New features added

So I've added a couple new little sections over there to your immediate right to highlight albums, books and DVDs I'm currently into, although I might not have time to always talk about them actively on the blog. At this time, however, I am.

Man, I couldn't have slept any harder on Emily Haines (of Canadian bands Metric and Broken Social Scene) and her debut album Knives Don't Have Your Back, but now it's what I listen to practically every time I'm listening to music without a distinct agenda.





"Doctor Blind" is the second track on the disc, and I think it's the first place I detected a bit of an Aimee Mann vibe to her stuff, which is something I would cherish in any artist. Haines also has this way of constructing her piano lines in skeletal fashion, rather than via complete chords. So the progressions don't always seem to make sense right away, but they hang together beautifully on repeated listening. So maybe skeletal isn't quite the word I'm looking for-- it's more like your nervous system: intimately linked to an underlying structure but weaving in and out of that foundation. The music geek in me also loves how the chorus breaks down into a measure of 5, a measure of 4, a measure of 3 and a measure of 4. I know, you probably don't care, but I have a deep love for tender and beautiful music that falls across the drums in weird ways. The lyrics from the chorus are also very Mann-ish: "My baby's got the lonesome lows, don't quite go away overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the blue ones / If the dizzying highs don't subside overnight / Doctor Blind, just prescribe the red ones."

Here's another key to a good album: if the first four songs are good, and all in slightly different but related ways, it's usually an album worth your time. Other examples I can think of: Menomena's Friend and Foe and Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. I'm going to skip ahead to the fourth track on Knives Don't Have Your Back, though.





"Detective Daughter," aside from fitting rather nicely right into my recent mix, "A Mix for Private Dicks," has a fantastic rhythm track, all bass drum and handclaps. The ominous walking piano line and guitar hits put it squarely in the path of Fiona Apple comparisons, but, much like that guy in the U.N.K.L.E. video for "Rabbit in your Headlights," she blows that car apart. Check it out:







"The Maid Needs a Maid" has probably the finest line on the album: "Your mouth should be working for me, for free." This would be a great choice for plopping right into the middle of a mix, a romantic song that skewers the genre in kind of a Clem Snide-esque kind of way. The twist is basically that Haines is saying she wants a kept man. Um, sign me up, incidentally.







It's also the rare album that buries a track as exceptional as "Nothing & Nowhere" as deep as track 9 of an 11-track album. Much like "Doctor Blind," the song is draped loosely across its pilings, but here, there's no rhythm section to drive that home, so it floats a bit more. The conceit here is a nicely literary and narrative one ("Some say, our life is insane," goes the chorus, "but it isn't insane on paper") but what I'd really like to draw your attention to is the first couplet of the second chorus. "Some say, we always only want to get off," goes the first line, and it's delievered in a flat enough way that the double meaning could fall just as easily in either direction, but when she delivers the second half, her mischievious smile is actually audible as she coos, "Some say, our hands are much too soft." Sexy isn't a sexy enough word for the effect, because it's not just hot-- it's brittle and apologetic and vulnerable and forthright, all at the same time.

That's just good rock and roll.

OTHER ALBUMS MENTIONED IN THIS POST