How has it transpired that a pair of siblings from Rhode Island has become the talk of the Montreal music scene? Credit a freak twist of fate. Brad and Andrew Barr trekked north of the border in 2003 with their band The Slip only to have their gig in Montreal nearly end in disaster when the club caught fire. However, when standing on the street waiting for the fire department to put it out, Andrew met the woman who—after a year of dogged pursuit—became his wife.

Part of that arrangement specified Andrew moving to Montreal, and Brad needed little convincing to follow since neither was willing to break the musical bond they’d shared their entire lives. Cut to 2011 and the Barr Brothers, as they are now formally known as a band, have put out a stunning self-titled debut album that combines their gritty folk and blues roots with the fearless experimentation that has become the hallmark of the Montreal scene over the past decade.

Although the brothers handled the lion’s share of the instrumentation and production on their own, the album’s distinct Montreal traits are unmistakable. Several tracks were polished up in the studio by Arcade Fire cohort Howard Bilerman and the Besnard Lakes’ Jace Lasek, yet the Barrs’ secret weapon is Sarah Pagé, who was asked to join the band after the brothers heard her practicing the harp in a neighbouring apartment. That is, the traditional harp, not the harmonica. It all adds up to a sound that careens effortlessly between the fragility of Nick Drake to a down-and-dirty assault, à la the Black Keys, and Andrew—whose chief duties are percussion—is thrilled to finally have it exposed to wider audiences after years of honing.

“It sort of feels like freshman year in college right now,” he says on the phone while navigating the tour van near Seattle. “One night we’ll be in a dive bar, and the next in a theatre. It’s kind of these constant new experiences, and it’s really cool. The band has a fair amount of experimentation built into it, so we’re definitely learning how to adapt the songs dynamically to any situation. We’re finding that it’s all about giving up control a little bit and just feeding off the energy of the room.”

That process of discovery has never really stopped for the Barrs since the new band was hatched, and Andrew admits that they had no clear idea how their album would turn out when they began recording. “When Brad and I moved to Montreal, we didn’t really know anybody and all we wanted was a space in order to write and practice. We found a little room in this building near Mount Royal and slowly started meeting this great community of musicians.

“Brad was writing a lot of songs that reflected this big life change we were both experiencing of being uprooted in your thirties, and we would invite people over just to see what they could add. Through that we got to become good friends with Sarah and our bass player Miles Perkin and organist Andrès Vial. So there was never really an idea that we were making a record until some other friends asked us to do a short tour and we threw together ten songs that we thought best represented what we’d been doing over the past two or three years.”

As noted, that period only represented the latest stage of the Barr Brothers’ musical evolution, one that was essentially ingrained at birth from their father, a dentist from Providence who for a brief time got to live out his rock and roll fantasies with his sons. “Our dad was always buying us instruments,” Andrew says. “Our first band was actually with him, playing AC/DC and ZZ Top covers. Our dad’s older brother, Ted Barr, was this sort of blues musician/Beat poet as well, and that had a huge influence on all of us. Growing up in suburban America, that was just one of the most exciting things to do as a kid. Then Brad and I went to Berklee College in Boston and we formed The Slip and toured around for about eight or nine years. It’s fair to say that music is in our blood.”

The Slip did achieve some notable success, releasing a half-dozen albums, appearing at Bonnaroo and on Late Night with Conan O’Brien, along with doing a month-long stint opening for My Morning Jacket. Yet, The Slip’s indie rock approach is almost non-existent with the Barr Brothers, and Andrew admits that the timing couldn’t have been better for their quest for new musical inspiration to coincide with starting new lives in Montreal.

“We certainly felt that there was something fresh and exciting happening in the city from the moment we got there seven years ago,” he says. “I didn’t quite realize the rebirth that was actually going on, but pretty soon it was clear that the eyes of the rock and roll world were on the city. I guess overall there was a sense that it was actually viable to be an artist, and there are still so many young bands there carrying on that spirit.”

