MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: ORIGINAL SOUNDTRACK - GOLD

This film, loosely based on the Bre-X mining stock scandal, got mixed reviews despite an appreciated performance but Matthew McConaughey. But the music supervisor should get rave notices. Whoever put it together has both good taste and good ideas, and stayed away from all the usual soundtrack pitfalls and over-used songs.


The big new track for the movie was a collaboration between Iggy Pop and Danger Mouse, and it's really the only disappointment. Not that the song "Gold" is poor, it's just not much of anything, with Iggy in deep voice croon on an unmemorable melody. After that though, it's a fine mix tape for the '80s/'90s alternative fan. Both Joy Division and New Order are here, with "Atmosphere" and "Temptation." Pixies' cut "Hey" is inspired, a regal strut from Black Francis. Scottish cult favourites Orange Juice are always welcome, with "Rip It Up."


There was some deeper crate digging on a couple of other tracks, which are nice surprises. Instead of the Eric Burdon & War version of "Spill the Wine", a cover by The Isley Brothers makes it more fresh. And I was won over by Kishi Bashi (Jupiter One/Of Montreal) doing Talking Heads' "This Must Be The Place" with just strings. When Television wrap up the disc with "1880 Or So," you can tell that a lot of thought went into programming a strong 45 minutes of music.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: NEIL DIAMOND - 50th ANNIVERSARY COLLECTION

The question here is not whether the music is good, but where it comes from and what is included.  I think we all know where we stand on Diamond, and and even on certain periods of his career.  I, for instance, love the '60s stuff ("Solitary Man," "Kentucky Woman," "Sweet Caroline"), tread carefully through the '70s ("Cracklin' Rosie," "Song Sung Blue," "Longfellow Serenade"), and am very, very careful from "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" on.  On this three-disc set celebrating 50 years, that's pretty much how it's laid out, one CD on each of those periods, 50 songs in total. 

In the past, Diamond collections have been hampered by rights issues.  Since he recorded for several companies, from Bang to UNI to MCA to Columbia to Capitol, you'd get the frustrating situation where a set such as The Essential Neil Diamond from 2001 would have several live cuts, in that case featuring concert records of the UNI tracks including "Play Me" and "Brother Love's Travelling Salvation Show."  Others, like the confusingly titled Neil Diamond Collection, would be just the 1968-1972 UNI era.  Well, finally, this set seems to have covered all the bases, and very well.  Almost every hit song is here, and the ones that aren't are from later, dodgy years, only enough to create a minor squabble among completists.  There are a handful of important album cuts thrown in, including "Crunchy Granola Suite" and his versions of "I'm A Believer" and "Red Red Wine", much bigger hits for others.  There are even minor hits that have rarely shown up on collections or reissues, such as the 1968 fizzle "Sunday Sun", quite a good song that tanked at #68 on release.

Disc three does get shaky, but not as dire as it could be, as the set races through the late '70s to today.  I always felt that the cheese and bluster was hard to take in those years, with "America" from The Jazz Singer and Vegas material like "Heartlight". Like so many others, Diamond enlisted Rick Rubin in the new century to give him the Johnny Cash makeover, without as much success, but the three tracks from those albums do bring him back down to Earth at least.  Still, it's disc one that will get my repeat play.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: ERIC BIBB - MIGRATION BLUES

Bibb tackles the very topical issue of forced migration on this set, whether it be due to war, poverty or enslavement. His goal is to challenge us to be more tolerant and welcoming, as history always shows us welcoming immigrants is humane and right. Opening cut Refugee Moan is a prayer, and it could be from migrant worker in the depression heading west, or a Syrian refugee arriving in Canada, scarred and scared for the future. We hear about the Great Migration of the early 20th century, when the children and grandchildren of former slaves left the Jim Crow-infested South for work in the northern cities. and soon after, "Prayin' For Shore" is about the drownings of thousands of refugees trying to reach Europe in recent years.


