Last winter I got the chance to speak with Toronto mash-up wizard, Josh Raskin, AKA Kids & Explosions. His record, Shit Computer built off the pop song mashes of Girl Talk, ditching Greg Gillis’s club-set party jams for songs that stood on their own.
Now Raskin, an Oscar nominated filmmaker (for doc short I Met the Walrus) has teamed up with Justin Broadbent andAlex Kurina to create “Canadian Song Contest” an audio-visual tribute to this year’s Polaris Prize shortlist nominees. Taking one track from eight of the ten nominated albums, Raskin created a new 3:44 track. You can check it out below, and at the bottom is a list of the songs he used.
Sources:
“Lemonade” from Native Speaker by Braids
“Diesel” from Tigre et Diesel by Galaxie
“Parson Brown” from Seeds by Hey Rosetta!
“Red Horse (Judges II)” from New History Warfare Vol. II: Judges by Colin Stetson
“Darken Her Horse” from Feel It Break by Austra
“Love Shines” from Long Player Late Bloomer by Ron Sexsmith
“Sprawl II” from the Suburbs by Arcade Fire
“Black Water” from Creep on Creepin’ On by Timber Timbre
After toiling away for a number of years, Jake and Jamin Orrall turned many heads with 2009′s Heavy Days and its mix of Nirvana-esque power chord riffing and psychedelic garage rock. Parts of We Are the Champions follows in the go-for-broke spirit of the Nashville duo’s last effort while adding new dimensions to the band’s sonic palate. There were hints of this on “Bummer,” from their split seven inch with Best Coast, which found the brothers slowing things down to achieve a heavier sound reminiscent of Weezer’s Blue Album. “Endless Fire” takes the comparison even further, with Jake and Jamin aping the twin vocal approach Rivers Cuomo and Matt Sharp used to great effect on Weezer’s first two records, singing over keyboards and even a sitar. Of course, anyone who has seen the band live over the past year-and-a-half can tell that these guys love to rip it up and there’s still plenty of that here. “Stays Up Late” and the aptly named “Shredder” pick up where Heavy Days left off, even if, at times, the songs lack the breezy feel of that album’s best tracks. Matching the ferocity of their last album, We Are the Champions manages to push forward without losing the band’s hazy, lo-fi charm.
When was the record recorded?
Guitarist Jake Orrall: We did two songs at one session ["Bummer" and "Mellow Out"] and then a couple months later we did the rest of them.
Did you record “Bummer” and “Mellow Out” with the intention of putting them on the record?
Yeah, we thought we were going to re-record them, but we ran out of time. We only had three days.
You recorded the whole album in three days?
Except for those two songs, and there was some stuff that we didn’t end up using; we’ll see where they end up.
Do you normally go into the studio with the idea that what gets recorded will be one coherent album?
Yeah. During the time we recorded the album we were touring most of the time, by a pretty good margin. We recorded it last year and we did 260 shows last year so we had to be very, very specific about when we were going to record and when we were going to mix, because we were home for so little time.
Was the album written on tour?
Yeah, mostly.
Is that how you normally write?
No, but we had no choice for the last couple albums.
Does it change the kind of songs you write?
I don’t think so.
Many of the song on We are the Champions are slower and heavier. Was that something you were trying to achieve?
It kind of happened that way.
A bunch of reviews have compared it to Weezer’s Blue Album.
Yeah. I’ve read a lot of those ― a lot of them.
Are you and Jamin fans?
Absolutely. That’s a huge, huge album for me.
Is there anything particular about it or was it just the time in your life that you discovered it?
I think it was just the timing; I was 11 when I became aware of it. Those are pretty formative years: 11, 12 and 13.
Has their influence come out on your past albums?
I think so, in some ways. Definitely not so obviously, I guess; it’s not necessarily just that album though. Smashing Pumpkins are my favourite band. Veruca Sault and Nirvana were huge for me. I started listening to that stuff again a year ago, just really getting back into that era of my life, because I found all my CDs from middle school.
Had they been in storage somewhere?
Yeah.
What made you pull them out?
I moved into a place. I didn’t really live anywhere for a long time so I just had my shit in storage for a couple years, living on couches. But you’ve settled into a place now.
Yeah, we run our record label [Infinity Cat] out of a house and I live in the house.
Many people heard about you guys through your live show. Was there any pressure to capture that element on this record?
