Adrian Whitehead is Gear.

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I seem to be posting a lot about very, very poppish stuff, so if this is overkill I can only beg forgiveness for now...

...but if you happen to love absolutely gloriously executed pop-rock craftsmanship and brilliant songwriting, let me tell you about an Ozzie named Adrian Whitehead. Far too many singers who can do a fey vocal quaver and saccharine harmony get a free pass from critics and fans who buy into it and wonder why the marginally talented slobs they're championing never get any recognition. I'm guessing they also wonder why albums by such non-talents become forgettable so fast.

It's all about the songs. A lot of people can sing like Brendan Benson, maybe...but very few can write a hook like "Cold Hands Warm Heart" or "I'm Easy".

Which brings me back to Adrian Whitehead. No idea who the bloke is. No idea where he cobbled together a recording budget to put his debut album "One Small Stepping Man" together with either, but the production here is stellar (strings, a variety of keys, and even a sax). No idea where he learned to write and arrange and sing songs like these either...but what a stunning record he's made.

You can listen to the whole album right here.

My favorite tracks are the first two, "Caitlin's '60's Pop Song" and "Saving Caroline". The former song he says he wrote to entertain his 8-year old niece to make her smile after a funeral for their great-grandfather. How sweet is that? The latter song starts off sounding like vintage Styx(!), but again finds a groove that belongs solely to Adrian Whitehead. I also dig "You Are The Sun" and "Ways Of Man" a lot. "Elle" is five minutes of exquisitely gorgeous piano (best one-note piano song in a while) and strings, and "Better Man" has the most gobsmacking hook on the whole disc. What you'll notice about all the songs is that they never go just where you think they're going; Whitehead knows exactly what he's doing, and half the joy of this disc is listening along to hear just exactly what unexpected turn he's going to take his melody line, and where he's going to extract a hook from playing the "wrong" chord or notes.

This has been in my heavy rotation now for over a week. Give it a shot, lemme know what you think.

No, I Do Not Want Cheese With This Whine.

You know what band just rules? Novillero. Novillero absolutely kicks all ass. They write brilliantly melodic songs that don't scrimp on soulfulness, and they belt them out with a barely-controlled fury that still erupts into Yardbirdian raveups ("The Art Of Carrying On" in particularly threatens to knock over household furniture if you crank it loud enough). I love Novillero so much that I put them at #1 on my year-end best-of list for 2006. Crazy thing is, I've been listening to that 2006 album Aim Right For the Holes In Their Lives in heavy rotation since 2006. I'd wager a week hasn't gone by in the last two years that I haven't cranked up "Habit Over Heart" or "Hypothesist" or "Morally Deficient Business" and just rocked out like crazy.

Last month brought the big news that Novillero was finally releasing a followup to Aim, their third album overall to be called A Little Tradition. Awesome, right?

So why am I whining? Well, let's just say that I do *not* get marketing as it exists (or doesn't) for so many bands outside the mainstream of late. I come at this from an old-school marketing perspective. In the olden days of Nevermind and Pearl Jam's Ten, us marketing flunkies did it the hard way: the record company printed up a bunch of "flats" (album cover-sized thin cardboard full-color promo shots that usually looked like the CD cover blown up), posters, stand-ups, fliers, and other crap that had to be toted around to record stores where you'd have to make the display yourself with a lot of tape and staples. It was a time-consuming and not inexpensive process, in other words. A lot of times you'd get promo CD's to flog to radio stations and record store employees, too, and that meant having to go into "sell" mode on a one-on-one basis, knowing full well that the odds were long that they'd ever even break the shrinkwrap on the CD you were giving away for free.

So let me get back to current (lack) of marketing and promotion here after that mini "You kids get off my lawn" rant. Things are different nowadays. There's this internet thing with the tubes and whatnot. It makes the barest modicum of marketing and promotion E-A-S-Y. You put up a Myspace page and a handful of your songs. People basically "subscribe" to your page by the friending process. From there, any time you add or change songs on your page, any time you blog about something to flog a tour or just one-off show, it goes out to a network of people who already are predisposed to liking you. CD release coming up? Post a bulletin and it goes to everyone on your list as well.

