Sad news from the Beulah camp – while they are set to begin recording their new album in Februrary (yay!), they’ve also declared that it will be their last. I guess they’re tired of the rock’n’roll lifestyle, and after this album and the ensuing tour, they’re calling it a day. Very disappointed…

Still working on my little review for Adaptation – how apropos.

Thanks to Azra for the Christmas cookies and the super-cool vinyl CD-Rs. Pity I don’t have a burner… soon, though.

np – Sleater-Kinney / One Beat

So I get an email today from Garry about my year-end Best Of list, and to explain what made Wilco’s Yankee Hotel Foxtrot so interesting to me. I gave it a fair bit of though, and elected to make it a blog entry instead of just an email reply.

First off, I’ve been a Wilco fan for about seven years now, since A.M.. I’ve been delighted to watch them evolve from the fairly straight alt.country pop band they were back then to their current status as arguably one of the best bands in the world (my biased opinion, but I’m certainly not alone in that estimation). Some have compared Wilco in 2002 to Radiohead in 1997, circa OK Computer – that is, a band at the peak of their creative powers. The point of this is that I have followed Wilco through their evolution and trust in their creative muse no matter where it might take them. They’re preaching to the choir.

However, with the media hoopla surrounding the release of YHF and all the accompanying dramatics and the appearance of the album at the tops of so many year-end lists, there’s a lot of people coming to the record with an attitude of, “Prove to me why you’re so great”. This is absolutely fair – Lord knows I approach most hyped-up bands I’m not familiar with in the same way. And in this sense, I feel for anyone who’d play YHF without knowing what to expect. This is not an accessible record, at least not on first listen. The songs are stripped down and skeletal, there’s almost no polish here at all. It’s not mixed like a convetional pop record – vocals are either buried or uncomfortably dry and upfront. There’s a pervasive sense of bleakness and heartache throughout the record, echoed in the music, lyrics, production… and it’ll either grab you by the heartstrings and never let go, or it won’t. Simple as that.

Beyond just the record, there were some additional circumstances that made YHF so special for me.

1) Walking down the southbound subway platform at Bloor Station just as a train had unloaded it’s human cargo during rush hour, the outro of “Poor Places” on the headphones. I was walking against traffic, watching the sea of commuters break around me and reassemble in my wake, the steady crescendo of noise and static in my ears, the detached voice intoning, “Yankee… Hotel… Foxtrot…” A moment of transcendence, a moment of clarity. Just a moment. I think of it every time I hear the song.

2) October 1, 2001, The Phoenix Concert Hall – barely three weeks after the attacks on New York City. The shock of it all still hasn’t worn off. I’ve had tickets to this show for probably over a month, and it thankfully hasn’t been cancelled as I’d expected it to… concerns about travelling, et cetera. The band had considered it, but elected to hit the road anyway, because what else were they were going to do? I think they’d been officially dropped by Reprise by this point, and had begun streaming the album for free off their website for a while now. I had a copy on mp3 since August or so.

Without getting into a full review of the show more than a year after the fact, I will detail the two moments that are burned into my cerebral cortex. First, about halfway through the set. “Ashes Of American Flags”. The title alone has an added poignancy now, but from the moment Jeff Tweedy plays that twisted, aching guitar riff, there was just an indescribable sense of release and catharsis. The desolation and just pure sadness conveyed during the reading of that song, I still can’t put into words. The closing solo, which was little more than Tweedy, eyes closed, spraying bursts of fuzzed-out noise, articulated how I’d been feeling for almost a month since I watched the Trade Center collapse on television. It was moments like that that remind me just how powerful music can be. The uniqueness of this was evidenced at their show this past April at Convocation Hall. “Ashes” was done on acoustic and while excellent, just didn’t send the same chills down my spine. Maybe that wound was just closed.

The second moment in the show was during the second or third encore – I don’t recall exactly – when they broke out Woody Guthrie’s “California Stars”, from the Mermaid Avenue album, and brought local boy and former Wilco sideman Bob Egan on stage to play guitar. If “Ashes” was the agony, then “California Stars” was the ecstasy – it was ebullient, healing, redeeming. We had been rent asunder but were being put back together. It was an affirmation that we could get back up and continue.

This is what I got out of the record, the music, this ‘year of Wilco’. This is why it’s not only my favorite record of the year, but one of my favorites ever. The records that people remember and treasure are the ones that mark a certain point in their lives, the ones that resonate with the events that made them who they are.

It’s like that old Chinese blessing/curse – “May you live in interesting times”. This has been an interesting year for me, on both sides of the coin, and Yankee Hotel Foxtrot has been the soundtrack.

np – Wilco / Yankee Hotel Foxtrot

New MP3 for this week, this time The Flaming Lips covering “Somewhere Over The Rainbow” – I got this off a CD of material recorded live at XFM in London which came free with an old issue of Select.

Was at Five Seventeen’s birthday party last night, a pleasant, low-key affair. Despite raging allergies I played with his cat Jean for a good while. It was especially nice when she took a shine to my lap and just sat there for 10 minutes or so while I pet her. Furry animal therapy, good for the soul.

Bringing Azra her Christmas gift today and going to see Adaptation, or at least that’s the plan. A plan I’ve made before, to no avail…

Rolling Stone has posted their year-end critics lists. I admit to being surprised and unsurprised by the quality of the stuff listed – it just proves that the writers are being told what to promote as opposed to being able to discuss the music they actually like. Mags like RS get equal parts contempt and pity from me. Well, far more contempt really, but there’s still some pity.

np – All-Time Quarterback / All-Time Quarterback

One of my favorite holiday season traditions is Muchmusic’s Fromage. Now they’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember, but in the beginning the show itself was a contender for stinker of the year – Christopher Ward (and later, Natalie Richard) couldn’t possibly have been more annoying and their ‘picks’ were almost always totally obscure Latvian polka-punk bands or whatnot – bands and videos who Much had never played anyway – no doubt in fear of offending someone at the record labels if even a disparaging syllable would be uttered about one of their artists.

Well no longer, thank god. Ed The Sock has been host for a few years now, and he is no-holds-barred in taking the piss out of heavy rotation artists. The segment I just watched was merciless in attacking Madonna, Britney, J-Ho, Christina SKANK Aguilera… it was marvellous. I rarely if ever watch MuchMusic, but this is the sort of programming you want to make a bowl of popcorn and curl up under a big warm blanket for. Booyaka.

np – Sleater-Kinney / All Hands On The Bad One

Someday I will perfect the over-easy egg. But that day was not today.

So this has been my least-spendy Boxing Day/Week ever, I think. 6 CDs overall – that’s hardly anything. Granted, there were probably at least that many more I could have gotten, but I can’t wipe out everything on my list in one fell swoop – where would that leave me? WITH NO REASON TO LIVE, that’s where. And yes, I am fully conscious of how sad that is.

But seriously, I am going to be dropping upwards of a couple grand in the next few months on a new computer, so I shouldn’t be too concerned about being thrifty right now. To say nothing of the fact that I will probably be paying taxes instead of getting a return for the first time ever this year, and need to finally contribute to my RRSP’s again (my other ones are doing job of losing money as is)…

Tonight is 517’s birthday party. Well his, as well as two other people I don’t know. I’m wondering how many people will be there – his place isn’t very big. Well it should be interesting, anyway. How many times have I gotten to say, “I’m in the band” in a social setting, anyway?

np – The Magnetic Fields / Holiday