Jon BergmanThe story surrounding The Submarines’ debut album Declare A New State was the stuff of romantic-comedy writer fantasy – boy musician meets girl musician, boy joins girl’s band, girl joins boy’s band. Boy and girl lose each other. Boy and girl write songs about each other. Boy and girl record songs together. Boy and girl get back together. Brings a tear to the eye, does it not?

The fact that State was also a sublime bit of pop that managed to capture and convey all the emotions surrounding its genesis just made it all that sweeter. But it also raised the question of how John Dragonetti and Blake Hazard (the aforementioned boy and girl, respectively) would follow it up? You certainly couldn’t ask them to go back to the creative wellspring that fueled the first record. There’s a reason rom-coms rarely have sequels. As it happens, The Submarines didn’t have too much trouble with the question, returning last year with Honeysuckle Weeks.

Though the backstory no doubt informed the specialness of State, one musn’t forget that both Dragonetti and Hazard were (and are) also seasoned songsmiths and were cranking out records before coming together as The Submarines and though the forlorn tenor of the debut is appropriately dialed down on Weeks, the pop smarts are certainly not. Beautifully overcast heartbreak has given way to a sprightlier approach, a broader, more colourful sonic palette, though it’d be going to far to say that things have gotten sunny. While The Submarines’ songs may have the spring in their step of those who’ve known love, they also tread with the caution of those who’ve lost it.

The Submarines are on tour alongside The Morning Benders and play the Drake Underground this coming Sunday, February 15 and even though it’s technically the day after Valentine’s Day, expect it to still be a heart-melting affair. And courtesy of Against The Grain, I’ve got a pair of passes to the sold-out show to give away. To enter, email me at contests AT chromewaves.net with “I want The Submarines to be my Valentine” in the subject line with your full name in the body. Contest closes at midnight, February 12.

The OC Register and The Washington Post have features on the band.

MP3: The Submarines – “You, Me And The Bourgeoisie”
Video: The Submarines – “You, Me And The Bourgeoisie”
MySpace: The Submarines

There’s a new video from Fleet Foxes taken from their Sun Giant EP.

Video: Fleet Foxes – “Mykonos”

Ra Ra Riot have also released a new clip from The Rhumb Line. The Smith College Sophian has an interview with guitarist Milo Bonacci and bassist Matt Santos.

Video: Ra Ra Riot – “Can You Tell?”

The new Sloan video features the band frolicking in the snow with pretty girls. But not in the way you might think. They appear to be playing two nights at the Mod Club on March 11 and 12 as part of CMW.

Video: Sloan – “Witch’s Wand”

Blurt profiles Mercury Rev.

NPR has an interview with Antony Hegarty of Antony & The Johnsons. They’re at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on February 17.

Scotland On Sunday talks to Asobi Seksu’s Yuki Cikudate about their forthcoming album Hush, due out next Tuesday. They play the El Mocambo on March 3.

Le Blogotheque discusses inspiration with Zach Condon of Beirut. Billboard also have an interview. Their March Of the Zapotec/Holland double-EP set is out on February 17.

Billboard reports that the forthcoming Wilco live DVD Ashes Of American Flags will get its release on April 18 to coincide with this year’s edition of Record Store Day, but only be available at independent retailers. Corporate outlets won’t get it until two weeks later.

Pitchfork interviews Stephen Malkmus.

MPR welcomes Mark Olson & Gary Louris to their studios for a session. The Boston Globe also has an interview.

Kind of an awful concept for a site, but Rock’N’Roll Dating redeems itself with a good interview with Mark Eitzel of American Music Club, where they talk about everything including his forthcoming solo EP and musical (!) but not dating, rock’n’roll or otherwise.

eMusic, however, has polled a great number of musicians about their first crushes. Extensive, sweet and kind of hilarious.

WilcoJust before everything shut down for the holidays, a dispatch arrived from Wilco HQ detailing some of the band’s plans for the new year. Some of it was already known, in particular that work has begun on album number seven and is targeted for a Spring release.

But they also let out a bit of new news, namely that they’ll be releasing their first official concert DVD in the new year. You may recall that the shows that went into the Kicking Television live set were supposed to be taped for a companion DVD but that was scratched because of dissatisfaction with the quality of things. Well they enlisted the talents of Brendan Canty and Christoph Green of Trixie Films, producers of the Burn To Shine video series and the Sunken Treasure Jeff Tweedy live DVD, to accompany them on their Winter 2008 tour and this time, the fruits of their labours have been deemed fit to release.

