It really would have been easier to pick a carol, or even something from Mariah Carey’s 1994 Yuletide epic, Merry Christmas. But Halifax’s Heavy Blinkers aren’t known for taking the easy route.
Instead, for Christmas, the chamber pop group enlisted Hali-famous singer-songwriter Jenn Grant to collaborate on an original holiday tune, “Silence Your Drum.”
The song explores the time-tested story of the little drummer boy told from the perspective of Jesus and Mary. They play the roles of concerned parents in the song.
“We’ve just put the son of God to bed,” croons Grant. “Couldn’t you have brought a harp instead?”
The song is a preview for the Blinkers’ highly anticipated double album, Health. It’s the band’s first album since 2005’s The Night And I Are Still So Young. The band still hasn’t confirmed a release date for the album.
For their part, though, the Blinkers have seen some tumult since their last release. Founding members Andrew Watt and Ruth Minnikin left the band in 2008, leaving main songwriter Jason MacIsaac and David Christensen to work on Health.
MacIsaac has also been busy producing albums for Grant, the Prospector’s Union and Brent Randall.
Check out an MP3 of “Silence Your Drum” here, or watch the video below:
I hadn’t planned on writing about La Strada. After all, they’re from Brooklyn, and one of the things of which I’m most proud when it comes to i(heart)music is the extent to which I focus on Canadian music. Clearly, there’s a bit of incompatibility between those two facts.
Then again, it’s my site, I can write about whatever I want, and if La Strada’s debut EP is blowing me away, then (by golly) I’ll write about it. Besides, up until I read this, I actually thought the band was from the Maritimes. After all, the EP was sent to me by an East Coast publicist because the band was swinging through Ottawa on a tour with Hey Rosetta!, so the pieces just seemed to fit together. By the time I found out otherwise, I was hooked. In any case, good music deserves to be written about…and La Strada definitely fall in the category of “good music”.
The obvious touchstone is Neutral Milk Hotel; frontman James Craft is a vocal dead ringer for Jeff Mangum, as “Mama” demonstrates, and there’s something slightly unhinged in the band’s pop sensibilities (but not so much that listening is ever a chore. That said, there are very clearly echoes of The Decemberists, Arcade Fire, and a dozen other baroque pop-minded acts in their debut EP, so you could pretty much take your pick of influences and you’d probably be right. Regardless of who you wind up with, though, it’s doubtful that you’ll pick a band that’s that much better than these guys. This is astoundingly good for a first album, and it’s most definitely worth picking up.
“With my songs I want to create a strong voice for women; to yell back instead of being silent, to create a dialogue with power systems around us that suppress us from being ourselves,” says Jen Clarke. “With my songs I want to encourage a sense of community between women and to support and encourage each other to achieve their goals, and make their own choices.”
Clarke is Halifax-based electro-songstress Jenocide. She tackles feminism, femininity and fashion on her latest release Machines That Make Us Wet.
“I always wanted to have a solo project,” says Clarke, who honed her musical chops in such acts as Murder Sounds, Hotshotrobot and Windom Earle.
“I would write all of these songs that seemed more radical or female in my journal but never found an outlet to play them. I wanted to interact with the audience; I didn’t want to be stuck behind the keyboard.”
Jenocide doesn’t just step out, she prances onto the stage. Decked out in heart-shaped sunglasses and glitter bodysuits, Jenocide loves to make a spectacle. She gives nod to riot grrrl with a post-modern take on pop music.
“It’s an alter-ego, absolutely. I don’t think everyone gets that,” she says. “Sleater Kinney and Bikini Kill changed my life. I’ve been criticized for aestheticizing riot grrrl. I don’t think I am that radical. It’s not the same time or the same place, though I certainly borrow elements.”
If PJ Harvey and Kathleen Hanna had a love child she’d be Jenocide. With thrash-dance tracks like “Slumber Party,” and “Off/On” Jenocide is the ultimate girl party.
