smug. As it ebbs and tides from gentler numbers like the country-flecked “Clouds”, to the uptempo rock of “Rich Wife”, it’s amazing how solid an album this is – diverse yet consistent and clocking in at a tidy 37 minutes. Kids, this is how it’s done.

The Long Winters are on tour this Fall to support and will be at Lee’s Palace in Toronto October 4. Roderick recently gave Indie Interviews an exclusive, song-by-song lyrical breakdown of the album and talked to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer about lightening up on the new album. Daytrotter has an extensive interview and so does StarWars.com. They talk about Star Wars. Duh. And while this fansite hasn’t been updated in a while, it’s still a great band resource.

MP3: The Long Winters – “Pushover”
Video: The Long Winters – “Fire Island, AK” (YouTube)
MySpace: The Long Winters

A whole pile more concert announcements courtesy of rootmeansquare: Memphis, aka Torq Campbell from Stars’ other band, will be at Lee’s Palace on September 28, tickets $12. Their second album, A Little Place In The Wilderness, is out on Tuesday. Sunset Rubdown are at Lee’s Palace October 7 ($13), and Califone at the Horseshoe November 5 ($12). And freshly added to my calendar, TV On The Radio have booked a date at the Opera House for October 12, tickets $17.50. BrooklynVegan has full tour dates. Their second album Return To Cookie Mountain is out September 12 and you can stream the first single, “Wolf Like Me”, below.

Stream: TV On The Radio – “Wolf Like Me” (ASX)

Portastatic’s Mac McCaughan talks to Billboard about his/their new album Be Still Please, out October 10. Unlike the orchestral Who Loves The Sun soundtrack released earlier this year, Still is classic ‘Chunk-y indie rock goodness. And speaking of Superchunk, McCaughan mentions that they’re working on material for a new album. Mothballs be damned, Superchunk lives!

Billboard also reports that Steve Earle has signed on with New West Records after being with Artemis Records since 2000’s Transcendental Blues. His new album is due out in the first half of ’07.

The Sleepy Jackson’s Luke Steele stopped in for a session of AOL’s Interface. Audio ensued.

Chart converses with The Futureheads.

No fewer than three people sent me this YouTube link yesterday. Someone trying to tell me something?

np – Eric Bachmann / To The Races

Post-rock is a tricky genre. Practitioners are inevitably going to get likened to Godspeed You Exploding Mogwai In The Sky, and more often than not, the comparisons are apt. There’s only so many ways to spin the no vocal, spidery guitar, thundering drum, epic song length with explosive crescendo thing – but thankfully fans of the genre aren’t necessarily looking for anyone to reinvent the wheel, just give them the whole tension-release thing and do it well. It’s about the visceral response, not an intellectual one, and visceral is something Los Angeles’ Red Sparowes offers aplenty.

The band’s pedigree includes Isis, Neurosis and other such bands with great experience in heaviness, but Red Sparowes’ 2005 release At The Soundless Dawn is surprisingly not that heavy – it certainly gets heavy at points, see the aforementioned “explosive crescendo”, but it’s balanced out by quiet passages and some very tasteful pedal steel, particularly in “A Brief Moment Of Clarity Broke Through the Deafening Hum, But It Was Too Late”. Yes, the genre-requisite, super-long song titles are also present. Based on this record, they don’t break any barriers or redefine the style, but they’re good at it and they can/will definitely hurt you with sound. And really, isn’t that all we want out of life?

Red Sparowes are in town on August 19 for a show at Lee’s Palace with Philadelphia’s Versoma and Toronto’s Fjord Rowboat. I’m running a contest for passes to this show, so if you’re curious and want to take a shot at winning, click here. Otherwise tickets are $10 at the usual outlets.

MP3: Red Sparowes – “Alone And Unaware, The Landscape Was Transformed In Front Of Our Eyes”
MP3: Red Sparowes – “Like The Howling Glory Of The Darkest Winds, This Voice Was Thunderous And The Words Holy, Tangling Their Way Around Our Hearts And Clutching Our Innocent Awe”

Billboard reports that Aimee Mann’s next album One More Drifter In The Snow will be a Christmas album due out on Hallowe’en.

Well THAT only took 10 months. Nellie McKay’s Pretty Little Head will finally be coming out on October 10, courtesy of SpinArt – or at least that’s what Amazon would have us believe.

PopMatters eulogizes Arthur Lee by contemplating his greatest work, Forever Changes. I was thinking a bit about how I said the other day that I would take Forever Changes over Pet Sounds or Sgt Pepper’s, and was trying to reason out why. Best I can come up with? I hear blood in Forever Changes. Blood and snot. Take that as you will.