Although the Barr Brothers’ debut album seems to have firmly sealed their bond with Montreal, that was perhaps accomplished as soon as they wrote one of its standout tracks, “Cloud,” a tribute to the late Lhasa de Sela, an artist whose diversity perhaps more than anyone personified Montreal’s place, not only within Canada’s musical culture, but on a global scale as well.

“Sarah was close friends with Lhasa, and when Lhasa was looking to put together a new band, she actually got Sarah, Brad and I involved,” Andrew says. “She was a very special person and had a huge influence on us. Brad had written the song before she died, just kind of as a lullaby to put himself to sleep, but afterward we felt it was appropriate to dedicate it to her as a tribute to how she could create such simple things that still had tremendous depth. I guess if there’s anything that we want our music to reflect now, it’s precisely that.”

So with that in mind, here’s my last minute attempt to counteract the treacle with a few choice selections I’ve received over the last few weeks:

Along with Skydiggers‘ reissue of the track “November In Ontario” (see Recent Posts), they’ve also again made available their beloved version of “Good King Wenceslas.” Aside from just its stirring melody, this song has always been my Christmas favourite for its simple message of those who follow the Good King’s example of helping the less fortunate will themselves be blessed.

Skydiggers — “Good King Wenceslas”

After digesting Josh T. Pearson‘s intensely personal Last Of The Country Gentlemen earlier this year, I’m not at all surprised to hear him apply his achingly beautiful style to “O Holy Night,” probably the Christmas standard that best captures the sense of spiritual redemption that Christ’s birth symbolizes. Those not familiar with this Texan’s work might hear strong echoes of Jeff Buckley, but I highly recommend Last Of The Country Gentlemen to get a more complete picture of his talents. But be forewarned that his songs aren’t for the faint of heart.

Josh T. Pearson — “O Holy Night”

Finally, here’s something from another of my faves from 2011, the Barr Brothers. The Montreal-via-Providence siblings released their soulful self-titled debut back in September, and I was immediately hooked. What makes this new track, “Dear Mrs. Claus” even better is that it’s an original composition based on the cheeky idea that Mrs. Claus is always alone on Christmas Eve and might welcome some companionship. I suggest putting on Chuck Berry’s “Merry Christmas Baby” right after.

This piece is also posted at www.exclaim.ca

With their 2010 album, Brothers, the Black Keys did everything right in ambitiously expanding their sound without sacrificing any soul. It was a career-defining work, and the Akron, OH duo of singer/guitarist Dan Auerbach and drummer Patrick Carney were rightly rewarded for it in the marketplace.

But while some artists might use such a milestone as an opportunity for further artistic reassessment, the Black Keys have stormed back in what seems a scant 18 months with El Camino, a crisp 11-track collection that displays a band that have constructed a grand home upon a simple foundation, but for now are content to rearrange the furniture. This is most evident in Carney’s drumming; for the first time, he no longer sounds self-taught and El Camino‘s tightness is its biggest surprise.

But after the opening salvo of “Lonely Boy,” “Dead and Gone” and “Gold on the Ceiling,” all of which could have been 1960s AM radio hits, Auerbach throws a curve with riff-fest “Little Black Submarines,” although it’s a rare concession to the band’s new arena audience. The rest of El Camino shifts gears effortlessly from the Hound Dog Taylor-esque boogie of “Run Right Back” to the vintage R&B of “Stop Stop.”

The latter bears the sonic stamp of producer Danger Mouse and his return to the fold after a minimal contribution to Brothers is another indication of Auerbach and Carney’s current desire for familiarity. Like the battered mini-van on the album cover, El Camino won’t attract the same gawkers that its souped-up predecessor did, but it’s reliable enough to get long-time fans where they want to go.

I understand that this record was made earlier this year and it’s been done for some time. True?
Yeah, but that’s how it generally goes for us. We’ll finish a record and it’ll take something like four months for it to come out.

Were you guys still itching to do something after finishing the tour for Brothers?
We actually hadn’t finished touring when we started this record. It took 40 days to make, but it was off-and-on because we had to leave for shows, come back and leave for shows again.

