Video Of The Week: Pearl Jam

Remember in 1995-1996, when the Smashing Pumpkins could do no wrong and went full-artistic with a double album (Mellon Collie And The Infinite Sadness) as well as a five-CD set of b-sides to accompany it (The Aeroplane Flies High), producing high-budget stop-motion videos for off-kilter singles like 33 and paying tribute to the films of Georges Méliès (Tonight, Tonight) to go with the heroin chic of Zero?

It looks like that's what Josh Wakely was going for when he pitched Pearl Jam his idea for a video based on their new single Retrograde - not the safest bet as a single:

There are nice images and familiar themes - the "end of the world" / Global Warming / nature fights back theme of Gigaton is omnipresent, there are waves and water galore, the idea of people mixed with tarot cards is neat - but the animation doesn't rock my boat, unfortunately.

This one's a nice effort but a miss. Still, it's the best new video out this week.

Video Of The Week: Pearl Jam

When I first heard Pearl Jam's Superblood Wolfmoon last month, ahead of their new record Gigaton's release, I felt a tad underwhelmed by the song. It had a decent riff, but the lyrics seemed too juvenile at first glance, and I got to hoping they wouldn't play it too often on their upcoming tour, where I'd be seeing them at least twice (Ottawa and Québec).

I didn't listen to it that often, for that reason, but once in a while I would hear it on the radio - and I never listen to the radio, but sometimes when my kid won't sleep, I'll tune in to CHOM (Montréal's last remaining rock station) and dance with him in my arms for a while, and it invariably played.

It's been stuck in my head for a couple of weeks now. The hook is addictive. And Keith Ross and the Tiny Concert animation crew did a fine job of capturing the band's energy in their primitive drawings and giving them life in the official video:

I always feel kind of bad when keyboardist Boom Gaspar is left out of the picture, though. The poor guy's been playing with the band since 2002 and still hasn't gotten promoted to "band member", instead remaining officially a "session and touring musician". Yeah, for one band.

Video Of The Week: Pearl Jam

It's been getting easier in the past 10-15 years to hear direct influences of Pearl Jam's newer songs, from the b-side Down sounding like a less-distorted version of AC/DC's You Shook Me (All Night Long); many people hear a Talking Heads influence in their latest video out today, Dance Of The Clairvoyants, but if you keep in mind The Heads have also influenced modern bands like Arcade Fire, you might also detect an eerie similarity to the Montréal band's own Reflektor:

Don't get me wrong, I'd rather they wear their influences on their sleeve and be true to it in their hearts, it's just that the Rock And Roll Hall Of Famers are clearly on a path where they are a lot less ahead of the curve than when they led the rock world.

Sure, with Gigaton, a record that dives head-first into political messaging and the urgency of global warming, their message is still on point, but the the edge no longer cuts.

Director Ryan Cory does a good job of merging the band's energy (and the track's dance-ability) with images of the earth's beauty and strength. Notice how guitarist Stone Gossard and bassist Jeff Ament - essentially the band's founders and co-conspirators since the mid-1980s in Green River, then Malfunkshun and Mother Love Bone - have switched instruments, with Gossard playing (and having come up with) the bass parts and Ament carrying his axe like a rockabilly twanger. 

They're no longer reinventing rock, but at least they're reinventing themselves. And the song's pretty good, too!

Video Of The Week: The Hazytones

Most days, I really like "stoner rock", distorted, slow-to-mid-tempo groovy rock like Queens Of The Stone Age, Bloody Diamonds and Priestess. The Hazytones definitely thread in those waters, with hints of Corrosion Of Conformity, Kyuss and heavy 1990s rock as major influences.

In the lo-fi video for the song "Living On The Edge", directed by Seb Black, the Montréal outfit shares the screen with wolf packs, "crazy" trains, fires devastating dead forests, mountaintops and psychedelic colours and effects:

I've already listened to it a few dozen times already this weekend. Good times!