And so a DVD release entitled Ashes Of American Flags will hit stores sometime in February or March of next year. More details and previews coming in the new year, and it’s worth noting that the shows recorded for this set came immediately after the band’s five-night stand at the Riviera in Chicago where they explored every nook and cranny of the Wilco catalog – check out the set lists of a couple of the shows that will be part of the DVD, and get excited.

And Jeff’s son Spencer has a blog and, well, it’s more interesting than this one.

MP3: Wilco – “Ashes Of American Flags” (live on Austin City Limits)

Spin declares Fleet Foxes’ Robin Pecknold as their “voice of the year”.

Wireless Bollinger interviews Death Cab For Cutie.

Sterogum is offering the first download from Malajube’s new album Labyrinthes, out February 10.

WOXY is offering a double-CD’s worth of free downloads comprising the best of their Lounge Act studio sessions, featuring acts such as Ra Ra Riot, The Kills, Okkervil River and Lightspeed Champion.

The Washington Post talks to Thao Nguyen, whom they declare one of their “best of 2008”.

Nickel Eye, aka Nikolai Fraiture, aka the bassist from The Strokes, brings his solo project to the El Mocambo on January 20. Low Vs Diamond accompany. Fraiture discusses the project with Billboard.

Dig For Fire has a video feature/interview with Florence Welch of Florence & The Machine.

Though The Long Blondes called it a day back in October, they still had a final farewell gift for their fans in the form of a Christmas song.

MP3: The Long Blondes – “Christmas Is Cancelled”

Frightened Rabbit contemplate various contemporary Christmas songs for The Guardian.

Frank YangIt’s impossible to fully articulate how huge Neil Young is for me. Besides having been one of my very favourite artists from the very start of my “musical awakening” some 17 years ago, it’s also not an exaggeration to say that if I were to draw a single common thread through all the bands I love or the styles of music they play, it would be him. Some may owe larger debts than others, but whether they dwell in the folkier end of the spectrum or the noisy, one way or another, they’re in the shadow of Neil.

So when the man comes home for a show – yes, he began his career up in Winnipeg but the man’s birth certificate says “Toronto” – it’s going to be a special occasion. And when he does so with one of your very favourite bands in the world as support, as he did this time with Wilco, then the phrase “must-see” just seems woefully inadequate. I had initially gotten tickets just for the first night, but thanks to the folks at Warner Music Canada, was able to take in the second night’s show as well – the first time I’d ever been to more than one show in a multi-night engagement by anyone.

And that’s lucky because otherwise, I’d have missed Everest entirely as photography logistics dictated that I was out of earshot after two songs on night one. I’d spent a little time with the Los Angeles outfit’s debut Ghost Notes and found it a pleasant enough and well-executed bit of country-rock, if somewhat innocuous. They came across more impressively in a live setting, but their more subtle charms were unsurprisingly lost in the largely-empty arena. While touring with and opening for an act like Neil Young (also their label boss…) is no small honour, I suspect they’d make a far stronger impression in a club setting.

Even more than the headliner, I was thankful I was able to see Wilco on both nights, and not just because it kept my streak of seeing every local-area show the band has played since 2001 intact. On the first night, the band’s performance was boilerplate Wilco – they played splendidly, especially considering that Jeff Tweedy was trying to recover from the flu, but it was a slightly-condensed version of the same show I’ve seen them play almost every time they’ve been here in the last few years. It could only be considered disappointing in that very relative sense, though it did offer up one very memorable highlight in “Via Chicago”, whose quiet-loud dynamics seemed to fill every corner of the cavernous venue in a way that I’d never heard or felt the song delivered before.

Night two, however, was an entirely different experience on pretty much every level. For starters, they were a man down with drummer Glenn Kotche having had to fly to New York City to play a previously booked engagement with the Kronos Quartet. Tweedy, obviously feeling much better than the night before, made it into a running joke and blamed his absence on a horrific Zamboni accident, getting cosmetic surgery and having fallen down a well, amongst other excuses. They opened with a drummer-less set, leading off with “Hesitating Beauty”, before inviting a trio of guest drummers – “contest winners”, as Tweedy called them – to back them up. I was told that two of the three were Neil Young and Everest’s drummers, but reports from closer up called that into question and I still don’t know who they actually were – we’ll just call them Donnie, Steve and Ryan. Jeff did. He also said that each drummer was allowed to pick the songs they wanted to play, resulting in a set list radically different from what Wilco usually stuck to. I thought I was giddy hearing them break into “Passenger Side”, not heard in these parts in some seven years, but with a trio of songs from Being There – “Red Eyed and Blue”, “I Got You” and “Outtasite (Outta Mind)” – I pretty much lost my shit. They closed out with a cover of “I Shall Be Released”, the second Dylan cover of the night (Everest did one as well), and while I would never, ever suggest that they’re a better band without Glenn Kotche, this night proved that when pushed a little out of their comfort zone, they’re absolutely amazing.