Did you have a plan in place with Danger Mouse?
We really love hanging out with Brian and respect him as a record maker and I think he feels the same about us, so there really wasn’t much to talk about. We agreed to do it, set up some dates and started working. That’s pretty much it; we didn’t talk much about what we were going to do ahead of time and we didn’t do any demos. There were no rehearsals; we had nothing when we went into the studio. We started from scratch every day.

You hadn’t written any songs?
No. No lyrics, nothing.

That makes sense, since my first impression of the record was just how tight and punchy it is. All of your records are raw to various degrees, but was your intention to do something really spontaneous?
Well, like I said, we didn’t really talk about it; we had no goal. But we were certainly listening to a lot of three-minute songs on 45s, old rockabilly records ― the Johnny Burnette Trio, the Sweet, the Cramps, the Clash, the Cars. We were just listening to stuff that was sort of compact. I guess subconsciously we got told what to do.

What stood out for me most was Pat’s drumming, which sounds so much different than how he’s played before. Tight is really the only word to describe it.
Yeah, there are parts that are super-tight. I think he was trying more stuff on this one than he has on any of our other albums, which is really cool.

As you said, you made the record while you were still on tour, so is it fair to say that all of the time you’d spent on the road played a role in how it turned out?
I definitely think it did. We’d become so used to playing the more up-tempo songs from Brothers; we didn’t really play the quiet ones. I wouldn’t say that our set is aggro, but it’s pretty rockin’, so that was our general mindset in the studio each day. Along with all of that music we were listening to that I already mentioned, it all just sort of happened without too much discussion. One thing I can say is that after we finished the fifth or sixth song we realized that we were getting into this real up-tempo groove, so we just let it be and didn’t really worry about it too much. Some of our records have had a lot of variation on them, in terms of tempos and a mix of loud and quiet songs, but we just let this one be what it was going to be.

It is notable that there aren’t any ballads.
Yeah, I guess the closest thing is the beginning of “Little Black Submarines,” but that goes away pretty quickly. I mean, we didn’t feel like we had to do a ballad. I think people know by now that we can play quietly if we want to, judging by our other records.

Since you mention “Little Black Submarines,” that really is the song that stands out from the rest. You must have had a good time doing that one, with the big riff and the guitar solo.
Yeah, that was my jock-rock moment. We actually did that song in two versions, an acoustic one and an electric one and spliced them together. I think that the electric half of that song is the closest representation of our live show than anything we’ve done before, and that’s more of the way Pat drums.

I also appreciated how you stuck to your R&B roots in songs like “Run Right Back.” I guess that will never leave you guys?
I don’t think so; it’s kind of ingrained in our brains. That’s what originally got us together: a mutual love of Stax Records, and hip-hop that was sampling Stax Records. That’s our foundation and I’m not sure we could shake that even if we tried.

I picked up on possibly a few Phil Spector-ish things too, or was that more Brian’s input?
I wasn’t listening to any Phil Spector, but I can say that I was listening to Duane Eddy and other kinds of ’50s stuff with that heavy reverb, which I guess is kind of Spector-ish.

The first single, “Lonely Boy,” is already all over radio in Canada, and I think that speaks to how much people here embraced you with Brothers.
Yeah, Canada was where it first really blew up.

It led to the extensive cross-country tour you did here earlier this year. What was that like for you?
A lot of miles and a lot of poutine. Seriously, it was amazing. The crowds were so much fun. A lot of times you’ll play in a big city and people will just stand around. That always seems to be the thing. You’ll go to L.A. or NYC and people will just stand there. You have to go to, like, Middle America to find people who want to go crazy. But it seemed it was like that in every place we played in Canada. There was such a great energy in every audience and that makes it so much more fun for us. It was basically show after show of that feeling.

From the first time I heard Brothers, there was something special about it, and I was really happy that it became as popular as it did. Did you have any sense while you were making it that that was the case?
I think it was a surprise; we didn’t go into it trying to make a commercial success. It didn’t necessarily sound like anything on the radio. It just sort of connected with people and there was no way we could have predicted that, to be honest. But I have to say that it is a beautiful thing to have had the success we’ve had and still be in complete control of every artistic step of the process. Ever since day one, we’ve made every call, not just musically, but with the artwork and the videos, everything. So whether it turned out to be a win or a loss, it was always on our shoulders.