And so I'm moaning a little bit about the lack of promotion or marketing on this new Novillero disc. Right now (Wednesday night, September 3rd) if you go to the band's myspace site, you won't see a single new song from a new CD that will be released in five days. They've managed to get a few announcements up and a track list and tourdates, so at least there's that...but man, you look at other myspace sites for bands who have either released or are about to release a new record and there's a lot more good old fashioned hype than you'll see with Novillero, and that's a shame. I won't knock the band themselves around for this; hey, I get that very few bands out there can actively make a living just on their music, so getting a record out there and then being able to do a mini-tour to support it probably means having to work real-world jobs extra hard for a few weeks to get ducks in a row so you can leave and do a tour for a bit. But...shouldn't there be someone who stands to maybe make a little money if a new album sells decently doing the hyping for them?

It gets worse, though. Novillero records for a Canadian indie label called Mint. Mint may not have the deepest pockets in the world, but then again I'm not sure they're paupers either. They have or had Canadian rights to folks like Neko Case, The New Pornographers, Mr T. Experience, The Sadies, and cub, all of which are artists that move a few units. You go to the Mint records site and you expect to see them pumping info for the first release in 30 months for a band who got almost across-the-board stellar reviews for a 2006 disc....and there's almost nothing. The newest info there was posted on July 31st. The only evidence of a new Novillero album to be found there is a single track, the title track from the forthcoming album available as an mp3 (we'll get to that once I get done bellyaching). You have to click on the artist page to actually get the information that, Boy Howdy, there's a new album coming out soon. (Compare the Mint site to what Merge records does with their site, and realize that it's not just their roster that contributes to Mac selling a lot of records).

I dunno. I guess it just bums me out because any time I'm playing a Novillero song at a party or something, invariably people want to know who the heck it is they're listening to, and where they can get more of it. I really do think they're one of the best 2 or 3 bands on the planet right now; in fact, if I were to imagine the perfect band that I'd want to be in, in my mind's ear that band would sound an awful lot like Novillero, and I just wish they'd get a little bigger push of promotion, especially from folks who stand to either recoup or make money on their investment in them.

So. If the band's label won't promote 'em, I will. Based on the evidence of the single track we've been given so far, this disc sounds like a great continuation of everything they've done before. Here's the song, "A Little Tradition", obviously the title track from the new disc. Along with The High Dials and Cobra Verde, this is one of the albums I'm most looking forward to in the coming weeks.

Their Time Is Coming Soon.

In 2005 the Montreal band The High Dials released a pretty great album called War Of The Wakening Phantoms. It was a disc that opened strong with two great songs ("Holy Ground" and "Strandhill Sands") and sealed the deal with a song that defies easy description, a 5-minute epic called "Our Time Is Coming Soon".

I've written about "Our Time Is Coming Soon" here a few times over the years, but screw it, I'm gonna do it again. "Our Time Is Coming Soon" is absolutely, hands-down my favorite song of the 2000's so far. The opening two chord riff sets the stage, like gale force winds presaging a hurricane. They go unconventional after the first chorus and head straight to a bridge before the second verse, and Rishi Dhir plays one of the most kick-ass sitar solos of all time there (I actually kind of hate the sitar; to my taste it sorta is Asia's answer to Scotland's bagpipes as far as "instruments that make me want to run away" go...so saying a sitar solo is "kick ass" is no faint praise.) By the time they get to the final vocal bridge the song is in full blazing glory, and you wonder how they're going to end this cyclone--almost always when a song gets as epic as "Our Time Is Coming Soon" gets, the creative juice runs out on the conclusion and things go out perfunctorily at best, if you're lucky. Not so on here, though: "Our Time Is Coming Soon" ends like a supernova; the snare fill that starts martial and ends up galloping just as a descending guitar figure drops in gets your pulse racing, and then the drums turn into Keith Moon and the sound goes maelstrom and when they finally take their feet off the gas and let the song end, you realize The High Dials have managed a song unlike almost anything else anyone has even attempted in the post-Nirvana rock years.

