1. Yes, he’s heard all those Joy Division imitators.
What do you do when your highly influential band splits up? If you’re Peter Hook, former bass player for English electro-pop pioneers New Order, you turn your attention back to your previous, even more influential group. Since last year, Hook and his band The Light have been performing Unknown Pleasures—the debut album from Joy Division, the band whose career was cut short by lead singer Ian Curtis’ suicide in 1980. New Order rose out of the ashes a couple of months later. “We locked Joy Division in a box and put it away in the attic,” he says. “It was wonderful to open that box and find how fresh everything sounded and felt.” As New Order forged ahead, Joy Division’s legend grew. By the turn of the century, the number of bands using Joy Division’s brooding minimalism as a template had exploded. “You do have to take it as a compliment,” he says. “It’s all about inspiration. I was inspired by the Sex Pistols to create Joy Division. And then you inspire other people. It’s perpetuating that circle of life, really.”
2. Nothing ruins a good thing like grumpy old men.
The other members of New Order recently announced they were getting back together—without Hook. This was just the latest in a long line of public spats between Hook and the rest of the band since New Order’s dissolution in 2007; Hook maintains the group split up altogether, while lead singer Bernard Sumner says Hook left. “They may reform and call themselves New Order, but in my heart they’re not New Order,” he says. “They’re as much New Order as I am Joy Division.” For his part, Hook just wishes things could have gone down in a more civilized manner. “As you get older you get very set in your ways,” he says. “Men get very stubborn, very cranky, very obstreperous. And when you’ve got a load of them together you’re gonna have trouble. Groups act like children all the time.”
3. You will always be remembered for your most gimmicky song.
New Order had staggering success, especially in the late 1980s. Yet their biggest chart hit in England was “World in Motion,” commissioned as the theme song for England’s 1990 World Cup soccer team. “The guy who was working at the Football Association said to [Factory Records head] Tony Wilson one day, ‘I’d love to get a great band to do the football song instead of these rubbish ones.’ And Tony said, ‘Well, who’s your favourite band?’ And, funnily enough, he said, ‘New Order.’ That’s one of the great things about being in a group like New Order, who always do things in a really wacky way. You get to do some really wacky shit. And that was one of them.”
4. It’s not so weird to see your life story in a movie.
Fictionalized versions of Hook have appeared on screen twice: in Michael Winterbottom’s 24 Hour Party People—where he was played by Ralf Little—and in Anton Corbijn’s Ian Curtis biopic Control (Hook was depicted by Joe Anderson). Watching someone else pretending to be you should be an unnerving experience, but Hook took it in stride. “Life has been quite surreal,” he says. “So watching the film and watching someone play you fit in quite well, really. With 24 Hour Party People, Michael did it very much as a comedy. When I saw it I didn’t recognize myself in it.” Control was a different story. “Anton Corbijn is such a perfectionist,” says Hook. “I knew that the guy playing me would reflect me and I was a little bit worried about that. When I saw the film it was like looking into the mirror.”
Dayve Hawk spent much of 2009 in transition. After the dissolution of his old band, Hail Social, Hawk released music under a number of different guises. But the success of Seek Magic (his debut as Memory Tapes) convinced him to stick with both the name and the spacey electronic sound.
Player Piano finds Hawk ditching any notion that he’d continue toiling around the chillwave ghetto and embracing pop. “Psychedelic girl-group music” is how he described the record prior to its release. And while Player Piano boasts neither the swirling haze nor the rich harmonies that description promises, it does feature some loopy, go-for-the-throat melodies and swinging rhythms.
On Seek Magic, Hawk hid behind the walls of sound he created, but on Player Piano, he puts himself front and centre, vocally, and with some aggressive instrumentation – check out the decidedly un-chill guitar solo on “Today is Our Life.” However, these flashes of brilliance are tempered by duller moments that are easily forgotten. Player Piano is a less consistent record than its predecessor, and while its lows aren’t complete duds, its highs are as thrilling as they come.