I suppose that explains why El Camino is coming out in what seems like such a short time after the biggest record you’ve had so far. Most bands or labels nowadays would want to take at least two or three years to follow up an album like that.
Yeah, we don’t get that. We’ve been doing things our own way for ten years now, to the point where, honestly, we don’t relate to other bands. We didn’t start using a producer until our fifth record, or even record in a proper studio. We’re completely self-taught ― our whole idea of what it means to be a band is different from everybody else’s. I think being from the Midwest, we knew that we really had to work for it if we wanted it, you know? We didn’t even have a club to play when we started; we had to drive an hour north to Cleveland to play shows. I’d say it’s the work ethic we have, combined with good luck and timing that’s made it happen for us.

You expanded the band with Brothers without tampering with that foundation of you and Patrick. Are you planning on going further with that when you hit the road for El Camino?
Definitely. The new songs are, for the most part, based around a quartet concept ― guitar, bass, drums and keyboard ― and I don’t think I’d feel right playing them without having those parts there from the record.

Since we’re already into December, I’m about a week late in posting this new version of one of the standout tracks from the ‘Diggers’ often-overlooked 1997 album Desmond’s Hip City.

It was the venerable Toronto roots-rockers’ first album after the departure of founding member Peter Cash (whose spot was taken by my good friend Paul MacLeod), and the new group dynamic was clearly evident in some of the album’s more experimental aspects.

“November In Ontario” was a good example of that, with its grinding, Crazy Horse-like attack underpinning the song’s tale of hunting trip that ended in tragedy.

This new version is just as grim, but the focus is placed more on the story with the atmospheric, piano-led arrangement. If it’s any indication of what the band’s upcoming album will sound like, the Skydiggers could be reaching another creative peak in their now 20-plus year career.

www.skydiggers.com

“The amount of time that you spend on anything should not, and will never, directly correspond to how important or interesting it is,” Tom Waits says. “A moment of inspiration will far surpass spending six years on something.”

Most fans of Waits would surely concur with that view, and in large part prefer it that way, knowing that catching up with the fortunes of the barstool philosophers, apocalyptic street preachers, and other characters that most often appear in his songs is a reward for patience that few other artists can offer nowadays.

Waits’s new album, Bad As Me, is indeed his first collection of new music since 2004’s Real Gone, on which experiments with turntables and beatboxing accentuated a more-caustic-than-usual frame of mind. In contrast, Bad As Me finds Waits returning to his patented balance of dirt floor stomps and heart-wrenching ballads—“brawlers and bawlers” to paraphrase the title of his essential 2006 rarities collection.

Even for fans accustomed to Waits’s open challenges, Real Gone required some heavy lifting, although that was tempered by Waits eventually following it up with a live album recorded on his six-week Glitter & Doom tour in the summer of 2008. Once donning his on-stage persona, Waits offered his most recent material in a less cluttered manner, and that approach has carried over into Bad As Me.

Recorded at the start of 2011, the album is again co-produced by Waits’s chief collaborator, his wife Kathleen Brennan, and features many of his core studio players such as guitarist Marc Ribot, bassist Larry Taylor, and son Casey on drums. But with guest appearances from Keith Richards, Flea, David Hidalgo of Los Lobos, Sir Douglas Quintet organist Augie Meyers, and harmonica legend Charlie Musselwhite, Bad As Me follows in the relatively accessible tradition of Waits’s most commercially successful albums, 1985’s Rain Dogs and 1999’s Mule Variations. In an eerie way, it almost seemed time for the next installment of this ongoing drama to appear, although Waits cannot say if he ever feels he’s on a timetable.

“On one hand [these records] all happen very quickly, and on the other hand they take forever,” he admits. “With every song, if you know how to crack them open, you can find hundreds of other songs within them. The first couple of songs are always the hardest and serve as icebreakers. Once the ice is broken, you go into the freezing water and float downstream. Then when you’re out of breath, you realize you’re half a mile from the hole you went in, and you drown in front of a class of elementary school kids.”