Pitchfork converses with Stephin Merritt about his pretty much universally reviled (by everyone I’ve talked to, anyway) Showtunes album.

The Toronto Star and Ann Arbor Free Press talk to Tim O’Reagan about stepping out from behind The Jayhawks’ kit for his first solo album. He’s in town for a free show at the Horseshoe on Tuesday, August 16 15.

Joseph Arthur is at the Mod Club on September 30. Billboard has the complete rundown on Arthur’s Fall schedule.

The New Music reminisces in list-form about Lollapalooza and points to this Spin piece about the closing day grudge match between Broken Social Scene and Red Hot Chili Peppers.

And one final Lolla note – MY PHOTOS ARE UP. Dear God, you have no idea how long these took me to process, but damn they look good if I do say so myself.

Dear eye – thanks for the shout-out, but re: “if you’re not so much into the twee”… what does that mean? Do I have to have a metal week for you? Cause I’ll do it. All Stryper, all the time.

Check out the trailer for Martin Scorcese’s The Departed, aka the Americanized Infernal Affairs, aka his latest love affair with Leonardo DiCaprio.

np – The Long Winters / Putting The Days To Bed

Her phantom show that was scheduled and then wasn’t for July 3 may have disappointed Toronto, but Cat Power is making it up in spades with not one, but two shows at Lee’s Palace on September 4 to liven up your Labour Day long weekend and give you a reason not to go cottaging. Lee’s is less than half the size of the Danforth Music Hall where she was slated to play in July, so this will be a super-intimate affair – just Chan and you/me/us, no Memphis Rhythm Band. That last point is a bit of a shame but certainly doesn’t make this any less worthwhile.

So while there’s two shows, there’s only one date. It’s a double-header with one show slated for a 7:00 start, the other for 10:30, so the question is – which one to go to? The kid in me likes the idea of the late night, warmed-up and in-the-groove Chan, but the adult in me likes the early bedtime the early show would allow. Whichever you go for, get your tickets fast – they go on sale today, will cost you $22.50 and will surely gone lickety-split. Pitchfork has the full Fall Cat Power itinerary. Many of the dates are two-fers, either on successive nights or the same night like in Toronto.

September 8 will see Brooklyn electronica act Ratatat team up with Swedish whack-pop outfit Envelopes and Portland’s Panther – I don’t even know what to call them – at Lee’s Palace for a night of music that should be unique, if nothing else. I offered my thoughts on Envelopes’ Demon back in May and I just got a copy of Ratatat’s Classics, out August 22, and it’s strangely compelling.

Also Silversun Pickups and Viva Voce are at Lee’s October 17. BrooklynVegan has more tour dates and MP3s.

And note that Film School have dropped off the Serena Maneesh tour that would have brought them to Lee’s on September 13, and have also bid adieu to their rhythm section. But other than that they insist all is well and are working on their next album.

And while I’m talking shows, here’s something that’s NOT happening at Lee’s Palace. This Saturday night, August 12, a very solid and worthwhile benefit show goes down at the Kathedral (yes, the metal club at Queen and Bathurst). The Diableros, The Coast, In Support Of Living and These Electric Lives, among others, will play Music 4 Change, a concert in support of OXFAM. Tickets are $12.

Productshop NY has posted an acoustic radio session he did with Okkervil River’s Will Sheff, including a new song – “The President’s Dead”. Yes! Weekly reviewed a solo Sheff show in North Carolina.

Prefix profiles one/two of the best independent labels in America today, the double-headed beast that is Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar.

CMJ would like to introduce you to a hip new band out of New York City – they’re called Sonic Youth and I think they’ll go far. The Globe & Mail offers a Sonic Youth guide to aging gracefully and The Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel talks to Kim Gordon. Having gone through my Sonic Youth photos yesterday, I can say that they may well have aged gracefully, but it’s still better not to look at them in bright daylight through a telephoto lens. Yikes.

Paste talks to Dallas and Travis Good of The Sadies about In Concert Volume One.

The AV Club, Glide and Billboard recount their respective Lollapalooza experiences.

np – The Mountain Goats / Get Lonely!

“Do you remember the JAMC?”

If not, then Rhino’s series of The Jesus & Mary Chain DualDisc reissues, released last month, should help your recall – unless you’re really young in which case never mind. Prefix, Pitchfork, Paste and PopMatters have all taken the opportunity to revisit the Reid Brothers’ oeuvre (or most of it since the reissues don’t include swan song Munki) and since I’ve never been one for independent thinking, I’ve chosen to do the same. And yes, this post is brought to you by the letter “P”.