"Our Time Is Coming Soon" mp3

The High Dials got a lot of deserved good press for War Of The Wakening Phantoms, but I'm not sure that translated into moving units. After what seemed like a hectic and gruelling year of touring in the States and through Europe, the Dials seemed rather emotionally spent. They lost their secret weapon when Rishi Dhir decided to opt out of the group. 2006 and 2007 went by without hearing much from the group. Their website went dark. Rainbow Quartz, their US label, has updated their site about twice since last October. Reading tour diaries/blogs from guitarist/singer/songwriter Trevor Anderson--who seems a great guy, but also seemed mentally exhausted by the time Dhir had left the group--I figured I'd heard the last from this once-promising band.

Not so! Back in May, the Dials promised to start posting songs from a new album on their Myspace page. The new record--which will be a double album--is called Moon Country. They've got 6 songs up at Myspace, and hoo-boy...if these six songs are representative of what's to come on the full album, we may have us a contender for album of the year here. The High Dials seemed to respond to losing a musical element like Dhir by opening up their sound and letting their talent run wild. The band's debut album, A New Devotion is pretty nifty, but it has an almost claustrophobic retro psychedelic sound that induces a little too much listener fatigue if taken in large doses. Phantoms, the second album, shows them opening things up a bit, with nods to more modern dreampop sounds like Kitchens Of Distinction or Ride.

Moon Country, at least based on the evidence of these six songs, takes that hinted-at direction of Phantoms and runs with it. "Do The Memory Lapse" could be vintage For Against or less blippy New Order. "These Days Mean Nothing To Me" manages to be both psychedelic and still manage a Kitchens influence while walking a fine line between light and darkness (the airy harmony on the chorus that gives way to the angry guitar chug right after is wonderful!) "Cartoon Breakup" opens with wheezy Melon Collie synths and then manages to give you four glorious minutes of spectacular, timeless loveliness. "Open Up The Gates" is a nod to their lysergic side, but far more interesting than you'd ever expect a song that could be described as a psychedelic pop song to be.

The real stunner here though is a song called "Killer Of Dragons", which sounds like nothing else The High Dials have ever done. It is a gorgeous, beautiful track that delivers on every promise and all the potential this band has ever shown. If there were any justice in the world, "Killer Of Dragons" would become the massive top ten hit it richly deserves to be, but probably won't because it won't get the push to radio and retail it deserves. Ah well.

In any event, Moon Country I think is still slated for a September release, at least in Canada. I can't wait to hear the whole thing, either. Over their past two records, when people talk about The High Dials, they talk about who they sound like; on these new songs, the greatest accomplishment on display is that the Dials sound like no one else but themselves. Keep a sharp eye out for this'n.

The High Dials Myspace Page, where you can bliss out on these six slabs of rock greatness...

There's A Reason George Martin Was The 5th Beatle

As we head into Derby Week (bummer of a post position, Brownie), tonight's blog post has me recalling something the ever-astute Marc Attenberg told me years ago about handicapping horse races: the worst guys to ask for 'capping wisdom are the trainers and jockeys. Why? I could speculate a few reasons, but to me the main one is easy to pick out. I think trainers and jocks are lousy at sizing up a race because perhaps they're too close to the subject to form objective theses on the subject at hand.

Which brings us to what I want to yammer on about tonight: earlier this month UNI/Polydor re-issued the seminal and only record (to date) released by Liverpool's legendary The La's. It arrives as a double-cd package with the original as-released album remastered, and then a variety of different mixes with different producers of the songs on that original album. Of special interest is the inclusion of the "Mike Hedges Album", allegedly the version of the debut album that La's frontman and creative force Lee Mavers was happiest with.

