I had every intention of doing a better job on boots and comps in 2010. But I got a real job which was going swimmingly until about June, then it all went to hell along with my mood and capability of feeling enthusiasm for anything except for red wine and codeine. But, I think things are going to look up in 2011. Seriously, that's not optimism but rather the result of a lot of hard work and Machiavellian scheming. So anyway, we're down to the wire on this year in music and it was definitely the best year in Canadian music (for me anyway) in a very long time. A particularly large appreciation and shout out to the city of Hamilton for birthing Young Rival, Cowlick, Huron and (sort of) Luke Doucet. They also own the rights to the magnificent Forgotten Rebels and Teenage Head. I can truly say that it is the first time I've ever uttered the words "I wish I lived in Hamilton". So without further ado, here's my Top 50 albums of 2010 and a Best-Of Canadian music compilation. Technically, there's one track (Christmas in Hell by NQ Arbuckle) that's from 2005 but I just heard it this year so what the hell. So once more I've got to give it up for Cowlick for releasing my favourite album and song ("Wires") in 2010, also let's face facts, its kismet that they released a track called 'White Russians' to boot. Cheers!

Top 50

01. Cowlick - Wires

02. Young Rival - LP

03. Sweet Thing - Sweet Thing

04. Gertrudes - Dawn Time Riot

05. Luke Doucet & The White Falcon - Steel City Trawler

06. Huron - Huron

07. The Beauties - The Beauties

08. Slowcoaster - Darkest of Discos

09. The Soft Pack - The Soft Pack

10. Kings of Leon - Come Down Sundown

11. Mother's Children - That’s Who!

12. Spoon - Transference

13. Zeus - Say Us

14. Arcade Fire - The Suburbs

15. The Hold Steady - Heaven is Whenever

16. Erykah Badu - New Amerykah Part Two (Return of the Ankh)

17. Flash Lightin'- Flash Lightin'

18. The High Dials - Anthem for Doomed Youth

19. Elvyn - The Decline

20. Drive-By Truckers - The Big To Do

21. Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti - Before Today

22. PS I Love You - Meet Me At the Muster Station

23. Macy Gray - The Sellout

24. The Dead Weather - Sea of Cowards

25. Kathryn Calder - Are You My Mother?

26. The Black Keys - Brothers

27. The Roots - How I Got Over

28. The Paperbacks - Lit from Within

29. The New Pornographers - Together

30. Izzy Stradlin - Waves of Heat

31. Spoon River - Kingdom of the Burned

32. Broken Social Scene - Forgiveness Rock Record

33. The Gaslight Anthem - American Slang

34. Marah - Life is a Problem

35. C'mon - Beyond the Pale Horse

36. The National - High Violet

37. Surfer Blood - Astro Coast

38. Via Audio - Animalore

39. Happy Birthday - Happy Birthday

40. Neil Young - Le Noise

41. The pack AD - We Kill Computers

42. Land of Talk - Cloak and Cipher

43. The Whigs - In the Dark

44. Black Mountain - Wilderness Heart

45. 7 Walkers - 7 Walkers

46. Drink Up Buttercup - Born and Thrown on a Hook

47. The 88 - The 88

48. Proud Mary - Ocean Park

49. 1973 - Bye Bye Cellphone

50. Electric 6 - Zodiac

Canadiana Mix Part 1

1. Wires - Cowlick

2. Chase Scene - Broken Social Scene

3. Big World - The Novaks

4. Those were the Days - Elvyn

5. Teenage Love Made Me Insane - The High Dials

6. Lazy Susan - Sweet Thing

7. You Got a Mouth - Flash Lightnin'

8. Quarry Hymns - Land Of Talk

9. King and Country - Huron

10. Fashion Blues - The Beauties

11. Fool - Spoon River

12. Dirty, Dirty Blonde - Luke Doucet & The White Falcon

13. Crash Years - The New Pornographers

14. Shaky Sue - Mother's Childre

15. The Ocean - Young Rival

16. Darkest of Discos - Slowcoaster

17. How Does It Feel - Zeus

18. Illness As Metaphor - The Paperbacks

19. Castor and Pollux - Kathryn Calder

20. Something Else - Diamond Rings

21. 2012 - P.S. I Love You

22. Sailor - Gertrudes

Canadiana Mix Part 1

1. Change of Seasons - Sweet Thing

2. Marching Through Your Head - Zeus

3. Lotta Lies - Elvyn

4. Your Hands (Together) - The New Pornographers

5. Forced to Love - Broken Social Scene

6. Chinese Boxes - The High Dials

7. B.Y.O. Life - Slowcoaster

8. No Sympathy - Flash Lightnin'

9. Bad Side of Town - Mother's Children

10. Patron Saint of Atheists - The Paperbacks

11. Ghost In the Park - Young Rival

12. Ronnie Hawkins - Gertrudes

13. Emmanuel - Spoon River

14. The East Wind - Gord Downie And The Country Of Miracles

15. Sooner or Later - The Novaks

16. A Day Long Past It's Prime - Kathryn Calder

