King of Missouri

Anton Barbeau

King of Missouri is a great album of high-energy retro rock from Britophile Anton Barbeau, a power-pop purveyor from Sacramento, California.

Barbeau's voice on this album bears a striking similiarity to Alex Chilton, though his songs tend more towards melancholy and cleverness than vitriol.

King of Missouri benefits from backup band The Bevis Frond – Barbeau opened for the British neo-psyche masters at a gig in Sacramento apparently and they liked him enough to do an album together. XTC are also said to be Barbeau fans.

Highlights include the high-spirited title track and the killer pop melody and heartbroke lyrics of the ballad I Remember Everything. Very stylish graphic design from Bongobeat Records label-head Ralph Alphonso conveys an appropriately vintage feel.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Great Moments At Di Pressa s Pizza House

Neil Hamburger

Great Moments at Di Pressa's Pizza House, the new album from America's Funnyman Neil Hamburger opens with some classic Hamburger bombs - terrible swipes at Mick Jagger, Robin Williams and Madonna punctuated by lengthy silences and throat-clearing.

Great Moments is a concept album about Di Pressa's Pizza House. Through interviews, anecdotes and historical recordings, it chronicles the story of a pizza parlor both loved and hated by staff and customers alike. In typical Hamburger style, the anecdotes, from a cast of weirdoes that give the Ham a run for his money in the pathetic department, are so ineffectual and aimless that the editor hilarously cuts speakers off mid-sentence.

Carnival music abounds, but plays in sharp contrast to the somewhat dark and seedy history of Di Pressa's, a pizza parlour whose garlic butter, one embalmer/food critic recalls, smelled exactly like pockets of a ir released from a corpse that's been dead for 72 hours. Di Pressa's was a parlour so dirty that the local food inspector considered chaining the front door to protect the public.

But it wasn't all bad news, we learn over the course of the record. Di Pressa's was a pizza parlour with heart. They hosted local clubs like Alcoholics Anonymous - it probably made sense since most of the members were staff at Di Pressa's, and featured a bizarre cast of entertainers.

It's no wonder this dive went under - they had a staff of entertainers that made Neil Hamburger look like the Funnyman he claims to be: Organist Gus Huddle died of AIDS at the age of 99, Leroy Brothers was a white comic with a black act and made unseemly cracks about white girls and honkies.

And then of course there was Neil who was apropraitely paid in Di Pressa's pizza - his wife threw his paychecks in the garbage. The album naturally features recollections of the original owner and namesake, who committed suicide in the restaurant with a gunshot to the head.

I don't know if Hamburger is finally getting it or losing it, because this is the first album of his that I laughed at. In fact I guffawed, and I yukked it up and had a real hoot.

- Gordon B. Isnor

A River Ain't Too Much To Love

Smog

As the title may suggest, this is a river concept album with a deep Appalachian twang. Wry humor, old-timey fiddles, he even manages to thrown in a y’all, and a dang, this is a charming and funny new album from Bill Callahan.

I got into Smog through 1993's Julius Caesar and stuck with him through Burning Kingdom, Wild Love, Kicking A Couple Around, and The Doctor Came at Dawn. It was around the time of Kicking that I had the fortune of seeing Bill and Cat Power at the old Starfish Room in Vancouver. Bill looked as uncomfortable in the club as I was, standing around a lot looking bored with a beer. His set reduced me to tears; I was going through a romantic hell at the time and, judging from the lyrical content, so was he.

I started to lose faith around Red Apple Falls. Around that time my friend Warren picked up the torch; he'd had a fun time hanging out in Montreal one night with Bill and friends. I'd love to have been there to see Smog singing When Doves Cry at that Cowboy karaoke bar on Sherbrooke St. After all, this is the man who gave us Prince Alone In The Studio.

Warren sent me copies of Red Apple, Knock Knock and Dongs of Sevotion, which is remarkable because the guy can't even get it together to send me a copy of his own Royal Mountain Band CD, although I will give him credit for sending me a copy of his awesome Proper Concern CD - check out a hilarious, bizarre live performance on Zed TV.

Bill started winning me back with Knock Knock and to some degree Rain On Lens and Supper. But I was still resistant! I think it's just hard in this day and age to stick with an artist for any great length and for me it's been 12 years. Too, I think, his flirtation with country rambles seemed to be increasing... But Bill deserves to be stuck with I'm proclaiming - this new River themed-concept album is proof.

Smog has so totally embraced a hillbilly twang that the moniker may be now entirely inappropriate; this guy sounds like he's living high on a mountaintop and loving it. He's throwing in 'dangs' and 'fuck all y'all's' left and right and it works – both funny and fun. There's still plenty of the alienated, paranoid depression that made Smog the perfect soundtrack to your suicidal, difficult years., and there's still that rich, mournful voice that grows stronger every year and yet still maintains its heartbreaking frailty.

