Category Archives: High Fidelity

And now for something we hope you’ll really like

Apparently, it’s music review month here at Lost In Transliteration. In that spirit, let’s talk about another album, released this past June, also made by someone named Sarah. Yes, sportsmusic fans, Sarah Harmer has a new album out!

Let me start by saying that I don’t understand why Sarah Harmer hasn’t taken over the musical world. She’s been around for quite a while; her first solo album was released almost a decade ago (and we’re going to talk about why you don’t own that album later), yet I am forever running into people who have no idea who she is. Even people who should know better don’t. “You Were Here” got monster critical praise, but almost no airplay anywhere — beyond “Basement Apartment” and “Don’t Get Your Back Up” on a few LiteFM stations — which is incredibly unfair because the whole record was so good it should have come free in the mail as a public service. It was eventually certified platinum in Canada, which is a relief, because it proves at least 100,000 people in this country don’t have horrible taste in music. If I had to sum it up to someone who’d never heard it, I’d say that the album is “solid,” in that the lyrics, the music, and the production is professional but not excessive; the writing is thoughtful without being overwrought, and it reflects a maturity we don’t often see in debut albums. (Though in fairness, it wasn’t really a debut album in the true sense of the word — a variety of projects, including Weeping Tile, preceded “You Were Here,” which might be why it’s so polished.) You can’t really characterize it cleanly — some songs (“Basement Apartment”) talk about the numbing banality of mid-adulthood poverty and unfulfilling relationships, while others (“Capsized”) manage to capture melancholy and emotional vulnerability with a clarity that can be downright bracing if you’re not ready for it. (“What’s the sense in being so sensitive?/Can I trade this thin skin for a shell?”) It was astonishingly good. It is astonishingly good.

“All of Our Names” came in 2004 and seemed a lot like the sort of record Joni Mitchell would make if she were making records in 2004 with contemporary sensibilities. And were a lot more talented. (Sorry, kids.) It got moderately more airplay:

“All of Our Names” didn’t really stick with me as well as it should have — or so I keep thinking. Working on this entry, I scrolled back through my library thinking I had to play the album over again so I could at least have something intelligent to say about it. Then it turned out I knew them already and could play them in my head, which probably means that it did stick with me better than I expected. And it also turns out I don’t actually have very much to say about it anyway — at least, not quite at this juncture.

The difficult third album: “I’m A Mountain.” I didn’t like this when I first heard it. “Escarpment Blues,” an unabashedly activist song, had been around for a couple of months before the release of the record, and I knew it was supposed to be on the new album, so I was entirely unprepared for what I got — a bluegrass/country compilation that was ridiculously well put together. You won’t confuse it for something by, say, Alison Krauss — there isn’t enough fiddle on it, for one thing — but that doesn’t matter. It’s a lot of fun to listen to, and it’s evident that Harmer and her collaborators got a lot of enjoyment out of putting it together. “I’m A Mountain” got even less airplay than the previous two, which is really unfortunate. Listen to the whole thing a couple of times through, and you suddenly realize what it is that makes Sarah Harmer’s music so appealing: it’s that voice. It’s not that the music isn’t good, or that the writing isn’t fascinating — it’s that her voice is staggeringly good. “Salamandre,” which is really a kids song (in French, no less), shows this off perfectly. She’s an alto, something we don’t often see in women singers, and she has complete control over it.

(As an aside, check out the total views on the videos linked above. What’s wrong with people?!)

Now comes the fourth act: “Oh Little Fire,” Sarah Harmer’s attempt at a rock album. By her own description, it’s music people can crank while driving down the highway. Much in the same way as her attempt at a bluegrass album worked and showed off something new, “Oh Little Fire” is clearly of Harmer, new and interesting. “Captive” is the first single:

The beat is new for her — it does, in fact, sound good loud (something that wasn’t true about “You Were Here”) — and it’s genuinely catchy. The rest of the album is similar, with the same kind of peculiarly observant songwriting we’ve seen before. But what makes “Oh Little Fire” interesting is what it reveals about Sarah Harmer, the musician: she’s a real musician. I don’t mean this in contrast to the various autotuned nightmares we’re exposed to on a daily basis (though of course that comparison is valid), I mean that this is very clearly someone who is committed to her art and her craft, who isn’t afraid to try new or different things, who has a very clear passion for what (for lack of a better term) might be called “competent music,” and material that continually reveals something new. In stark contrast to what I wrote earlier about “Laws of Illusion,” this very clearly is the work of someone trying to innovate: I hesitate to call it growth for her, but it is a change, and god, is it ever brilliant.