Speaking in such shocking metaphors has become a Waits trademark in this current phase of his career. His gift for crafting modern fables now attracts admirers from all musical genres, and coupled with his frequent film roles playing a wide range of shady characters—including Satan himself in Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus—Waits has emerged as a unique presence within the global arts scene, someone unafraid to shine a light on the world’s dark corners, albeit with enough wit and style to make it romantic.

When asked about playing out the roles he writes for himself in his songs, Waits in some ways speaks like an actor, distancing himself from the process. “The ingredients of songs can easily include a stain on your bedroom wall, or the flavour of a soda they’ve stopped making—a variety of recollections over one chord. And the title is a girl’s name that you made up. So songs have humble and peculiar origins, and by the time they become songs they conceal most of what really happened. They usually send you off in a direction that’s completely incorrect. It doesn’t mean they’re not interesting, it just means that the truth is overrated.”

That may be so, but many Waits fans can attest to discovering his music at the onset of adulthood, the moment when life’s artifice is exposed for the first time. Like Catcher In The Rye and On The Road, Waits’s albums in the wake of his 1983 tour de force Swordfishtrombones can offer the sorts of lessons that those leaving home for the first time will never learn in school, i.e. the grim reality that one day we’ll all be (as a track from 1992’s Bone Machine plainly states) “Dirt In The Ground,” or in the case of “Get Behind The Mule,” that the best we can do is an honest day’s work, although it still won’t be enough to get what we really want.

Tying in these sorts of ideas with an artist’s personal life is always dangerous, but in Waits’s case it’s virtually irrelevant. His appeal, in large part, seems to lie in listeners living vicariously through his image, one developed from the pre-rock musical and literary touchstones that for the first decade of his career made him an oddity among popular “confessional” singer/songwriters like Neil Young and James Taylor. That view of Waits has changed drastically, however, as recent unlikely interpreters as Robert Plant and Scarlett Johansson have proven that anyone can extract their own meaning from his songs if they are willing to get their fingernails a little dirty in order to uncover what’s buried just below the surface.

It’s not as if Waits hasn’t earned the right to hold the keys to America’s cobwebbed cultural attic. While at the outset of his career in the early 1970s, the California native was just one of countless troubadours hustling their songbooks around L.A., by the middle of the decade Waits chose to fully immerse himself in a fading world of aging Beat poets, after-hours jazz clubs and seedy motels; a world about as far removed from the general perception of California at the time as one could get.

It was a bold decision, especially with the first stirrings of punk rock underway, and peers like Bruce Springsteen embracing the stadium rock aesthetic. But Waits’s commitment to his bohemian muse—along with a knack for hiring the ideal backing musicians to realize his vision—brought him a devoted following through albums such as 1976’s Small Change, and 1980’s Heartattack And Vine.

Right after that, director Francis Ford Coppola hired Waits to score the film One From The Heart, and everything changed. Kathleen Brennan was working as a script consultant for Coppola, and she and Waits married not long after the film was completed. Although she had never sought the spotlight, Brennan’s fertile creative mind had an immediate impact on Waits. She also knew the reclusive Captain Beefheart, aka Don Van Vliet, who passed away late in 2010. It was his dada-ist approach to blues that soon became an integral component of Waits’s musical evolution.

“[Don] was angry when Swordfishtrombones came out,” Waits says while reminiscing about Beefheart. “He thought I’d appropriated elements of it from him, particularly the image of a fish, which he’d used on [his 1969 masterpiece] Trout Mask Replica. For me it was more of a tribute in a way. Somebody said that Trout Mask is the only pop/rock record that can be considered a work of art by the standards imposed by other disciplines, like painting. [Don] was a comet; he was not like anything else, and that’s about all you can say.”

A similar notion of Waits’s own work breaking free of artistic conventions took hold by the mid-‘80s. He and Brennan produced the play Frank’s Wild Years, based on many of the first songs they wrote together. It was followed up with an equally theatrical tour, captured for posterity on the 1988 live album and concert film Big Time. Since then, Waits and Brennan have written songs for playwright Robert Wilson’s productions The Black Rider, Blood Money and Alice, the last two featuring Canadian avant garde saxophonist Colin Stetson as a member of the band.

