MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: THE EAST POINTERS - SECRET VICTORY

Never, ever make the mistake of thinking East Coast trad is treading water. Wave after wave of new players hit the shores, each one shifting the sands, changing the shape of the sound in their own way. Highest tides in the world, you know, we're used to rocking the boat.


The latest band to storm the beaches comes out of P.E.I., an acoustic power trio, The East Pointers. Well, the Maritimes version of a power trio, with a guitar yes, but also a fiddle and a banjo. There's still lots of power in that, when you have banjo and fiddle trading licks, weaving around the driving guitar chords, and pounding footsteps as percussion. The players in the group aren't new to the scene, three long-time pals who knew they'd make a mark if they teamed up. Tim Chiasson has been wowing folk and country fans with his golden voice and tender lyrics on his solo albums, plus as fans know, he's a killer fiddler as well. When he wasn't fishing professionally for lobster (seriously, it is P.E.I.), Koady Chiasson, was playing bass in cousin Tim's band. Thing is, he's also a brilliant hand at the banjo. On guitar is Jake Charron, a much in-demand instrumentalist whose last release, a duo album with Shane Cook called Head to Head, was nominated for a Canadian Folk Music Award. We're talking a P.E.I. supergroup, then.


With a singer like Tim C. on board, you're not going to keep him silent, and three new vocal cuts are on the album, written by the band. The rest of the ten cuts are instrumental, but these aren't numbers out of the Celtic College playbook. The members are all composers, and have brought their own melodies and licks to the project. Medleys move from one writer's work to another duo or trio composition seamlessly. It sounds old and new all at once, the members playing the way they were taught in kitchens and town halls, but adding in more modern melodies and a touch of deft production as well.


Then there are those vocal tracks, adding not just another mood, but a really a hands-down showstopper each time. The cut Cold just aches, Chiasson adding an extra tug of sadness, his cousin and Charron harmonizing, the backing a kind of mournful bluegrass jazz.


The group is finishing up a few Ontario dates this week, with a show in Ottawa Wednesday, Nov. 18 at Live On Elgin, another Thursday in Toronto at Hugh's Room, the London Music Club on Friday, and The Livery in Goderich on the 21st.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: THE BEATLES - 1+

The Beatles used to send out Christmas singles to their fan club members in the '60's; they are still providing a present each Christmas season, with a major reissue guaranteed to get fans reaching for their Visa cards. This year sees an especially nice one, an expanded issue of the best-of, Beatles 1.


Now, we all have the music, and that's not the point here. What you get is a video to accompany each song. And please, no ho-humming that detail. Video clips from the band haven't been readily available to purchase like most other groups. You got bits and pieces in The Beatles Anthology and the movies, but no full collection, so this is the one area of Beatledom that has actually been under-serviced to the audience (and under-exploited by Apple).


None of this would be exciting if the clips were average, but The Beatles were ground-breakers in that field as well. It's been argued they created the rock video, thanks to the several films they made in their heyday out of necessity. There were so many requests for their appearances all over the world, that it was figured the best thing to do was make films of them performing the new singles, and send them out to TV shows, movie theatres, whoever would play them. Even Ed Sullivan had to make do sometimes with these films. Later, when the group stopped performing live, they became even more important for fans dying to see the group in person.


Each of the 27 tracks from the 1 album is matched by a corresponding video. However, not every one of them had one of these specially-made videos in the first place, so the remainders have come from a variety of sources. There are TV show appearances, live concert bits, some of them older, some of them made up well after The Beatles split. The one for Come Together is an animated piece done in 2000 for the launch of the beatles.com website, and is really quite a dull bit. But its a rare failure. The Love Me Do clip is brand-new, a skillful 2015 edit using a partially-surviving live performance film from 1963. From Me To You is the famous Royal Variety Performance from that same year.


As important as those historical documents are, it's what The Beatles did without an audience that really impresses. Faced with the task of recording promotional films, and not just standing there miming to the backing tracks, the boys did what they did best, and relied on their chemistry, wit and charm. For I Feel Fine, they got up to Beatle hijinks. While John and George played it cool and laughed a little, George started singing into a punching bag set up like a microphone. Meanwhile Ringo, at first nowhere to be seen, sprints on and sits on an exercise bike, set up where the drums would normally be, and peddles away. It's simple and awesome.


Help! sees them sitting in a straight row facing the camera, John at the front singing. The others poke their heads out, around John's to sing a harmony line or just get on camera. Ringo, inexplicably, is holding an umbrella, and just starting at us. It's riveting. Oh, then it starts snowing indoors, and Ringo stays dry.


The technical work is tremendous, with the original films cleaned up in amazing details, for pictures and sound. The colours leap out once the black and white days end, Paperback Writer positive sparkling. The audio work continues on the companion CD as well, this new version of 1 now sporting the latest stereo remixes.