Mansplaining Reactions To The News That Ryan Adams Was An Asshole

The New York Times continued to out public personalities as assholes/abusers today with a researched piece that has seven women (among them his ex-wife Mandy Moore) accuse indie darling Ryan Adams of being a manipulative creep.

It's a tad short (the article, not the women's suffering), but to the point.

I believe the women's suffering, and I believe there being (at least) seven makes for a pattern. Those are statements that are most likely facts, in a legal manner of speaking.

What I have a problem with is the public lynching in lieu of due process and the lumping apples and oranges to create a bigger story than it is.

Case in point, one at a time:

From this post

"95% of the music industry, from the independents to the huge stars, are mediocre pervert dudes." Notwithstanding the fact that almost all pop stars are female, that most of the music paid for in the past five years has been made by or with women, that the most influencial acts of the 1990s that weren't part of the "Seattle grunge quadrinity" (Pearl Jam, Nirvana, Soundgarden and Alice In Chains, maybe Mudhoney and Chicagoans Smashing Pumpkins thrown in for good measure) or Nine Inch Nails were women, including a lot of other Seattle acts (Hole, Babes In Toyland, Bikini Kill, L7, Sleater-Kinney, The Fastbacks, The Gits, Heart/The Lovemongers, Sonic Youth, Unwound, Bratmobile, 7 Year Bitch, The Breeders, Veruca Salt, The Pixies, Suture). I'm sure I'm forgetting obvious ones.

The Beastie Boys - not quite my cup of tea -  helped Luscious Jackson and Cibo Matto have success, because friends help friends, and gender doesn't have to be an issue.

One of the best songwriters of all time came from the 1990s, PJ Harvey, in England, but my limited knowledge of British music from my adulthood has me thinking ladies may have been rarefied there indeed. On the American side of the pond, Tori Amos, Ani DiFranco and Liz Phair made a huge dent. In Canada, a jazz singer and pianist, Diana Krall, became a world-renowned jazz legend - the only jazz legend borne out of the 1990s of any gender. I doubt their critically-acclaimed work came only from their looks or men wanting to sleep with them.

I was not a fan of Garbage, Fiona Apple, Björk or Alanis Morrissette, but they had clout.

In the 2000s, the only decent new male rock acts were The Strokes, The Raconteurs and The White Stripes (female drummer). The rest of the fun and quality came from Yeah Yeah Yeahs, The Kills, Sahara Hotnights, Arcade Fire, The Donnas, First Aid Kit, The Pack A.D., The Dead Weather and so many others acts that proven women have a lot more balls and talent than their tired and lame male counterparts. Did all of those acts have to sell their bodies to make it?

And about the men...

Artists: Eddie Vedder, Trent Reznor, Beck, Andre 3000, Ben Gibbard, Marilyn Manson, Jack White, Robert Plant...

Executives: David Geffen, Russell Simmons, Bruce Pavitt, Jimmy Iovine, Berry Gordy... all pervert dudes? Each of their public personae go against all of that.

That's a serious fucking accusation, a high fucking number - and completely made up.

I ran a music festival for over a decade and every night, we had at least one woman on stage - usually one in at least two-thirds of the acts, never with a quota in mind - it just happened that way because that's what was good and worth sharing to concert-goers; the only style of music that didn't fit that statistic was noize - which is basically a bunch of solo sound nerds doodling and tweedling on knobs.

Here's another extremely harsh accusation:

From this post

I get the sarcasm, I get the exaggeration for effect, but while we're conducting public lynchings instead of going through the (failed, uneven, biased) Justice System, we are all responsible of our words, for the scope and impact of our comments. Hyperbole is dangerous. It isn't you with your friends in someone's living room; it's public, to the world. It's your public reflection of you.

If a threatening tweet can result in probably cause condemnations, so should false accusations.

Fuck, (wo)man, how many rapists do you think are around?

And all of that is saying nothing about the fact that if any one of the people overreacting to this story in particular played devil's advocate for just a few minutes, they could see that he actually has a half-credible defense if he can get expert testimony from a qualified shrink.

That probably wouldn't be enough to prove he wasn't responsible for the way his victims felt (civil case), but there may be enough evidence that someone who was already recognized as having had bouts of mental illness was just responding the way his brain was letting him, with threats of suicide and bipolarity (not guilty in a criminal case).

We're not there yet, but it helps to once in a while put yourself in the other side's shoes with a clean slate instead of a bias to understand the pattern of behaviour.

Again, I'm not defending his actions. But when he says he can sue over this, he might have a case.

What works for the NYT is having his ex-wife and ex-fiancée on record corroborating his actions in terms of behavioral change, tonal change, and so forth. They likely won't get him on impeding careers (not of all seven anyway, but maybe Moore), and he definitely inquired about the young one's age (she refused to provide ID and they never met in person) enough to get away with what would possibly have been the worst charge of all.

As a "fan" of legalese, this is far from the Bill Cosby case, but it's also far from the Chris Hardwick case.

Video Of The Week: Fox And Bones

Somewhere along the lines of five to ten years ago, I took part in a benefit concert for the Mile-End Mission (a homeless shelter) in which all participants agreed to sing political folk songs; most chose to cover Woody Guthrie, Billy Bragg, Bruce Springsteen and Pete Seeger. My friend John "Triangles" Stuart used to hold these every month, each time with a different theme, which usually meant new songs we had to learn.

Fox And Bones sound like they would have attended a show like that one and been turned on by the general themes of "songs of the proletariat", but with an indie rock quality to their sound, a bit more polished.

The Portland, OR couple comprised of co-songwriters Sarah Vitort and Scott Gilmore know how to write a fine song; there's a nice positivity about Better Land that rises the song up like the best songs from acts like The Lumineers, however that takes away from the depth of what one expects from "songs for the people":

The video was co-directed by Chris Bigalke and video animator Zachary Winterton.

Video Of The Week: Kandle

I haven't been able to stop listening to Kandle since I featured her last month - not that I ever did, really, as she's been playing steadily in my rotation since 2014.

I dove back into her first EP, her debut album, switched up my phone's song list to remove the oft-skipped Baby and replaced it with Gimme A Pill, a song she hasn't played live in a while because it sends mixed signals, often being interpreted as "pro-drugs" when in fact it is about her struggles with chronic migraines.

She shot a video for it in 2016, directed by Maya Fuhr, which depicts a day in the life of an opioid-addicted adult:

"I won't stop until the pain goes away" - the phrase that best describes the millennium so far.

Video Of The Week: Jack White

I haven't been able to listen to Jack White's latest record, Boarding House Reach, with the same fervor as, well, anything else he's ever done; it just doesn't resonate as much as a whole and the individual pieces that I want to listen to over and over are few and far between.

Except the actual song Over And Over, that is, which has a riff reminiscent of Icky Thump and Lazaretto, a fact that isn't surprising considering he's been toying around with it since his days with The White Stripes, having almost recorded it with The Raconteurs as well.

The video, directed by Us (Christopher Barrett and Luke Taylor), shows alternate-universe Whites in the same room matching with each White personae, accompanied here and there by his band, background singers, a bunch of children, or by himself:

My conclusion: White The Brown seems like the most natural, while White The Blue is in his solo project's palette; White The White is more country and has the best décor.

Video Of The Week: Kandle

I was at a taping for weekly talk show Le Beau Dimanche last night and was surprised that the musical guest was a favourite of mine, Kandle; she played her recent single Bender, which reminded me that she had a video for it that I hadn't featured yet:

It looks stunning, directed by Kat Webber in what seems like an abandoned NDG appartment, with visuals inspired by horror classic such as Stanley Kubrick's The Shining or the Silent Hill video game series...

Well done!

Video Of The Week: Death Cab For Cutie

Once indie rock darlings (1997-2003), Death Cab For Cutie hit the mainstream hard with their last independent record to date, Transatlanticism as the 00s went in full swing, scoring hit singles with The Sound Of Settling and Title And Registration, but it wasn't until 2005's Plans (on Atlantic Records) that they went off into the stratosphere with peak-of-songwriting gems like Crooked Teeth, Soul Meets Body and I Will Follow You Into The Dark.

This week, Ben Gibbard's main band released Gold Rush, their best song in over a decade (listen to it twice, it takes a minute to sink in...) and lead-off single off of Thank You For Today, which should come out in August:

The video was directed by Alex Southam, a London-based filmmaker responsible for Kwabs' Fight For Love, Mumford & Sons' Ditmas, Atl J's Tessellate (Clean), Laura Mvula & Nile Rogers' Overcome, Rae Morris' Under The Shadows and Labyrinth Ear's Amber, among others.

Video Of The Week: Alex Lahey

Alex Lahey is an independent singer-songwriter from Melbourne, Australia who is on her way to make a junior Jack White of herself, owning all of her art, her image, and in charge of her entire career. She's won a couple of prizes and prestige festival slots in Australia, and is now set on conquering the rest of the world with her fun, smart, poppy indie-rock debut, I Love You Like A Brother.

When I first heard the lead single, Every Day's The Weekend, my first thought was "oh, cool, the generation that grew up listening to The Strokes and that one good song by The Killers is ready to take its place at the podium", and there's nothing wrong with that, although the song does have that very 2017 lack of guitars and overuse of empty-sounding space:

Callum Preston directed the video and made the sets, while co-director Jam Nawaz was also its cinematographer. It stars Lahey's entourage: James & Lloyd, Boo Johnson, Barry Morgan, Megan Quigley and Vicki Lahey.

Video Of The Week: Wolf Alice

I remember hearing Wolf Alice's Moaning Lisa Smile in 2015 and being slightly impressed with their Veruca Salt/Breeders vibe. Then I promptly forgot they existed, until a few weeks ago, when I fell upon Beautifully Unconventional, a more textured and groovy song, albeit more pop-oriented on the rock scale.

I'll have to buy the record to see if they just took the loudness out of their songs in general or if it's just that song, or if it's more introspective or experimental.

Whatever the reason, I like the song's video, directed by Stephen Agnew:

It's a visual throwback to 1950s, 1960s and 1970s variety TV shows featuring musical acts lip-synching their songs and doo-wop acts' fashion styles. This look is archetypal of what American Conservative voters think "their" politicians mean when they think of the "good old days", when they're actually referring to WWII policies and class rule (men above women, graded highest by lightest skin tone and revenue).

In case you were wondering, Agnew is a British filmmaker who has mostly done Nike ads and videos for Drenge (Fuckabout, Face Like A Skull, Nothing), Royal Blood (Out Of The Black, Ten Tonne Skeleton), Crystal Castles (Sad Eyes), White Lies (Strangers), Fangclub (Better To Forget), The Vaccines (Post Break-Up Sex), All We Are (Honey), Ruen Brothers (Summer Sun), Gabrielle Aplin (Miss You), Spector (Kyoto Garden), and Dogs Trust (We're Here). He really likes bright colours, men in suits and long, classy dresses.

Video Of The Week: Tonnes

Sure, these are disturbing times, and as we sacrifice Liberty for Security and Bureaucracy, we are losing our Humanity. Franz Kafka wrote about this in Der Process (The Trial) in 1915, and published it in 1925, between the (first) two World Wars.

History has, of course, proven him correct time and time again. As bureaucracies get bigger and bigger, the "Big Picture" and "Greater Good" start constantly getting cited as the reason for doing and acting in certain conventional ways, except most people are at best only 90-95% conventional, meaning we're all exceptions in certain cases, and as soon as a government, State or otherwise leadership group looks into one of our behaviours, we are all likely to fall in some of the system's cracks at some point and be judged unfairly. Because at the end of the day, The System is unfair, rigidity is unrealistic, and we are all outsiders to some exent.

And so, Montréal indie rock "supergroup" Tonnes have enlisted director Giuliano Bossa (also the band's bassist) to set this reality into our own timeline, in this military-police-led present day - and the results don't even shock anymore, as we've seen these kinds of scenes happen on TV - and not just in fiction - and in film so often in the past two decades. The song is called In Trouble and, yes, we are.

TONNES - In Trouble from Giuliano Bossa on Vimeo.

Video Of The Week: Cake

Cake.

With Soul Coughing, they're my favourite band that I always forget exists.

I wanted to add a few of their songs to my phone playlist this week - namely Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps, Never There, Sheep Go To Heaven, Cool Blue Reason, their cover of Black Sabbath's War Pigs, Satan Is My Motor, She'll Come Back To Me, Open Book and, of course, The Distance:

The 1990s were great about introducing us to acts that didn't all resemble each other, what with the boom in indie labels and the traveling festivals. All bands didn't have to be big at the same level, either; Cake had one extremely successful album - 1996's Fashion Nugget, with their cover of I Will Survive - but also enjoyed moderate success with 1994's Motorcade Of Generosity and 1998's Prolonging The Magic, building a fanbase that would remain loyal to them to this day. Like Pearl Jam, but on a much smaller scale.

In many ways, Cake was similar to Soul Coughing, both containing elements of deadpan-delivery spoken word, rock, humour, poetry, irony, sarcasm; the main difference was the flavouring: Cake was based on country (particularly clearer after the departure of guitarist Greg Brown and his distinctive tone) whereas Soul Coughing's love of jazz was the underlying essence behind the composition.

Video Of The Week: Hadley Kennary

Hadley Kennary straddles the line between heartfelt ballads, folk and "new country", that quasi-orchestral-pop music sung with an accent that wins awards that we wouldn't want Toby Keith to get anyway.

Personally, I'd do away with a lot of the instrumentation on her Momentum EP, particularly the bass, which does nothing for me and is just too conventional and too present. The last song on it, 24 Hours, is more along the lines of what I'd like to hear her do more in the future. I'd be up for a solo/acoustic tour with her.

That being said, today I wanted to show her video for Painkiller, a black-and-white clip directed by Joe Barnard:

It's standard, 80s-tinged fare (complete with one-shot-stop up-motion strumming to add punch to a chord switch as if it were light ska), with the darkness-infused lyrics more prevalent in pop since the grunge era. But it ain't half bad.

Video Of The Week: Dead Messenger

There's this erroneous idea that tense, rigid and far-right-leaning political times makes for better arts in general - and music and film in particular. People point to the presidencies of Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) as proof of this, and I want to make a counter-point.

It's harder for the Nixon years because the utter crap that existed back then didn't make it all the way until my time, but I vividly recall the 1980s, and such bands as Squeeze, Hall & Oates, Flock Of Seagulls, Depeche Mode, Simple Minds, and so forth - thousands of acts that saw Miami Vice as a way of life.

For every U2 there were dozens of Duran Duran; for every R.E.M., there were a hundred boy bands like Color Me Badd; for every Guns N' Roses, there were thousands of Poison, Mötley Crüe, Ratt, Great White and W.A.S.P.-like shitty hair metal bands. And Bon Jovi existed pre- and post-New Jersey, which seems more and more like an accident every time they release anything, including Greatest Hits packages.

Which is to say that, yeah, Rage Against The Machine and Public Enemy are great vessels of thoughts of equality. But Pearl Jam and Bruce Springsteen would exist under any administration. And sure, some already-recognized acts are spurting out some nice art in opposition to what is happening right now in the U.S., but that art would likely have been great even without the added political message.

