MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: JIM CUDDY - SKYSCRAPER SOUL

Now on solo disc three, we know the drill:  Blue Rodeo album, Blue Rodeo tour, another tour, and then time for solo work, with all the band members doing what they dig.  Cuddy seems to be most comfortable in the solo career, having started a third family with the Cuddy Band, and will be out on tour in the soft-seaters this fall.  And you know the drill for his solo albums; some folks use them to get their wild streaks out of their systems, but with Cuddy, it's more like his mild streak.  Sometimes I think Keelor goads him into being that rockin' kid he used to be when they were starting out.  And I think Jim lets Greg toughen up his songs in the Rodeo partnership.  Because, quite simply, solo Jim Cuddy is softer than his Blue Rodeo stuff, where he's definitely the soft guy.

Okay, I have to go back and apologize, since I'm saying soft like it's a bad thing.  What's a better word?  It's probably a very hyphenated one:  pop-folk-Canadiana-balladeer.  Anyway, you get the shorthand, Greg's the wilder of the two.  Having said that, don't think Cuddy plays it completely safe.  He does experiment, in his own setting.  This disc is actually less violin-No Depression than the last two, instead getting into some interesting melodies and vocals, finding some lovely chords and changes to wrap those gorgeous pipes around.  Ready To Fall is a piano-based, delicate mood piece with a trumpet solo.  And Don't Know That Much is completely unlike anything Blue Rodeo has ever touched, a vocal tour-de-force that's like a latter-day Brian Wilson number, all mood.  There's also an R'n'B tougher number, Water's Running High, again not something you'd expect from Cuddy, but as always, a well-placed gritty number always sounds good from him, in contrast to the balladry.

The track that has the initial chatter is Everyone Watched The Wedding, which takes its title from the recent Royal nuptials.  Thankfully, it's not as saccharine as that, and actually has a good tale in it, a guy taking stock of all the people in his life, the troubles they have, and how it all looked so perfect on TV in that fairy-tale existence.  It's a great narrative.  I have more problems with the title cut, a clunky metaphor, one of those ones that sounds better than it is:  "I got a skyscraper soul/There's mud in my veins and there's steel in my bones."  I don't even know what that means.  But thankfully, it's a rare misstep, and as usual there's lots of touching lines and a few special moments.  He'll have to drag out something rocky from the old albums to liven up the tour this fall, but he's already laid the tender trap for the fans.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: NIRVANA - NEVERMIND DELUXE EDITION

Never mind.  Forget it.  Oh well, whatever.  I feel stupid and contagious.  Punk may have been an outsider music in 1991, but the words sure spoke to a lot of under-30's, and quite a few older than that.  I remember walking into our local hip record shop and seeing the brilliant, arresting cover, and being told what was going on by the hardcore of the Moncton hardcore scene at the time.  Within a couple of years, those guys could actually get big-time record deals, members of Eric's Trip and The Monoxides.  Ya, Nevermind not only spoke to a lot of people, it shook the established rock world by the lapels and said, Entertain Us.

It's hard to separate the album from the tragedy that followed, now that we know just how torn Cobain was inside.  However, it's good to hear the music again, step back and consider if it holds up.  It does, of course, thanks to a flow of solid songs.  This was not just an album built on Smells Like Teen Spirit; following in succession are In Bloom, Come As You Are, Breed, Lithium and Polly, each different and powerful.  Cursed as it were to come out at the height of the CD era, when the art of lining up an album was lost, and all the best songs were stuck at the front, the remaining six tracks almost feel forgotten, but there's strength to them as well.  Quit hitting repeat on Teen Spirit, you geeks.