This is one where I'd advice seriously looking at the deluxe version, even with the added price. It's called 1+, and features an entire second disc of videos. There are so many important ones here, including the famous clip for Strawberry Fields Forever, not a #1 hit so not included on the first disc. It's my favourite, trippy, a little scary and very much a piece straight out of London of the time, with the shell of a piano looking like its melting on acid. Take that, Pink Floyd. By luck, a film crew was sent to follow the group on the day they happened to be recording Hey Bulldog, so there's actual footage of the real performance for the record. And there's two different takes of the Hello Goodbye video, this time with the band doing more goofy stuff, Lennon acting like Elvis, and them wearing street clothes instead of the Sgt. Pepper outfits.


Other bonuses include a hard-bound book with notes and sources for each video on both discs. There are also commentaries on a handful of tracks by McCartney and Starr, but those are disappointments across the board. Both have long ago run out of stories about the songs, and struggle to think of what to say. Plus, there's nobody to say 'That sucked Ringo, do it again.'


So, get it, and if you can, get the expensive one. The deluxe limited edition of 1+ is selling for $70.00 for the blu-ray edition, and $60.00 on DVD, while you can get various editions featuring just the DVD or blu-ray, or the CD/DVD or CD/blu-ray combos, in the $20 to $35 range. There's even a new double LP available. Pick the option that works best for you.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY - NEIL YOUNG - BLUE NOTE CAFE

It can't be overstated how important the live show is to Neil Young's career. While we tend to look at long-established artists by following their albums, with Young you have to follow his tours too, as they are almost always linked. The songs come, and some get taken on the road, some get developed in the studio. Sometimes entire tours are inspired by one set of tunes, but then develop into something else on the road, resulting in the completely different album a few months later.


The best Young tours have been the ones where he launches brand-new songs. Of course this can be much to the chagrin of those who want greatest hits when they go see him, but hindsight shows how lucky they were to have been there. How about the crowds who got to see Rust Never Sleeps debut months before the album in 1979? Or the solo shows post-After The Gold Rush, when Young started adding the Harvest numbers to the set?


That's what makes his on-going Archives releases so rewarding, as he's been going back to those important shows and tours from the past. This particular set is is one of the most interesting, because it sheds light on a period that saw Young climb from one of his lowest points back to favour, thanks to, of all things, a big blues band.


The '80's were Young's most controversial and unsuccessful. Signed by David Geffen to a huge contract, he immediately pissed off the boss, and most of the general public with the album Trans, a hugely-misunderstood album about technology. Geffen refused his next album, an all-country affair, and then sued him for making uncommercial music. Young then answered his demands for a rock album with just that, Everybody's Rockin', a 28-minute lark filled with rockabilly numbers. Then came the reworked country album Old Ways, which satisfied no-one. He went back to more conventional rock after that, but his audience had largely left him. No wonder he had the blues.


But things were looking up. His Geffen contract was up, and he was back at Reprise Records, his old home. He hit the road with a band he called The Blue Notes, after a club back in Winnipeg. It featured some old friends, such as Crazy Horse guitar player Frank Sampedro and long-time pedal steel foil Ben Keith, but they were out for a lark, playing keyboards and alto sax respectively. There was a whole bunch of other horn players, plus a heavy hitting new rhythm section, Chad Cromwell on drums and Rick Rosas on bass. This was going to be fun.


The shows started at the end of '87, almost completely full of new material. And it wasn't strictly blues either, more an amalgam of rock and blues, a good part of Young's signature sound, and lots of horns. It was good stuff too; the song This Note's For You became an unlikely hit a few months later upon release, with Young standing up against his fellow musicians taking big buck sponsorship from corporations, mocking Michael Jackson singing for soft drink money. It was the start of a new generation appreciating Young, and just a couple of years later, the same youngsters would be wearing plaid like Neil and praising him as the godfather of grunge.


Part-way through the tour, an album of these heavy blues numbers appeared, called This Note's For You. At first it was credited to Neil and the Blue Notes, but Harold Melvin's lawyers quickly pointed out he owned that name. Then the band became Ten Men Workin', but now Neil's calling it Blue Note Cafe for this release. What we get is 21 songs recorded over nine months of touring. And, we get to see the band, set list and sound develop into something even better.


As happens when Young gets on a roll, the songs keep coming and a new concept comes out of the old one. There were plenty of numbers that didn't make the This Note's For You album, fun blues numbers found here such as Doghouse (as in, I'm in the...). There were several about rocky relationships. One of the best Neil moments is heard here, not from a song, but from a brief spoken intro, where he asks the crowd, "Who here is having trouble at home? Let's talk about that awhile," before launching into Married Man. There are, as usual, better songs that weren't included on the album, including Don't Take Your Love Away From Me.