You won’t get shivers from it. You will, however, thoroughly enjoy it.

Note for Victoria residents: Sarah Harmer will be performing on Saturday, 25 September 2010, as part of the Rifflandia music festival at the Alix Goolden Hall. Wristbands for the three-day festival are $65++; other performers include Great Lake Swimmers, You Say Party!, Hot Hot Heat (who suck) and Men Without Hats (who, unaccountably, are not in fact dead). Details here. I won’t be there, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be.

Set my soul on fire

How I was unaware of this version of “Viva Las Vegas” until quite recently (well, actually, yesterday to be exact) is a bit of a mystery to me. But I have since found it, have fallen in love with it (not surprising, given who did it), and think you’ll like it too:

That bass line is… magnificent.

Open Letter #91: A bullet hole in my bucket

Dear Canadian Top 40 Radio Stations,

I know you have to fulfill your Canadian Content programming requirements, but for the love of God, you really, really, really have to stop playing Carly Rae Jepsen’s “Bucket”. Anyone who samples children’s nursery rhymes is — well, let’s be honest here, there are no words to describe that degree of musical atrocity. We should be clear that I don’t harbor any particular animosity towards Ms. Jepsen, and I am unfamiliar with the rest of her work, so it’s not like I’m judging her or her music in general — just this one song. It’s awful, even by the standards of contemporary Top 40.

We put up with a lot of bad music these days. We tolerated, for instance, Katy Perry being shoved in our faces and ears even though we all knew how annoying she was. And we’ve all cataloged the four P!nk songs (well, the four categories of P!nk songs, anyway), and we tolerate her continued presence even though her recent material is neither as interesting nor as edgy as it used to be. I’ve gotten over the fact that Kelly Clarkson apparently only had one really good album in her, and what we’re hearing now seems to be some kind of experiment in cultural longevity. (Some of us — like me — are holding out a bit more hope for Kelly.) I am prepared, under the right circumstances, to pretend that Lady Ga Ga is about more than just not wearing pants (or any bottoms, really) and is not suffering from a rare case of retinal hypersensitivity requiring the continual wearing of wrap-around sunglasses.

I can even cope with the fact that Nickelback apparently has “new” music out, though that’s a derived data point, since I can’t actually tell any of their songs apart.

In short, I’m willing to listen to your radio station because it is (a) there and (b) doesn’t generally cost me anything except the occasional micron or two of tooth enamel. But “Bucket” needs to be thrown in a sack, the sack thrown in a river, and the river hurled into space. It’s easily the most irritating thing on the radio right now, and it’s twice as irritating because it gets stuck in your head, you start humming it at the wrong time, and then you’re angry all over again. The only fun part is how you can annoy other people with it, but that’s not really the point of music, is it? So please, I’m asking you as nicely as I know how: stop playing this song. I’ll let you replace it with some new Britney abomination, and things will be OK. Promise.

Lots of love,
-m.

P.S.: If you wanted to send that Karl Wolf guy’s Toto cover off into deep space too, that’d be cool with me. One or the other — it doesn’t really matter. OK? Please? Thanks.

"Bruce Springsteen singing for a Cure cover band"

I’ve been trying to figure out how to write about The Gaslight Anthem for a couple of months now. It’s challenging. When I wrote my giant mash note to Edie Carey and Rose Cousins, I was writing about a couple of singer-songwriters who were basically unknown except to a handful of dedicated and devoted fans, in the hopes that other people might start spreading the word.

It’s different for The Gaslight Anthem. They actually are getting airplay, and eMusic even called their sophmore album, The ’59 Sound, released in August of last year, the best album of 2008: “Because they are destined for greatness, and because this album means they’ve already achieved it.” And where I could gush about Edie Carey and Rose Cousins and talk about how they made me feel in ways I hadn’t felt in a long time, I can’t do the same about The Gaslight Anthem — not because their music isn’t emotionally evocative or anything, but because it doesn’t work in the same way. Mostly.

They’re just really, really, really good. And where I loved Another Kind of Fire with my heart, I love The ’59 Sound with the part of my brain that likes to pretend it knows something about music. I love the way Brian Fallon manages to somehow blend Jersey Shore with punk rock sensibilities, the fact that they’re unashamed about cribbing lyrics, titles, and themes from movies and literature, the fact that once again music seems to be telling stories. And the sound — holy hell, it’s good. The post title does a good job of describing it, because it’s not quite like anything you’ve heard before but is immediately familiar if you grew up listening to music in the 1970s or 1980s. Echoy reverb for the vocals and big, pounding arena-rock-ish drums.