17. Sex - Cowlick

18. Corktown - Huron

19. Love and a Steady Hand - Luke Doucet & The White Falcon

20. You and Me - The Beauties

21. Christmas In Hell - NQ Arbuckle

Canadiana Mix Part 2

Gimme Danger

The lack of posts has not only been pure laziness but also a disastrously boring bootleg group on Usenet. I'm serious, unless you're a Uriah Heep or a Stevie Ray Vaughn fanatic there's been very little interesting recordings to be had. SRV falls into that category where those who love him, love him A LOT and then post everything he's ever done and eat up the bandwidth with boring blues. Then I found this sweet soundboard recording of the first reunited Iggy and the Stooges show in Sao Paulo, Brazil from 2009. Considering that James Williamson hadn't played a gig in 35 years, I think he sounds pretty great. While I previously tended to favour Funhouse above all others, I've come to really love the Raw Power era band and frankly Kill City is the best non-Stooges record he ever made. Also, Iggy's vocals have barely changed in 40 years. Compare and contrast the voice and also his physique with many of his other contemporaries. The old adage 'Whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger' while usually completely false is clearly appropriate here.

Tracklisting

------------

01 (4:25) Raw Power

02 (2:30) Kill City

03 (4:23) Search & Destroy

04 (4:02) Gimme Danger

05 (3:08) Cock In My Pocket

06 (3:15) Shake Appeal

07 (2:44) Sax Solo

08 (3:30) Loose

09 (5:00) 1970

10 (7:12) Funhouse

11 (1:38) Night Theme

12 (3:31) Skull Ring

13 (2:59) Johanna

14 (3:32) I Gotta Right

15 (4:51) I Wanna Be Your Dog

16 (5:09) Five Foot One

17 (5:14) The Passenger

18 (4:47) Death Trip

19 (4:05) Lust For Life

20 (3:46) Interview

Playing Time : 79:41

Total Size : 142 MB

Perpetual Autumn

Here's a mix loosely inspired by my growing dislike of the season known as 'Summer'. I don't know when it happened exactly but I think it occurred when I stopped drinking beer. Well, it's not that I've "quit" drinking beer; I still occasionally consume and enjoy it, particularly the 3rd beer buzz but I think I've largely outgrown its charm. I just don't feel the desire anymore. I think maybe it's conditioning because once I left academics for a permanent position in the health care industry, I lost the freedom to come and go as I please at the lab. Gotta be at work 5 days a week and keep my hours, no more knocking off early to find a patio and well, drink beer. So what I'm basically driving at is if I'm not sitting around a patio, goldbricking and drinking beer, I hate summer. Makes sense to me, I'm a very linear man. Also my house retains heat like a fucking green house. I should install solar panels. Anyway, I'm sick of summer, the heat, the bugs, sweating, I'm done. The mix below is loosely inspired by this feeling. It leans a little heavy on CDN artists from the last couple of years, largely CBC3-kind of artists. Here's to perpetual autumn, cool, dark evenings and and pitch black early mornings with cupped hands, visible breath & broken leaves under feet.

01. Science Comes First

02. Eighteen - Lions in the Street

03. Don't Tell Mom - Mother's Children

04. Ghost in the Park - Young Rival

05. Young Hipster - Little Foot Long Foot

06. Echoes Of My Sins - Anders Osbourne

07. Soft in the Center - The Hold Steady

08. Settin' The Woods On Fire - Ronnie Spector

09. I Went To Heaven In A Dream Last Night - Daddy

10. For a Few Dollars More - The Manvils

11. Fashion Blues - The Beauties

12. Something About the Bedroom - Cobra Verde

13. Me and Your Ghost - Sarah Borges & The Broken Singles

14. Officer Down - Carolyn Mark & NQ Arbuckle

15. It's Not the Liquor I Miss - Luke Doucet

16. I Got A Life - Dojo Workhorse

17. Perpetual Autumn - The Paperbacks

18. Our Little Secret - Art Bergmann

19. Forced to Love - Broken Social Scene

20. Anyone's Ghost - The National

21. Huntsville Affair - NQ Arbuckle

22. Touch Me I'm Going to Scream Pt. 2 - My Morning Jacket

All right, here's my semi-annual favourite songs of the year mix. If you're a listener of modern indie type music then it's extremely likely you'll have heard some of the songs and artists in the mix (e.g. The Dead Weather, The Hold Steady, The New Pornographers, Spoon). Hopefully they're are a few you haven't heard (e.g. Elvyn, Via Audio, Spoon River and Flared). It's pretty upbeat so throw it on late afternoon, pour some libations and enjoy.

