Alright, it becomes clear I’m going to have to adopt a much more casual approach to this blog if I want to get anything posted. So, I guess, from now on, it’s probably safe to expect one-liners like “The new Kathleen Edwards record is really kickass” and fevered, elitist rants on stupid things like how the word ‘acoustic’ does not in any way, shape or form mean the same thing as ’solo’.

Possible upcoming topics include Oh Susanna, politics in music and fans of bands like My Chemical Romance who think they exist outside the influence of cabaret, country, blues, and other very uncool genres.

Cheers, internet!

I’m writing a quick note to say that I’m not abandoning this, I’m just going to college. And battling hurricanes. My sympathies, thoughts, prayers and good vibes to anyone affected by Ike or any other storm this season. Nobody wants to hear that it ‘could have been worse’ when their house has been destroyed, but it’s true, ’cause Ike’s death toll is currently hovering somewhere around 55 and there are so many people that are still missing. So if you still have your life and the people you love, all things considered, you’re doing alright.

On a similar and sad note, I’m going to copy-and-paste a bulletin that I sent out on Facebook and Myspace on the 23rd. Even if you just stumbled in here by accident, if you do nothing else, take a couple of minutes to read this. In fact I think I’m going to give this a permanent page on my blog.

Hey guys. I’m normally too shy to post bulletins, but I’m making an exception for this. I don’t know that I’ve ever felt so strongly about anything. It’s important. And it’s long, I know; read it anyway. If anything’s worth your time it’s this.

A week ago tonight a five year old girl named Alyssa Castillo was hit and killed on my street by another neighbor. She was riding her bike after dark. She came out from behind a pile of fallen tree limbs that were stacked way too high on the curb, and he didn’t see her until it was too late. She was run over with both tires. Her lungs were crushed and her skull was split open. She died almost instantly.

He wasn’t drunk.

He wasn’t speeding.

It could have been anyone behind the wheel of that truck. My next-door neighbor, my mother, my brother, me, or you. It could have been any child under that car’s wheels.

The neighborhood built a memorial in front of the Castillo house. My brother made a cross with Alyssa’s name on it, during a candlelight vigil every person, at least fifty people, laid a flower down in front of it for her, and there are candles burning in front of it every night. There’s still green spray paint in the street where investigators marked the location of the truck’s tires, the bicycle, and the body. And I still see cars come flying through my subdivision, not only strangers who must have seen the cross and the spray paint and chose to keep speeding anyway, but people who live in this neighborhood, people who were there the night that Alyssa died, who saw the lights and the ambulance and that tiny body covered up with a sheet, who watched Alyssa’s mother collapse in the driveway when she found out that her daughter hadn’t survived.

I know that this kind of thing happens often enough that it doesn’t even faze most people. I get it. If I’d only seen it on the news or read it on the internet, it wouldn’t have fazed me either. It apparently didn’t even faze some people who witnessed it. The thing is, though, it shouldn’t be that way. We shouldn’t shake our heads and think “how sad” and move on. We shouldn’t just chalk it up to unfortunate conditions caused by the hurricane and fall back into complacency. Bear with me because it’s cliched, but it’s true that everyone should be outraged.

It takes so little to ensure that this doesn’t happen to another child. You can write to your local suits, petition for the speed limit in your neighborhood to be lowered, demand to know why, if school zones must be 20 mph, residential streets should be 30 mph. You can petition for Children at Play signs. You can buy one of Keep Kids Alive Drive 25’s signs or you can make your own. You can do that, and someone needs to.

But you can also just start with yourself. You can drive slowly through residential areas. You can drive even slower at night or when you’re tired and take special notice of who or what might be on the sidewalks. You can report street lights that aren’t working. You can make sure your garbage isn’t piled high enough to block an oncoming car’s view of a child. You can avoid parking on the street if you can. And most importantly, you can talk. Tell your kids, your neighbors’ kids, your brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews and cousins to look both ways before they go into the street, and explain to them why they can’t run out from behind parked cars or trash bags. You can talk to their parents. Tell them about Alyssa. Tell them never to let their kids play unattended. Tell them how they can help.