You get this feeling, listening to the album, of dusty back roads, old cars, dead-end jobs, and a longing for escape. I’m fascinated by songwriting that can transport you to a specific time and place, and this stuff feels very much like the sort of music you might write if you had to live in Texlahoma circa 1960. Trapped, unhappy, trying to get out — and these are your experiences.

But then there’s “Here’s Looking At You, Kid”:

You can tell Gail if she calls
That I’m famous now for all these rock and roll songs
And even if that’s a lie she should’ve given me a try
When we were kids on the field of the first day of school
I would have been her fool
And I would have sang out her name in those old high school halls
You tell that to Gail, if she calls

And you can tell Jane if she writes
That I’m drunk off all those stars and all these crazy Hollywood nights
That’s total deceit, but she should have married me
And tell her I spent every night of my youth on the floor
Bleeding out from all these wounds
I would’ve gotten her a ride out of that town she despised
You tell that to Janey, if she writes

But boys will be boys
And girls have those eyes
That’ll cut you to ribbons sometimes
And all you can do is just wait by the moon
And bleed if it’s what she says you oughta do

You remind Nana if she asks why
That a thief stole my heart while she was making up her mind
I heard she lives in Brooklyn with the cool
Goes crazy over that New York scene on 7th avenue
But I used to wait at the diner
A million nights without her
Praying she won’t cancel again tonight
And the waiter served my coffee with a consolation sigh
You remind Nana, if she asks why

And then you realize that you can love this album with your heart, too. What can you say to that kind of brutal honesty, the conversation you always wanted to have with your ex-flames or the great, unrequited love of your life? I turn that bridge over and over in my head, and I keep thinking about how you sometimes find music that captures some fundamental truth — and there it is. “And girls have those eyes / that’ll cut you to ribbons sometimes.” Oh, wow. It’s not the sort of song whose meaning you immediately get when you’re under about 25; the true emotional resonance comes later in life.

In the end, I’m not sure this album is for everyone. Scouting around, I found a lot of criticism that it’s not actually punk. I don’t pay enough attention to punk to know whether this is a fair criticism or not, but I’m also fairly sure I don’t care. It exists in its own space of awesome; much like lovers of a particular brand of Nova Scotia beer, I suspect that those who like Gaslight will like it a lot, and the rest will be somewhat indifferent. You’ll either get it or you won’t, but it really deserves a good solid listen with an open mind. Either it’ll blow you away from the first track, or you’ll shrug and move on.

On a shorter note, I’m a little embarrassed to admit this, but I also have a guilty, lightweight favorite right now: Valerie Poxleitner, a.k.a. (d.b.a.?) Lights, Canada’s answer to, uh, Bjork. Shut up. It’s good.

That's… remarkable!

So last month, Sirius-XM went ahead with their channel merger, blowing up basically every channel I actually listened to. Lucy, the alternative hits channel — gone. The System, a WorldSpace trance channel — gone. POTUS, kind of like talk radio without the morons — gone on XMSR Canada. XM Chill — horribly disfigured. Bluesville is OK, for now, but I’m not holding out a lot of hope for it. Thanks, Sirius-XM! I’ll be waiting to see if the Mariners suck before deciding whether I’m going to cancel my subscription.

What amazes me is that the only thing I actually wanted on Sirius — CBC on satellite — didn’t get merged over. Blows my mind. Buncha apes. I fail to see the point of paying for subscription radio services that don’t sound all that different from the crap that’s on commercial radio for free.

The only bright spot in the channel realignment is that I now get BBC Radio 1 — not a subset, not a stupid branding with a bunch of poncy accents — no, we’re talking about the real, live, actual Radio 1 feed from the UK. Of course, I’m too old to fit in Radio 1’s demographic, and I’m listening to it eight hours out of sync (hooray for 0300 programming in Britain!), but man, this is what satellite radio is supposed to be! I’d kill to be able to get radio feeds from other English-language radio networks. That’d be awesome.

But that’s not the point of this entry. I’ve been diving back into my music collection, and trying to find new and interesting stuff to listen to. Pop music these days mostly makes my teeth hurt, or makes me miserable; the last truly great new pop song I heard was (and I’m almost ashamed to admit this) Leona Lewis’ “Bleeding Love.” Everything sounds the same. So I’m back exploring what, for lack of a better term, could be described as “sonic landscapes” — instrumental, electronica, trance. Start with Sigur Ros and E.S. Posthumus and get stranger from there.

