Daily Archives: July 26, 2010

by | July 26, 2010 · 7:45 pm

Andrew Vs. “The Beckon Call” by Christopher Smith

Christopher Smith is an artist of little notoriety. His name sounds familiar only because it is so simple. To school the rest of you, he is a singer/songwriter from Vancouver, but before he started working on music he was involved in the city’s art scene. I actually ended up noticing this album because of this fantastic little video for his song “Gently Gently”. I figured I would purchase it on my own as a courtesy to the artist and what I got was just a little underwhelming.

The starting track, “Gently Gently” is ominous as it is sweet. It is also perhaps the best song on the album. There is no percussion on the entire runtime, but on “Gently Gently” it seems to really help the song. The looming electric guitar keeps the song fun to listen to while the acoustics keep it progressive. The lyrics are simple as well and end up being useful in the overall simple-delivery of the entire song. It also helps that his voice sounds incredibly soothing but real.

Smith sings the next three songs as if he was in front of his girlfriend’s porch with his guitar in attempt to woo her back into his arms. Unfortunately, it’s also like he’s in high school and has had little experience in writing lyrics. “Middle of the Night” is wrought with clichés and painful repetition that made me want to cringe a few times. The turn in the three songs after “Gently Gently” abandon the feeling that he was the quiet kid that you knew in school, never really knew, but respected him because of his obvious intelligence, and replace it with sort of an amateurish take on songwriting.

Some my complaints changes for the better when he becomes a bit edgier in the second half of the album. “The Beckon Call Part 1” and “The Beckon Call Part 2” aren’t much on the side of music, but are good, ambient tone-setters. However, you can find a five-note connection between the two songs making them consistant.

“Two Strawberries In a Jam” finds Smith in a place of weakness, when he has little sound backing him and his guitar and it comes off as honest, catchy and enjoyable. In fact, there is a sense of the same weakness on the rest of the album but it becomes disappointingly edgy. The cohesion in “Hands” seems like it wasn’t written with a whole lot of thought and depends solely on the sadness in its musical tone.

The problem with this album is that it’s really kind of boring. Honestly, I had trouble listening to it and it’s only about 35 minutes. In times when it should be personal, it just comes off as whiny. When you want him to be emotional, he portrays himself as cold with his delivery. I guess what I’m trying to say is that this album doesn’t want you to like it that much. It wants you to say “it’s okay but I wouldn’t listen to it again.” And to put it frank, that’s what it is.

WINNER: Andrew

WHY: Christopher Smith is an okay artist. Nothing should be expected of him, but “The Beckon Call” just isn’t that interesting to listen to.

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by | July 26, 2010 · 7:37 pm

Matt Vs. “Breathe On It” by The Hidden Cameras

Note: I’m lending my impressions on this performance of the song specifically. The studio recording is somewhat different, but a lot of what I say here still stands with the original track.

I never thought there would be a point in my life where I would stumble upon “Gay Church Folk Music,” but then I opened up an album by The Hidden Cameras and was surprised at what I had found.

Joel Gibb, The Hidden Cameras’ frontman/songwriter, is, for lack of a better word, a giant pervert. This guy isn’t afraid to get down and dirty with the… down and dirty, discussing such topics as underage sex, drinking semen, and being peed on. The Hidden Cameras’ albums are usually filled to the brim with dark, perverted undertones that are subsequently drowned out by a buoyant choir and full orchestra.

But I’m not going to be talking about their albums as a whole. Instead I’m supposed to be talking about a specific song — “Breathe On It.” Now, I don’t really know what the song is about. Some speculate it’s about fellatio, some say it’s about being proud of your sexuality, some say it’s about individualism – again, I have no clue. I’m not here to analyze the words, just the sound, mainly because I’m too stupid to understand subtly.