“It’s about being inclusive more-so than a gender kind of thing. It’s a positive, inclusive party atmosphere,” says Clarke. “It’s kind of the antithesis to going to a club to dance and party and trying to act sexy to attract attention. It’s about having fun with your friends. Girl parties can be a group of girls hanging out in a kitchen, talking or dancing at a show.”
Jenocide is a touch tongue-and-cheek and tough enough to wear her heart-on-her sleeve. Wherever she goes she leaves a trail of glitter and lipstick marks in her wake.
“I can wear whatever I want, do whatever I want. I can wear a sparkly tube top and it doesn’t make me a slut,” she says. “Jenocide is a character; she’s in your face. It’s engaging and gets people’s attention. What can I say, I like sparkle?”
Jenocide explores themes of empowerment, embodiment and ego. Her agenda isn’t explicitly feminist, though her work is inherently so. With lyrics heavily based on relationships, power dynamics, body image and gender, Jenocide’s work borders on queercore.
“It’s really difficult to talk about ideologies that mean so many different things to different people,” she says. “As a woman, feminism reminds me to be critical of the systems around me, to be open to every choice that a woman makes as her own choice, and to support empowerment and challenge the status quo.
“But in my experience I feel that as a woman, I am always pointed in different external directions to find value in myself or my choices with the media etcetera. Feminism reminds me to listen to my inner voice, to be conscious of the reasons I make decisions and ultimately how I choose to live my life.”
Ruth Minnikin and the bands she played in were always ahead of the curve. I mean, Booming Airplanes got signed to EMI when she was barely out of high school and without a doubt, if The Guthries were making music today in the “everybody wants to be a rootsy, lap steel heavy, cowboy shirt wearing music player” they’d be huge. That same “what if” type pondering could easily be applied to the orchestral pop The Heavy Blinkers delivered so well.
So even though Ruth’s solo work was strongly rooted in the realm of folk, it’s not surprising she refuses to sit still. The first half of her new record – Depend on This – hits me the way the same way Jets To Brazil’s Perfecting Loneliness did. Even with the strides and fleshed out sound the band made, it was the perfect summation to Blake’s evolution from the early days of Jawbreaker to his more mellow, melodic stylings under the JTB moniker. For Ruth and her friends, the tracks still dabble in the country, down home sounds we’ve come to expect, but she fuses that traditional feel with the lush orchestration and quirkiness you could find on a Blinkers effort.
Orchestral horns blasts and group vocals stand on equal footing as steel guitar and. Tracks like Theme Song and Sleeping and Dreaming expose Ruth’s more playful side, where as Four Churches moves into the chamber pop realm and Animals of Bremen is about as traditional as Ruth gets this time out, but the meticulously arrangements she constructs help weave the songs together in a warm, multicolored quilt. Perhaps the standout is the blissful title track that uses terrific horns and steel during the verses before exploding into a sing-along chorus.
Even if this effort was a simple, six-song EP you’d feel satisfied after each listen, but what really stands out is the progression in sound she made for this record. The b-side of Depend on This will shock even her oldest fans as it finds Ruth exploring an end of the evening vibe thanks to her ambient, atmospheric collaborations with Dreamspolitation’s Chuck Blazevic. She revisits each of the themes and titles of the A-side of the record in a completely new fashion, transforming each in a way that inspires and challenges the listener, but never loses them.
The flute that makes an appearance on Theme Song II and the hand claps and heavy plucked bass line of Sleeping and Dreaming II peak your interest, but the echo-y horns and computer effects on the later are what really takes you into a more magical, dream like swirl. The first few tracks on the second side are shocking and enjoyable, but the effort peaks on Four Churches II. The smooth horns, hand clap beat and rapid fire synth all dance around terrific vocals, swooning strings and and terrific, long bended guitar notes and really demonstrates how effortless Ruth could find a home in this new style. She follows up with the click clack, flute filled Depend on This II, a track that never moves past a brisk shuffle but spikes the record with energy and emotion.
