Music, musings and miscellanea

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

It’s worth noting that Talking Heads are the band behind Stop Making Sense, generally considered to be the greatest concert film of all time. So any collection of live performances from the band is going to have an incredibly steep hill to climb.

Perhaps then it’s better to view this hodgepodge of performances as a prequel to that famed film, chronologically charting the quartet’s evolution from wiry art-school punks to funky global rock stars before retiring from the road all together. The stiff CBGB performance from 1975 barely hints at the live force they would become, but helps to put in perspective just how out of place Talking Heads were. By the time they hit American Bandstand with their cover of Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” it was clear the group had found their groove.

The band’s original run ends with a performance of “Burning Down the House” on Late Night with David Letterman, displaying many of the theatrical elements that the group would exploit with Stop Making Sense director Jonathan Demme. It ends, fittingly, with a performance of “Life During Wartime,” from the band’s 2002 Rock ‘n’ Roll Induction Ceremony.

The deluxe edition of the DVD comes beautifully packaged like a hardcover book and includes a lengthy, unedited essay Lester Bangs wrote as a review of Fear of Music forThe Village Voice in August of 1979. Bonus features include a great 35-minute doc from 1979 that finds the band discussing their history and music up to that point. Also included is a 1978 interview with David Byrne and audio commentary from all four band members.

While some might argue with the selection of tracks included (many of the band’s later hits are missing, while rarities like “Love→Building On Fire” make a welcome appearance), this collection is essential to understanding the live evolution of one of music’s most interesting and challenging groups.

“Psycho Killer” (Live Acoustic, 1975)

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca

Finding rare and unseen footage of your favourite artists these days is a piece of piss, Just pop their name into YouTube and you’ll be instantly treated to a litany of talk show appearances, awkward video blog interviews and fashion trends the artist would prefer left forgotten to time. So, the idea of actually paying for a hodgepodge of interview and live clips from across an artist’s career is about as savvy a marketing move as selling CDs in a store these days. But the success of the Rare and Unseen series lies not as much in the footage its producers unearth as in how it’s presented to the audience.

Case in point: David Bowie, the subject of the series’ latest instalment, has been kicking around the music world for over 40 years. There’s no shortage of footage of the man. The interview that makes up the bulk of the DVD finds Bowie in Los Angeles, speaking via a primitive satellite hook-up with British talk show host Russell Harty, circa his 1976 transformation into the Thin White Duke via Station to Station and the film The Man Who Fell to Earth. Both Bowie and Harty attempt to outwit one another, barely hiding their disdain beneath a mask of British politeness. But the interview is inter-cut with a conversation Bowie had with NewMusic host Avi Lewis in 1999 while launching his Earthling album. With Lewis, Bowie is calm and relaxed, ready to discuss any facet of his long career, including his and Iggy Pop’s escape to Berlin to kick drugs not long after the Harty interview. It’s both Bowie’s drug-enhanced egomania during this period and the gross misunderstanding of Bowie’s various onstage characters by the media that make this so fascinating. (This misunderstanding would continue well into the ’80s.) Similar questions about Bowie-the-spectacle hounded him even in the lead up to 1987′s Glass Spiders tour.

While hardly essential, David Bowie: Rare and Unseen does a great job providing context to Bowie’s long and, at times, confounding career.

“Rare & Unseen”

This review originally appeared at Chartattack.com

Penelope Spheeris‘s most profitable film will forever remain Wayne’s World, but she’ll always be associated with the Los Angeles music scenes she’s documented over the past 30 years.

Suburbia was a scripted drama in the most loose sense, about a group of outcast punks (one of which is played by Red Hot Chili Peppers’ Flea) trying to survive in the L.A. suburbs. The loose plot gives the film a hazy, cinema verite feel, linking it to Spheeris’s landmark film The Decline Of Western Civilization.

Along with providing one of the most honest depictions of what the life of a suburban punk was like in the early ’80s (dodging the ire of local rednecks and police), the film contains some great live performances from scene luminaries D.I., TSOL and a very young Vandals.

Although it feels a tad dated, Suburbia remains a vital document of one of the most often forgotten punk scenes.

These reiviews originally appeared at Chartattack.com as separate articles here and here.

The problem with trying to sum up a decade of music is it’s difficult to relate disparate genres to one another. That’s the case with this second installment of the CBC’s trilogy on Canadian pop music.

Shakin’ All Over, which covered the 1960s, had a much easier task since pop music in the ’60s was easier to track. But by the 1970s, the impact of Bob Dylan’s move to electric rock had taken its toll and musical genres began to splinter, blurring the lines about what “pop music” really meant.

Rather than look at the country’s artistic output through themes or genre, This Beat Goes On’s chronological view gives long-running and influential punk band D.O.A. the same level of recognition as a one-hit-wonder like Gino Vanelli. Similarly, the introduction and impact of the controversial Canadian Content laws are here met with cheers, mostly from the artists who have benefited from them. Couldn’t the documentarians have found someone who thought otherwise, if only to give an alternate perspective?

That’s not to say this is a complete washout — far from it. This series, narrated by Jian Ghomeshi, is an incredible undertaking and is the greatest summation of any period of the Canadian music industry.

But its ultimate flaw is just that — it’s a summation of Canadian music from an industry perspective rather than one that focuses on artistic achievement. It makes this series feel like a cheap overview rather than a critical examination.

The series’ third installment suffers from a focus on the industry rather than the art, just like its predecessors Shakin’ All Over and This Beat Goes On. It also grapples with the difficult task of summing up a decade that spawned sub-genre after sub-genre.

Like most music around the world in the 1980s, what was popular grew increasingly more insipid as the decade dragged on, and the gap between the mainstream and underground widened. But the introduction of MuchMusic in the middle of the decade helped heal those wounds as the new 24-hour music channel looked for any artist — mainstream or otherwise — with a catchy video.

It was this situation which allowed for artists like The Pursuit Of Happiness and Blue Rodeo to gain mass exposure and set the stage for the Can-Rock Renaissance that would explode in the early-’90s.

The trilogy has done an admirable job of including artists from Quebec’s thriving and perennially overlooked music industry, but again, the lack of a critical eye drags down what is otherwise essential viewing for Canadian music fans.

With two solid albums and an excellent side-project under their belts, Arctic Monkeys have far outlasted whatever post-”I bet you look good on the dance floor” goodwill most gave them back in ’05. But while we wait for album number three, the Sheffield-quartet offer up this stop-gap cum money grab live DVD/CD set as their way of saying, “hey, don’t forget about us.”

Directed by Mighty Boosh alum Richard Ayoade, the DVD is a beautifully shot set from the last date of their 2007 tour in Manchester. A multitude of cameras were used, capturing unique angles — the moving wide-angle shot from behind drummer Matt Helders is a particular beauty — and employing split screens. Unfortunately, the band look and sound absolutely burnt out. Once you get over the visuals it’s hard to keep watching.

On the other hand, the show captured on the CD is a blistering set from the middle of 2006. This is the Monkey’s at an energetic peak; they had just conquered England and sound hell-bent on proving their mettle in America. Hopefully they’ll regain this passion when they drop their new record later this year.

This review originally appeared at Exclaim.ca