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
It would be easy (and not all that inaccurate) to dub this Toronto, ON crew Broken Social Scene-lite. The band’s everything-and-the-kitchen-sink approach, with hushed boy-girl vocals, makes it difficult to distinguish the crew from their heavyweight Toronto colleagues. Of course, enlisting Dave Newfeld (best known for his work on the Scenesters’ first two records) to produce doesn’t exactly help squash the comparison.
But that discounts the sophisticated level of songwriting on display. The Paint Movement’s songs are lean jams held together by some soaring melodies and subtly brilliant saxophone work. But credit Newfeld with bringing these tracks to life; his clean production cuts through the busy noise of the band’s six instrumentalists, bringing out the inherent hooks of each track.
Though not the most original group going, this debut proves that the Paint Movement certainly have the potential to be among the most thrilling.
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.
You may not have heard of J-Rocc, but you’ve probably heard his work before.
Rocc was a founding member of the World Famous Beat Junkies DJ crew in the early ’90s, was an O.G. Dilla-head and served as J. Dilla and Madlib’s DJ on their Jaylib project. Most importantly, Rocc was entrusted with a hard drive of unreleased Dilla beats shortly before the producer’s death.
It’s unclear if any of those beats made it into the melange of styles and sounds on this, the DJ and producer’s solo debut. But there’s no doubt Some Cold Rock Stuf‘s more than strong enough to stand on its own.
The album eschews the digital cut-up techniques favoured by too-many of today’s laptop DJs. There’s a warm analogue vibe coursing through these dozen tracks; this is an LP far more in the vein of DJ Shadow’sEndtroducing… than Prefuse 73′s cut ‘n’ paste masterpiece One Word Extinguisher. Some choice samples from across the globe, including those on seven-minute jam “Party” are what set this apart, creating an LP that works surprisingly well both for the dancefloor and as a headphone masterpiece.
A second disc of extra, untitled jams only shows what a focused approach Rocc took with this release. He’s clearly a man of many talents. Let’s hope it doesn’t take nearly as long for a second helping as it did for his debut.
Kelley Stoltz is often looked upon as the lynchpin in San Francisco’s current lo-fi rock renaissance, but who knew the dude was so damn funny? Setting aside his solo career to play drums in fellow Bay Area stalwarts Sonny and the Sunsets, Stoltz had his bandmates and the sparse crowd who gathered to watch them in stitches throughout the night, trading one-liners with Sonny Smith throughout the band’s 75-minute set.
Even openers the Sandwitches conceded that, when it came to stage banter, they were clearly outclassed. But the female trio delivered some excellent vocal harmonies on their tweed-up doo-wop tunes, but again, their stage presence (or lack thereof) somewhat muted their overall performance.
Sporting a short crop of hair, tight button-up shirt and a battered semi-hollow bodied guitar, Sonny Smith looked more like a ’50s blue-collar folk singer than the ’60s hippie his music sometimes suggests he is. Along with three-piece the Sunsets, Smith worked through a set composed mostly of songs off the band’s last two full-lengths Tomorrow Is Alright and Hit After Hit, belying Smith’s prolific songwriting over the last few years. Though the singer-guitarist did his best to not break a smile, Stoltz thwarted him at every turn, telling stories about being harassed by Texas cowboys as a young teen punk rocker or making Wolfman Jack impersonations. Not to be outdone, Smith mocked en vogue indie rockers Vampire Weekend by introducing one song as “an African tune straight outta Williamsburg,” before singing “Saw her walking across campus.”
When the band did get down to the business of playing, the results were spectacular. Live, Sunsets tracks are given an added visceral bump while Citay and the Dry Spells member Tahlia Harbour provided uplifting harmonies to Smith’s relatively small range of nasally vocals.
Though the bar was barely a third full, Sonny and the Sunsets had clearly impressed all in attendance; it’s rare to find a band whose live prowess is matched by their personality. As a band whose rep has been based almost entirely on word of mouth, Sonny and the Sunsets’ performance is the type that ensures repeated viewings and enthusiastic testimonials to friends.
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.
Stalk me!