But while there are clear distinctions among all of these phases and facets of Waits’s career to date, the fact that he treats them all as a single body of work has made it nearly impossible for critics to pin him down. Not surprisingly, he views his career arc in much simpler terms today. “Songs with wisdom in them or cautionary tales, or songs that pretend to teach, are not new and never will be new,” Waits says. “They’re as old music itself. At some point someone figured out that the best way to remember something was to sing it, just like if you want to remember a poem, you write it down, or if you’re rehearsing a play, you walk through it while saying the lines—when I get to the chair, I know I’m supposed to say, ‘kill Dad.’”

For many casual listeners, though, it’s Waits as the gravelly-voiced hobo bluesman that they want, and Bad As Me will not disappoint them. From the churning opening track, “Chicago,” which explores with modern clarity the great migration of African-Americans from southern plantations to northern industrial cities, the album is another stage in the great blues reinvention project that Waits in large part instigated, with his early experiments at adapting raw sounds from long-forgotten performers of the 1920s and ‘30s now having led to Black Keys songs being used in TV commercials.

Someone who can testify to Waits’s importance in that regard is the Ontario-born spoken word/beatbox artist and harmonica player C.R. Avery whom Waits encountered in Berlin during the 2004 Real Gone tour and invited on stage for two of the concerts in that city. “Tom’s a living, breathing example of that mystical world of troubadours, so it was great to experience that firsthand,” Avery says. “It actually did confirm for me that that mystical world does indeed exist and I should keep striving to become a part of it. Even though I grew up loving hip-hop, and still do, the appeal of the blues will never be denied.”

Waits explains further that he often writes with a specific artist in mind, as evidenced by how some of his most affecting songs have been for others, such as Johnny Cash’s “Down There By The Train,” and Solomon Burke’s “Diamond In Your Mind.” On Bad As Me he says the song “Raised Right Men” was an attempt at a song for Aretha Franklin, a la “Respect,” but some of the album’s other lyrics were spurred by a fascination with reading west coast newspapers from the dawn of the 20^th century. “Sometimes you’d turn the page and it would disintegrate, like it was made out of butterfly wings,” Waits says. “But what you realize immediately is that nothing is new under the sun, to quote Ecclesiastes, and at the same time there are fascinating insights into life before cell phones.”

That can also be said of the album’s closer, “New Year’s Eve,” which reads like the outline of a lost Charles Bukowski manuscript, as the plights of the song’s characters are illuminated in the harsh light of what is supposedly our most celebratory communal holiday. Yet, it’s a prime example of why Waits can never be accused of being a sentimentalist; an unceasing desire to keep living in the face of life’s misery is what matters, not looking back with regret.

“One of the first songs I remember was ‘Abilene’ [by George Hamilton IV],” Waits says before breaking into an impromptu rendition. “The line in that song that always stuck with me was about the guy sitting alone, wherever he was, watching the freight trains go by, wishing to God one of them could take him back to Abilene. It’s about missing your home after leaving behind things that you know, and trading them in on something you’ve never seen before. It’s a simple song, but profound at the same time.”

Nowhere is that idea better expressed on Bad As Me than “Last Leaf,” a duet between Waits and Keith Richards that finds them toasting their shared resilience with a noticeable glint in their eyes. If there’s any song that men will want played at their funerals from now on, it’s this one.

Yet, at 61, Waits still has a lot to accomplish. Earlier this year he contributed a series of poems to photographer Michael O’Brien’s book of portraits of homeless people, which raised close to $100,000 for a California food bank. There is also said to be a new musical with Robert Wilson in the work. What Waits says he won’t be spending his time doing is writing an autobiography as Richards did to great acclaim, even though a Waits book has to be one of the Holy Grails in publishing today.

However, just as his characters must continually look ahead with hope in order to find a reason to go on, so too does Tom Waits. “It takes a certain kind of hubris to do [an autobiography], and a big advance,” he says. “I see it as you’ve put your pack down and you’re sitting on a stump, looking back instead of forward, which is really not the best angle. Maybe I’ll be able to do it when I’m senile. That will make it more interesting.”

