Jan26

Graham Parker Sings “Partner For Life”

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Graham Parker Sings “Partner For Life”

Listen to this track by former angry young man turned happily-married stalwart singer-songwriter Graham Parker. It’s “Partner For Life”, an ode to love, commitment, and the realities of adult relationships as featured on Parker’s 1995 album 12 Haunted Episodes.

By the 1990s, Parker had been prolific as a writer and performer, even if his mainstream success didn’t match that of his contemporaries to whom he is often compared; Elvis Costello and Joe Jackson, both of whom held Parker as an influence. He had become, and remained to be, a cult artist.

Parker had been through the wringer with various major label record companies as a result, suffering a lack of support and poor sales of his albums. Or was it the other way around, with the lack of support resulting in his cult status?

Either way, he’d established himself as an artist with a consistent body of work, despite the hardships and vicious cycles he’d experienced while tangling with the majors. He  certainly succeeded in consolidating a lasting core audience, doing so by being a steadfast songwriter, record maker, and tireless live performer.

By this record, he’d cut the shackles of major label skulduggery loose and gone indie on the Razor & Tie label. As such, there is a certain liberation that can be heard in a song like “Partner For Life”. And there is another kind of liberation to be found in this song, too.

Read the rest of this entry →

Jan23

Heaven 17 Play “Temptation”

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Heaven 17 Play “Temptation”

Listen to this track by Sheffieldian one-time Human League splinter group, and sonically ambitious hitmakers in their own right, Heaven 17. It’s their smash UK single “Temptation” as taken from their 1983 album The Luxury Gap.

One of the features here is guest vocalist Carol Kenyon, who sings in a Northern Soul influenced style, contrasting the synth-pop groove. The tune would also incorporate a full orchestra, creating even more textural contrast, and producing a high-charting single that year for the band, reaching number 2 in the UK pop charts.

The Luxury Gap was the group’s second record, after 1981′s Penthouse and Pavement. The band had been one of the most prominent proponents of Northern synth pop, although initially split off from the Human League, a project that was abandoned by keyboardists Ian Craig-Marsh and Martyn Ware. They’d left the band in the hands of vocalist Phil Oakey. That version of the Human League under Oakey’s leadership would become an international success with a new line-up.

But, Craig-Marsh and Ware had pop smarts of their own to draw from. Read the rest of this entry →

Jan18

Stop SOPA/PIPA

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Stop SOPA/PIPA

For anyone interested in keeping free speech alive on the Internet, and/or anywhere else, read this article about why SOPA/PIPA must be stopped. There is also a video attached that outlines how this bill threatens free speech and expression on the Internet.

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

To me, SOPA/PIPA reduces our cultural inheritance and history, and our opinions and experiences surrounding it, into base commodities. It will punish people based on biased perception, and upon the self-interest of a minority.  This is not to mention the potential it has for controlling the expression (or lack of it) of masses of people through curtailing the function of  the biggest, most effective, and most democratic communication channel the world has ever seen – the Internet itself. SOPA/PIPA has the potential to foil the ability of populations to communicate with one another, denying them the power to affect change to make their lives better as they see it on an international scale.

SOPA/PIPA goes against everything this blog stands for. And if you consume content on this blog, and on others like it, it goes against everything you stand for, too.

If you’re as freaked out as I am, please  write to your member of congress about SOPA, or your member of parliament (Canada), or member of parliament (UK). I choose those three based on the audience of this blog. But, if you hail from another country, find out how to oppose SOPA/PIPA in your country.

U.S policy like this isn’t a domestic issue. It attacks the very nature of the Internet, and is therefore international in its scope.

Thanks, everyone.

Rob

editor-in-chief

The Delete Bin.

Jan16

The Sonics Perform “Have Love Will Travel”

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The Sonics Perform “Have Love Will Travel”

Listen to this track by Pacific Northwest R&B supplicants the Sonics. It’s “Have Love Will Travel” (that title being a possible reference to Have Gun Will Travel, a TV western program), a well-travelled rock tune, written by the same guy who wrote “Louie Louie” , Richard Berry. This tune would be covered by many from Stiv Bators, to Tom Petty & The Heartbrekers, to the Black Keys.

This version of the song appears on the Sonics 1965 album Here Are the Sonics, a release that would characterize ’60s garage music, and later be seen as the roots of punk in the 1970s. The group grew out of the growing Seattle rock scene, among the first bands to forge a scene in that city that would endure for decades. The band were quintessential garage rockers, with a clear mission to deliver scrappy and loud R&B in a rock context.