“Breathe On It” is much like what I described in the above. The song sounds as though it has a dark, more serious meaning behind it, but is accompanied by the instrumentation that is far away on the other side of the field. It’s almost as if Joel originally wrote this song to have a different tone, but then the band came over to his house and fucked everything up. Everyone started playing cellos and violins and Joel just said, “Ah fuck it, this is fine.” Not to say this is a bad thing, the contrast between the words and the sound are actually kind of refreshing, even though I hardly ever listened to the words because I was too caught up in the instruments (you’ve probably heard this from me before).

SECOND TANGENT OF THE NEW BLOG: It’s odd. I say I’m not smart enough to understand the meaning behind this song, but it’s more that I don’t need to. I’m more inclined to just sit back and listen, because the feelings the song makes me experience are holding me in such a way that I don’t want to dig deeper. It’s ignorant, I know, but I believe that the most important part of music is the sound (when I say that aloud it just sounds painfully obvious), and I want to take my time and deal with that instead. If I’m interested enough in what you have to say, I might snap myself out of my trance to check that out.

“Breathe On It” holds me in the same manner. The song is larger than life, but at the same time grounded in some sense of reality. It starts out timid with Joel leading with his guitar and voice. As the chorus hits, the back up vocals and strings come into the mix. From there on they just keep adding to that, the back up choir becomes more persistent though the verses, the strings are a lot more prominent. At that moment, I stopped thinking about everything that was going on around me, and I became perfectly in sync with The Hidden Cameras’ performance. It was just me and the music. I soaked up everything I could. I was in tune with my senses. Every bit of rational thought I was capable of disappeared for a brief time.

This, I believe, is the affect every song should have on me. When I listen to a new track, I should be taken away from my reality. Each piece of music should be a gateway to a new world, filled with new sights, sounds, people, feelings. “Breathe On It,” for whatever reason, hit all of the right nerves. While listening to it, for the first time — as stupid as it sounds — I felt as if I was lifted away from all of my problems. For a series of minutes, I was in another place.

And it was a truly fabulous experience.

WINNER: “Breathe On It” by The Hidden Cameras

WHY: For giving Matt a new perspective on the power music can have over a person.

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by | July 26, 2010 · 6:35 pm

John Vs. “Mines” by Menomena

This is the vulnerable album. Not to imply that Menomena’s been about a whole bunch of macho self-confidence, but there’s a decided difference in how they’ve addressed their topics. “Friend And Foe” was externally directed, almost a collection of fables and attacks in how disconnected they were from introspection. The late album series of “The Pelican,” “Air Aid” & “Weird” is the best example of this; worldly rampage followed by a meditation on the history awaiting this place in time, and closed with a venomous spike at an anonymous antagonist. It’s “Weird,” though, that was able to give a bit more perspective on what was coming from Mines: there’s a decided self-depreciating side to it, where it’s admitted that it could just be him feeling inadequate.

Mines is very much about inadequacy and the struggle against it. Opener “Queen Black Acid” is an abused relationship hymn, complete with the disconnect with life after it finally comes to a close. Brilliantly, it’s followed by “TAOS,” which is the closest thing to swagger that such a band could ever achieve. It’s self-depreciating but in a charming way, bold and playful while subtly desperate.

It’s really tempting for me to just gush about what every song on this album is, and how brutally open all of these songs get, but that’s just rude, so I’ll pick one more to spend time on: “BOTE.” It’s likely my favorite song on the album, as it’s a great display of the album’s character arc, for lack of a more appropriate term. After whatever crushing event precluded the album, the songwriter seem to be growing stronger and stronger. A confrontation with the seas that caused such dread earlier are now met with full attention, and fought with everything he’s got. The catastrophic storm overtakes him, but at least not peacefully this time.

The reason that I’m not talking about the actual instrumentation to go with these songs is because they are so well paired with their lyrics that it’s almost redundant. At no point in the album does the music clash with what the singer is trying to say, and similarly do the vocals not overshadow the actual music. It’s a unified front, like a… a band, or something.

Huh.

WINNER: “Mines” by Menomena

WHY: It’s as much worldbuilding as music.

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