Amazingly, even with all Chuck’s electro flourishes she still manages to hold true to the spirit and soul of the original versions. Animals of Bremen II still feels traditional – especially when the piano ends the track – even though it’s filled with computer effects and a heavier bass line. I’ll be honest. This isn’t the record I expected from Ruth, but I’m not complaining. The funny thing is, just when you think you know where Ruth is going to reside, she shifts and her next record could be recorded in a farmhouse, a disco, on a bus or with Symphony Nova Scotia playing behind her. That’s the great thing about a creative spirit. You never know where it’s going or where it will end up, but you know the risks will end up in rewards for the us all… it just might take us a few months to catch up.
Oh to have been in Fred Squire’s garage this past summer. What an amazing sight that would have been: two Canadian royals (Squire and singer-songwriter Julie Doiron) and the lead singer of Attack in Black (Daniel Romano) getting their folk on and having a great time doing it.
An album full of folk standards and a few originals penned by Romano (including the album stand out “Runner”), this self-titled trip is bound to get you slapping your knee and tapping that toe. The three share vocals and perfectly harmonize throughout, switching back and forth from sullen (”Down By the Weeping Willow”, “I Dream of Jeannie”) to jovial (”Johnny Sands”, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum”) and everything in between.
Listening to this record, you feel as if you’re listening eavesdropping in on three musicians just hanging out and having a great time. Really, what more could you ask for?
Prairie Cat on Surviving The Golden Age • 02.12.09
Prairie Cat: It Began/Ended With Sparks
Cary Pratt has become a staple of the Vancouver music scene. On his second full-length as Prairie Cat, Pratt continues making insouciant piano-pop.
What makes Pratt so likable is that he seems so innocent. His music is poppy and fun. Even when its completely stripped down to just him and piano, it never sounds like Tori Amos or anything. But rarely is his music that stripped down. For the most part, the album is filled with fun arrangements including such esoteric instruments as trumpet, trombone, saxophone, strings, and moog. His voice is wobbly and unsure; it reminds me of Isaac Brock from Modest Mouse except without the angst.
Despite the innocent act, Pratt is not looking to be the next Boy Least Likely To; he writes about adult subjects. He writes about breaking up with his girlfriend, not in a sappy way but in a sardonic, quirky way. He writes about a fire that destroyed most of his belongings and the original recording of the album, but does so unbitterly.
Who would have thought that out of love lost and tragedy would come such a happy-go-lucky sounding record? But the truth is It Began/Ended With Sparks does nothing but further solidify Prairie Cat as one of the best Canadian exports.
Dog Day’s Elder Schoolhouse on Skeleton Crew Quarterly • 01.12.09
Dog Day, Elder Schoolhouse EPThe morning after Dog Day’s blistering set at Horseshoe Tavern, I sat down and counted myself one of the lucky 400 people to own Elder Schoolhouse, the Halifax quartet’s ultra-limited, vinyl-only, mini-album. Having prepped myself a bit by reading a Chart Attack interview with bassist/vocalist Nancy Urich, I thought I was ready for the band’s “spooky” direction. I wasn’t. Slopping out of my speakers like compost sludge, ‘Ritual’ sounded like a lost track off The Cure’s Pornography, all doom-laden bass and eerie keys, with vocalist/guitarist Seth Smith singing through some sort of thunderous mic effect. Was Smith being sarcastic when he described Elder Schoolhouse as “lively and bright”? Was this the result of Urich’s quoted affinity for noise-bands? Nah, it was just my record player – which had somehow changed speeds without me knowing – and by the end of the first chorus, I rectified the problem.
The message of that story isn’t that I’m pretty dim-witted (I can translate that in less than a paragraph), but that Dog Day’s sound is rooted as firmly in pop music as it is in gloomier, noisier genres, and I wouldn’t have been terribly shocked had their record not been playing at half-speed. Luckily, Elder Schoolhouse at its intended speed is way cooler and finds them toiling in progressively noisier arrangements. If you’ve checked out the sample ‘Synastry’, you’ve also just heard the brightest of these tracks, one that wouldn’t sound out of place on Concentration. More menacing but no less enjoyable are ‘Ritual’, with its harsh guitars revving like a pack of hungry motorcycles, and ‘Dark Day’, which was written specifically for the band by Rick (Eric’s Trip) White. With claustrophobic melodies and frightening song-breakdowns, Elder Schoolhouse could’ve been the devious little brother to Concentration’s accomplished nuances but no… Dog Day take it a few steps further. What might’ve been a title track becomes the black psychedelia of ‘Concentration’, a falling off point where Dog Day revels in the echoed incoherence of lost lyrics and near-goth guitar riffs.