You can talk to anyone you know who drives. You can talk to anyone you don’t know who drives. You can copy this message, paste it into a set of quotation marks and repost it, or you can not. You can do whatever you’re comfortable with.

Just tell somebody.

RIP Alyssa Castillo
9 – 16 – 08
Never Forgotten

I was worried that I wouldn’t have anything to say about Justin Rutledge’s Man Descending that I didn’t already cover in my earlier all-inclusive post about him, and maybe I don’t have anything super constructive, but I will say this: I had a really really trying day. (And I was worried I talked too much about myself in this blog.) I was exhausted and ill and cranky. By the time I got home, the sun was going down and I was borderline murderous. I turned off the lights, laid down, put this album on and shut my eyes, and by the second or third song I felt the most content I had in weeks. That’s pretty much what this man does. In a house where getting through a day sometimes feels more like crossing a minefield, he’s staved off countless panic attacks, kept my blood pressure low and just, in general, soothed away the irrational feeling that the apocalypse is nigh. I’d never really been able to relate to those fans that claim so-and-so’s music saved their life, or that they wouldn’t be able to survive without it, and I won’t imply that either of those are true for me – which I don’t want to undercut my perceived opinion of his work, because it’s unbelievably high. I’m just not that dramatic or that bad off, so I can’t truthfully say that Justin Rutledge saved my life. But I can say, with complete and total honesty, that he made it a hell of a lot better.

/mush

Man Descending is a beautiful record. So is everything else the man has produced. Go buy it – it’s worth every penny.

Here’s “The Wire“, my current favorite from the album, featuring vocals by Catherine MacLellan and horns by David Travers-Smith. Another few of the many guest musicians on the album include Ron Sexsmith, Hawksley Workman, Oh Susanna, Melissa McClelland, Jim Bryson, Jenn Grant, and Colin Cripps.

The next band I want to ramble like a big ol pretentious idiot about seems to kinda fly under the radar a lot of the time. I don’t know why. Maybe because they don’t tour as rabidly as some of their labelmates, maybe because their frontman is not as conventionally handsome as some of their labelmates (though I think he’s pretty sexy); either way though I feel they’re tragically underappreciated.

Though NQ Arbuckle are often accused of being country, they insist they lean more towards the rock side of the spectrum, saying they’ve gone up in front of country crowds and bombed – I don’t know why, because they sound like any band I’d hear if I stepped into an icehouse here in Texas, only loads better which is nothing but the highest compliment from me. They are made up of frontman Neville Quinlan, brothers Mark and Peter Kesper, and bassist John Dinsmore, and they make candid, high-energy, quietly romantic songs that compile little snapshots of every day life: walking home in the early hours, musing on laundry and dirty dishes that need attending to, making awkward conversation with the girl you like and tipping a few pints – oh boy, there’s a lot of pint-tipping. Enough to warrant a little nod of the head to Neville (along with Chang of Veal) in his buddy and producer Luke Doucet’s song “Brother”, on which Neville actually does vocals: “He was drunker than Arbuckle/he was higher than Chang.“

So, yeah. I don’t have an eloquent or witty way to wrap this up, so I’m just going to be frank and say that their songs always make me feel really happy, and even if you’re not into country music, they’re definitely worth taking the few minutes to check them out. You might be surprised.

Highlights:
- “I Can See the Moon“, from Last Supper in a Cheap Town : I don’t have anything to say about this. I just love it, that’s all.
- “Walls Are So Thin“, also from Last Supper in a Cheap Town : Decidedly less twangy than the rest of this album, and I will always consider the last chorus, “And the stars fall from the sky/And this broken moon has lost its shine/and the clouds all tumble like smoke/it’s wintertime and I feel cold” to be on par with Tom Waits’ “Earth Died Screaming” with respect to apocalyptic music.
- If you take a gander at Richard’s live recordings, which you can find in the link list to the right there, you can find a thirty-minute clip of a live show in Waterloo in 2006. It’s huge, but it’s worth it. They’re fantastic live and Neville Quinlan is endearing as hell.