But I stumbled on this thing tonight, and it was so striking, so startling that I had to share. It’s Max Richter’s “24 Postcards in Full Color” (available on iTunes for the damned, but in a DRM-free format). This is 24 tracks, none of them longer than about 2:30, using a string quintet, a guitar, and a piano, with a bunch of other, stranger found sounds. The goal was, apparently, to explore — get this — the ringtone as a musical form.

Yeah, right was my initial reaction. But here’s the truly weird part: it actually works as music. They’re like, I dunno, musical amuse-bouches. It’s some of the strangest, most interesting music I’ve heard in a long, long time.

Open Letter #57: In the nick of time, she's gonna come through

Dear Edie Carey,

Last night was simply spectacular. But I have a complaint: Where the hell have you been all my life?


For (quite literally) fifteen years I have been looking for this moment. I didn’t know I was, but it turns out that I was. It’s that instant where you pop a new CD in the player and listen to it from start to finish, and where you can do absolutely nothing else because you are so transfixed by what you’re hearing. Last night, I played your latest album, Another Kind of Fire. And for the first time since October of 1993, I was nearly moved to tears by music that was so achingly beautiful and gorgeous that I have been able to think of almost nothing else for the past 24 hours.

Who are you? Where did you come from? Why didn’t I know about you before last night? How did you manage to write such a lush and pitch-perfect collection of songs without me knowing about it? Why weren’t you writing this music when I was 15 and in desperate need of hearing lyrics like this:

hey, i know just where you are
you ate up every last word
and you swore you’d never let it get this far
and you’d never get hurt
hey, i know i can’t change your mind
like you can’t change her heart
hey, i know i know the cliche ‘love is blind’
but who knew it could be so dark?

God, I needed to hear that once upon a time — when I was young and heartsick and full of unrequited love. I would have found that very, very soothing.

The thing is, Edie, this isn’t really about you and me. Not exactly, anyway, at least, not until now. It’s really about me and a girl called Sarah. See, the early 1990s were eye-opening years for me, musically, and for a bunch of years I kept running into these albums that just knocked my socks off, that left me helpless and unable to do anything except listen. Two of those years stick out — 1992 was all about Shawn Colvin’s Fat City (which I bought and listened to in San Antonio, and will be forever linked to that city); I remember thinking about how grown up the lyrics were, how plain and honest and yet deep and touching. Then, the next spring, I sat in a cafe in Montreal and played Jann Arden’s Time For Mercy over and over again, and I sort of figured that was going to be it for me and 1993 and music; I wasn’t going to find a better record that year.

That’s where Sarah enters the picture. I’d known who she was for a while, mind you, because I’m a Canadian and wasn’t living in a cave. I knew Sarah was going to come back into my life in the fall of 1993, was even looking forward to it a little bit. But I was so thoroughly unprepared for what was going to happen the first time I slipped Fumbling Towards Ecstasy into a CD player and let the thing go — it was stomping on the accelerator of a very very very fast and dangerous car. When I finally worked up the courage to put a new CD in we were well into 1994, and I continued to form all kinds of associations with that album four or five years later. At the time I remember thinking that it had no right to be anywhere near as good as it was, and even now I will sometimes play it through, half-thinking I’m going to discover some kind of critical flaw on it that I’d missed the previous eight million times I’d listened to it.

I know that album better than I know some people I see on a daily basis. I know every note, every chord change, every pause where she stops to draw breath. There’s this long pause after the final track plays, and then there’s this weird little discordant chunk of musical noise (for lack of a better term), and I even know exactly when that chunk is going to come in. It is so familiar to me, and yet I daresay that I still have moments where I’m awestruck by how good it still is. (They’re apparently putting out a new version of it next week that I’m going to have to go pick up — the 15th anniversary edition. Who knew?)

The problem is that October of 1993 is the last time that happened to me. Oh, sure, there’ve been tantalizing moments where that kind of experience flashed in front of my eyes. Sarah Harmer’s You Were Here didn’t start out that way, but turned into it over time — I certainly didn’t need to sit there and just listen the whole way through the first couple of times. Ultimately You Were Here is an astonishingly great piece of work, and Sarah Harmer deserves every bit of praise and then some for it. Suzie Ungerleider’s “Tangled and Wild” and “Alabaster” are nearly pitch-perfect, and Johnstown was looking like it was going to be one of those albums, but somehow it fell short; other than those two tracks, it never really came together for me in the way that Fumbling Towards Ecstasy or Fat City did.