Bibb's acoustic blues are powerful, dark, and with just the right amount of tension. Like the Delta bluesmen, he's singing, but there's a bit of speaking in there as well, which reinforces the story-telling feel. The accompaniment is subtle, mostly Bibb with his two frequent touring collaborators, Canadian Michael Jerome Browne on guitar, mandolin and banjo, and the atmospheric harmonica of France's J.J. Milteau. For a final stamp on the theme, Bibb covers Dylan's "Masters of War," and Guthrie's "The Land Is Your Land," making the strong connection between blues and social justice.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: HURRAY FOR THE RIFF RAFF - THE NAVIGATOR

Bronx-raised of Puerto Rican descent, Alynda Segarra made this one personal, a concept album about a street kid lost in America, trying to find her culture in all this mashed-up mess. It's presented as a two-act play, looking back and looking forward, and it has layers upon layers of interest, from the story she's trying to tell to the Puerto Rican musical elements she's incorporated to the literary/cultural references added. As rich as that makes the concept, it's simply a fantastic collection of songs.


Segarra has a tremendous alto voice (reminds me of Feist, am I alone in this?), and her vocals hold you throughout, full of drama as the songs unfold. She's still working in the folk idiom, but it's enhanced by the melting pot of influences Segarra has collected, as production techniques and a wide assortment of instruments are used across the album. There are piano ballads with power ("Pa'lante") and uptempo guitar pop tunes ("Life To Save"), before closing on a Puerto Rican percussive groove. Segarra is making a bold statement about culture and identity for sure, and it the fact it comes rapped in such dynamic music makes it that much more important.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: THE ORWELLS - TERRIBLE HUMAN BEINGS

Ah, young, loud and snotty, the basic recipe for modern-day punk.  Not much has changed since the '70s really, although this is a tad more polished than your granddad's punk.  More like latter-day Green Day punk, if you get my drift.  The must-hear band of 2014 by some accounts has now got to put up or shut up.  They've cleaned up the production a bit, but kept the attitude and power chords, and thrown in some gratuitous shocks ("No one can fill your vision/They're on vacation masturbating").

There's some fun going on certainly.  The tribute song called "Black Francis," goes about it in a roundabout way, including a conversation in the second verse:  "Have you heard that band?  Yeah I think they're shit."  It's off-kilter, like Bowie's "Andy Warhol."  There's great sha-lala's in "Hippie Soldier," a good contrast to the distorted bits to come.   Even some very, very dark lyrics are treated with goofball irony:  "So take me to the desert and chop off my heavy, heavy head.  Put it in an Easter basket and place it down upon my mama's bed."  I guess jaded never gets old.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: MURRAY McLAUCHLAN - LOVE CAN'T TELL TIME

With a career that goes back to the heyday of Yorkville Village in Toronto, and enough Juno Awards to make Drake and Bieber gasp, Murray McLauchlan has earned the right to do, well, whatever the hell he wants to in music. At 68, he still tours constantly, both solo and as part of the long-running collective Lunch At Allen's, never failing to fill the soft-seat theatres across the country. As for new music, he hadn't released an album since 2011's Human Writes, until now.

"I thought, okay, I've hit my dinger, I don't know if I've got another album in me," said McLauchlan of his 19th album, Love Can't Tell Time. "So along came this project, and I went, well I guess that wasn't the case. I'm totally overjoyed with it, I really really love it."

The album was more of an accident, and never a plan. He had several new songs he'd done for another project that hadn't worked out, but he had picked up a new guitar technique. He thought the songs sounded great with that playing style, so he decided to record them to try it out. Sitting with his friend, acoustic bass player Victor Bateman, McLauchlan laid down the songs in the simplest of ways.

"We just did what I really like to do, which is a kind of retro recording," he said. "Although I think it may be also the recording of the future. The idea was, let's make a recording here that just sounds like what people used to do in the 1940s or early 1950s, just set up with a great big old U-47 tube mic, I'm going to sit in front of it with my 1938 guitar, and I'm going to just sing the songs, I won't even put a microphone on the guitar because I believe the performance will kind of mix itself as we move in and out dynamically. And it did. Victor was certainly on mic, but everything leaked into everything else. So you can't really adjust anything while you're mixing, if you change the equalization on the voice you're going to do it on the guitar, so you can't. The result is, you get something very honest and very natural right off the floor."