Most famously came a classic Young epic, a dark, wordy trip that would have fit nicely onto the On The Beach album, called Ordinary People. It had a bunch of verses, told a rich tale, and eventually did make it out on the Chrome Dreams II album in 2007. Here we get one of the life recordings of this major Young number which was still evolving at that time. You can pretty much figure this is why Young is now putting out these live albums at a steady rate, to give us these gems.


When the new songs arrived in 1988, there were more along the lines of Ordinary People, most importantly Crime In The City. It was another one that had lots of verses, a long narrative and a dark tale to tell. It would go through a lot of changes over the next year, but it signaled the next phase for Young. He kept Rosas and Cromwell, and pared down to a power trio called The Restless for a Far East tour. Then they set about making the Freedom album, with a much-altered Crime In The City, and massively-successful Rockin' in The Free World. But to see how he got there, you have to know about this tour.


It's not just historically important, it's a grand listen. Bad New Comes To Town, another song found nowhere else, is like a gunfighter ballad fused with jump blues. Then there's a 20-minute version of Tonight's The Night, one of the few old songs he played, completely re-arranged and deranged for the horns. Available as a 2-CD or 4-LP set, I'm loving the big box of albums, with a wonderfully-warm tone, and lively horns. And with all the unreleased numbers from this tour, it's like getting an album of new songs too.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: THE SCENICS - IN THE SUMMER

Here are more great lost songs from vintage Toronto punk-popsters The Scenics. One of the lesser-known, but no lesser-talented gangs of the original scene, the trio were at the bill at the infamous Last Pogo in 1978, opened for like-minded Talking Heads, but most importantly, recorded all their stuff, leaving a legacy. This is the second recent set of archival recordings from the crucial 1977-78 period, sounding fresh as a daisy. Umm, an abstract daisy with electronic eyes coming out of it, but fresh still.

Mavericks they were, and obviously quite excited that strange things were happening nearby in NYC. At this period in their career, the influences are easy to spot, going back to the Velvet Underground and au curaunt with Talking Heads. The Scenics would also develop nicely as well, seeing the limitations of punk and embracing the art rock of New Wave. An album, Underneath The Door, did arrive in 1979, but these studio tracks are plenty polished enough for full release, and far surpass many of the supposed key records of that period, from Toronto and the other punk capitols.

Twitchy and angular, the band was making up chord combinations and vocal intonations, sounds that weren't supposed to be pretty but certainly were once you had ears to hear. The title cut has all the swagger of Sweet Jane, the beauty of The Byrds vocals on the chorus, and a mad scientist singing lead everywhere else. Great Piles of Leaves is about a fish-out-of-water kid who really just wants to play cello like Pablo Casals, and Wild Trout is just about a fish. And it rocks. Meanwhile, the Juno Award for Best Selling Album in 1978 went to Dan Hill for Longer Fuse. Just sayin'.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: RYAN ADAMS - 1989

I have a unique perspective about this whole Ryan Adams-Taylor Swift situation. In case you aren't familiar, the edgy roots rocker has covered the entire Swift album, 1989, without irony and straight as can be. It's now his new album.


While I know Swift's name of course, I don't know any of her songs. Seriously. I couldn't name one, hum a note, couldn't pick her out of a police line-up. This is not some unlikely twist of fate, where somehow I have avoided her ubiquitous presence over the years. No, it's down to hard work. I monitor my exposure to popular culture with great precision, something I've perfected.


I never have pop music radio stations on, nor TV channels that still play videos. I don't have friends on Facebook that would post such stuff, and if they accidentally did, I have the sound turned off anyway. I don't go into trendy clothing stores where they would play that kind of music, and avert my eyes in the magazine racks, rushing past Tiger Beat (or whatever it's called these days) to make my way to Curmudgeon Weekly.


It's not just Taylor Swift. I avoid them all. Lady Gaga, Beyonce, Jay-Z, Avril Lavigne, Drake, Bieber, it's a long list. I saw a Kanye West performance by accident a few months ago, it was ridiculous. I've picked a lifestyle, I'm proud of it, it's right for me. Don't judge me.


And for the record, I started doing this back in the '90's, when pop music, my former love, went all to shit. I warned you all about Milli Vanilli and Debbie Gibson and Britney Spears, and I was right.


Look, for all I know, Swift could be a lot better than the rest of the pop stars of today, and I get the sense she is, at least marginally. I've heard some rumblings in the reviewers world, the same people who give Carly Rae Jetson props (Elroy's sister, I assume). And in the hands of a master craftsman such as Mr Adams, her work certainly sounds like the kind of stuff I'd enjoy. It sounds exactly like a Ryan Adams album in fact.