Before going forward, I suppose there might be someone out there unfamiliar with the turbulent history of The La's and their only album. As the story goes, Mavers had a precise and certain La's "sound" in his head. Signed to the ultra-hip Go! Discs, the label forked out a lot of money to hook the band up with in-demand producer Steve Lillywhite. Mavers was upset with the production and would later claim the band deliberately played poorly in the recording sessions, in hopes that the material would never be released in that state. The La's subsequently went through a series of producers (including John Leckie) re-recording the album before a frustrated record label had Lillywhite piece together as coherent a record as he could for release from the initial sessions. Mavers was livid with the label and refused to release another album until the debut could be recorded properly with the songs sounding on record the way they did in his head.

Yeah, good luck with that Lee. Allegedly of all the producers who took a stab at The La's back in the day, the guy who came closest to capturing the sound that Mavers wanted was Mike Hedges (who'd later work with U2 and Radiohead, among others). The inclusion of the Hedges version of the debut on The La's Deluxe Edition, then, would seem to be a pretty important occurrence for fans of the band...

...and yet, having listened and re-listened to the Hedges versions of the songs...not so much. There are discoveries to be made on this double-disc set to be sure, but the most major of these is that Steve Lillywhite is one hell of a great producer. Lillywhite's versions of these songs just seem far, far, FAR superior to anyone else's. Obviously, the bias of having heard only those versions for the last 18 years is part of it. But even trying empirically and objectively to find brilliant bits of the songs as recorded by Hedges, Leckie, or Gary Crowley, it seems clear that Lillywhite was head and shoulders beyond his peers here. The other versions plod with a sort of deliberateness and hesitancy that make the songs sound positively dull. The myriad versions of the hit "There She Goes" are really jarring; the signature guitar riff on the song sounds fluid and loose in the original, but the differnt versions on the re-issue sound like first-year guitar students picking out the riff by sight-reading a tablature chart. Lillywhite's versions practically leap out of the speakers by comparison; taken side-by-side in this format it ends up being like watching the "Wizard Of Oz", where everyone else is black and white and the original version is glorious technicolor.

As such, I'm going to express a bit of pop music blasphemy: Lee Mavers was wrong, wrong, wrong. If the Hedges version of his songs were the one closest to what he wanted, then Mavers was a talent lacking in perspective. Which brings us back to the horse racing analogy at the beginning of this post (yeah, I'd almost forgotten it too). When you're in a band, I think that like horse trainers and races, you're too close to the subject sometimes to be able to think critically and have accurate notions of what works and what doesn't. Hey, the guys in Nirvana were sick and tired of playing "that stupid riff" that became "Smells Like Teen Spirit". Eric Clapton fled The Yardbirds partly because he couldn't stand playing the four-chord strum of "For Your Love", which sounded boring to him. Hell, take a look at the post-1969 solo careers of The Beatles; on their own it became clear that John, Paul, and George sure seemed to need the critical and editorial ear of George Martin to help them tell the difference between what worked and what didn't.

Sadly then if over the years you've built in your mind a sort of altar to someone really getting The La's sound "right" in the studio and laid hopes on hearing the same, I've got news for you. Seems as if Steve Lillywhite had it right all along, and had a better feel for The La's sound than the band themselves. Unless you're a completist or contrarian, there's no reason to throw over your old La's CD for this new version.

Crash Into June.

June 10th is looking like a treee-mendous day for new releases. As mentioned elsewhere, The Telepathic Butterflies emerge from 3 years of silence with a new disc, and samples available at their myspace page and on the Rainbow Quartz page sound pretty good.

...and then there's this, posted last week on Sloan's official site:

Sloan have completed work on their ninth studio album, "Parallel Play", which is due to be released on June 10th. In Canada, the album will be available on Sloan's own murderecords, distributed by Red Ink Music. In the USA, we are once again working with our friends at Yep Roc Records.