The album contains several of what can be considered classics of the R&B catlog including Chuck Berry’s “Roll Over Beethoven”, Rufus Thomas’ “Walkin’ The Dog”, Barrett Strong’s “Money (That’s What I Want”), and Ray Charles “Night Time Is the Right Time”, among others.

All of these songs were the early templates for the British bands that had loved the originals and that had sold them back to American audiences during the British Invasion. And even if the Animals, The Stones, Them, the Yardbirds, and others had gone past this canon of material by the mid-60s, it was still very much alive and well on garage scenes all over the United States and Canada, even if many bands would not distinguish themselves by covering them.

But, what of this song by R&B vocalist and writer Richard Berry, and why is the Sonic’s version of it so undeniable, influencing so many down the decades? Read the rest of this entry →

Jan12

Ron Sexsmith & The Uncool Play “Don’t Mind Losing”

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Ron Sexsmith & The Uncool Play “Don’t Mind Losing”

Listen to this track by St. Catharines Ontario favourite son and effortlessly awesome singer-songwriter Ron Sexsmith, with his former collective known as The Uncool – Steve Charles on bass, and Don Kerr on drums and backing vocals. It’s “Don’t Mind Losing”, a jubilant Moondance-era Van The Man style acoustic soul-pop gem as taken from his 1991 independently released album Grand Opera Lane.

The song, and the album off of which it comes exists as something of a prequel to his major label debut Ron Sexsmith in 1995. You can hear the decidedly different tone and approach to presentation and style characterized by more overt soul and rockabilly references.

Ron Sexsmith had spent some time living in rural Quebec, letting his dream of becoming a songwriter steep while mapping out how he was going to pay for his life in the meantime. While working out how to bring his talent to the table of the music industry, he had a wife and newborn son in tow, with a daughter soon to join them by the end of the 1980s. So, in returning to St Catharines, and then to Toronto, he had to secure a day job as a courier, wondering if his real calling as a songwriter and musician would ever really come to fruition.

It’s a pretty common tale, many versions of which we’ll never get to hear from songwriters who never found their path.

With that in mind, never has a song about feeling set upon by circumstance and existential despair sounded so bright and bouncy, gleaming with horns, a seriously groovy bassline, and ecstatic backing vocals.  But, in all of that aural joy, where does it connect with where Sexsmith was going as a professional musician?

Read the rest of this entry →

Jan9

David Bowie Sings “The Jean Genie”

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David Bowie Sings “The Jean Genie”

Here’s a clip of androgynous musical brushfire-starting alien pin up David Bowie, and his soon-to-be-erstwhile Spiders From Mars. It’s the recently discovered clip of his 1973 performance of “The Jean Genie” on the British music program Top of the Pops.

The song is taken from the album Aladdin Sane, a record released that very year in April. This song was the lead single, actually released earlier in November of 1972.  This was the height of the glam-rock period, when colourful costuming and gender-bending stage personas met the vintage Chess blues ‘n’ boogie sound.

This particular clip was discovered recently, and broadcast on the Top of the Pops 2011 Christmas special. Bowie and TOTPs go hand in hand, particularly in this phase of his career. His performance of “Starman” in the summer of 1972 galvanized rock fans all over the country and kick-started the seeds of British punk, post-punk, and New Romanticism. But despite all that, Bowie had his own preoccupations, namely making sense out of America, the fascination and disorientation he felt about it, and then putting it into his work.

So, how is that revealed in this tune? Read the rest of this entry →

Jan5

Spoons Play “Smiling In Winter”

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Spoons Play “Smiling In Winter”

Listen to this track by new wave suburbanites and registered Canadian anglophiles Spoons. It’s their 1982 hit single “Smiling In Winter” as taken from their album Arias & Symphonies, the band’s second. The song outlines the impression of a season that their country, and mine (the same one, as it happens) is known, delivered in a style that demonstrates their love of British pop music, specifically new wave, post punk, and New Romantic.

Spoons were formed in 1979 out of high school. They’d put out an indie single in 1980, and later a debut album in Stick Figure Neighbourhood the following year with what would be their classic line-up: Gordon Deppe (lead vocal, guitar), Sandy Horne (vocals, bass), Rob Preuss (keyboards), and Derrick Ross (drums). They would go on to tour with some of the biggest acts of the era in Culture Club, The Police, and Simple Minds.