So what does this mean? Am I totally wrong about Taylor Swift and should rush out and get all her albums and discover a brilliant poet and performer? Is Ryan Adams so brilliant he can take a lightweight, manufactured pop star and turn their work into high art? Is there good in every piece of music, just waiting for the right person to come along and polish it, revealing the gem?


Nah. Here's what it means. It means I like Ryan Adams. I liked him when he did that Heartbreaker album, and I'm probably always going to like him now. I don't like current pop music, because I'm too old for it, have a closed mind, whatever. I don't like much post-bop jazz either. Seldom do I listen to classical. I'm not perfect. We like what we like, ain't nothing wrong with that. I don't know what Adams was trying to prove with this album, but it's cool, you like him, you'll like it. We all get to like or dislike whatever we want. It's good to be open-minded, but there's nothing wrong with having particular tastes too. Sometimes it is only rock and roll.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: COLD AND BITTER TEARS - THE SONGS OF TED HAWKINS

We know the stories of Rodriguez and Charles Bradley, but an even more unlikely tale is that of Ted Hawkins, a brilliant singer-songwriter who died back in 1995. Born impoverished in Mississippi, he spent much of his early life in reform school and jail, where he picked up music. He developed his own blend of country and blues, with a distinctive, rough voice and wrote songs that were simple yet powerful, full of life's pain, and occasional humour. He was famously discovered, more than once, busking on the boardwalk in California's Venice Beach, where he did most of his playing, between jobs and jail.


At least, that's how the American version of the story goes. In Europe, he was far better known, and lived there for stretches, playing far better gigs, doing BBC radio sessions, having a respectable career. But he had flaws that followed him his whole life, and crime and addiction continued to show up, plus a contrary attitude. Even with record deals and opportunities, he would prove erratic, and end up busking on the boardwalk again.


Hawkins seemed to finally get the break he deserved with the release of the album The Next Hundred Years in 1994, on Geffen Records. Lots of people were hearing his music for the first time (me included), at a time when roots music was really starting to gather a large following. But just as soon as the records and shows were selling, Hawkins died at 58, of a stroke.


While his death didn't inspire the same sort of interest in his music as other such as Jeff Buckley and Elliot Smith, here fellow musicians get together to celebrate a remarkable group of songs. Because they remain largely unfamiliar, this set doesn't have to struggle with the problem that usually wrecks tribute albums; that the originals are done better. Most won't know them. Also, except for the Geffen album, Hawkins could never afford to have a band back him, so again, these don't suffer from comparison. What you get is a batch of fantastic songs, with his Southern background shining through.


Hawkins had a way with language that cut through all pretense or ego. He'd just put emotions out there simply, and sometimes shatteringly: "I was cruel, mean and selfish," he sings in the hidden bonus track here, Great New Year, a story about a man wishing all his family was with him at Christmas, but eventually letting us know all the kids are with their mother, whom they choose to give the love he foolishly ignored in the past.


The main album though, is an excellent set of tributes from artists in the roots field, with some familiar names (James McMurtry, Kasey Chambers, Mary Gauthier) and several more obscure (Even Felker, Shinyribs). The best cut of all is from Sunny Sweeney, a country singer out of the Austin school, putting a good twang into Happy Hour. For anybody who misses country songs like Dark End of the Street or Ode to Billy Joe, this stuff will be a revelation.

MUSIC REVIEW OF THE DAY: FRANK KOREN - RED CHAIR

The talented guitar player from Hamilton has been a mainstay on the scene there, working with talented friends (Harrison Kennedy, Marta Pacek) and equally-talented family (wife Kim, daughter Marra, son Jordan). But after 20-plus years in that career, he's stepped up front on this debut album. Like all well-traveled sidemen, he has experience in several styles, so this is a varied and wide-ranging collection.


Lead track I'm Already Down has a country-roots feel, a solid strummer with organ and lots of guitar lines shot through. My Life goes further down that roots road, this time with pedal steel and piano. The tempo picks back up for Winter Dream, some good-time rock on this one. Reckless Train lets Koren get into an outlaw sound, with some driving acoustic, bottleneck and a some nasty electric, as he handles all the guitar parts.


Halfway through the 10-track album, Koren moves on from the roots tracks to some broader, more experimental works. The title cut is a lengthy, mysterious number, built on power atmospheric guitar layers. Water Dance has shots of percussion and burbling keys, hypnotic and funky. And the group really gets a groove on for the closer, Look But Never Touch, with beatbox vocals and a Robert Palmer feel.

Koren will launch the album Saturday, Nov. 14 with a show at The Casbah in Hamilton.