Luke Simcoe, OP Trendsetter The Blood Brothers “Young Machetes” eek: “Hold On, Hold On” by Neko Case Patrick Mackenzie, OP Contributor M4 After several high-profile meetings with the OP crew their de facto official atering hole, Brooklyn's Pub in New Westminster, I promised I would smarten up and get current with my next installment of Song of the Week. So, not wishing to alienate anyone, I have taken my editors’ con- rns to heart with this week's installment and have carefully selected a ng from a record released this year. Thinking about the past with a ot planted firmly in the present I give you Neko Case’s “Hold On, old On.” Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, the record from which “Hold On, Hold On” appears, sounds like it was recorded in 1958. Reverb, the succession of echoes from plugged-in guitars, seems to dominate the recording. These hollow-body sound- ing guitars lend a rockabilly style to most of the songs but the fecord could just as easily be a country album. “Hold On, Hold On” is the most rocking and party oriented tune on the record, but like the rest of Fox Confessor, the warm and far- away echo of electric guitars haunt the song like a broken- aeditor@gmail.com Stuff ’ve Been Listenin Downloaded: The Blood Brothers — Young Machetes ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — Source Tags ¢> Codes Listened To: The Blood Brothers album... over and over again. The Blood Brothers — Young Machetes I remember the first time I heard The Blood Brothers; it was in my friend Tristan’s car: Jordan Blilie and Johnny Whitney screaming ambiguous lyrical phantasmagoria like tortured schoolgirls, Cody Votalato’s piercing, fractured - guitar, Morgan Henderson’s vaudevillian bass and synth lines, and Mark Gajadhar’s “who needs time signatures or fills” drumming. The abrasiveness and general WTF!-ness of it all repulsed me as I sat in Tristan’s passenger seat. However, repulsion is the twisted cousin of infatuation, and over time, The Blood Brothers became one of my favourite bands. If any of you have been following my illustrious Other Press career, you'll know that the first article I wrote for the paper was about a road trip I took to Seattle to catch the band in their home town before returning to Vancouver to see their sophomore gig at Mesa Luna the following night. Anyway, my first reaction to Young Machetes was one of pure bliss and adoration: I was hungry for new material (it’s been over two years since the release of Crimes), and “Laser Life,” the lead-single, is perhaps one of the catchi- est tracks the band has ever penned. However, as I let the rest of the album sink in over the last week, my excite- ment has waned. Young Machetes is doubtless a more accomplished and cohesive album/statement of intent from the band than Crimes, but parts of it actually drag. “Camouflage, Camouflage” is a mid-tempo number with a slower breakdown that practically has you salivating for the inevitable sassy freak-out, but it never comes, choos- ing instead to sputter out in a faux-operatic dénouement. Luckily, “You’re the Dream, Unicorn!” pulls us out of the slump almost immediately after, but the album never reaches the same level of destroy-your-bedroom fervor that their previous LPs inspired. “Spit Shine Your Black Clouds,” a fairly straightforward garage-rock song, is a particular let-down, and finds Blilie and Whitney trying to hearted man alone on an empty highway. The retro sound of reverberated guitars might strike most as nostalgic, but for some reason I find that a hollow-body Gretch or Gibson guitar played through a Vox AC-30 or simi- lar amplifier creates a necessarily haunting vibe — an irrepress- ible sadness turned into music. What with living in an age dominated by digital technology, hearing something that could have been recorded in a church half a century ago is like invit- ing the shadows of the past in for a drink. Even as Neko Case’s emotional vocal range soars over the guitars, the hum- ming shadows are always near — intangible, but waiting still for a drink of the warm hard stuff. Like the desperation of lingering drunks staying past their welcome at a debutante’s party, a certain emptiness runs through “Hold On, Hold On.” With words like, “The most tender place in my heart is for strangers / I know it’s unkind but my own blood is much too dangerous,” the speaker makes it clear her heart isn’t prepared to give or receive the love most people want. Simultaneously, it seems that the speaker has good reason to give her “love” only to strangers: like in all good country or rockabilly songs, the speaker was done wrong: “In the end I was the mean girl / Or somebody’s in- between girl.” But now she has wised up and leaves parties “at three a.m. / Alone thank God / With a valium from the bride.” Despite the romantic sentiment implied by the title, “real” love is mocked as a sleep inducing drug — guaranteeing one’s enslavement to an uninspiring world. The speaker, how- g To approximate some kind of Mick Jagger-swagger after spitting a reference to “John Lennon and The Rolling Stones crooning in plastic bags.” Don’t get me wrong; several moments on the album, par- ticularly “Rat Rider” and “Vital Beach” harken back to their earlier records, and I’m glad the band is moving forward, but if you were a diehard fan of Burn Piano Island Burn, Ym sorry to report that the nail has been hammered into the coffin with the blunt end of a young machete. = ...And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead — So Divided As far as most music critics are concerned, Trail of Dead has been kicking ass and taking names in the world of driven (read: loud), sonically expansive indie rock since their self- titled debut in 1998. Their sophomore record, Madonna, itself another piece in the excellent Merge records puzzle, catapult- ed them into the big leagues, but it was Source Tags ¢ Codes that solidified the band’s aforementioned ass-kicking, name- taking status. Hell, P4K even gave it a 10.0! They achieved this by exemplifying all the best things about their predecessors and contemporaries: the beautiful, circuitous interludes of Sunny Day Real Estate, the unchained guitar frenzy of Fugazi, and the intense, heart-on-sleeve vocals of At the Drive-In. And they did it all without seeming derivative! ' I guess I’m mentioning all this for a few reasons: the first is that Trail of Dead is set to play the CCC in December with The Blood Brothers and Celebration, but the main reason is that I’ve got my hands on some of the leaked tracks from their forthcoming album, So Divided, and like many others, I feel let down. Maybe the execs at Interscope had their way, or maybe, as Quinn of From Blown Speakers fame would suggest, Neil Busch took the band’s balls when he left/got kicked out prior to Worlds Apart, but where Trail of Dead once took pages from indie’s anthemic heavyweights (to the point where they became one of those heavyweights), they now sound like any other watered-down “we're from, or have some members from Montreal” groups. The band’s myspace page has them depicted as characters in The Simpsons, and after listening to So Divided, the first thing that comes to mind is Boo-urns!_ Luke Simcoe is an aeronautics engineer at the University of Advanced Engineering in St. Louis, and is a regular contributor to Astto Funk Monthly. ever, is unapologetic and has happily given up on romantic love, preferring rather “the devil,” or some such figure with whom to share a dangerous exis- tence. Often compared to the late great Patsy Cline, Neko Case, along with other roots musicians, is raising the dead, or at least the awareness of traditional forms of American music. In our over- whelming culture of immediacy we are bombarded by music that is reflective of the digital now. What then are we to make of music that appears to be from another time, that self-conscious- ly emulates the past? Maybe this music is a form of resistance, against a crass age; or maybe it’s paying homage to the past. Either way, listening to “Hold On, Hold On” will draw in the phantoms, some of whom you may recognize. Play it at your next Halloween party.