25 Songs from 2010

01 Hundred/Million - The Whigs

02 Rest Sniper, Rest - Dirty Sweet

03 Bushwick Blues - Delta Spirit

04 C'mon - The Soft Pack

05 Written in Reverse - Spoon

06 Those Were the Days - Elvyn

07 Blue Bood Blues - The Dead Weather

08 Protection Racket - Fionn Regan

09 Marching Through Your Head - Zeus

10 Denise - Clem Snide

11 Look Around You, Part II - Flared

12 Babies - Via Audio

13 Can't Hear My Eyes - Ariel Pink's Haunted Graffiti

14 The Diamond Church Street Choir - The Gaslight Anthem

15 Lonely Is a Town - Glossary

16 The Weekenders - The Hold Steady

17 Lunch In Field Four - Adam Arcuragi

18 Within The Spirit Sagging - Marah

19 Buried In the Sun - Spoon River

20 I Don't Wanna Know - Peter Wolf

21 We Are the Foolish - General Fiasco

22 Your Hands (Together) - The New Pornographers

23 Every Light - Shabby Rogue

24 Somewhere By Now - Sime Nugent

25 Girls Who Smoke - Drive By Truckers

Can't be a Has-Been When You Never Was.

If you've never had the chance to hear Tommy Womack, I implore you to do so and I'm here to meet you halfway. If you like it honest and real, if you like Dylan, Steve Earle, CCR, southern rock, roots rock, Americana etc. you're probably going to love Tommy Womack. Actually if you're a carbon based form of life with an intact IQ with both hemispheres firing, you're probably going to love Tommy Womack. He's been around for awhile and if you want to learn more about him, check out his website here. I was introduced to him via the obner board where there was a massive mix project (the "tenner" series, put together 10 tracks from some of your favourite artists as for an introduction to their work) and this fellow put together one for Tommy. I think after I played it a single time I was immediately in love with this dude's music. I immediately went and bought everthing he'd released as a solo artist and then from the Bis-quits. I've never been able to track down anything from Government Cheese but from what I can gather, this fall we'll see some re-releases of those older records. And in my opinion, he's getting better over time. His last record may be my favourite (There I Said It), which contains possibly the greatest song in the history of the universe. 'Alpha Male and the Canine History Blood'. A wise man said, once this songs starts you HAVE to let it finish the whole way through. Also, I also liked what he has to say in general, from interviews that I've read. This quote speaks volumes, when he was pressed if he felt screwed over by the record industry in a Nashville interview:

“If anybody has not been screwed over by the music industry, it’s me. I've had chance after chance, one at-bat after another. Nobody ever twisted my arm and made me get drunk before going onstage. No one made me do a show stoned. No one made me run at the mouth at the microphone not knowing what my point was. And, in the long run, I never gave the music industry a song it could use. Commercial is not a bad thing. The Sermon on the Mount is commercial. But what did I do? I gave the machine an eight-minute-long song about The Replacements.”

Hell yeah! So I've bundled a 10 of my favourite Tommy Womack songs here and added one bonus track from Daddy (Will Kimbrough & Tommy Womack), which Tommy had been performing solo before appearing on Daddy's For a Second Time album. Check them out, I practically guarantee a better mood because of it. And then hit iTunes and buy the goddamn albums, there's plenty more good stuff to here from him solo or as part of Daddy.