But here’s the thing about Suzie’s music: It has this weird, timeless quality to it. Playing those songs, it feels like I’ve been listening to it forever. Every time one of her tracks rolls over in the player I keep thinking I should have piles of CDs with music like that. But I don’t. And then, last year, I heard Rose Cousins doing a studio session on CBC Radio 1, and there was this momentary shiver that ran up my spine.

Let me talk about Rose for a second. You know Rose, of course; she’s another in a long line of east coast musicians, girls with guitars, who are classified broadly as folk acts but for whom that particular label is totally useless. Rose is a folk act the way I wear shoes — it’s technically true, but there’s a lot more to it than that. I bought If You Were For Me last year on the strength of its title track. On first listen, I felt a little twinge on the back of my neck. The sound, the mood, the lyrics — it all fits. Like Suzie’s music, it had that ageless feeling to it, familiar though it was the first time I’d heard it. I thought, once again, “I know I have more like this.” And, once again, I couldn’t find anything like it.

If You Were For Me didn’t exactly take the first couple of times outside of a handful of tracks, though. Slowly, though, I’ve been coming to realize how remarkable it really is — to the point where I’m listening to it quite regularly right now, and to the point when someone asked me the other day what kind of music I liked, I almost immediately blurted out “Rose Cousins!” before realizing that (a) it wouldn’t have contributed anything to the conversation and (b) he wouldn’t have had any clue who I was talking about, so instead I made up some lame story about being really into ambient and trance right now, which made me seem like a huge dork.

I should have said something about Rose instead. If You Were For Me really is a great album, and deserves all kinds of publicity.

Anyway, because I’ve been listening to her music so much lately, I thought it might be nice to try branching out a bit. Since it seemed like I should have had CDs full of her kind of music, I thought it would be reasonable to assume that finding more music would be trivial. Yeah, not really — it turns out it’s hard to come up for comparables for musicians who aren’t well-known outside of a small but loyal following. Out of desperation and more for my own amusement, I fed Rose’s name into the engine at music-map.com, and was deeply disappointed by the three comparables that came up in response.

Tracy Rice, who was closest to Rose on the map, wasn’t very good. I didn’t really want to listen to Sophie B. Hawkins, because I’ve never been able to get into her stuff. But there you were, drifting down towards the bottom right of the map. I fed you into Google and went over to your MySpace site in the thoughts you might have some music samples up.

Now, when I listened to Fat City, it took about four tracks — right into the middle of “Round of Blues” — before I fully understood what I had on my hands. I sat through “Polaroids” and “Tennessee” and “Tenderness on the Block” with a kind of a stupid look on my face, and halfway through the fourth track I finally understood why I hadn’t been able to do anything else. It was the third track on Time For Mercy, “Will You Remember Me?” that secured that album’s place in my heart. “Possession” had been floating around for a couple of weeks on radio before Fumbling Towards Ecstasy had been released, so it didn’t count as far as I was concerned, but it took 30-45 seconds of “Wait” before the album vaulted itself into my musical pantheon. I knew it was going to be good, but it took me that long to realize how good it was, and from there I was hooked.

Here’s where things get kind of strange. It took you and Another Kind of Fire the first thirty one notes of “Hollywood Ending.”

And all I could do was sit there, slack-jawed, listening to this music wash over me. I realized at that moment what had been missing from my music for so long — I didn’t think I’d been craving that kind of experience again, but it turns out that I needed it in some way. God, how I needed it! I’m a loser that way, I know, but strange to discover that something had been missing for so long.

Another Kind of Fire is perfect. I hesitate to call it a concept album because I don’t know if you meant it that way, but it feels like a concept album about the nature of love and relationships; it feels like it grows in its understanding of those concepts, building towards a grand finish. There isn’t a single moment on it that feels wrong or artificial. It is soaked in honesty. God, it’s really, really good. It’s so good it almost hurts.

Thank you so much for making this album, Edie. I didn’t realize what I’d been craving, but once I figured it out there was this almost palpable sense of relief that came over me. I don’t know whether I’m relieved because I found another one of those amazing albums, or whether I’m relieved because I’m still able to feel this kind of thing fifteen years later.

But you know what? I don’t care. Your album is fantastic. I want to hug it.

Lots of love,
Dr. Hazmat