Talkin' about other people talkin' about music.

I've mentioned before that I hadn't been buying a lot of records recently, and it was starting to bother me. Or if I hadn't, I'm sure saying it now. I have taken some steps to rectify this - taking care to check out new stuff on eMusic regularly, stopping by Birdman Sound and listening to some local bands' MySpace pages. I suspect that by the end of the year, I'll probably be able to come up with a semi-respectable top 5 (or even 10) list of records, because we all love a list.

Which drew me to this, the list of the "Hottest Bands in Canada" (2006), as chosen by a bunch of music bloggers (I was lead to it from Dial 6-1-3_). And, okay, so there are some reasonable choices on the list - The Arcade Fire, Junior Boys and Broken Social Scene (#'s 26, 18 and 6, respectively) make sense, and people who get on the cover of Exclaim (Jon-Rae and the River, #13) or sign to big-assed foreign record labels like Sub Pop (Wolf Parade, tied for #9) and Warp (Born Ruffians, #11) are likely to be the groups people are excited about.

But holy crap, am I ever finished with indie rock.

I duly checked out the linked songs from the bands I didn't know on the list, and some of them I can imagine being moderately interesting to see live (Henri Faberge, Jon-Rae & the River) or maybe even worth buying if it's not too expensive (Tokyo Police Club, Malajube). But the overall trends - the wimpiness, the dance-punk aesthetic, the not-good singing - are just perplexing to me. I don't begrudge the youngsters moving on to, well, sounding like parts of 1981 and about a third of 1987, but why bother?


Anyway, I have found some stuff that I'm very happy with, and goodness, some of it is even current. My two main recommendations are Bobby Bare Jr's The Longest Meow and Nina Nastasia's On Leaving. The former lists in the liner notes, "11 songs - 11 people - 11 hours", and indeed it was recorded in half a day, with his usual band plus members of My Morning Jacket (and, IIRC, Lambchop), and it sounds like, and I'm just going to go ahead and be immodest, the Golden Famile on a really good day. Nina Nastasia's new one had me worried, or at least the reviews did - I loved, loved her last two records, particularly Run to Ruin, which veers from gorgeous to terrifying in seconds. So when I read that the new album was a more straightforward folkie affair, and didn't have Dirty Three drummer Jim White, I put off buying it or even giving it a listen. But, it's really good - not Run to Ruin good, but very good nonetheless.

Also picked a copy of Mastodon's Blood Mountain (on vinyl!), and sure, it's not for everyone, but if you're ready to try some prog metal, you probably can't do better than this. I know there's already a bit of a backlash against the tokenization of metal, with Mastodon standing in the role Public Enemy used to hold in hip-hop (ie., that one group that indie-rock-loving critics and fans decided was acceptable to like and include on year-end lists, which allowed them to ignore the rest of the genre with a clear conscience because hey, I said I liked It Takes a Nation of Millions), but goddamn, Blood Mountain is really fucking good - considerably better than Leviathan, their last one.