The album was recorded this winter at Sloan's studio space and features 13 new songs.

We will soon have news about our summer and fall tour plans. We'll also have some brand new audio and video posted before long, so be sure to check regularly for updates.

The good folks at Yep-Roc have the whole freakin' album streaming right here. Impressions later, but my first take is that there's more Patrick Pentland on this disc than on Never Hear The End Of It...and more Patrick Pentland is always a good thing.

Oh....and then I note that the long-anticipated new disc by The Modfather is due to drop on June 24th. Too. Much. Great. Music.

On The Horizon

Stuff I'm listening to and digging and may or may not write about in the next few days/weeks:

1. The first For Against record with original guitarist Harry Dingman III since 1989.
2. The new Telepathic Butterflies disc (I'd worried they'd broken up, but new disc out soon!)
3. The Foxboro Hot Tubs (I've become a Green Day fanboi, and an unapologetic one.)
4. The Constantines
5. etc. (not a band.)

I'm also simultaneously attempting to read:

1. the first-ever collection of Michael Chabon essays ("Maps & Legends", published by McSweeney's with a pretty kick-ass cover/coverlet),
2. Jonathan Barnes' The Somnambulist
3. Lauren Goff's The Monsters Of Templeton

I Know How To Ask For More Lemons...

...and "mas papas fritas, por favor" I can do in two different accents, but beyond that my restaurant-learned Spanish is pretty awful. Not that I'm at all good with foreign languages. I struggle enough with my mother tongue; people who are effortlessly bilingual fascinate me.

But I'm digressing. I have a sudden interest in non-restaurant Spanish all of a sudden.

Here's the deal: it will surprise few of you reading this that I'm a pop knob at heart. I unabashedly heart the Fab Four, prefer the Buzzcocks and Undertones to The Clash, and think "Box Elder" is far and away the best song on Westing By Sextant and Musket. The flip side of that, though, is that for the last 20 years I've been acutely aware of just how much utter shite there is out there masquerading as melodic rock and roll. Honestly, I can take about 30 seconds of most "power pop" stuff before my teeth ache from the cotton candy-ness of it all. That's why bands like The Blakes or Novillero (message to Winnipeg: please tell me Novillero hasn't broken up?) rock me so hard--they get that hooks are good, but by themselves they're like whipped cream without the pumpkin pie. They're chili and cheese without the dog.

I also learned while playing a college radio show and working at Euclid Records that playing one favorite song of mine after another bored me to tears inside of 15 minutes. My favorite radio shows (and music discoveries) were when I busted myself out of my comfort zone. That's how I discovered and/or learned to love stuff like Sparklehorse or People Under The Stairs or The Grifters or Silkworm.

And so for the last month or so, I've been listening to a ton of music that falls way outside my usual interests. Underground hiphop and electronica. Metal. Lots of metal. Indie rock with no discernible music structure to it. Experimental guitar stuff and even some found sound noodling that didn't have me lunging for the eject button.

I have eaten my musical vegetables, in other words.

And so now we get back to my interest in Espanol. I just stumbled across a double CD retrospective by a band called Ross. I know zilch about them, except for on first listen I immediately figured the singer had a non-American accent and, thanks to a cover of Teenage Fanclub's sublime "Verisimilitude" pegged them as Scots or Geordies from the North of England. Nope. Finally tracked down their Myspace page (try finding out info on a band called "Ross"; if they'd called themselves "Jack" I'd have had an easier time of it) and it turns out they're from Murcia, Spain. Which means that while their songs are all in English, all web infos about 'em are in Spanish. Since none of the information or bio on the band involves lemons, fish, potatoes, or the words "hot" and "cold", I've got nothing really to tell you about them, other than it seems as if Ross's career ran from 1992 to 2002, and after a long hibernation they seem to be doing live shows and stuff.