If Dog Day’s direction on the record’s first side sounds vicious, side two – a looming ten-minute onslaught of distorted guitars – is downright sadistic. The song in question, ‘New Beginning’, sets out like a controlled, if surprisingly raw, slow-burner before distortion stretches through verse and chorus, percussion fades in and falls out, amps start crinkling and six-strings become band-saws waging war. As unrehearsed and messy as it sounds, the whole spectacle of it is pretty marvelous, no different than how Smith and Urich battle their instruments against each-other to close each live show in deafening fashion. This mini-album isn’t for everyone (i.e. my neighbours) but Elder Schoolhouse is more than a few new songs recorded at Rick White’s studio; it’s a descent into madness that will either mark Dog Day’s discography as a bizarre hiccup or crucial turning point.
Dog Day, Elder Schoolhouse EP. Damn, I love this band. Dog Day linked up with its spiritual forebear, Rick White – whose work with Eric’s Trip and Elevator has obviously had a profound influence on the young Halifax quartet – for a few wild days of recording in the country last March, yielding a creepy, slightly tripped-out five-song companion to this year’s wicked Concentration album. White has drawn out the more unsettling elements of the band’s grimly propulsive post-punk sound, but the melodies are as strong and as memorable as ever. Until you get to the second side, which is a 10-minute experimental noise freakout unlike anything Dog Day has tried before and, perhaps, an intriguing portent of things to come from what is, for my money, the most exciting Canadian act of the moment. Just 400 copies out there on vinyl only. Get your ass to Rotate This before they’re gone.
A History Of on Chartattack • 28.11.09
It’s usually a bad idea to judge an album by its, er, digi-pack. But in the case of A History Of, it’s perfectly appropriate.
The quintet — featuring members of prominent Halifax locals Tomcat Combat, Gamma Gamma Rays and The Plan — had Action In The North Atlantic recorded by former North Of America member and one of the city’s math rock forefathers, J. Lapointe.
And you get the sense that these boys are quite the vinyl archaeologists. Their jittery, jagged brand of indie rock immediately conjures up visions of the best math rock seven-inches you’ve never heard or remembered. For A History Of, the argyle sweaters are a little tighter, the hair is a little greasier, the zines are a little more vegan and the music is much, much louder.
Indeed, this could be 1998, and this LP would fit neatly into the backpack of any Makeoutclub.com devotee.
Accordingly, Action situates itself somewhere in the 2,000 kilometre gulf between Halifax and Washington D.C. Moments on the album recall Les Savy Fav’s angular sass (”Low Level”), Q And Not U’s discordant dance punk (”Strike It From The Lexicon”), or Modest Mouse’s eccentricity (”National Tectonic”). Others pulsate with the urgency of a young Fugazi (”On The Make”).
Add in a sprinkle of pseudo-scientific lyrics (”We can’t raise the dead/with your ritual protocol/or paperback luck”), and you’d swear that this was the de facto theme song to a New Brunswick basement show — in the Maritimes or New Jersey, take your pick.
The guitars scream like power tools, everyone’s shouting along at the same time, and the seamless rhythm section has your synthetic New Balances shuffling. Forget the stuffed animal backpacks and tribal tattoos — A History Of prove that there are indeed moments of the 1990s worth remembering.
Cary Pratt’s Prairie Cat has stepped out of bedroom pop and into the world of pure pop. Ring-tone rappers and Rock Band rock stars may infest the industry, but Pratt has a formula that will save his soul, and his listeners’ alike: have fun and stay human. Sparks is an album built up from two years of break-up recuperation—but is there any better source of creativity? A track like “Just Cuz” could make you cry if it didn’t accept failure so cutely (”I’m over here now/you’re over there now”), and “Get Off” could sound bitter if Pratt wasn’t having such a good time singing away his sorrows.