Now, the real question:  Should you upgrade?  On offer is this Deluxe Edition, which gives you two CD's, including all the studio and live b-sides (nine of them), the original pre-production demos with producer Butch Vig, almost a year before the official session (eight more cuts), the infamous Boombox rehearsals, demos recorded by the group on a blaster, including the first-ever Teen Spirit (eight cuts) and finally two BBC session tracks.  14 of the 18 cuts on disc two are previously unreleased, and you probably don't have many of the b-sides unless you're a collector, so at $19, this is not a bad deal.  What is a bad deal is the absolute lack of liner notes here, just a photo booklet.  I assume it's because they saved up the essays for the 90-page book that comes with the Super Deluxe Version.  They had to have something to offer to justify the whopping $130 price tag.  Yes, it's four discs and a DVD, but get this:  The DVD is the same concert as CD #4, Live At The Paramount, and you can buy that separately on Blu-Ray for $13.  That leaves Disc 3 as your only exclusive, and it's just a different, earlier mix of the regular album, done by Butch VIg himself instead of the official mixer, Andy Wallace.  Why?  I don't friggin' know, because that information is no doubt in the 90-page book, which didn't come in the basic Deluxe version.  It bugs me, but not enough to spend an extra $110 to find out.  I'm thinking Kurt wouldn't think this was a cool deal at all.  Times have changed in twenty years.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: WILCO - THE WHOLE LOVE

Wilco has been out generating such good will and good media presence in advance of this album, I thought for sure it would see the group continue down the more mainstream path ventured on the previous release, 2009's Wilco (The Album).  Well, what a surprise to find this one starts with a lengthy, experimental cut, complete with guitar weirdness from resident experimenter, Nels Cline.  The second track, I Might, just might have been a pop cut on the last album, but here Cline is once again allowed to coax shrieking animals out of his amp.

The Whole Love is a mixed bag of songs by Jeff Tweedy, none of them ever allowed to be just normal.  Dawned On Me is a sunshine-filled number, but every time you think it's going to relax into a radio-friendly hit, something is dropped in to insure it will never, ever grace anybody's consultant-based playlist, even if it's just the slightly warbled whistling or tiny bit of feedback at the end.  Of course, Tweedy is an old hand at presenting things that are skewed.  The big surprise here is the number of ballads, real acoustic and introspective numbers that see the electric boys step back and the string section take over, plus a major role for Cline's lap steel.  Open Mind is a return to the country roots of the group, way back in the '90's, and it's almost shocking to hear Tweedy's voice in a relative normal setting, without Cline-effects or band craziness vying for equal attention.  It's basically a pretty little melody with a sadness thanks to his natural default vocal mood.  By the time his acoustic picking-Paul Simon-from-1966 number, Rising Red Lung, comes along at cut 10, you've forgotten this is the mighty, noisy Wilco.

Don't get comfy though.  Next comes a ditty.  Yes, I said ditty.  It's called Capitol City, and it's a little music hall melody, with a jaunty rhythm and a silly organ, and if Davy Jones had been its singer, it would have been on More Of The Monkees.  Wow, what a collection.  It's the opposite of a thematic album, rather it's a work that shows how much the band has going for it, how many great ideas are floating around when these artists get to play.  It's all over the place, in the way The White Album or Sgt. Pepper's is, and that makes it such a rewarding listen.  This is truly an experience, and has all the hallmarks of something I'll be listening to over and over again for years.  The disc of 2011, methinks.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: VARIOUS ARTISTS - NATIONAL PARKS PROJECT

If you've done any traveling in New Brunswick, you know what Kouchibouguac National Park looks like.  But what does it sound like?  Not the gulls and wind through the trees and happy campers preparing breakfast, not that sound.  What would it sound like as a song?

That was the challenge facing three musicians, and one filmmaker, dispatched to the park in 2010.  Across the country, similar teams were sent out to parks in each province and territory.  It's called the National Parks Project, and featured such artists as Sarah Harmer, Sam Roberts, Matt Mays, Kathleen Edwards, Old Man Luedecke and 34 others.  The National Parks Project aims to explore the ways in which the wilderness shapes our cultural imagination.  So this series of films and music was put together, and it's been airing on Discovery World channel, in a documentary narrated by Gord Downie.  While the tunes have been married to the visuals, and available on iTunes, now we get a CD collection.  (Vinyl hounds take note:  you get a bonus six tracks on a 2 LP set, as opposed to the 20 here).

This is not a particularly easy task.  If you're looking for strict inspiration from a tranquil setting, odds are you're going to get pretty calm music, and that is what has happened with much of the music here.  Despite the inclusion of lots of Canuck indie rockers, most are mellowed out and trying to tap into their folk or ambient sides.  I like the tracks with a little life to them, such as the couple here by Old Man Luedecke.  Proof, as Steve Martin once told us, “You can't play a sad song on the banjo - it always comes out so cheerful.”