Nowlemmetellyawhat: Ross is one of the sweetest, most wonderful music discoveries I've made in a long, long time. This double CD retrospective contains 44 songs and clocks in at well over 2 hours of tuneage. It has all the easy stuff for poppish, Beatle-influenced bands to do: chiming guitars played through AC30 amps, sweet Lennonish vocals and gorgeous (but not overdone) harmonies. Thing is, there are thousands of bands able to muster that start, but most of these bands are utterly terrible. These Spanish fellows don't fall into that trap. In fact, they manage to take that start and take it to some wonderfully unexpected places.

I've now spun through the two discs in this collection, and I'm utterly stunned at the fact that these guys managed to come up with 44 gorgeous pop songs that never induce listener fatigue (I got to the end last night and punched up disc one again immediately). They manage that with some incredible songwriting craftsmanship--the melodies here twist and turn and go in all sorts of unexpected places with a seeming effortlessness. Thanks to the mixed recording heritage of these tracks, there are moments of lo-fi majesty, and plenty of Teenage Symphonies To God, as they say.

The disc is called "A Collection For Enemies & Friends, 1992-2002". You'll have to hunt for an online shop to import it if you don't have a buddy stationed at a military base in Europe to pick you up a copy. This is a double CD worth jumping through some hoops for, though.

Let me play you a couple of reasons why:

"Starships-Supersonic Spacewalk"
"Sugar"
"Chroneman"

Here's their Myspace site, if you speak the language.

Ever fallen in love....

....with something you shouldn't have fallen in love with?

Yeah, Pete, I sympathize. I spent the better part of six months ignoring and/or feigning hatred/outrage for the buzzband flavor o' the month, NYC's own Vampire Weekend. Morton had hepped me to the Weekend back in August or July of last year, and I think I gave "Mansard Roof" all of 40 seconds before I recoiled in horror and decided that this was not my thing, as they say. I think it was an expectations thing: you hear "Vampire Weekend" as a band name and I dunno...I was expecting cave teen stomp-a-billy, or at worst really shitty goth revivalism (note to college freshmen intent on forming bands after flunking out this semester: we are not now, nor will we ever be, in need of a Mission UK or Sisters Of Mercy revival so just don't, ok?) Instead, "Mansard Roof" bubbles out like the Mark Mothersbaugh soundtrack to some Wes Anderson pirate movie (now that, we could use...)

I could've left it at that, except for Sirius radio. One of the coolest gadgets I've seen recently is the Sirius Stiletto 2 portable satellite radio. I got one for Christmas, and it is a slick piece of hardware, managing to do all those cool satellite radio things, along with a lot of mp3 storage in a package the size of a small iPod. Last week I was walking home from a buddy's house after an evening of beer and poker, and it was after midnight, the stars were out, a beautiful, balmy early spring night. I don't even remember which Sirius station I had on the Stiletto, but I heard this song that seemed to effortlessly mix early Israelites-style reggae with a dash of Graceland-ish African feel, as well as that sort of dreamy Mothersbaugh-ish soundtrack shimmer. The song was "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa", and in the setting I heard it in, it was absolutely perfect.

And that's how it started. I got home and decided to give Vampire Weekend a good solid chance, and this time I noticed how cool songs like "Mansard Roof" and "Oxford Comma" really were. I noticed that "A-Punk" defies you to not fall under the spell of its tricky rhythms. I noticed especially that "Bryn" might be one of the most touching and gorgeous love songs I've heard in a while. What I also noticed is that this CD isn't a bunch of hyper-precious refrigerator-art pretense; these fellows can write a terrific song and a wonderful melody hook, and manage to deliver it in a way that, lord help me, makes the heart feel glad.

So yeah, here I am buying into something that a month ago I would've told you was pure fraud. I can't help it and I can't deny it. Listening to Vampire Weekend makes me happy. There is a sense of joy and wonder shot through these songs that once taken root inside will possess you.

Here, have some video: