Tuesday, September 28, 2010

Easy to Love

My friends Dan and Sky danced to this at their wedding. Aka The Most Amazingly Beautiful There Are Not Enough Adjectives for How Lovely it Was Wedding Ever. The album version is a little more upbeat. A stunning bride in cowboy boots and a short petticoated dress and the groom with exactly the look you hope to see on the face of a friend at his wedding ... I ruined my mascara.

Ivan and Alyosha - Easy to Love




I never see shows listed for anywhere other than Seattle. Boys - it's only a short (and scenic - I once saw a submarine. True story.) boat ride to Victoria. Dooooo it. We have numerous and fantastic breweries. I'm buying.

Tuesday, September 07, 2010

O My Heart

Oy vey, another music post. Bear with me, I will actually write something again .... some day ....

Anywhoo .... Mother Mother. One day no one knew who they were, and the next they were adding dates to sold out shows. Well, it probably didn't seem like that to them, what with the toil of forming a band, writing (fricking fantastic) songs, building a following and so on. But from the outside, there was definitely a 'holy shit, where did these guys come from?' moment.
 
I saw Ryan Guldemond play solo a few months ago, sandwhiched between Vince Vaccaro (a pleasant yawn) and Jon and Roy (here's a bat, bludgeon me around the ears). Honestly, Jon and Roy ... at one point my friend Wendy turned to me and said 'duder, they've played the same song 21 times!'. Agony. Starbucks Pick of the Week, beach ditty flavoured agony. But Ryan Guldemond, oh my god. Without the flanking of the pretty girls and rest of band, all his Gumby strangeness was so magnificently magnified. Wendy was all 'is this dude even serious!?'. And I was all 'oh my god, I want to spoon feed him soup and watch him while he sleeps!'. He has such amazing stage presence, does things to his guitar that makes me want to have intimate encounters with his fingers, and dear god, are his vocals amazeballs. There were moments where, I swear, there was a whiff of Wayne Newton. But mostly he doesn't sound like anyone else.

Brief aside. When I was a kid I couldn't understand why Ferris Bueller was lipsyncing to a woman. Totally didn't get that Danke Schoen was sung by Wayne Newton, and that he was a dude, until probably the 12th viewing.

But Ryan Guldemond ... I can totally get down with a man that writes about not eating for days before a date so he'll look extra skinny. And, he was totally gracious when some puka shell wearing frat boy told him he was the bombdiggity. I couldn’t even keep a straight face.

Fast forward a few months, and Wend and I go to see Mother Mother. A second show that was added as the first was about to sell out. We made the call to see the club show instead of the sit down show as they're pretty frigging fun live, and not so much sitty downy. Unfortunately the show coincided with the influx of approximately 6,000 international navel personnel (the streets were running with seamen!), so the crowd was taller, drunker, sluttier and louder than usual. And that’s saying something, as Victoria has some seriously asshat chatty crowds. Oh god, and smellier! We were sucked into a whirling vortex of stale pit and old underwear for several songs. But, despite all that, it was a fantastic show. Though sort genre bending and hard to define, I’ll go out on a limb and say that Mother Mother is pop at it it’s best. Smart, distinctive, fun, catchy music that isn’t comfortably packaged to pander to the widest possible audience. Though that certainly hasn’t held back their ability to build a fan base. Not at all bad for a kid from an Island most Canadians couldn’t find on a map.

My little intro to this video turned into a bit of a ramble. I was just going to post this, and a wee note, but again, sucked into the power of Mother Mother.

This video turns the band into paper dolls and features a kid that looks like a gender confused Wednesday Adams channeling Robert Smith before he got all chubby and awkward, so I’m pretty much totally down with it.

Mother Mother - O My Heart

Monday, September 06, 2010

All Your Friends Seem Like Enemies When You're Broken Down and Empty

Last long weekend of the summer and it's raining balls. Seriously starting to feel like fall. I've only ventured out to take out the trash, spent most of the day doing the domestic putter, wrapped in the vestiges of yesterday's dourness. Trying to cobble together a mix for birthday invites, but I keep getting sucked in to City and Colour. I really resisted City and Colour because, honestly, Alexisonfire ... always thought they were sort of douchy. And made me want to buy stock in throat lozenges. I have to give Dallas Green credit though. He's won this girl over.

This song is perfect today.

City and Colour - Waiting



* Are those rapist glasses?

Sunday, September 05, 2010

While You Were Sleeping

Urgh. Had the sort of hungover day that involves fantasies of ritual disembowelment, disturbingly adolescent melancholic self-loathing, and a driving desire to consume nothing but ginger ale. I don’t sleep well after a drink-heavy night out, so I was out of bed at 8:30, after fours hours of sleep. Only four hours because, after stumbling in famished and managing to whip up french toast I decided it was a darn tootin’ good idea to finally go on that neighbourhood-in-the-dark photo wander I’ve been meaning to do.

It was not a good idea.

For several reason. Not the least of which is that apparently the only other people awake in my neighbourhood at four am are a couple of skeezy dudes down the street. They very kindly offered ‘come on in the house, we’ll give you something to photograph’. Something about it gave me the nos though (go figure).

The photos didn’t turn out too smashingly. Shock. These were semi-salvageable. I do love dark empty streets.





I managed a semi-productive day of tattoo shop visit (oh god, tattoo noise + hangover headache = bad case of the unhappys), Scott Pilgrim, grocery shopping and pad thai cooking. All of which was soundtracked by White Stripes, Kevin Drew, Broken Social Scene and LDC Soundsystem. A concerted effort to not indulge the hangover weepies with  the usual folky heartbreak fodder. It pretty much worked, except now I’m rocking a serious case of the envies for whoever Kevin Drew wrote this song for. Lucky bitch. Sadly, this is about the best video of it I could find on the internets. Hopefully BSS will play it October 12th. That would be nice. Very nice.

xo  ~ m

Kevin Drew - TBTF

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