It really would have been easier to pick a carol, or even something from Mariah Carey’s 1994 Yuletide epic, Merry Christmas. But Halifax’s Heavy Blinkers aren’t known for taking the easy route.
I hadn’t planned on writing about La Strada. After all, they’re from Brooklyn, and one of the things of which I’m most proud when it comes to i(heart)music is the extent to which I focus on Canadian music. Clearly, there’s a bit of incompatibility between those two facts.
“With my songs I want to create a strong voice for women; to yell back instead of being silent, to create a dialogue with power systems around us that suppress us from being ourselves,” says Jen Clarke. “With my songs I want to encourage a sense of community between women and to support and encourage each other to achieve their goals, and make their own choices.”
Ruth Minnikin and the bands she played in were always ahead of the curve. I mean, Booming Airplanes got signed to EMI when she was barely out of high school and without a doubt, if The Guthries were making music today in the “everybody wants to be a rootsy, lap steel heavy, cowboy shirt wearing music player” they’d be huge. That same “what if” type pondering could easily be applied to the orchestral pop The Heavy Blinkers delivered so well.
Oh to have been in Fred Squire’s garage this past summer. What an amazing sight that would have been: two Canadian royals (Squire and singer-songwriter Julie Doiron) and the lead singer of Attack in Black (Daniel Romano) getting their folk on and having a great time doing it.
Prairie Cat: It Began/Ended With Sparks
Dog Day, Elder Schoolhouse EPThe morning after Dog Day’s blistering set at Horseshoe Tavern, I sat down and counted myself one of the lucky 400 people to own Elder Schoolhouse, the Halifax quartet’s ultra-limited, vinyl-only, mini-album. Having prepped myself a bit by reading a Chart Attack interview with bassist/vocalist Nancy Urich, I thought I was ready for the band’s “spooky” direction. I wasn’t. Slopping out of my speakers like compost sludge, ‘Ritual’ sounded like a lost track off The Cure’s Pornography, all doom-laden bass and eerie keys, with vocalist/guitarist Seth Smith singing through some sort of thunderous mic effect. Was Smith being sarcastic when he described Elder Schoolhouse as “lively and bright”? Was this the result of Urich’s quoted affinity for noise-bands? Nah, it was just my record player – which had somehow changed speeds without me knowing – and by the end of the first chorus, I rectified the problem.
Dog Day, Elder Schoolhouse EP. Damn, I love this band. Dog Day linked up with its spiritual forebear, Rick White – whose work with Eric’s Trip and Elevator has obviously had a profound influence on the young Halifax quartet – for a few wild days of recording in the country last March, yielding a creepy, slightly tripped-out five-song companion to this year’s wicked Concentration album. White has drawn out the more unsettling elements of the band’s grimly propulsive post-punk sound, but the melodies are as strong and as memorable as ever. Until you get to the second side, which is a 10-minute experimental noise freakout unlike anything Dog Day has tried before and, perhaps, an intriguing portent of things to come from what is, for my money, the most exciting Canadian act of the moment. Just 400 copies out there on vinyl only. Get your ass to Rotate This before they’re gone.
It’s usually a bad idea to judge an album by its, er, digi-pack. But in the case of A History Of, it’s perfectly appropriate.
Cary Pratt’s Prairie Cat has stepped out of bedroom pop and into the world of pure pop. Ring-tone rappers and Rock Band rock stars may infest the industry, but Pratt has a formula that will save his soul, and his listeners’ alike: have fun and stay human. Sparks is an album built up from two years of break-up recuperation—but is there any better source of creativity? A track like “Just Cuz” could make you cry if it didn’t accept failure so cutely (”I’m over here now/you’re over there now”), and “Get Off” could sound bitter if Pratt wasn’t having such a good time singing away his sorrows.