We try to keep our live shows and our record really separate. We have such an intense live show that we don’t usually try and emulate that on record. Most people that try and have that same live experience listening to the record fail at it. We just try and have the best live show we can have and make the best record we can make.
Was there a pressure in knowing that more people would be listening this time?
I definitely wanted to make it better than the last record, but I think we got better as a band.
Do you think you succeeded in that goal?
Yeah, absolutely. The songs are better, the recording’s better.
You’ve added a lot of sounds too ― there are sitar and keyboards.
Yeah, our buddy Ryan plays sitar. We had a friend who plays sitar and we were making an album and we thought we’d take advantage of that.
Did you want to expand your sound?
Not live, just on record. If we just played the songs through like we do live it wouldn’t be as interesting. And [if we replicated the record] live there wouldn’t be kids jumping off of the stage, you’d just be sitting there listening to it. When we record we try and put stuff that will make it as attention grabbing of a listening experience as it would be live. But live it would be really difficult to incorporate anything else because there’s only two of us. So we might as well keep it simple so we can rock harder.
You’ve always taken a very DIY approach to your career ― starting your label, producing your records, shooting low budget videos ― where does that attitude come from?
Growing up in Nashville, it wasn’t like anyone was going to do that for you. The punk scene was pretty small, pretty underground. Watching kids come through who had obviously dropped out of school and quit their jobs and who were just doing it, that was a pretty big inspiration. No one else is going to do it for you and you can either keep playing local shows once a week or you do some shit.
Did you find it difficult to break out of Nashville and tour?
Yeah, it was horrible. The first four-and-a-half years that we toured it was just trying to find someone interested in having us play in their parents’ garage. We can deal with anything; we just want to play in your town. At that time it was all through MySpace. Everything that we did to book a tour was through MySpace. 2006, ’07, ’08 was all MySpace. We’d find a band that seemed like they’d be pretty cool in the town we were trying to do the show in and then negotiate a show swap, where you book them a show and they book you a show in their town. We did that for four-and-a-half years, then we got a booking agent and told him to put us on the road all the time. It was really hard; we weren’t making any money. You’d make 50 bucks if you were lucky, which would be just enough to get to the next town. But mostly it was spending your money or whatever people would donate. And we’d have to find people’s couches to crash on. It was really hard, but it was really fun.
Is that how you developed your live show?
Yeah, just playing every night for a long, long time.
What turned the tide for you? You mentioned getting a booking agent.
When we put out Heavy Days, we really went for it. We both quit our jobs and moved out of our places and lived in the van for 13 months. Then we got a booking agent and started to make a bit more money.
You recently played a gig in Moscow for Vice Magazine. What was that like?
It’s totally different. We did a Europe tour in the spring and most cities, no one knew who we were. In Moscow, we played with two Russian bands and we were the headliner ― no one gave them the time of day and when we went on people lost their shit for the whole show. And no one even knew who we were. They could care less. We were just some rock band from America that flew all the way out there for one show. They were really appreciative; it was cool.
Brooklyn, N.Y.’s The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart won over a lot of fans in 2009 with the fuzzy indie pop of their self-titled debut.
But a lot of heads were turned when it was revealed that their follow up to that modern lo-fi masterpiece would be recorded and mixed by English duo Alan Moulder and Flood, probably best known for their bombastic production on ’90s classics like Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral and Smashing Pumpkins’ Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness.
Belong, the resulting album, is far more polished than its predecessor. But while not espousing the virtues of his favourite bands, singer and guitarist Kip Berman maintains that underneath the walls of guitars, the band were able to retain their core identity.
“It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic,” he says. “If you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between.”
Here are some other things Berman had to say:
You guys took a bit of a gamble with this record. Have you been happy with how it’s been received?
It’s not so much the reception. We were just really happy with the record we got to make. It’s such a relief that our idea for it and our songs got captured in the way we wanted them to sound. Once you do that, you can’t control much else. But you do you have that record on your shelf that sounds the way that you feel happy with. That was really the exciting part.
When was the decision made to take things up a notch on the production side of things?
I think that’s a process that started back in 2007 when we started the band. Each successive thing we’ve done was to try to get better.
I still don’t think we’re very good. Our first recording was self-recorded with a drum machine and that was okay. Then we got Kurt [Feldman] lined up to play drums and he really improved things. We recorded [the band's debut] at my friend’s basement studio and that sounded better. After that we recorded the Higher Than The Stars EP and another mixer came into mix the single — each thing we’ve done has tried to improve on the thing before and try to get to a better spot.
