Mogwai - Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will

When will Mogwai make a bad record? I have long wanted to write about Martin Bulloch, but despite his awesome playing, I couldn't find anything on previous Mogwai records that I hadn't already talked about with some other similar players. Instead of forcing it, I figured I would just wait, and lo and behold, Mogwai released Hardcore Will Never Die But You Will and this post practically writes itself.

On previous records, Martin would usually adjust the volume of his playing to change and affect the mood. Quiet playing for quiet parts, loud playing for loud parts. Simple really, and effective. But with HWNDBYW he plays hard, with consistent volume and relies more on the technique to push things forward, and it's fucking great. Take a song like Mexican Grand Prix which starts with a bare kick/snare pattern. It's already pretty punchy and has a lot of momentum, and then simply by adding the high hat he takes it so much further. Nicely placed high hat flourishes and snare/cymbal hits keep things interesting, but it's always grounded. This is a drummer who we've been able to hear mature over the last few Mogwai records, and it's a big contributor to why Mogwai are still an interesting and relevant band sixteen years into their career.

We get sort of a throwback to early Mogwai with songs like Rano Pano and Death Waves, which have pretty consistent guitar/bass patterns, allowing Martin a little more room to play with the timing and drive of his patterns. It's incredible how rooted his feet and snare had stay while he travels around his drums, the man is a rock.

Martin seems to have developed a better feel for softness as well, giving us some really lush brush playing of Letters To The Metro. It's one of the slowest tracks, but it is one of my favorites.

Bulloch is an example of a good drummer taking a proper look at his rhythmic position in his band, and over time finding a way to let his personality and style shine through the limitations, becoming a great drummer. I don't think there is a bad track on this record, and it's insane to think that a band that has been together for sixteen years is still recording some of the best music of their careers.

Mogwai and Lady Gaga are both playing in Montreal on April 25th. I'm driving up from Halifax. I'm going to let you guess who I'm going to go see.

BDK News - Kuato Winter EP

My instrumental band Kuato have released our second EP. It has 3 songs and is 30 minutes long. You can get it for free from the Acadian Embassy.

The Holy Shroud - Ghost Repeaters

Loel Campbell is the real fucking deal. Genuine talent mixed with imagination and stamina. I've seen him play fill in sets for Kary and Trephines, two bands that are part of every Yarmouth County musician's DNA, and whom have albums that have aged better than most. I've seen him play countless times with Wintersleep and Contrived, his two main outfits for a while. I've seen him take part in the blossoming of Holy Fuck, the little band that could. I've seen him double up on the drums for an entire Jon Epworth set (alongside Mike Belyea, whom I've written about already. You can watch a clip of it here). Shit, I've seen Loel play more shows than any other drummer. I'm sure no one will be surprised to see me writing about him.

I was so close to writing about one of the Contrived records, but I just knew that I would start writing and get lost on how to sum up how fucking awesome those records/that band are. There is just too much history there to cram it into a blog post.

The Holy Shroud's history is much simpler.

1/2 North Of America +

1/2 Contrived

= One hell of a rock band.

When The Holy Shroud formed I had just started to come to the city for shows, and I saw them play at The Idiot with Radarfame. They came out all dressed in white with white ski masks on and they ripped through their set flailing around and blowing everyone away. It looked sort of this.

As far as drumming goes, this is Loel at his most spastic and uninhibited. The energy never wanes, but his playing never loses focus. He is completely locked in with Mike Bigelow's bass, and this record is one of many examples of why those two were the most sought after rhythm section in Halifax when they lived here. The amount of sweat that went into these songs is unimaginable. For a brief period The Holy Shroud were the best band in Halifax, even opening up for The Arcade Fire during their legendary performance at The Marquee for the Halifax Pop Explosion. We might only have one full length record to remember them by, but what an album it is.

The thing about Loel's drumming is that it has that little extra touch that can never be emulated. You can always tell when it's him on the skins, but you can't pinpoint how. I think one of my favorite songs is Landmarks to Postmarks, where the drums and guitars are totally in sync, only to have the guitars drop out and the drums take the lead. The rolls in Calling In Confederate Debts are also lightning fast and perfectly executed, candy to a drummers ear.