The great acoustic folk/blues guitarist Bert Jansch died from cancer on Oct. 5. I had the pleasure to interview him in 2006 upon the release of his excellent album The Black Swan. He was soft-spoken and humble, very much grateful that a new generation was discovering his music.

Here is the piece as it was published in the Nov/06 issue of  Exclaim!:

Bert Jansch Is A Folk Star Reborn

As a cult hero for over 40 years, Bert Jansch can count among his many admirers Jimmy Page and Neil Young. But it is the new generation of psych-folk artists that has brought the British acoustic guitar god back with The Black Swan, arguably his best work since his days with Pentangle. Co-produced by Noah Georgeson, the man behind Joanna Newsom’s exquisite Milk-Eyed Mender, and featuring guest appearances by Devendra Banhart, Beth Orton, and Mazzy Star’s David Roback, the album recaptures the ancient mystique that made Jansch’s early albums, like 1966’s landmark Jack Orion, endlessly entrancing.

“Noah was recommended to me to help with the production, and I met him for the first time after seeing him play with Devendra in London,” the soft-spoken Jansch says. “Everyone in the band offered to help out on the record right away, which was great. It took me a while to get used to how Noah works, but once we got going, it was a fantastic experience.”

The revisiting of classic sounds only adds to The Black Swan’s top-notch performances, from the heartbreaking Irish prison ballad “The Old Triangle,” to the haunting title track, an original composition that Jansch says he’s had with him for several years. “I had a chance to play a lot of these songs live for a long time, which made a huge difference before recording.” The Black Swan’spedigree has already set it apart within Jansch’s vast catalogue, and should prove to be his best received album in recent memory. But aside from that, it is a timely and fitting tribute from the latest group to fall under the spell of his groundbreaking style. “I’ve been listening to Devendra a lot lately, and it is surprising to hear my stuff in his music,” he says. “It was strange at first, but then that made me think of how strange I probably sounded when I started.”

Sure, we all know about the grunge revival by now, but it stands to reason that its early ’90s flipside, power pop, deserves its time in the spotlight again too.

It seems rather gauche to think that Matthew Sweet has been waiting for such a moment to cash in, but after toiling in the shadows since his output sharply declined in the ’00s, I can’t blame him.

This track isn’t immediately as grabbing as you might think, though, but it’s sufficiently enticing. Modern art from a retro master indeed.

From Modern Art (Missing Piece 9/27/11) www.matthewsweet.com

These guys have come far from their 2007 Dan Auerbach-produced debut, when it was basically singer/guitarist Parker Griggs running the whole show.

Now a full-fledged power trio, “Little Eyes” proves conclusively that they’ve attained the honour of being lauded as the spawn of Cream and Blue Cheer.

Retrogressive? Possibly, but there’s plenty of honest frustration in these riffs.

From The Great Escape Of Leslie Magnafuzz (Alive Records 10/11/11) www.radiomoscow.net

The romance of the pre-technological revolution age continues to flourish.

There’s undoubtedly an essay to be written about why the styles and attitudes of the early 20th Century are suddenly back in vogue, but until I can wrap my head around that fully, I’ll just keep amassing examples such as the latest effort from this Toronto folk-rock trio.

Definitely more arena-ready than their previous work, which seems aimed to appeal to fans of both Arcade Fire and Mumford & Sons. I’m not always convinced that grandiosity is naturally more compelling, but this track is instantly memorable.

From Us Little Devils (Outside Music 10/18/11)

www.sunparlourplayers.com

I first became aware of the Sheepdogs when a copy of their self-released version of Learn & Burn arrived at Exclaim! Magazine in the spring of 2010. For starters, I wasn’t impressed by the package–the garish yellow cover was amateurish, and the inside contained the sort of slapdash photo montage that a million other weekend warriors have employed on homemade CDs.