Callahan's New Weird American Drag City label mates seem to be having a bit of an influence; the first song, Palimpsest, has a bit of their energy, methinks. Being the album opener, it's not surprising that this is the finest song. Another highlight Another goodie is the sweet reminiscent tone of Drinking At The Dam with the classic line "Skin mags in the brambles, the first part of my life, I thought women had orange skin."

The production is great – sparse, with warm acoustic guitars, harmonicas, some strings and fiddles, the occasional piano and very relaxed drums.

This is a really good album.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Love's A Real Thing: World Psychedelic Classics Vol. 3

Various Artists

Ingredients: 1 tablespoon - exclamations worthy of James Brown 1 teaspoon - African sounds not entirely unlike King Sunny Ade 2 cups - Funky drums 1 cup - Congas 1/2 cup - Super soul saxophone A pinch of - Father Yod-style psychedelic madness A dash of greasy funky organs that will blow your mind

Blend well.

Oh christ, I'm making myself hungry with this writing gimmick.

David Byrne continues to dig up awesome and rare musical gems, from the early Brazilian and Cuban releases that got so many of us excited about world music in the first place through Chinese pop (Peppermint Tea House), and Indian film music (Dance Raja Dance). This album of West African sounds is no exception and will be well-loved by fans of Sunny Ade, or the Ethiopiques series.

Apart from current marketing cache I don't entirely understand this being called a Psychedelic classic – there's not too much psychedelia at work here that I can detect. But it's a great album nonetheless. It reminds me of Sunny Ade but with tons of James Brown sounds going on – saxophones and drums, grunts and whoops that recall the Godfather of Soul with an almost eerie similarity.

There's some great marimba work on a cut by Manu Dibango and some silky smooth loungey vocals from William Onyeabor. There are also some psychedelic guitars sprinkled around, most notably on a song from Ofo The Black Company. Now, my knowledge of African music is not that strong but doesn't Guajira Van by No. 1 de No. 1 sound very Cuban?

The quality varies from track to track from there's some great stuff here, especially if you like Ethiopiques, or any of the world psyche that's been coming out in droves as of late.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Blues Runs The Game

Jackson C. Frank

A lot of the long lost singer-songwriters that have been dug up and embraced in recent years have depressing life stories but I don’t think any are as dark and dismal as that of Jackson C. Frank.

You may know recognize his classic Blues Runs the Game as a song covered by Nick Drake on the Tamworth-In-Arden bootleg. Or you may remember his incredibly gorgeous ballad Milk and Honey from bad-boy Vincent Gallo’s wonderful Brown Bunny – legendary for its Chloe Sevigny cocksucking scene.

Frank sounds like a darker, less political Phil Ochs with a marvelous fingerpicking style on the acoustic guitar. He found his sound traveling to coffeehouses as a young man with Steppenwolf’s John Kay, and later moved to England where he lived with Paul Simon.

His life was fraught with disaster and bad luck, from an explosion that left him as its only survivor, to never finding success despite his enormous talent, a failed marriage, his son dying of cystic fibrosis, a nervous breakdown followed by mental illness and being homeless in New York City, a parathyroid malfunction that caused weight gain, and ending up blind in one eye as a result of being the victim of a stray bullet.

And if that wasn’t enough, just as his life was winding down – he died in 1999 at the age of 55, he was beginning to finally be rediscovered by a new generation of fans of his mournful and world-weary sounds.

This is his first album and features the above-mentioned Blues Run The Game and Milk Honey, as well as the standouts Don’t Look Back, Kimbie and My Name Is Carnival.

Fans of Ochs, Nick Drake, and others like them will find this to be a classic album.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Bait The Traps

Dandi Wind

Fans of The Vanishing and Veronica Lipgloss will go crazy for Dandi Wind, an electro/death rock duo that exploded onto the Vancouver dance punk party scene midway through 2004, gigging relentlessly and becoming quite a smash before leaving for Montreal early in 2005.

The band is made up of art-damaged singer Dandi Wind, equal parts performance artist, sex symbol and 80's tinged tortured Nazi robot and her partner Szam Findlay, responsible for the 80's inflected synth programming. Live shows are a key component to the Dandi Wind experience – Dandi is known for her costumes and high-energy antics.

Bait the Traps opens with the Arab tinge of Umbilical Noose and moves to the album highlight, Balloon Factory, a frenetically paced number with Dandi's crazed vocals belting out a very catchy if totally indecipherable chorus, something along the lines of ‘wang diddly dang dang, diddle bit of wang, wom bom ding dong.’

The second strongest moment on Bait The Traps is album closer Todo O Dia. Its robotic synth programming and vocal rhythm perfectly match Dandi's Germanic vocal affectations. The song is catchy and funny (there’s a comical interplay between the lyric “I’m going to band a gong” and a recurring gong sound through the remainder of the song), and the synth programming is at its most distinctive and interesting with gurgling sounds and off-kilter kick drums.

Arguably, the album's weakest moments see the duo attempting to boogie on Ms 45 and again on the Ueno Park Boogie. Points for trying, though – it's not easy for machines to sing the blues.