First off, a couple declarations of heresy: first, I don’t really like the Jesus & Mary Chain all that much and second, Psychocandy is my least favourite of ther five albums relevant to this discussion (and no, Munki wouldn’t have been it even if it qualified). While I appreciate the ultra-crap production is sort of the point with the early records, that doesn’t make them any less grating to listen to. And no, I don’t think that the remasters would help because even if I don’t like history it doesn’t mean that I support revisionism. It’s really only Psychocandy that hurts my ears – I remember the first time I heard it. I was in a friend’s car and we put it on the CD player – and the sound from the speakers was almost indistinguishable from the noise of the engine.

No, I have to say my favourite JAMC album is Honey’s Dead, which incidentally is the one which consistently gets the lower reviews of the reissued works. Can’t really say why, maybe it’s just the brashness and attitude of it or the fact that it’s the first of their albums I got that I could actually hear the vocals. Objectively, then obviously Darklands and Automatic are better, but sentiment is a funny thing. The acoustic-y Stoned And Dethroned has some glorious moments but is far too long to be for the ages.

But these are all relative statements – as I said in the beginning, I rarely listen to my JAMC stuff. Their shadow might loom large over the last 20 years of British music (they were undeniably the proto-shoegaze band and the Reids could teach the Gallaghers a thing about brothers not getting along) but overall, I found them too rough around the edges and one-dimensional to really engage. But I am curious to those who’ve heard the reissues – how do the remasters sound? Did they mess with the sound? Or is the sound still a mess?

The reissues have stimulated a little blog activity as well – RBally posted a live JAMC set circa 1987 a few weeks ago and The Sound Of Indie dug up a video of an interview they did with The New Music waaaaay back in 1985. There’s also some videos YouTube-d in the PopMatters link above. Jim Reid continues to make music in Freeheat. What I’ve heard isn’t especially inspiring. Here’s a Psychocandy track and a Psychocandy cover by The Shins (whose new album has been pushed back to next year).

MP3: The Jesus & Mary Chain – “Some Candy Talking”
MP3: The Shins – “Taste Of Cindy”
MySpace: The Jesus & Mary Chain

Rhino also pays tribute to the late Arthur Lee. If you’re not familiar with Love, then take advantage of this sad event to learn a bit about Lee and his music – The AV Club has a lovely requiem and Chart has 12 reasons why Lee was cool. USA Today and The Los Angeles Times also have rememberences. If anyone asked me whether I was a Sgt Pepper’s or Pet Sounds guy, I’d probably say (or wish I said), Forever Changes. Lee and the reincarnated Love were supposed to come to Toronto way back in 2002, but had to cancel on account of border difficulties – namely Lee’s criminal record for firearms possession. I had always hoped that that would get sorted out somehow and I’d get the chance to see him play. Alas. Anyways, in tribute, here are some past Love covers that I’ve posted. If you’ve never heard them then do yourself a favour and find a copy of Forever Changes. I’m serious.

MP3: Billy Bragg – “Seven And Seven Is”
MP3: The Boo Radleys – “Alone Again Or”

Beth from Rock Paper Pixels interviewed Jay Ferguson of Sloan for BlogTO and got some insight into their new album Who Taught You To Live Like That? Never Hear the End of It, out September 19.

A fair number of concert announcements rolled out while I was away – let’s get caught up. The Strokes have been added to day two of the Virgin Festival – that’s September 10 – and Emily Haines will perform selections from her new solo album Knives Don’t Have Your Back at The Gladstone Hotel on September 12. The album is out September 26, full dates at Filter. Brooklyn’s Grizzly Bear will be promoting their new album Yellow House, out September 5, with a show at the El Mocambo on September 23 (Full dates here).

Looking to October, Jenny Lewis will return with more Rabbit Fur Coat for a show at Trinity-St Paul’s on October 7 (full dates at Pitchfork) and Juana Molina, who played there in June, returns with Adem on October 12 to play the slightly less formal Supermarket. Mojave 3’s October 16 show will be at the Mod Club, not Lee’s as I originally speculated, Billboard previews Frank Black’s Fall tour which brings him to the Opera House on October 26 and The Hold Steady, who were just here last week (and about which they’ve blogged), have added a Toronto date to their Fall tour in support of Boys And Girls In America (out October 3) – they’ll be at the much cozier Horseshoe on October 28. Man, if they thought their Lee’s Palace show was the hottest one yet, wait’ll they see the ‘Shoe.

Newsarama is serializing Bendis and Oeming’s Powers, one of the best comic books on the market today. They’re posting one page a day from the first story, Who Killed Retro Girl? so if you need even more pop culture to distract you from important things, there you go.

np – The Hold Steady / Separation Sunday