Six Degrees/Pointless Trivia Section:
- John Dinsmore is an extremely talented musician who has played for Sarah Slean, Sarah Harmer, Danny Michel, Kathleen Edwards, Melissa McClelland, Oh Susanna, and many more, and has a spot in Luke Doucet and the White Falcon as both a bassist and a rhythm guitar player. He sings, he writes, he produces, he engineers, and, apparently, runs the Lincoln County Social Club, a recording studio in Ontario.
- Off the top of my head, Neville has guested on Luke Doucet’s songs numerous times, helped pick out the best songs to make the cut for his latest album Blood’s Too Rich, and when Luke lost his voice at the SxSW this year, Neville helped him out by singing some of the songs for him. Awww. In addition, Luke has produced all their albums so far.
- The whole of NQ Arbuckle also went out to Europe with labelmates Luke and Justin Rutledge last year in what was deemed the Six Shooter Triple Barrel Tour. Seriously, guys. What I wouldn’t give to be able to see that.
- Sarah Slean (Neville’s alleged then-girlfriend) guested on their first album, Hanging the Battle-Scarred Pinata, along with Carolyn Mark, with whom Neville did a duet called “Fireworks” on her album Just Married: An Album of Duets – which also features Ford Pier of the Rheostatics, Geoff Berner, Corb Lund and Luke Doucet.

Get the music – once again – at Six Shooter Records and Maple Music.

Anybody who’s reading my blog at this point knows that I’m maybe unhealthily fond of Luke Doucet, the frontman of this band, and his music, and I’m not really going to make any stabs at denying that. But even if I had no idea who the man was, I’m pretty sure I’d still love Veal. The thing about them, though, is that everyone keeps trying to categorize them. I guess it’s human nature but even the bio on their myspace is littered with comparisons to Indie Music Heroes and futile attempts at genre description to the point of absolute ridiculity. I’m not sure if that’s a real word but let’s roll with it. I mean, look at that thing. The phrase “Surf-noir-motorcycle-hillbilly rock” is used seemingly without irony. Tom Waits, Lou Reed, Elvis Costello, Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, David Lowery of Cracker, the Who, and Fugazi are all referenced in the span of a few paragraphs. Last but certainly not least is the mention of the Cramps/Dick Dale/Iggy Pop orgy. Flattering as all those comparisons are it seems to me to actually do them an injustice, because in the end, they’re just Veal: unique, utterly bizarre, and really good.

Take their first album, Hot Loser, released in ‘97 in, as far as I can tell, a haze of pot smoke. (Luke had long hair, see right. I don’t know if I like it on him but I do think that, much like his recent beard, regardless of aesthetics it was pretty impressive. Dude has surprising hair-growing abilities and that’s a beautiful head of hair.) The man himself has admitted, both then and now, that the lyrics at this point were pretty much “free-association bullshit”. They’re kind of my favorite part of the record, if only because they make me giggle so hard sometimes. But, the thing is, regardless of that, the album is still just fun to listen to. The lyrics are weird and the songwriting is unconventional, but it feels really, really good on the ears. The production (y’all just sit tight for the Six Degrees section.) is the kind that kinda swallows up your head. And, amidst the unusual musical structure, there are some fantastic songs. I fully believe that “Mexico Texaco”, “Cauchemar” and especially “Down Again” could be singles now – the latter may be the best on the album. The only song that doesn’t really agree with me is “In Bed With The Pope”, the sound of which makes me cringe a little, but even that’s growing on me.

Something similar can be said for their next release, Tilt O’Whirl (2000). While the music is hit-and-miss in some places on this record, when it’s good, it’s really good. Take for example “Spiderman” and “Buttercloud” – though, if I’m being honest, it might have taken a listen to the more stripped-down versions of them from Luke’s live record Outlaws (Live and Unreleased) to realize exactly how good they were. Even still, there’s a lot of gems on Tilt O’Whirl, like the short-but-sweet “Underground”, my personal favorite “Skid”, and the bitter, sleepy ballad, “Centre of the Universe.”