Bait The Traps features lots of wild photos of Dandi in performance and the short movie Another Side Effect – a few minutes of Dandi stumbling around a warehouse in a leotard puking, writhing and retching in a pile of cardboard boxes. Towards the end it turns into a bit of a blood feast worthy of Herschel Gordon Lewis. More funny than discomforting but Dandi’s scream probably did make my upstairs neighbor wonder.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Let Us Never Speak Of It Again

Out Hud

This second album from Brooklyn's Out Hud, who share three members with !!!, is truly marvelous. Justin Vandervolgen's breathtaking production of electronic dazzlements is both dance party enabler and experimental ear candy alike.

Eras and genres of recent and future decades collapse in a perfect equation of quantam mechanics - you hear so many things flashing before your ears over the course of Let Us Never Speak Of It Again - the disco funky seventies, the gated reverb snare drum eighties all awash with cheap brass synth patches, the Teenbeat nineties, the glitch-house new millennium.

Latin percussion reminiscent of Sheila E. collides with Chic-worthy bass lines and one particular piano riff that sounds like Robert Smith's hands conjured it himself. Tons of super pretty funk from guitarist Tyler Pope would sit equally well on a hip hop track or a Roxy Music album.

The album is consistently strong, but I think it's no coincidence that the highlights of the program are all songs which feature vocals by cellist Polly Schnick and drummer Molly Forbes - airy female vocals that float through the mixes effortlessly, approaching twee sweetness and take me back to the delightful days listening to Blast Off Country Style and their awesome ilk.

I shouldn't dwell so hard on comparisons to historic elements in the sound, because Out Hud is more than the sum any retro parts it may contain - it's something entirely fresh and new. This is the future of music at the end of history and it sounds so damn good.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Lost and Safe

The Books

Mixing live cello, curiously processed guitars banjo and twee vocals with soundscape, drum machine beats and a plethora of sound bites, The Books arrive at a smart sound both pretty and relaxed but also experimental and fascinating.

Rare is the sound that escapes the Books hands without effects processing -clips of human speech may find themselves accompanied by singing vocals or rhythmic hits to great effect; on Lost and Safe this technique is at its most dazzling on the close to perfect An Animated Description of Mr. Maps.

While I'm generally of the opinion that most music is made better with the addition of a nice pop singer on top, I find that The Books are at their best when they do without; their instrumental and production prowess doesn't require the vocals, and in fact at times may even feel cluttered by them. The music alone is absolutely beautiful and thoroughly engaging, and the sound clips bring a wonderful human element to the album.

This is very exciting and inspiring music.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Black Mountain

Black Mountain

I'm not exaggerating much when I say that every local Vancouver paper and weekly I have picked up over the last year has featured an article or cover story about the Pink Mountaintops or more recently Black Mountain. More recently, the same is true of weeklies and music magazines everywhere. But that's not the fault of Black Mountain right?

It's actually a great album and it's hard not to love, The opening song, Modern Music hooks you with two rare delights in this day and age: a super organic sound, which is sadly a rare thing in this day and age, and an awesome group vocal track.

By the time the drug-drenched Zeppelin riffage of second track Don't Run Our Hearts Around comes plodding shamelessly out of the speakers you don't even care that it's almost comically anachronistic and wears its dinosaur rock influences on its sleeve. Homage is likewise paid to Sabbath and the Stones in subsequent songs. Steve McBean's highly affected voice sounds like the eighties nineties and 21st century never happened.

An utterly perfect yet dead simple guitar riff drives No Satisfaction, which rivals Modern Music for best song on the album and is backed up by a driving and very Velvet Underground sounding eighth-note piano and drum beat. More group vocals to continued great effect. Also noteworthy are two songs, Set Us Free and Heart of Snow for the achingly beautiful voice of Amber Webber.

An unexpected drum machine drives No Hits, a track that reminds me of early Elevator to Hell with its sparse and elegant production of kick drum, claps and duo vocals. Sci-fi synths and thickly distorted guitar chords which kick in midway through turn the song into an epic psychedelic journey. From hereon, the album heads into further psyche freakouts and winds its way to conclusion.

Very good music, but be warned - to appreciate fully (or at all), you've got to have a deep fondness in your heart for vintage drug-rock sounds from decades past.

- Gordon B. Isnor

Human After All

Daft Punk

There's some awesome vocoded fun on this new Daft Punk album but there's some pretty shameful mediocrity at work too. The album suffers from a lack of editing (or inspiration) and too long a running-time given the quality of the material.

Opener and title track Human After All is pretty danceable and rocking and good, followed by Prime Time of Your Life, which is also very pleasant. Robot Rock is probably the best song on the album with some incredibly sleazy synthesizers backed up by some super sleazy hard rocking guitars. Delightful!

After these first three songs though, things start to go downhill wickedly. The album rallies a bit with Television Rules The Nation, and Technologic but Daft Punk could have probably dropped five tracks from the album and called it an EP.

- Gordon B. Isnor