I remember walking out of the first of stunning three-night stint at Massey Hall last year and thinking that I was so glad I wasn’t going to either of the next two nights, because the compulsion to compare the experiences would mean that what had seemed like an absolutely perfect show might possibly turn out to be less than that. As it turns out, relentless A-B-ing of the shows isn’t as unavoidable as I’d thought – it’s also possible to just sit back and enjoy it all over again. The Thursday show did run two songs longer, however, with a new song that has been dubbed “Lighting A Candle” and “Old Man”, featuring roadie Larry Cragg on banjo, so quantitatively speaking, night one was superior. And I’d have to say that vocally, Neil seemed to be a bit stronger on Thursday – marginally, but noticeably. Otherwise, the two performances were near identical, set-wise, as they’d been for every show on the tour. Neil’s band – creatively dubbed “The Electric Band” – was largely the same as the one that accompanied him to Massey last year, though Crazy Horse drummer Ralph Molina was replaced by Chad Cromwell. And unlike those shows, where Neil took advantage of the intimate setting to open things off with a solo acoustic set, these shows started off with all guns firing.

“Love And Only Love” set the table and “Hey Hey, My My” demolished it… and that was just the first two songs. The first third of the show was devoted to classics of the loud, solo-friendly variety including “Cinnamon Girl”, “Cortez The Killer” and possibly my favourite Neil song ever, “Powderfinger”, before shifting to acoustic mode with cuts like “Heart Of Gold”, “Needle And The Damage Done” and “Unknown Legend”. Things plugged back in for a trio of new songs which weren’t bad, per se, but did dampen the momentum somewhat but they finished strong with a searing “Cowgirl In The Sand” and finally “Rockin’ In The Free World”, which is probably cliche for anyone else on the planet to perform but coming from Neil, it’s somehow still potent. The one-song encore was a cover of The Beatles’ “A Day In The Life”, the finale for which Neil managed to break almost every string on Old Black on both nights. Epic. I think I’m done worrying if Neil will ever be able to top his last performance. It’s pretty much a given that it will be amazing, and that’s more than enough.

More reviews of Thursday’s show can be found at The Globe & Mail, The Toronto Star, The Toronto Sun, The National Post, eye and Exclaim!. Rolling Stone has an interview with Neil where they discuss the state of Toast, the seven-year old Crazy Horse record which is finally being released sometime in the new year, as well as Archives which – surprise, surprise – will no longer be coming out on January 27. Amazon.com is now saying February 24, and are backing that up with not only a price ($323.99) but pictures! It’s real! Last week, Thrasher’s Wheat ran a Q&A with some of the team assembling the archives and Uncut also has some details on what Archives will comprise, whenever it finally does arrive. And if you picked up the just-released live record Sugar Mountain: Live At Canterbury House 1968, you may not know there’s a link to a bonus track hidden on it, only accessible if you view the CD as data on a computer. The track is called “#1 Hit Song”. It’s hilarious. If you want it, head over to Thrasher’s Wheat for directions.

Filter, Metro, dose.ca, Flint Journal and Chart all have feature pieces on Everest.

Note that for the photos from the shows, Thursday’s were taken from the photo pit, Friday’s from way up in the 200-level. Obviously the first set are much better – thanks again to Warners for helping me get access to shoot one of my all-time heroes. And oh, I’d mention that I got to go backstage after the Friday night show and got to meet Neil (albeit very briefly), but that’s probably just bragging.

Photos: Neil Young, Wilco, Everest @ The Air Canada Centre – December 4, 2008
Photos: Neil Young, Wilco, Everest @ The Air Canada Centre – December 5, 2008
MySpace: Neil Young
MySpace: Wilco
MySpace: Everest

MySpaceThe arc of Neil Halstead’s long and storied musical career taken him many places. He was both an architect of sonic cathedrals at the dawn of Slowdive’s career and a pioneer of electronic ambiance at its end, then with Mojave 3 he played the roles of country-rock and power-pop songsmith with equal facility. With his first solo album Sleeping On Roads in 2002, he took the soft-spoken folk balladeer that’s lain at the heart of his songwriting throughout it all and brought it to the fore, a place he revisits once again with the long-awaited and long-delayed follow-up, Oh! Mighty Engine.