Back to New Brunswick, it actually inspired the best song on the collection, a real epic, with different movements and a stand-alone sound, quite something even without its companion film.  It's called Mystic Morning, and feature the talents of Don Kerr, one-time Rheostatic and frequent collaborator of Ron Sexsmith, Casey Macija, the intriguing and high-pitched vocalist with Ohbijou, and Ohad Benchetrit, the multi-instrumentalist with Do Make Say Think, and musical pal of Broken Social Scene and Feist.  The films probably give us more of the inspiration for each song, but in this case, the trio had no interest in recording background music.

Soundtrack work is always a different beast than normal recording, as the music is supposed to add to the film, and be collaborative between the disciplines.  However, when you are putting 13 such pieces together, and presenting it as a finished collection, you can only hope and pray for some cohesiveness, or lucky break to make it all interesting.  I find too much sleepy-time music was made here, either late at night or early in the morning.  Maybe if you and I head out to a national park and listen on our iPods as the sun sets, we'll love it, but here in my living room, I nodded off.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: O BROTHER, WHERE ART THOU? DELUXE EDITION

It's interesting that at the same time we're hearing all about the 20th anniversary of Nirvana's Nevermind, and its impact on music ever since, this item also comes out, celebrating its 10the birthday.  In its own way, O Brother is just as significant, a game-changer that reached much further than the several million copies it sold.  Like Nevermind, its reverberations are still being felt.  And like Nevermind, here's the Deluxe Edition if you want to buy it again.

The movie never set the box office on fire, but it was quite brilliant I thought, an artwork.  The process of how the music was selected and recorded is described in a fine new essay by producer T-Bone Burnett.  He talks about the magic of early American music, or as we came to call it when the soundtrack hit, Old Time.  What he doesn't talk about is how Americana exploded with the disc, and all of a sudden even young people were cool with bluegrass and fiddles and banjo and such, and how live music was changed in festivals and clubs.  If you think Old Man Luedecke would have had half the considerable audience he commands now without the disc, I beg to disagree.  My gosh, last weekend in Fredericton a local bar almost exclusively catering to University-age crowds had a bluegrass afternoon.  Every alternative band worth their salt has acoustic instruments now.  I'm going to argue that while 20 years ago, Nirvana put really loud (then quiet then loud) into the mainstream, O Brother made everyone unplug ten years later, at least partially.

Of course, the music of the soundtrack was excellent, as we all discovered such gems of the past as Big Rock Candy Mountain, and Man Of Constant Sorrow, and enjoyed the sight of George Clooney miming with the Soggy Bottom Boys to In The Jailhouse Now.  Well, it turns out T-Bone and crew did a great job the first time, and even though the set is expanded to with a second disc and 14 more cuts, there's not much you'll need in the extras.  Tracks that first got me excited, including those by Colin Linden and Van Dyke Parks, turn out to be short instrumentals.  Norman Blake does a nice Big Rock Candy Mountain, but it's still more fun to hear the old Henry McClintock version.  It's almost entirely made up of the same songs, but different versions.  So unless you've misplaced your first copy, it's still fine and dandy.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: BARENAKED LADIES - HITS FROM YESTERDAY & THE DAY BEFORE

It just so happens that I saw Steven Page perform last Saturday, at Fredericton's Harvest Jazz and Blues Festival, just the man himself on guitar, along with the fantastic Mr. Fox, Kevin, on cello.  He did a mix of songs from his first solo disc, First Page, and a selection of BNL songs he wrote and sang over the years.  Since I was MC, I was backstage watching on the monitor, and one Green Room chat begin, "Boy, they had a lot of hits."  Yes, they did.  We forget that sometimes.

I think because the biggest hits were and still are played so often, we tend to forget there's a pretty good-sized body of work from the band, and not all of them wacky and fun.  The band could be sneakily subversive, with a backwards solo stuck on, or they could rock out just a bit too much for regular radio, but somehow it got played.  There were puns, but sometimes there was an underlying sadness, and often it was Page with the sensitive stuff.  In a fair world, they wouldn't be thought of only as a comedy-pop band, but rather as a bunch of occasionally jokey big thinkers with killer hooks, a Canuck Crowded House.