And last but not least – their greatest, in fact, there’s Embattled Hearts. Luke had really honed his songwriting skills by then, and every song is memorable and catchy. And the lyrics are at their best, too. “Everybody Wants More Cocaine” (which, sorry Rivers, owns Weezer’s “We Are All On Drugs” a hundred times over, though that might not be saying a whole lot.), “Miss Brazil” and the parts of “Fader Creep” I can make out are social commentaries that I actually don’t mind for once, and “Radio” a lament for the state of popular music with some pretty nice movement to boot. Neville Quinlan declares “Toothbrush” one of the sexiest songs ever written by a Canadian. And everything else is so tongue-and-cheek and laced with delicious irony. It’s a good record, a consistently good record, with strong performances all around, and it got no response. It totally bombed. That was back in 2003, and they haven’t put anything new out since. Luke Doucet insists that the band’s days are not over. No one else seems to believe him, but I do, and I’m hoping like hell that, now that his latest record Blood’s Too Rich is out, a new Veal album is the next thing he releases.

Highlights:
- “Down Again“, from Hot Loser. Listen to the melody, and especially the nuance in his voice.
- “Skid“, from Tilt O’Whirl, just makes me happy. The music, the tongue-in-cheek lyrics, the keytar, the ‘ooh-la-la-la’s in the chorus, and that solo.
- “Miss Brazil“, from Embattled Hearts, has a crazy catchy chorus, lyrics with a point, Luke singing in the upper registers, and the phrase “to satisfy viagrified erections”. I don’t care who you are, that’s just good stuff.

Six Degrees/Pointless Trivia Section: Alright, brace yourselves.
- Veal can’t keep a bassist for beans, and they’ve had a revolving cast of bass players over the years. They seem to have finally clicked with their seventh, Nik Kozub, member of about a zillion different bands including up-and-coming, ridiculously fun “we just make dance music” band Shout Out Out Out Out, producer of another zillion records in Edmonton, avid sweatband wearer, and head of Nrmls Wlcm Rcrds.
- Veal’s drummer is known only as Chang. I don’t know about any of the other projects he may have been involved in, but I feel he deserves his own special mention, because he’s a tight drummer, and he’s hella mysterious and charismatic to boot. If this were fandomsecrets and I had less dignity, I would be slapping the words “I’d hit that.” on his picture.
- One of Luke Doucet’s first major gigs was as a hired guitarist for Sarah McLachlan’s Fumbling Towards Ecstacy tour. Sarah’s band is all over Hot Loser. For one, her keyboard player and one-time boyfriend (oh yes, I went there) David Kershaw produced and played additional instruments on it. Another of Sarah’s guitar players, Sean Ashby, is frontman of a band called Jack Tripper which is thanked in the liner notes along with Ms. McLachlan’s drummer and husband, Ashwin Sood. Finally, her longtime bassist Brian Minato plays guitars and Yamaha Portimento on the record. Brian would actually later do a stint in Veal as one of their many bassists, and he also was part of Jack Tripper for a time, as well as co-producer on their album 9 Easy Pieces. Oh, yeah, and he played bass for Luke for a bit too. Dude gets around.
- I don’t know much about Barry Mirochnick, but the guy’s everywhere. He wrote or co-wrote five of the songs on Hot Loser, did lead vocals on two of them, played bass and background vocals on everything, and did some other instrumental things. He’s played on every record Canada’s ever produced (including Jack Tripper’s 9 Easy Pieces). I am not even kidding. He was also a member of Acoustically Inclined (as was Luke Doucet), and has played for Christine Fellows, Martin Tielli of the Rheostatics, Veda Hille, and Neko Case.
- They’re not directly related, but when I got my copy of Hot Loser – with four incomplete layers of shrink wrap, two copies of the liner booklet and a certificate from Divine Industries for three “divine dollars” – and I looked the company up to see wtf was going on, I found on their website The Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, who make music about HP Lovecraft and his literature. And that deserves some kind of mention.
- Tilt O’Whirl was produced by Rheostatics drummer and producer Michael Phillip Wojewoda, who produced the Barenaked Ladies‘ Gordon, and albums by Ashley MacIsaac, Spirit of the West and a ton of other people. He was also married to singer/songwriter Mia Sheard, who covered Veal’s “Mexico Texaco” on her album Reptilian, bringing us full circle! Hell yeah!

