Snobbin: Beautiful Trash in the Pop Culture Gutter

Folk has increasingly been the rule here at Snobbin' headquarters. When it gets really cold out, there are two consistent directions for the music hereabouts -- acoustic or metal. As it gets colder, (Temperatures are dropping into the negatives lately) the folk albums drop increasingly onto the turntable. While other Canadian folk bands have been covered on the blog, Whitehorse, whose tuneful melodic folk tunes have helped them make the Polaris Short List, has never been mentioned. Their album The Fate of the World Depends on this Kiss is a stunner; beautiful melodies, harmony vocals, and terse production help them stand above the rest in the increasingly crowded Americana field. Whitehorse consists of Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland, who both had successful solo careers before teaming up. They have released two records, including The Fate of the World, and an earlier equally relevant Self-Titled Effort. Comparisons to the Handsome Family can be easily made, yet this husban...

The past looms on the back of a record sleeve. Labels, such as, Lookout, Epitaph, even Bomp, cryptically allowing for years of wasted moments. The times that your finger tips traced the edge of an LP or slammed your fist against fragile drywall. You marveled at the pictures on the back of each sleeve, somehow they were more real than your own family members. They spoke through each lyric, each guitar line, each drum fill, each chord change -- so goddamn directly to you. A slipped power pop backbone, a hardcore frustration, a mod moment, a Dischord emo relapse. The emotions bubbled over into a potent stew of remembrance and forget, lost in transition as the records and years slipped quietly away. They were replaced by other records, other ideas. But the intent is the same, a slipping away into the night, a creative outlet or an escape from yourself and the world. The past looms on the back of a record sleeve, as surely as the present looms in the smile lines of your face -- a crow's...

The other day when I was writing the "Track This" for Jawbox's "Cooling Card," something jogged my memory about music magazines I had read in my formative years, particularly those published while I was still in High School. Many, if not most, of them are gone now. They gave way to blogs and online publications. These include zines like Flipside , which covered mainstream and underground bands -- they also had some of my favorite columnists of all time, Punk Planet , which ventured further into Indie rock as it progressed, and MRR , which is still going strong. The magazines that I read often included Alternative Press and Magnet , as well as Ray Gun Publishing's huH which turned me on to a ton of great music because it included a cd with each issue that served as a sampler for what had been released that month, divided by genre. While other magazines did this, huH undoubtedly was more inclusive in the types of bands these cds covered. In fact, these col...

When I was in High School, I was addicted to the Eels. Their combination of maudlin lyrics and E's world weary vocals really touched me. I fell in even deeper when Mark Oliver Everett slowed back down and started making records that were more similar to his first solo records, A Man Called E and Broken Toy Shop . But there was something about that first album; it rocked, while speaking particularly to my teenage frame of mind. I wanted to hide in my room all the time, cranking music that mirrored my angst. When I feel this way now, I just put Beautiful Freak on and hide for a few hours, even though my head is in a much better place. The album asks for, but also acts as shelter against the arrows and slings of the outside world. Its loud moments are always tempered by slower sections, where E sings his heart out in a primal call to arms. In "Not Ready Yet," E sings, "If I leave my room, don't you tell me to lighten up / Maybe sometime sooner or later / But I ...

A culturally significant moment occurs in Stephen Frears's 2000 adaptation of Nick Hornby's 1995 novel, High Fidelity when oh-so earnest, and not yet famous, Jack Black transcends his character, Barry, to make an astute statement about Rob Gordon's (John Cusack) wardrobe. In a film filled with immensely quotable dialogue and tons of Black diatribes, his speed fire "That's the worst fucking sweater I've ever seen. It's a Cosby sweater. A Cosby Sweater. Does Laura let you leave the house like that?" stands out. The Cosby Sweater has become a cultural high-water mark that is remembered by most who lived through the '80s, as well as most who caught the epochal television show in reruns in the decades since. Little touches, like this reference to non-music cultural ephemera, such as the Cosby sweater, humanize characters who are often the epitome of the worst record consumers and snobbish music dilettantes. These are folks who mercilessly taunt ...

"Cooling Card" contains all the tricks that made Jawbox such an indie powerhouse -- interesting chord changes, J. Robbin's sputtering vocals, chiming guitars, and ever-cryptic lyrics. The lyrics are always filled with imagery, often obtuse or near impenetrable. Robbins begins the song with the lovely and poetic, "Fear as a friend I wish I never kissed / Fading hand to mouth as catalyst / Technicolor static sender / Second guess my love for danger / Bold-face it with a hand of 10 by 10" over chunky guitar chords, and the song only spirals from there. Much of the fun of listening to Jawbox lies in trying to decipher the lyrics and marvelling at the band's near pop song melodies. At the time it seemed strange that they signed to a major label, Atlantic, before any of their fiercely independent Dischord label mates, yet listening now, with the hindsight of years, it is easy to see how they were snatched up in the post-Nirvana blitzkrieg. Intricate songwriting...

We walked the darkened streets at night, ignoring our studies, ignoring sleep, ignoring the sleeping world. We walked for miles past the abandoned houses on the edge of town, through peaceful  cemeteries, along disused train tracks, near the banks of the river. We trekked through every mile of that dirty old town. We knew where to find the alienated junk shops, the best broken pop machines, the forgotten hulls of ancient automobiles. The scent of an angry skunk, the wandering characters that populated that town, and the street sweepers that patrolled back alleys; none were strangers. We should have even known them by their secret names. All my life I walked at night with honest compatriots, who knew the thrill. We broke out of our houses, disobeying parents to while away the quiet hours of the morning. We ran from commitments, necessary or imagined, to smell the stale night air in August, or to breathe in fresh spring rains. Nothing beat the feeling of strolling down an unknown s...