If you have been paying attention to anything musically you'll know that Loel is constantly breaking new ground with Wintersleep (the band just performed on David Letterman, the first for a Nova Scotian band) and if you've done any research you know about Contrived and all of the Dependent Music bands he was involved in. I'm hoping that if you've never heard this album you'll seek it out, because it's a treasure worth finding. The amount of quality albums Loel has played on is massive, and it gets larger every year. Hopefully this one won't get lost in the past.

Led Zeppelin - in Through The Out Door

I know that John Bonham is not an underrated or neglected part of drum history. Hell, if you play the drums and you don't know who John Bonham is I don't need to tell you you're an idiot, I'm sure you'll figure it out soon enough. I'm not writing about John Bonham on here to talk about his influence or importance, that's been discussed to exhaustion in every god damn drum magazine and forum in existence. I'm here to tell you that John Bonham the drummer may have died at 32, but John Bonham the artist was just an infant, barely two years old when he was taken from us, and that's the biggest tragedy. Let me explain.

In Through The Out Door is my favorite Led Zeppelin album. I'm sure that's some sort of blasphemy somewhere, but fuck you I think about this stuff a lot more than most other people do. You see, this is the first album where Led Zeppelin had really stepped out from under the safety blanket of the blues and really made something innovative stylistically. They had proven they could wail on the last seven records, but the songs on In Through... have a certain maturity to them, all the power and energy of the previous albums but much more focused thematically, concentrating of feel and dynamic more than virtuosic playing.

A big part of this can be attributed to Page and Bonham becoming unreliable due to their various addictions, and the writing responsibility falling mostly onto John Paul Jones and Robert Plant, who had always had input but never this much. The previous songs had mostly always relied on riffs, with everything else coming to life around them. Until now Bonham had been used to the freedom of Page's parts. Page was a master of creating space for his band mates to work their way into, it's one of the best parts about his playing. As a drummer, when you play along to guitar riffs, there is usually quite a few pockets of space where you can throw in little frills and fills, which Bonham had been doing quite well up to this point. Once Jones took the reigns writing parts for In Through The Out Door, the songs became very bass-prominent and it sort of lasso'd in John's playing. Jones has a great ability to keep things grounded, but his playing is very thick. Bonham couldn't start throwing in drum flourishes everywhere because there was simply no room for them.

This could have killed his inspiration, but instead Bonham used this musical confinement to hone his skills under duress. By this point he had really carved out his own niche, and he worked within the limitations set by Jones while still holding onto his style. The result is an album full of really interesting rhythms, played with the ferocity and skill of his previous material. When he does get a little room he makes it count, working in fills as extensions of his rhythms. There's parts in Carouselambra that are just out of this world, better than anything he had laid down before.

It's not that Bonham hadn't done anything impressive before this point, but this was the first time he was forced to change his approach, and instead of throwing in the cards he really shaped it into something unique. It's like throwing a painter a lump of clay and saying, "there, what can you do with that?" He always had his own style, but this was the first glimpse of personality to come from his playing. He died shortly after this album was released, and it's the only glimpse we have into where his drumming would have progressed.

I can't help but wonder what kind of drummer he would would have been on the next three records the way I wonder what Albert Camus' books would have been like if he hadn't died in that car crash. Sometimes it's best not to think of these things.

The Boredoms - 77 Boadrum DVD

In the summer of 2007 legendary Japanese noise rock group The Boredoms hand picked 77 drummers from around the world, brought them to New York and set them up in a park for a one of a kind performance. The drums were set up in a spiraling motion, and patterns would begin in the center and travel outward until the entire group played in unison. With a set of colored sticks with various meanings, The Boredoms would orchestrate the entire performance from an elevated stage in a middle, and for an hour and a half the city of New York was witness to one of the loudest, most powerful performances ever recorded, whether they wanted to be or not. This DVD is a must-see for any drummer, just ogling at all the different kits they wrangled up could take up a lot of time.

If you're wondering what 77 drums sets look like in spiral, well, here ya go.

This DVD is a mixture of documentary footage and performance footage, and it gives great insight into how this giant project was executed. If you have a surround sound system, the drums will swirl around you, putting you right in the middle of the performance.