Take Dead Messenger, for instance. I've been telling the whole world that they're Montréal's best live band for years (nearly a decade, actually), and they likely still are even though the competition is stiffening. Their new single absolutely rocks, and it's the best, most condensed riff they've put out in perhaps five years, but they likely still would have come up with it without the election of Donald Trump and, let's face it, the U.S. has done enough damage internationally that the track may still very well have been called Hyper USA with a similar video directed by lead singer Roger White, shock-full of news footage of rights being trampled, flags and stock footage of go-go dancing, and 1950s fun times:


My point being that chaos does not just breed talent. Talent exists, and sometimes chaos focuses it for a bit, but it always surfaces by itself. Keep in mind all three of RATM's albums came out during the Bill Clinton era, as did Radiohead's OK Computer - a British piece, sure, but one nonetheless marked by a general feeling of unease, with a song called Electioneering smack-dab in the middle of it.

Video Of The Week: Cage The Elephant

The difference between imitation and inspiration is that imitation always pales in comparison.

Inspiration doesn't guarantee quality either; not all ideas are good, and not all good ideas turn out great in practice. But once in a while, things pan out for the best.

In Cold Cold Cold, Cage The Elephant hit such a moment; in and of itself, there is nothing wrong with listening to The Animals and The Rolling Stones a lot - and there is no way to listen to too much of them either. And when listening to Eric Burdon, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards enough leads to the best 60s song to come out of the 2010s, something has gone right.

Singer Matt Shultz directed the video, which harkens back to Stanley Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange in theme and Eyes Wide Shut in visual style:


The video comes on the heels of a memorable performance on The Late Show With Stephen Colbert and a Grammy nomination for best album, for 2015's Tell Me I'm Pretty, produced by The Black Keys' Dan Auerbach.

Video Of The Week: Neil Gaiman & Amanda Palmer

There are troubling times, to be sure. The world is in turmoil - and not just at war. People's rights are being bought and sold everywhere, usually to the lowest bidder.

The artists we saw a buys and lighthouses, guides in the darkness, are vanishing nearly every week. One such artist, Leonard Cohen, has fortunately left behind a body of work that many will be able to draw from; this week, award-winning writer Neil Gaiman narrates the lyrics of Democracy, with his partner Amanda Palmer accompanying him on piano, and an orchestra arrangement by Jherek Bischoff that features Étienne Abelin (violin), Ola Sendecki (violin), David Schnee (viola), and Lukas Raaflaub (cello) in a video animated and directed by David Mack and Olga Nunes:

What I like most about this version is that it is straightforward, with the words up-front, ahead of all, including melody, which means they do without the cheesy keyboard, 80s electronica-pop parts.

It's the one thing I didn't like about Cohen's oeuvre: the fact that he felt he had to provide cheesy bridges for his dames-of-the-moment to sing, rather than include them in the actual body of the song.

Video Of The Week: Vienna Ditto

Electronic indie-rock act Heksagons have made a video for their friends in Vienna Ditto, one that is essentially a short film about a ring or team of killers-for-hire, which includes themes of treason and nods to 1970s spy films as well as a decidedly Quentin Tarantino-esque overall aesthetic:

Essentially, Vienna Ditto is a British trip-hop act that was a threesome and a foursome at some point but is now a duo; this song, however - Busted Flush - has them in a quasi-rock configuration.

Video Of The Week: OK Go

Continuing their career path of fun, quirky, one-take videos that started with 2006's Here It Goes Again, OK Go have released another impressive little piece of visual artistry for their recent single, The One Moment, directed by the band's lead singer and guitarist, Damian Kulash:

I don't know how much or how little editing - or how much research - went into it, but the parts where Kulash appears to be singing at the same speed as the soundtrack are pretty darn impressive - both from the flipping pages in a book and the rotating-poster machine.

It also happens to be their best song in a long while, which will likely help propel them to a new level of recognition.

These Chicago rockers are the real deal; they're imaginative and creative, and they can actually rock as well.

Well done.