Were Flood and Alan Moulder at the top of your list of people you’d like to work with?
It’s not like we had a list.
We were excited to work with Archie Moore on the first album. He brought a lot to the mix of the first album. If you’d heard what it sounded like when we were first done recording and then Archie Moore mixed it, it sounded way better. We were all really excited about that process and the work he did.
On this record, getting the opportunity to work with two people who have been involved with a lot of the records that we love and a lot of bands that we love just made intuitive sense. If you want to make a big American rock record, those are the two British guys that you want to talk to. Our idea going into this was make it a really visceral, powerful, kind of excessive… not excessive in a bad way, but superfluous amounts of emotion and feeling and sound and really just push things beyond reasonable subtleties and good taste.
It’s sort of a mall-rock aesthetic. Let’s go further than cool. When you look to bands like Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and listen to bands Alan Moulder mixed and Flood produced as well as examples of an ideal. It’s always that thing, where if you aim for that and you are who you are, the reality comes out in between. Our record doesn’t sound half as bombastic as Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness, and nor should it. But having that as a goal pushed us beyond our normal comfort zones, and we were pretty psyched with how it turned out.
Yeah, it sounds great. And probably a good thing you left the orchestras out.
Yeah. There are ideas of excess that are positive and then there are ideas of excess that are not positive. And we didn’t really need to bring the string section in for our second record on Slumberland Records. Nor could we afford to. We had a synthesizer that sounded like strings.
Did you spend a lot of time in the studio compared to past records?
It’s an interesting thing. The first record was chopped up. We recorded in my friend’s basement, but we could only use it when his roommates weren’t home. It wasn’t like a solid stretch of time.
This time, it was pretty solid. It was in two parts. We did all the music in New York, and then went on tour and ended in London, went into a studio, did all the vocals and mixed it. I think we had not enough time to pursue any dumb ideas. It was still very around the clock, and we can’t really afford this anyways. Even though those dudes are awesome to work with and they want to work with you, we want to make the most out of this opportunity and get the most out of it that we can.
You’ve spoken in the past of your love for fuzz boxes and I read that you had one that was custom made to sound like the Smashing Pumpkins.
It’s funny, because at the time — if you go back two years ago that band name never came within 500 words of our band name. But it’s a sound we’ve always really loved. And just because we love the Smashing Pumpkins doesn’t mean we don’t also really love The Pastels or Rocket Ship.
Growing up when we did, there were two worlds of music. There was radio music which wasn’t always bad. A lot of the times it was Nirvana and Weezer and Smashing Pumpkins and Ash — this really big huge sounding alternative rock — we love that. That’s just what we grew up with. And at the same time there’s the underground stuff which was basically just pop-punk and then later on it was indie-rock and indie-pop.
I don’t know if anything unifies those two loves. But there’s something about stepping on a fuzz box and playing some chords that never gets old to us. Even if it’s not something new. The Ramones weren’t something new. They just stuck to something that they thought was the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll, and in a weird way they corrupted it to their own vision. Now people look at them as the true spirit of rock ‘n’ roll. It’s a process that goes on and on, and we’re happy to be a cog in that wheel.
It seems like the lines between the radio and the underground were a lot more blurred in the ’90s than they are now.
It’s almost like a wave. There’s always that moment where the underground breaks into the commercial world. That happened in the early 2000s when bands like The White Stripes became huge and they were on Sympathy For The Record Industry. It was a bunch of stuff like The Dirtbombs, who up to that point had never been considered a commercial or marketable beyond a niche community. Or like when Teenage Fanclub were playing on Saturday Night Live.
Instances where something cool creeps into the normal reality. Then it recedes and you get copycat bands and it becomes the thing where it’s like “We’ve got to sign the next Nirvana” and you get Candlebox. That is the mentality of the music industry. But if it weren’t for Nirvana, I wouldn’t have known who The Vaselines were when I was 14 or have been curious about the Beat Happening. It paved the way to discover more music.
I’m glad that you mentioned Ash there. I always thought they were underrated.
They’re so underrated. I love 1977. It’s an amazing record. Everyone romanticizes [Weezer's] Blue Album and Pinkerton, but I think that’s right up there.