So for every If I Had $1,000,000 we all know, there are ones like Too Little Too Late we forget, but that's track that always impresses me when I hear it again.  Same goes for Call And Answer, and It's All Been Done, but I'll happily pass on hearing One Week again for oh, a decade of so.  I notice that song is Ed Robertson's, whereas the others are Page numbers.  Just sayin'.

I have a problem with this best-of, because it pales next to the last one they issued, called Disc One:  All Their Greatest Hits 1991 - 2001.  Unfortunately, the past ten years haven't offered many true hits to add to the canon, and to put a few recent ones on this new collection, some major tracks were left off from the past.  Sacrificed are Be My Yoko Ono, Jane, Enid and their famous cover of Bruce Cockburn's Lovers In A Dangerous Time.  There's no Shoebox or What A Good Boy, either.  What we get are five you couldn't name if I offered you $1,000,000 in Kraft Dinner.  The big grab here is the theme song for the TV show The Big Bang Theory, which has never been on an album before.  Itsounds better in the 30-second burst you get from the screen, although it's not much longer than that.

One benefit to the inclusion of the later tracks is we do get to give another chance to last year's non-Page disc "All In Good Time", with the track You Run Away, where Ed proves in fact he can both write and sing the sensitive, non-goofy pop song.  Is there life left in BNL?  Or are they going to be Canada's R.E.M., hanging on too long? Tough call at this point.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: DAVID MYLES - INTO THE SUN

What is David Myles thinking, releasing two albums in six months? It seems like yesterday I was writing about his Live at the Carleton album, and now we have Into The Sun, a brand new studio disc. I don't know the motive, but I actually like the thinking. All usual music business marketing practises are out the window now anyway, so why not go back to 1960's release schedules? It certainly didn't hurt those artists to put out two or even three albums a year. It's actually been a year and a half since his last studio album, Turn Time Off, but even that is a very fast turnaround these days, with three years being the norm for many artists.

I think what happened was that Myles got excited about an idea and a project. He's long been a fan of certain kinds of world music, rhythmic stuff from Brazil and Africa. Of course, given his age, that means Paul Simon was an early influence, and he also tells me he's been addicted to Harry Nillson of late, he of "put the lime in the coconut" fame. This is all a natural mix, since Myles is also a singer-songwriter first and foremost. As you'll hear on Into The Sun, the rhythms don't overwhelm the songs, and there are some numbers where they barely show. But the basic idea here was to incorporate some of these influences, and see where that leads.

This summer we got the first taste, with a sun-soaked single, Simple Pleasure. Both versions of that fun number are included here, the regular and the Classified mix. From there, you don't know quite where this album is going to go, but all the directions have good end results. Don't Look Back is Myles' version of an African number, and certainly you won't hear that same kind of song on anyone else's album. It features layered vocals and harmonies over a repetitive guitar line, and eventually a clip-clop percussion. There's that light, high electric guitar solo like the ones on Graceland, but that's about all you can fine to compare the two. It's one of the best vocal tracks, and lyrics Myles has done in his career.

The track Nina is one of the Brazilian-flavoured numbers, with a hypnotic Southern samba groove, and a 60's chintzy organ, plus more layered Myles voices on the ba-ba-ba's. He also gets to show off those high school trumpet skills. There aren't many words to this song, but who needs it, when the groove is so cool. This one is great lounge music.

Smart boy that he is, Myles never lets the experiment get out of control or too far away from his signiture style. The nice-guy singer-songwriter stuff is still here, and I have to say his voice has never sounded better, in studio or live. He's spoken about some training he took with New Brunswick opera singer Wendy Nielsen, a regular at The Met and stages around the world, and it sounds like this has paid off. Myles appeared Saturday night at the Harvest Jazz And Blues Festival in Fredericton, and he easily commanded the soft-soft theatre The Playhouse, a large house that needs a strong voice to fill up the space.

The disc is available on-line and in-store October 4th.