The endless shadow of WWI

The culture is having a strange World War I moment, or at least I am. The book I just finished reading, A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book, is all about England in the years leading up to that war—especially a bohemian family with kids who run wild in the woods and characters who make puppets and write fairy stories. The war looms like a giant black cloud over the pastoral scenes, and I couldn't help wondering which of the beautiful young men would never come back from France or Belgium.
Then there was Downton Abbey, the exquisite PBS/BBC miniseries about life upstairs and downstairs in an English country house in 1913. The first season ended with the announcement of war, and I'm partly dreading the next one, when no doubt many of the young men will be slaughtered or forever altered.
And now there's PJ Harvey's amazing new album, Let England Shake, which references WWI specifically, but also war in general. It's a big change for her—she usually sings of lust and anger in a growly voice with harsh blues guitar chords. This time she sings of death, blood and devastation in a strangely sweet voice with melodious keyboard and guitar sounds. It's shocking, almost like enjoying the beats of a hip-hop song and then realizing that the lyrics are ignorant and evil. Except that despite the blood-stained earth and the bodies hanging from battlefield wires, I still love Let England Shake... it's a beautiful piece of work.
Is it that WWI still occupies our psyche so much, that we're still freaked out at the massive change and destruction it set loose, or is it being used as a way to think about more recent wars? Like the way MASH was a way of dealing with Vietnam indirectly...

Revisiting the Runaways

There's so much to like about Floria Sigismondi's movie The Runaways, like the acting by Kristen Stewart, Dakota Fanning and Michael Shannon, the dead-on costume design and of course the music. But considering that it comes from a director known for dark and creepy videos, there's something strangely toothless about it. We do see some glazed eyes and a collapse in a telephone booth, but there's really very little of the dark side of their story—and it peters out at the end without going into the reasons why they broke up, which might have been exhaustion as much as the metal vs. punk argument. Not that everything has to be about the music industry's ugly underbelly, but I was left with the feeling that there's a whole chunk of the story that's not being told. Maybe it's because Joan Jett was the executive producer and it was based on Cherie Currie's memoir, and they're being self-protective, but still, you'd think they'd have a few things they'd like to get off their chests. Interesting bit of trivia: Riley Keough, granddaughter of Elvis, plays Currie's twin, Marie.
The Runaways never got their due as writers and musicians in their heyday; they were laughed at and seen as nothing but jailbait lust objects. How frustrating that must have been for them is left out of the movie, which is disappointing.

Moments of music bliss

It's a bit late for best-of-2010 lists, but so what? I made a list of the best live music shows I saw last year. Here they are in roughly chronological order:

Stars at the Mod Club
They still haven't surpassed Your Ex-Lover is Dead, and maybe they never will, but The Five Ghosts is their best album since, and they played it so beautifully. It's the give-and-take between Amy Millan and Torquil Campbell that makes this band stand above others, and the tunes of course.

Metz at the Garrison
These local geniuses can pummel the hell out of a rock song. Why aren't they huge? Perhaps they should put out an album instead of seven-inches—much as I love that format, it's not going to get them the attention they deserve. They're absolutely exhilarating live.

Pavement at Olympic Island
After unforgivably long lineups for beer and washrooms—and I'm never a fan of crowds + hot weather—this could so easily have been a waste of time. But Pavement was wonderful from start to finish. They didn't have new material, but it didn't matter with so many great songs. The icing on the cake was the moonlit ride back to the city in the QCYC boat.

Raul Malo at Hugh's Room
His voice makes your knees weak and your spine go all soft so you kind of collapse in your chair. He's so good, the words Roy Orbison and George Jones can be used in the same breath.

Teenage Fanclub at the Horseshoe
Three brilliant songwriters with seemingly endless beautiful melodies in them. They're aging but still writing and singing great songs. And they're Scottish. And one of them moved to Canada. What is not to love?

Nick Lowe at the Mod Club
First time playing with a band in years! The criminally underrated singer-songwriter played a bunch of his best songs—The Beast in Me, Cruel to be Kind, When I Write The Book, Heart of the City, there are so many!—with the kind of backing band that is so understated because they're so damn good. Why Ron Sexsmith came on stage and left without doing anything was a mystery, but Nick rules. On what would have been my late best friend's 50th birthday, and I barely shed a tear. Time heals, slowly.

Jim Bryson & the Weakerthans at the Horseshoe
Jim is an awesomely talented singer-songwriter who never gets the attention he deserves. That's said so often it's like a broken record. But it was a smart move to make a record backed by the Weakerthans, who seem to have reined in some of Jim's meandering tendencies and provided a solid backing for his songs and a steady balance for his onstage persona. Finally.

Lightning Bolt at the Great Hall
OK, there I was standing in the middle of the floor, transfixed by the unbelievably intense two-man assault. It was an experience of music as a physiological response more than an emotional one. I thought to myself, this is crazy, this is so intense, I am feeling this shaking my entire body, am I really enjoying this? I'm still not sure if it was pleasure exactly, but it was something remarkable. Also, afterward it was great to freak a young guy out that an old bag like me had enjoyed Lightning Bolt.

Chris Dignan at Lulu Lounge
This freaking ageless young man evoked the ghost of the great Suckerpunch—which he fronted, what, 15 years ago?—with a swinging garagey-surf rock show led by his guitar and voice.

Lowest of the Low at Lee's Palace
There's a lot of 90s nostalgia on this list, but these guys actually reformed to play their freshly reissued 1990 debut album, Shakespeare My Butt, which hit a massive nerve with a whole generation of people. It must be frustrating to have not managed to hit that nerve again, or at least not so successfully, but those songs really are perfect shots to the heart, able to evoke a time and a place with impressive clarity. And they play them beautifully.

St. Simon's Choir at St. Simon's Church
Every year this choir blows me away with their exquisite harmonies, blasting through the church and through my body without benefit of microphone or amplifier, and for free. It's something I take for granted, since it's always been there. I hope it always will be.

The ghosts and Christine Fellows

I love the way Christine Fellows doesn't follow the rules and structures of pop music. On her new album, Femmes de chez nous, there's a song in completely free time. She only realized that when she tried to add some overdubs to her vocal and piano tracks and was told it would be impossible.
I marvel at her ability to do what sounds right to her despite the conventions of music. I had a wonderful interview with her and only wish I could have had more than 350 words to write about her album and the DVD of the live performances she did as part of her artist-in-residency program at the Musee de St-Boniface Museum in Winnipeg. It was inspired by the story of four nuns who travelled from Montreal to Winnipeg by canoe in 1844. It took months, and when they arrived, in the middle of the night, people could hear them singing as they came down the river.
I mean almost anybody could be inspired by that, but Fellows made a beautiful album about Franco-Manitoban culture out of it. And though she's not religious, she said that a series of weird things happened to her when she was finishing the project—a hard drive crash that forced her to re-record some of it, some funding that was promised but didn't come through, things breaking down and getting lost. The film editor told her that the nuns weren't finished with her yet, and she had to go back to the museum. So she did, and she said she “may or may not” have hidden some sort of offerings to appease the ghosts. Whatever she did, it worked.