And even though six years have elapsed between records, Halstead picks up largely where he left off. The spectre of a failed relationship that hung overhead during the making of Roads isn’t present here, which perhaps explains why the new record is brighter in tone than its predecessor. Even so, Engine is still spare and homespun, built in rich melody on a sturdy framework built of voice and acoustic guitar with gentle percussion, piano and electric or steel guitar accouterments where appropriate. It’s a format that suits Halstead well, as for all the soundscapes that he’s surrounded himself with over the years, he’s always been at his best when conveying a quiet, thoughtful intimacy. And for showcasing his strengths as a singer-songwriter, Engine is Halstead at his best.

As solid and enjoyable as Halstead’s solo output is, it’s not a substitute for the chemistry and magic that is Mojave 3. So it’s good to know that even with drummer Ian McCutcheon busy with his solo project The Loose Salute and Rachel Goswell continuing to recover from the ear-related illness that kept her from playing a larger role on Puzzles Like You, in this interview with AgitReader Halstead says that he hopes to begin work on a new Mojave 3 record before the year is out.

Halstead is currently on tour across North America – finally Jack Johnson-free – and will be at the Drake Underground on Saturday night, November 8, for an early show (9:30 start). Anyone who saw him play at the Rivoli back in 2002 in support of Roads surely remembers how utterly magical that performance was and if this show even comes close to measuring up to that one, it’s going to be a special one indeed. Courtesy of Against The Grain, I’ve got two pairs of passes to give away to the show – to enter, email me at contests AT chromewaves.net with “I want to see Neil Halstead” in the subject line and your full name in the body. Contest closes at midnight, November 6.

Apparently as part of this tour, Halstead has an agenda to visit NPR as many times as possible. Currently there’s two sessions available to stream – one at the World Cafe and one at KEXP.

MP3: Neil Halstead – “Paint A Face”
Video: Neil Halstead – “Paint A Face”
Video: Neil Halstead – “Queen Bee”

Drowned In Sound reconsiders the musical oeuvre of Swervedriver, still isn’t overly impressed. The three albums in question will be re-released in North America on January 6.

Pitchfork has details on the debut album from head Swervie Adam Franklin’s current project, Magnetic Morning. A.M. will be out January 27.

Simon Jones of The Verve talks to Chart about why guitarist Simon Tong wasn’t invited to the reunion party.

Another Tong – Matt, of Bloc Party, gives an interview to Virgin Music. Bandmate Kele Okereke talks to Metro and The Edmonton Journal.

I wouldn’t normally bother noting anything that Norman Cook of Fatboy Slim gets up to, but when the second single from his new project The Brighton Port Authority features Emmy The Great front and centre, you have my attention. You can stream it at their MySpace or better yet, watch the video. Via Stereogum.

Video: The Brighton Port Authority featuring Emmy The Great – “Seattle”
MySpace: The Brighton Port Authority

EDP24 interviews Matt Urby of Noah & The Whale and Erockstar has a video interview with the band. They’re at the El Mocambo on December 9.

Scottish quartet Glasvegas, first considered in these pages last December, will begin their attempt to conquer North America the way they have the UK with the release of their self-titled debut on January 6. I picked up a copy on import a little while back, thoughts forthcoming. They’ll also be doing some touring over here in the new year, but no Toronto date as yet. They’ve also recorded a Christmas EP, which they talk to The Daily Record about.

Anyone see Wilco on The Colbert Report last week? I didn’t. Thankfully it’s viewable online in Canada on CTV and in the US at Comedy Central. Or you can just watch the clip of the new song they played.

Video: Wilco – “Wilco, The Song” (live on The Colbert Report)

Fleet Foxes are the subject of features at Rolling Stone and Filter.

Gotham Acme talks to Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste about the US election… which is today. How about that.

Speaking of election day, Patterson Hood of the Drive-By Truckers has made available for free a new song written just after Bush II was re-elected. Hood has never been one to shy away from political statements, wearing his opinions on his sleeve… or his guitar.

JAM finds out why The Hold Steady always seem so dang happy. The Hold Steady and the Drive-By Truckers are at the Phoenix next Tuesday night.

Couple shows announced for the new year… on the same day. First you’ve got Annuals at the El Mocambo on January 24, tickets $10.

MP3: Annuals – “Confessor”
Video: Annuals – “Confessor”

And down Spadina at the Horseshoe, you’ve got buzzy band du jour, Passion Pit – tickets for that one are also $10.

MP3: Passion Pit – “Sleeyphead”
Video: Passion Pit – “Sleeyphead”