Get Veal’s music here, at Six Shooter Records, or here, at MapleMusic.

I get that not everybody’s going to like Justin Rutledge. He’s fairly unabashed about the twangy elements in his music, his songs are all mid- to low-tempo, his lyrics are poetic and romanticized, the general vibe on his albums is a very quiet, low-key one. A lot of people are going to accuse him of being too mellow, too boring, too country, or just plain not their taste. I’m cool with that, but he’s still one of my favorite songwriters of all time, which is pretty damn cool too.

Here’s an example of the man’s awesome power: the moment I heard him – on the song “Too Sober To Sleep” from his debut album No Never Alone – I realized I loved country music. Years of deepest, most stubborn denial smashed clean to pieces by five minutes of sparse piano playing and a chorus that goes, “I’m too sober to sleep/but I’m too drunk to cry,” which, out of musical and lyrical context, would probably fit right in on any watered-down and overproduced bit of country-pop crossover frivolity you’d expect to hear on the radio right now. But Justin makes it work. He’s the (or at least my) antidote to glossy, written-for-radio country music.

So, I got No Never Alone, an unassuming but as it turns out, gorgeous record. And now – with his third album due to be released any day now, whoops – I finally have in my hot little hands a copy of his sophomore effort, Devil On A Bench In Stanley Park. The latter is maybe a little bit ‘bigger’ in vibe and energy than the former, but on both of them, Justin’s understated songwriting skills are apparent. In fact, if I had to pick one word to describe him, it’d probably be just that: understated. The production, the lyrics, the melodies, and the vocals are all simple and sparse, but the way they come together never fails to produce that good old unidentifiable longing feeling in my chest. I don’t want to oversell him (too late eh?) so that you hate him if you do check him out, but you know, I have a crush on him and I can’t help myself. Both of these records are like instant contentment for me.

Highlights:

- “Lay Me Down Sweet Jesus” from No Never Alone: best listened to loud and over headphones. It sounds like a rejected, possibly slightly bent, gospel song, and lopes along, slowly building until a whole chorus of voices just kinda envelops you in the final verse.

- “A Letter To Heather“, also from No Never Alone, which features Mary Margaret O’Hara on vocals: I’m just going to quote what Neville Quinlan of NQ Arbuckle* said about it because he’s awesome and right, too: “This is a beautiful love song. If you put this on and lip synch to your girlfriend … make-out city.”

- “This Is War” from Devil On A Bench In Stanley Park: Holy crap. Sorry, I know that’s sort of uneven coverage. Being from a new (to me) CD, me and this song don’t go as far back as the others, but it makes a hell of a first impression. Greg Keelor of Blue Rodeo plays some fantastic electric guitar on this track.

Six Degrees/Pointless Trivia Section:

- No less than 2/3s of Blue Rodeo appears on Devil. Bazil Donovan and Bob Packwood play bass and piano/B3 organ, respectively, throughout (though Bazil also plays acoustic guitar on “The Suffering of Pepe O’Malley [Pt. IV]“), you already read about Greg Keelor, and Jim Cuddy lends his voice to the closer, “I’m Gonna Die (One Sunny Day)”. Which I guess isn’t really surprising since Justin was part of their Blue Rodeo and Friends tour which just recently wound down (along with Luke Doucet* and Melissa McClelland*, Ron Sexsmith, and Oh Susanna. You know I have to add these things in.) Still. 2/3s.

- Speaking of, Oh Susanna also laid down some lovely vocals on “Backseat Honeymoon/Blue Is What I Do”, and Melissa sings backup on a good chunk of the album.

You can purchase all of Justin’s records at his awesome record label’s website.

*If I do actually decide to go on with this whole music reviewy thing, it’s very likely that any of the names you see in this entry will probably turn up in a later blog post, but anybody who’s asterisked is pretty much a guarantee. Just warnin’ ya.