Of course, none of that should matter, but when you receive a few dozen CDs a week, judging by the cover soon becomes second nature. When I did listen to the album, my first impression was that this had to be a reissue of something originally released in 1974. I honestly couldn’t believe that these guys were serious, and I couldn’t even be bothered to review it. It was as if they were from a world where punk rock never existed.

This seems to be a good thing, judging by the media reaction to the Sheepdogs recently winning the contest to be the first unsigned band to appear on the cover of Rolling Stone. It’s raised a lot of questions for me though, the biggest one being why is this happening now?

A clue is in one of the initial reviews of Learn & Burn, posted on Chartattack, formerly Chart Magazine, the Canadian publication geared toward mainstream pop and rock listeners. The “4/5″ review compared the band to Led Zeppelin, the Beatles and Pink Floyd. The Sheepdogs’s own bio cited the Allman Brothers and Moby Grape as influences.

I encountered a similar enthusiastic reaction at a recent story meeting at Exclaim, when a 20-something contributor, well-schooled in modern rock, raved about a Sheepdogs’s set he saw at a summer festival. I was dumbfounded.

I cannot fault the young music journalists of today for dropping names that must have the same iconic ring to them as Robert Johnson’s name had for me as a teenager, but in my view, the Sheepdogs sound like Led Zeppelin about as much as LZ sounded like Elvis Presley.

What the Sheepdogs do sound exactly like is the Guess Who, and band who–as a kid growing up in Canada in the 1970s–was ubiquitous and the antithesis of cool. Yes, “American Woman” encapsulated the feelings of a large segment of society in 1970 and it made the group Canada’s first true international rock and roll success story.

Yet, the force-feeding of their catalogue as a result of Canada’s horribly antiquated Can/Con broadcasting regulations has made me even more hostile toward all things Bachman and Cummings. These guys have gotten a free ride for the past 40 years, as many other Canadian musicians of that generation continue to receive, and I’m tired of it.

So now we have the Sheepdogs carrying on that tradition, and songs from Learn & Burn will no doubt be heard on Canadian radio for decades to come, even if the band never puts out another album. The difference is, this is comfort food for an increasingly conservative culture; a soundtrack to enable baby boomers to bond with their grandchildren.

To be clear, I shouldn’t have to remind anyone that September marks the 20th anniversary of the release of Nirvana’s Nevermind. Rock and roll, circa 1991: 

The Rolling Stone thing is a whole other issue. It’s as if Jann Wenner saw the opportunity to play out the premise of Almost Famous in real life–and don’t think that that thought didn’t cross his mind. He’s a guy who still goes out of his way to give his old pal Boz Scaggs’ albums 4-star reviews. 

Speaking of Scaggs, I found it coincidental that the writer of the Sheepdogs’ RS cover story bore that last name. Another coincidence? The band’s TV showcases have been on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon–Fallon had a role in Almost Famous. All of that is aside from the overriding question of how an unknown band from Saskatoon gets in that position in the first place, with the entire music industry falling at their feet. If there’s any lesson at all in Almost Famous–as Fallon’s character illustrated–it’s that that sort of thing just doesn’t happen without the highest levels signing off on it.

The article itself has raised the ire of Canadians for other reasons, mostly for several unnecessary–and offensive–swipes at Saskatchewan and its residents. Scaggs also takes a poke at The Tragically Hip, calling them “awful yet extremely popular.” Why he couldn’t have said the same thing about Nickelback is not clear. I have admittedly been disappointed at times with The Hip over the years, yet their music is not awful, and never will be. The fact that they have never attained enough currency to warrant the cover of RS seems the only criteria for the magazine to feel the need to dismiss their entire catalogue.

The music industry as Jann Wenner knew it is on its deathbed, and its so-called legends are looking more pathetic by the day. Attempting to recapture those days of stadium tours and double live albums is a natural, but highly misguided, way to recoup staggering financial losses. But in the not too distant future, it will all be gone; a process that will speed up if derivative bands like the Sheepdogs are all that’s out there.

I’m prepared to receive your ire, but please keep in mind that this isn’t a personal thing. I haven’t met anyone in the band, and I’m sure they’re good guys. All Canadian musicians are good guys (that’s what everyone always says), but that doesn’t mean they all make good music.