1. Betty Was Black (and willie was White)

2. If That's All There is To See

3. Tough

4. The Highway's Coming

5. 25 Years Ago

6. You Could Be At the Beach Right Now

7. I'm Never Gonna Be a Rock Star

8. The Replacements

9. I Want A Cigarette

10. The Ballad of Martin Luther King

11. Alpha Male & the Canine Mystery Blood

Over & Out of Control

The Manvils are my probably my favourite band right now. Stating this comes as a bit of a surprise as the immediate realization of this fact didn't initially come from me. It happened at the Slice in Lethbridge before seeing The Manvils last month. I was there with my friend Crystal, ridiculously early as usual, drinking way too much considering how many hours we were gonna log that evening. As our server dropped off the second of about 27 pitchers of Keith's she asked us if we were staying to see The Manvils and Crystal said "Oh yeah, they're like his favourite band in the world'. And I thought "well I don't know about favourite..." and then after the first set ended with an absolutely blistering 'Buried Love' I thought "Goddamn, they probably ARE my favourite band in the world!". And that's really difficult for me to state for multiple reasons. Firstly, I had to qualify the acknowledgment with 'probably' because as science type guy I have difficulty with absolutes. You cannot really know anything with a 100% certainty, there's always an unknown factor. For example, out the population of current rock & roll bands currently roaming the planet, I've only heard a small sample. Maybe there's a Ukrainian version of the Manvils that I might like even MORE than the Canadian version but because they're unsigned and never leave the old Bloc I'll never hear them. Plus, "favourite" is an overused word to begin with, people are always saying "oh that's my favourite blank" "Oh really, seriously your favourite?" "Well, no, not my absolute favourite..." Ahhhh, I see, so you just like it then. That's great. Also as a bit of a music obsessive, I probably listen to a lot of artists relative to the average person. Like a lot. So picking a favourite out of a large sample is tough. And how does one realize they have a favourite? I think it's kind of like when you realize you're in love. Do you get excited when that special person walks in the room? Yes? How about after the millionth time you watched them walk in the room? Is that excitement still there? It's probably love. It came to me recently after playing their debut Buried Love and their eponymous 2009 album for probably the billionth time. When I throw The Manvils are the turntable and put the needle on the record, I still get excited to hear Mikey sing the first line "Not a delicate staaaaarttttt..." from 'Good Luck Club'. It's gotta be love. And like the ineffable love, the sound of The Manvils it's hard to verbalize for me. It's simple but it ain't. Of course, it's only rock & roll and therefore not terribly complicated. But this isn't left hemisphere business, sir; this is ALL right brain. The right brain can't tell you a damn thing, but it just knows. The Drive By Truckers, who I also love, have a sound that is pretty easy to nail. Of course they play straight up rock & roll too but clearly they got a southern vibe they don't stray from (thankfully). The Manvils are just classic, but not classic rock. They're high energy but not fast. They mine the same musical vein as The Clash and The Jam and Raw-Power era Stooges. It's just rock & roll, done right.

So check out the sample mix and then be good to yourself and pick up their LPs, Buried Love (2007) and The Manvils (2009) along with the Strange Disaster EP, all available on iTunes. And for the love of god, if they're even in the remote vicinity of your town go catch them live, they're fucking incredible. I've even toyed with the idea of not drinking the next time I see them because I don't want to miss a moment. Of course, that's the ledge I'm going to have crawl onto because the drinking and their rock & roll show is pretty much the best combo going. If I could somehow combine my Peter Jackson menthols and the rest of the carnal pleasures in there, I'd be in heaven. I've seen them twice now here in Lethbridge and like I said, halfway through the last show I threw all caution to the wind and declared them my favourite band. I hope more folks hear & see them in 2010. They're that good.

1. Good Luck Club

2. Pretty Bleed

3. The Stoker

4. Strange Disaster

5. Missing You

6. Turpentine

7. Between the Lashes

8. Buried Love

Caught in a trap.

How over the course of a year, Elvis managed to do the 1968 television special to the Vegas stage is nothing short of sad and bizarre. But I guess that's Elvis. And drugs. And poor management. But still Elvis. Stepping onto a Vegas stage which should be the end of the line in terms of a performer's cultural impact, but this was Elvis' next act and probably most iconic. The suits, the hair, the belts, the karate, the drug-hazed monologues. That would all come later, but for now this is his debut performance at the International Hilton on July 29th 1969. One last trip, long way down.

Are You Satisfied with the Life You're Living?

It seems logical that my first post of the new year and the first in nearly a month's time should definitely be about a genre of music I know practically nothing about. I'm ignorant of almost everyone but the artist everyone identifies with this genre. Like the worst white devils, I heard Bob Marley first on the most popular career compilations ever in the history of the world, Legend. As I've grown to dislike most compilations in favour of actual albums I sought out a bunch of his albums with the Wailers and the songs that aren't on there are just as brilliant as those very famous ones. However, what really ratchets up the intensity are the live albums. The insanely great Babylon by Bus taken during the Kaya Tour in 1978 is probably one of the hottest live albums ever. So much to my delight, I recently snagged a soundboard recording of their stop in Rotterdam, Holland at the Ahoy Club. When I first heard it, I put down what I was reading and just listening to the damn thing, transfixed actually. There are times when even I feel like getting up and dancing. And that is saying something. Part of my plan for 2010 is to get better acquainted with this genre.