I love Supergrass as well. Just big, fuzzy, great pop songs. It’s all the good ideas of punk with an extras ounce of mega-ness… they take it up to another level.
We were music fans before we were a band, so we have more than a healthy interest in stuff involving bands.
You’ve called yourself a record nerd in the past. Do you make records for all the other record nerds, with nods to your favourite albums built into the music?
I wonder who are the bands who aren’t record nerds. Like it’s always a surprise when a band really likes music. Who are these bands?
I think at the end of the day, everybody who plays music must be in some way. I think it’s really funny when I see old records of ours selling for a lot of money on eBay. I couldn’t give those away when I had them. I should have kept some more of those. It could have been my retirement fund.
You played in a couple bands before Pains Of Being Pure At Heart — The Starve and Jackie— that sounded much different than Pains. Has your music changed as your tastes have?
I really loved the Starve. That’s probably the band I felt the most at home in until Pains came along. I wrote all the songs and lyrics and sang. It’s hard to explain why The Starve is similar to Pains. It’s this idea of emphatic, over the top expression of an ideal.
With Jackie, it was fun, but The Starve was emotionally connected to the ideals of music that I love most in the same way Pains is. Me and Alex [Naidus, bass player] when we met were both big fans of the Exploding Hearts and they probably inspired us to play music a lot. They’re just great written songs. They’re catchy and immediate.
I feel like progress in music isn’t about boundaries and who can play the loudest or who can play the fastest. I think I realized this in seventh grade. No one is better pop-punk than NOFX or Propagandhi. You can’t outdo that. But it’s that realization that you can’t out Merzbow, Merzbow. There’s always someone on the periphery. And at some point you push boundaries to for the sake of boundary pushing, which is great.
But for me, progress is at the centre, where you just write pop songs with energy and enthusiasm with lyrics that are really good. That ideal doesn’t seem like it ever will be fully realized. The Buzzcocks were great, but 20 years later the Exploding Hearts come along and they’re really great in a similar way but at the same time completely different. It means a different thing to be a pop-punk band in Portland in 2000 than it did in Manchester in 1978. And you shouldn’t pretend to know what it’s like to be in Manchester in 1978.
To me it’s that ideal, that if you can write a great song in under four minutes with great lyrics, there’s always more room in my life for that.
Beavis and Butt-Head always seemed destined to be a ’90s relic. Few pieces of media from that decade were able to capture the Gen X zeitgeist so perfectly. Perhaps its because while the characters – two slacker friends who spend the majority of their time parked in front of the television taking the piss out of whatever happens to be on – had the stereotypical look and attitude of teens at the time, their actions and, most importantly the comments they made while watching music videos were shockingly cutting and insightful.
So it’s surprising then to discover that not only is the show making a return to the airwaves, but it’s also as funny, if not funnier than I remember the show being. Check out the sneak-preview – which includes a shot of Stewart, still rocking his Winger tee, as well as the duo’s take on Jersey Shore – below.
Hamilton, ON trio the Dirty Nil have been toiling away for a few years now, netting themselves a Hamilton Music Award for Best New Band in 2008 and releasing the Saccharine Visceral EP on Southern Ontario label Wolfshirt Records back in 2009. Now the group are looking to get their music heard on a wider scale, something their recently released seven-inch should do handily.
A-side “Fuckin’ Up Young” is the best slab of Blue Album-era Weezer we’ve heard in years. But where Rivers comes across as the victim, Dirty Nil guitarist/frontman Luke Bentham plays the pissed-off kid who ain’t taking no more shit. Of course, it all comes to a head in the massive chorus that takes the message of the Specials’ “Too Much Too Young” and amps it up to 11.
Virginia rockers Ceremony (this Ceremony, not that equally awesome one) have offered up the title track off their forthcoming EP Not Tonight. Like the tracks on their debut, Rocketfire, “Not Tonight” filters My Bloody Valentine fuzz, Jesus and Mary Chain aggression and New Order melodicism into beautifully blissed-out noise. The EP is out April 5 on Custom Made Music.
A couples weeks ago I was hipped to an emerging scene in the North Eastern part of the States made up of bands who use 90s emo as their primary touchstone. They embrace the tortured vocals, jammy guitars and heavy breakdowns of groups like Promise Ring and Texas is the Reason. Of course, as soon as I heard about this I immediately started scouring the Internet for records. Safe to say that I’m now completely enamored with bands like Everyone Everywhere,Into It. Over It., and Grown Ups and the label Top Shelf Recordings (as an odd side note, these bands and this genre are for some reason being classified as Twinkle Daddies. I’m not making this up.)