This is something that will probably never happen again, and is a true example of drumming as an art. When things really get going you can hear the true force that exists in drums and it must have been heard for miles. If you watch closely you will see a crowd full of people in tune with what's going on, and if you look closer you'll see one hippy in a bandana and tie-dyed shirt just losing his mind trying to grasp what's happening.

I mean c'mon.

duuuuuuude.

drums.

Dire Straits - Brothers In Arms

The best part about getting further and further away from the 80's is that we can finally listen back and really sort out the gems from the turds. You have to appreciate the 80's for what it was; a time where technology in the industry was moving much faster than the participants and where excess and grandiosity were the way of the world. Never have bands been so removed from their audiences as the entire Decade of 1980. Any organic part of a song was basically rung out with digital effects until it had almost no character at all. They were selling millions of albums and making billions of dollars off of artists for the first time, and the bigwigs sort of went a little nuts. It started with Frampton and it sort of ended with Nirvana, but for a good 12 years or so the music industry behaved like the son of a Saudi Prince attending university in another continent, shoving money around just for the sheer pleasure of it.

My point is, a lot of the influence and importance the 80's actually had wasn't really apparent until now, twenty years later. Once people finally got a handle on how to manipulate the technology into progressing the art, things improved drastically. Engineers had the time to work the kinks out of the recording software, and musicians had time to figure out which effects are good (FUZZ) and which effects are dumb (PHASER). With regard to recording technique and style, if we never had Dire Straits' Brothers In Arms, we might not have had Kid A. Think about that, hmm? Brothers In Arms is impressive even in it's dryly recorded, synth-infused world. Great songs will work no matter what you do to them, and this record is a great example of that.

Recently it was disclosed that after longtime drummer Terry Williams couldn't hack it, jazz session master Omar Hakim was brought in and recorded every song in two days. The only piece of Williams' recordings left on the album are the echo-y, crescendo drums at the start of Money For Nothing, which I have to admit, are pretty fucking cool.

Hakim's drumming is a lot more practical, albeit necessary for the type of album Brothers In Arms is, and its definitely part of the reason this album was so popular that it put the entire CD manufacturing business on hold when it was released. The straight, minimalist style of drumming on So Far Away and Money For Nothing still feels like rock drumming but it's never bombastic, it's always even and concise.

The second half of the record is more folk/world music influenced, but instead of being too jazzy Hakim plays more the way Nick Mason would; sparse, but straight and dynamic. Well thought out hits and patterns let Mark Knopfler's talent as a songwriter shine through. With a laid back approach on the bass by John Illsley, you get a tinge of cool guitar stuff too.

It's kind of nice to hear a different rhythmic approach to Dire Straits' songs. Terry Williams had his own merits, but it shows a lot of character to step aside and let another man have at it for an album. Williams returned for the subsequent tour and catered his playing on these songs according to Omar's style.

I'm not sure I could be that passive, but I'm glad he was.

NOTE: These videos are of Terry Williams playing Omar Hakim's patterns.

Indie Spotlight - Orphan Choir - S/T

I've always had a lot of respect for Nate Gelinas. Orphan Choir were one of the first bands I met on tour that I really felt a connection with, musically and socially. Nate played the drums with force and precision, and he's one of the lucky guys who just looks cool playing the drums.

We picked up the Orphan Choir vinyl last time we were in Windsor, Ontario. That was six months ago and I still listen to it constantly. Songs like the Night Nurse are just so rich in tone and energy, with Gelinas' playing just hard enough to be noticed, but never pushing others aside.

The way he locks in with the bass most of the time is reminiscent of mid seventies studio-rock, but his hands keep things chaotic enough that it never feels overdone. Nate does a lot of stuff on this record that is really stylish, and it's that style that sort of holds the album together thematically for me. The guitars and vocal styles change quite a bit, but the drums keep it all kind of cemented.

Sure, maybe I could use my blog to give props to people and bands that I know personally, but where is the fun in that? Besides, I just said I respected him, I never said I liked him. Nate Gelinas is actually a huge asshole.

I'm kidding.

Please don't hurt me Nate.