This song was one of three singles off of what would be their breakthrough on mainstream radio and help to define the era in early ’80s Southern Ontario, especially in the suburbs. The other two would be the title track, “Arias & Symphonies”, and “Nova Heart”. And these were all from a local band from Burlington, Ontario – actually one town over from where I grew up in Oakville – rather than from Sheffield, Liverpool, London, or other British musical mecca of early-’80s post punk and synth-based pop.

But, Spoons were no copycat band. They understood that the core of that new wave sound is about playing shadows against light on all kinds of levels. They knew that taking rock instruments and contrasting it against synths was really just the base ingredient of that dynamic. But, what of this song, and the contrasting forces working within it?
Read the rest of this entry →

Jan2

Hannah Georgas Sings “The Deep End”

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Hannah Georgas Sings “The Deep End”

Photo: Brenda Lee

Listen to this track by Ontario born and Vancouver-based singer-songwriter Hannah Georgas. It’s her radio single “The Deep End” as taken from her 2010 record with the self-explanatory title This Is Good.  This is certainly one of those songs that has dueling forces at work within it, with a joie de vivre to be found in the way it sounds, musically speaking, working against some pretty serious lyrical darkness.

Georgas began recording songs in earnest while a university student, having moved to Victoria B.C from Newmarket Ontario. Her career since has so far included TV spots for jingles, an EP, songwriting accolades and best new performer results from CBC3, and a debut record – this one. She has opened shows for Royal Wood, Joel Plaskett, and City and Colour, and is about to start touring the UK with Kathleen Edwards. At the time of this writing, the follow up to This Is Good is in progress.

So, as much as an artist who has been active for nearly half a decade or more can be thought of as new on the scene, Hannah Georgas’ star is rising steadily. But, what of this song, a loping, banjo-abetted joyous thing that lights up the radio, even while it deals with darker human concerns lyrically?

The situation is common. We have a friend who’s always in trouble. And when the shit comes down, we get the call. This is what this song seems to be dealing with; that vortex of helplessness, of pain, and of obligation that often comes out of trying to help someone who, perhaps, won’t help themselves in favour drawing on the energy of others instead. This is prime songwriting material, with Georgas’ otherwise encouraging “don’t let them break you down” sounding rather leaden and weary to support the emotional undercurrents of the song. That’s good performance, and good songwriting too.

For more information, check out the Hannah Georgas official site.

Enjoy!

Dec22

The White Stripes Play “Candy Cane Children”

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The White Stripes Play “Candy Cane Children”

Listen to this track, a yuletide assault from two-piece blues-indie heroes, the late, lamented White Stripes. It’s their Christmas tune from 1998, and something of a rarity, “Candy Cane Children”. This was an early single from a band who had yet to break through, yet clearly had the juice even this early on.

The song is on the books to be one of a number of early singles from our heroes to be re-released from Jack White’s Third Man Records.

Have a great Christmas from the Delete Bin, and as of this past December 18, happy birthday to us – the Delete Bin mark II has been going for four years! We’ll be taking the next week off, so see you in the New Year!

 

Enjoy!

Dec19

John Coltrane Quartet Plays “Greensleeves” AKA “What Child Is This?”

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John Coltrane Quartet Plays “Greensleeves” AKA “What Child Is This?”

Listen to this track by saxophone immortal John Coltrane and his classic quartet (Elvin Jones on drums, Jimmy Garrison on bass, and McCoy Tyner on piano). It’s the perennial holiday favourite “What Child Is This”, or as it is credited: “Greensleeves”, with those two pieces having the same melody, with lyrics added by hymn writer William Chatterton Dix in 1865.

This song was recorded during a specific and very celebrated phase in Coltrane’s career, when things were really gelling with his band, many of whom believe was the greatest collection of musicians in jazz over a long-term recording period between 1961 and 1965. This period corresponded with Coltrane’s work on the Impulse! label, with whom he’d stay until his untimely death from liver cancer in 1967.

The song itself has an even older pedigree than Coltrane’s classic period of course. It has been connected with King Henry VIII, he who provided a number of creative ways to get out of being married during a time when that wasn’t an easy thing to do. In the meantime, evidently, he was a songwriter. I’m not so sure about  the facts on that one. It seems kind of unlikely to me.

But, whatever.

It’s a melancholic, beautiful little tune no matter who wrote it. “Greensleeves” is about being rejected by a true love, which is a pretty solid theme no matter what era it comes out of. And in a Christmas context as “What Child Is This?”, it’s used to tell the story of the birth of Jesus; not just about the joy of that event, but also through its minor key suggests the shadow of human brokeness, too. So what makes Coltrane’s take on that so compelling? Read the rest of this entry →