It's not all about being retro though, it's also about sounding, to McLauchlan's ears, and plenty of others, better. "I'm a big fan of this idea of recording," he said. "You put people in a room that can play, and you record it. Somewhere along the line, I think the technology took over the music. I guess I'm sort of a bit of a bloody-minded person, as I tend to kind of go the opposite way from what is the current flavour of the month, and right now the current flavour of the month is electronically manufactured soundscapes with tones of auto-tuning on them."

The only parts that were added later were the glorious string arrangements on each track, done by Drew Jurecka. Each is elegant, and quite different from the next, working with the vocal rather than providing a lush background. Again, a modern use of a classic technique.

Old but new is theme throughout Love Can't Tell Time. Seven of the cuts are new McLauchlan pieces he either wrote or co-wrote, while three of the numbers are favourites of his from the 1940s and '50s. "They were songs that when I'm up at the cottage playing music for the loons, that I play for my own enjoyment, it's the kind of music that I play when I'm just relaxing by myself," he said. They are "Come Fly With Me," "Hey There," a Rosemary Clooney number from the movie Pyjama Game, and the Jerome Kern tune "Pick Yourself Up".

McLauchlan, a fan of the classics, has found himself moving toward that style of songwriting as well.

"The songs are deceptively simple when you look at them casually, but they are layered like an onion, and you don't really get the songs unless you've been around the block a little bit," he said of the '40s - '50s hits. "So that's what I was shooting for, in a co-write with my brother, who is the original Don Draper, there's a song called 'My Martini.' I actually went back to the well, to how Sammy Cahn wrote lyrics, because he was the master of ethnic inversion. The best example is, 'My kind of town, Chicago is.' It's like how an old Jewish guy would talk. So I did the same thing with 'My Martini,' when my brother wrote the lyric originally, it was 'Don't mess with my martini, I like it on the rocks.' So I went to the Sammy Cahn well, and went 'My martini, not a thing you should mess with.'"

Other songs are light-hearted as well, but not without a message. For the most part, they pass on a little wisdom from experience, such as "I'm Not Going To Waste A Minute Of My Life". McLauchlan has been out road-testing the material. "I just had an eight-concert run myself, and the whole second half of the show on stage is actually this record, these songs," he said. "You think off the top of your head it's a lot to ask people to accept a lot of new material they haven't necessarily heard before, but the really interesting thing is, they go nuts."

There are lots of opportunities for most of the country to go nuts for the Love Can't Tell Time album. He says he has 29 concerts on his books before the end of November, 19 with Lunch At Allen's in both the west and east, and a 10-concert tour in central Canada in November.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BOB DYLAN - TRIPLICATE

It always takes me a bit to get used to Dylan's, um, croon on these classic songwriter collections. It doesn't help that he hits a couple of clunkers on the very first song, "I Guess I'll Have To Change My Plans," but eventually I warm up to it, and start appreciating the phrasing and the charm. When you listen closely to, say, "P.S. I Love You" (NOT The Beatles' song), he is bang-on the melody. He does better on the ballads than on livelier numbers; he's all over the place on "The Best Is Yet To Come," which has a tricky tempo, but he survives.


Even if he's not the greatest singer, he does a lot of other things very, very well on these collections. Dylan is, as he has always been, an excellent curator. His taste is impeccable, and if at this time in his life he has chosen to perform the work of the great American songwriters, it's that guy who wanted us to know about Woody Guthrie back in 1962. That touring band of his has developed a whole new sound for this material, different than anybody else has ever played it. The key is Donnie Herron's pedal steel, lush and eerie, that replaces the strings that are usually found on these songs. The guitars, brushed percussion and acoustic bass settle in, and create a dreamy, jazzy world.


Dylan had said he'd recorded a bunch of this material when he released the first such album, Shadows in the Night, back in 2015. Since he's never stood still for long, it wouldn't surprise me if, with this triple album, he'll be done with this career phase. It sure doesn't feel like a last act.