Seeking out new bands is all fine and good. But what bothers me is the kind of bands that I’m after. These twinkle daddies basically sound like bands I loved ten years ago. And here I am, a decade later, still being pulled into their little sonic webs. I can’t stop listening to the music of my youth. And when I say the music of my youth, I’m referring to the slew of late-’90s, early ’00s emo bands I swooned over in my early 20s – Lifetime, Sunny Day Real Estate, JimmyEatWorld, Saves the Day and the Get Up Kids – I listen to them on a regular basis, their albums taking up valuable space on my overstuffed iPhone. I’ve even rebought have these LPs on vinyl. And now they’re brushing up against a bunch of new ones that sound just like them.
I get the appeal of what’s familiar. What I can’t account for is my continued devotion to bands who were supposedly meant to appeal when you’re in your teens and early twenties. Most of the songs are in some way about unrequited love aimed squarely at young men (yes, there are female fans, but I’m going with the stereotype here) unable to process their teeming emotions. So why do I, four months shy of 30, continue to identify with their music? Even the bands who are most identified with the emo tag did everything they could to drop the association by either breaking up, drastically changing their sound or both. If they can walk away, why can’t I?
While the stereotype of the awkward 17 year old crying to Dashboard Confessional songs in their room has become a little tired, it’s not that far off from the truth. Over the holidays I read Andy Greenwald’s book Nothing Feels Good, which back in 2004, tried to make some sense of this whole emo thing. And based on the accounts from the fans he interviewed, my self-identifying with the problems these dudes were singing about paled in comparison to the emotional connection other people had with it.
But I think there’s more to the music than just broken hearts and spineless young men. What I continue to connect with is the non-specific emotional malaise, not the pained tales of heartbreak. Whatever problems I had with girls are long since past me (I’m in a long term relationship) and even if they weren’t, the problems that arise with the opposite sex at 30 could never be encapsulated in a 3-minute Dashboard tune. What remains though is a general confusion with life.
Which is whay I’m so drawn to this new generation of bands, their songs about tiny apartments and having bigger fish to fry speaking to me far more that the orchestral pop and folk-tinged indie rock that so pervasive, particularly up here in Canada (and thanks to Arcade Fire’s recent Grammy win, won’t be disappearing anytime soon). There’s a restless energy to these bands. Like the best music rooted in a punk rock aesthetic, they’re raging about something, even if its not immediately clear what that something is.
I similarly still feel this restlessness, though I can’t quite pin down what it is. Suffice to say though what I continue to hear in the band’s of my youth and this new generation of groups is a sense of uncertainty about what’s to come. Their pained wails and thrashing guitars saying far more than any movie or book I’ve encountered have been able to.
At some point maybe this feeling will pass, and I’ll look back on these songs with the same sense of longing nostalgia that I’ve since bestowed upon bands like Pearl Jam and Nine Inch Nails. But even the bands who walked away, due to frustration of expectations or embarrassment at the public airing of their deepest feelings have returned to not only play together live again, but to record new music. If they can continue to find new meaning in their own music, why can’t I? And why can’t a new crop of groups tear this music away from the clutches of mainstream stereotypes and make something meaningful with it again? It seems as if what were once constants aren’t so constant anymore.
In the year end issue of Spin, comedian Patton Oswalt refered to pop-singer Ke$ha as the “Arbys to Lady Gaga’s In ‘n’ Out Burger.” While I find this statement both hilarious and true when it comes to the quality of the two singer’s music, it also perpetuates an image of Ke$ha that I don’t entirely agree with.
Since she dropped her single “Tik Tok” back in 2009, people have thought of Ke$ha as the poor-man’s Lady Gaga. And while it’s true that both apply their make-up smeared pop to Euro-disco beats, the similarities end there. You see Lady Gaga has pretensions towards artsiness that her numerous imitators seem unable to duplicate. Whether she actually succeeds in making art is a whole other debate, but there’s no doubt that there’s an element of fucked-up performance art in everything Gaga does. Her video for “Paparazzi” probably comes closest to portraying the life-as-art thing she so desperately strives for.
Ke$ha on the other hand, harbours no such pretensions. Down to the dollar sign in her name, it seems that all the singer wants is fame and fortune. How she gets it seems besides the point; she’s gonna get it no matter how many strangers beds she wakes up in hung-over as shit, partying her way to trophy-wifedom. At least that’s what her music videos would have us believe. And so far it’s working: “Tik Tok” even managed to supplant Danny Elfman’s theme to an episode of the Simpsons last fall in a move that either payed homage to, or ironically made fun of the track. I still can’t tell.
What’s worse is that at least in her music, Ke$ha gives no indication that drinking and fucking your way to the top might not be the best course of action, or that there might even be another option. And while Ke$ha is hardly the first singer to celebrate spoiled party girls – Paris Hilton’s ill-fated foray into music comes to mind – she’s the most vocal adherent to the cause. Just check out “We R Who We R” where she rallies the troops who “make the hipsters fall in love” and are “running this town just like a club.” Her message: accept us or else.
But Ke$ha’s hardly the first artist to champion a much-maligned demographic who perhaps should have remained firmly on the pop-culture sidelines. Back in ’99 Eminem and Kid Rock did the same thing for white-trash, making wife-beaters and white-angst the style of the day. And while both of those artists have since done a lot to distance themselves from the fans who once made-up the backbone of their base (okay, maybe not so much in Kid Rock’s case), a gaggle of less talented groups quickly swooped in to fill the void. Some, like Insane Clown Posse and their annual Gathering of the Jugalos, continue to blight our airwaves with their extreme ignorance.
So for everyone waiting for the Ke$ha scourged to pass, I’ve got bad news: she’s here to stay. Even if her career blew up in a puff of smoke tomorrow, she’s laid enough groundwork for a whole slew of vapid, self-entitled pop-tarts who look like they taste like whiskey and whose knowledge of feminist theory starts and ends with “Girl Power” and are ready to invade our airwaves. Because not giving a fuck is a hell of a lot easier than actually giving one. So it’s not going to be too hard to recruit new converts to the cause.
This post should not be confused with this post I wrote several months ago.
This video accompanied a friend request my friend recently received, encouraging her to play his track on her indie-rock college radio show. As music director at said station, I have the power to approve or disapprove it’s inclusion in our music library. What should I do? I mean, I’ve never had my car towed, but I bet it’s a bummer. So what say you Interweb?
Robyn’s self-directed reinvention finally seemed complete last year, when she unleashed her excellent Body Talk full-length. The album closed the book on her transformation from late ’90s teen-pop star into Euro-disco diva, embraced by indie-minded hipsters and, if her Toronto gigs are any indication, the gay community as a whole.
But as her star re-emerged on the pop-culture landscape, Robyn seemed to find herself right back where she started. Last fall, the Swede appeared on teen-drama phenom Gossip Girl, while she will be playing warm-up act to teen-pop sensation Katy Perry across North America this summer, playing some of the very same venues she turned her back on over a decade ago. So in reclaiming her image, has Robyn simply come full circle?
Her rescheduled performance at Toronto’s Sound Academy would suggest not. Drawing heavily on the dance-floor fillers that populate Body Talk, Robyn proceeded to throw down the gauntlet for all subsequent pop shows that role through town, swinging, dancing and twirling her way into the hearts of the sold-out audience who cheered her every move.
Robyn fills her songs with heartfelt emotion, giving her listeners an actual piece of herself as opposed to a manufactured version. Similarly, onstage Robyn gives a piece of herself to her audience and, in turn, feeds off their energy in a performance that is neither hindered by the shallowness of a singer like Perry or the choreographed and distracting spectacle of Lady Gaga.
Her exuberant personality won over even the most casual fans in attendance, as she had the entire bar dancing along to her three-piece band (her second drummer was mysteriously absent), who were decked out in white lab coats. Throughout the 90-minute set, the singer never wavered in her energy levels, stalking the stage with a determination that rivals Mick Jagger, grinding the air and generally defying physics with her flexibility and dance moves in a pair of impossibly huge platform shoes.
Whatever Robyn has in store for the future, it’s clear that she continues to occupy the driver’s seat of her own career. While she may continue to flirt with the mainstream she once abandoned, these dalliances are on her terms. If Robyn decides to move away from the fan base whose fervent adoration helped spread word of her resurrection, it will be of her own volition.
Stalk me!