Week of June 26, 2008, Issue #662
MUSIC
New Sounds
Vue Staff
NQ Arbuckle
XOK
Six Shooter
EDEN MUNRO / eden@vueweekly.com
The latest from Toronto’s NQ Arbuckle—the band led by Neville Quinlan—creeps forth like an epic tale of us-against-them battles, an twisting tale of tragedy and hurt, flecked with a spirit of hope and survival.
The album’s hurt is sometimes even self-induced, as on the opening track, “My Baby,” where Quinlan’s voice starts the song off quietly, with just an acoustic guitar picking out a few notes behind him as he catalogues all the qualities that make his baby so right. Really, this special lady has no bad side, or so it seems. But then a piano enters—the kind of piano that you might have heard at a 1950s high school dance, providing the soundtrack for a more innocent time—and Quinlan’s voice begins to rise, transforming into a growl that just plain hurts until finally he asks, over and over, “What’s wrong with my baby?” It’s as though he’s desparate to find something—anything—wrong with her so that he can leave the relationship behind.
Of course, there’s another interpretation possible here, one where Quinlan isn’t the trouble. In this take, it’s the world that is out to get his baby, and his question is a futile one as he rails at the sky, the land or maybe the sea.
It’s that sort of opportunity for double-edged meanings within the songs that makes XOK the kind of album that makes it easy to lose oneself in the music. And not in terms of melody, although there are plenty of moments that lull one in—like the gentle country roll that takes hold with the title track’s opening chords—or even occasionally drive a stake through the heart and drag the listener kicking and screaming into the album’s world, as with the deep rumble of album-closer “Spooking the Rocking Horse.”
Instead, it’s the way that the songs are left open both musically and lyrically, while never flinching in setting a graphic scene. Quinlan doesn’t provide answers for anyone save perhaps himself, and even that’s debatable; sometimes he simply sounds as though he’s working his way through a list of his own demons, like on the lo-fi “Mincing Words” where he sings, “Singing mincing words about nothing / Dancing crazy to old rock songs / I drank until I was a one-man angry mob.”
But it’s not all darkness on XOK; there’s also the tender love of “I Liked You Right From the Start,” although once you start digging, even that one seems to be made up of more grey areas than black and white. Ultimately, as dark as the songs on this album can get, there is consistantly a light that shines through the clouds, breaking the darkness even if it’s only for a few moments before the questions begin again. But that’s exactly what is so interesting here: XOK plays like a bar fight that’s getting dirty because the stakes are so damn high. You want the band to pull through even when you’re doubting that they will. Ah, but there’s always that glimmer of hope, and that’s the hand that Quinlan offers to the listener, a chance at finding something of worth buried beneath all the wrong.
Assault of Knowledge
If You Don’t Buy This CD the Terrorists Win
Independent
CAROLYN NIKODYM / carolyn@vueweekly.com
There is something wonderfully unsettling about beginning a track with George W and ending it with Martin Luther King, but in just over two minutes Assault of Knowledge draws the line from one to the other in “Freedom is a State of Mind,” pointing out all freedom’s contradictory definitions. Hip hop is another state of mind, and it’s one that local rapper AOK (aka Omar Mouallem) fully inhabits with his debut and its hell-yeah, head-bopping moments aplenty. There are times when things fall unfortunately flat—the heartfelt message of “The Cedar Seeds” gets a little lost in unrealized production—but there are also times when you’ll laugh out loud. “The Hood Samaritans” is downright hilarious.
A CD release party for If You Don’t Buy This ... will be held on Sat, Jun 28 at the Axis Café, alongside a fundraiser for Hip Hop in the Park.
Living With Lions
Make Your Mark
Black Box Recordings
BRYAN BIRTLES / bryan@vueweekly.com
The hardest partying band in lotus land has channelled all of the energy that it would take to puke on the run and keep going into a stellar full-length album that surpasses most of what passes for pop hook-laden punk rock these days. Moving into more socially conscious realms with the likes of songs such as "Granny Steps," which asks why the preferred solution to Vancouver's prostitution issue is "taking out the trash," Living with Lions is certainly not leaving its reputation for beer drinking and disgusting behaviour behind (one song, after all, is a eulogy for the group's former band house / punk crash pad Dude Manor) but the band is coming into its own as an entity that has something to say, and isn't about to let you forget it.
Matt Mays & El Torpedo
Terminal Romance
Sonic
EDEN MUNRO / eden@vueweekly.com
Matt Mays is back with his second record featuring his band, El Torpedo. No, wait, the band is more than “featured” here; El Torpedo is absolutely essential to the sound of Terminal Romance, with guitars pushing each other around and overlapping while the drums and bass give the songs just the right momentum for road-trippin’. It’s true: this album was made for the open road. It’s ragged and rolling, and it’s also familiar enough that it drops a comforting veil over top as it plays out. Mays isn’t rewriting any songbooks here, but neither is he simply regurgitating the past—”Building a Boat” sounds like a combination of the Who and ZZ Top’s synth-era, and it works. There’s a distinctly garage rock sound to the album, as though Mays and the band are having fun bashing out the songs with as much abandon as possible, and in the process they turn out a record that’s just right for the now-dwindling summer.
Mötley Crüe
Saints of Los Angeles
Motley
EDEN MUNRO / eden@vueweekly.com
One thing Mötley Crüe has not been very often is boring—at least not according to the band’s collective biography, 2001’s The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band. That book was something of a rollercoaster read, and it was riveting regardless of one’s personal opinion of the band’s music. So now, some seven years later, Mötley Crüe has released its first album in eight years, based upon the storyline in The Dirt. At this point in the musicians’ careers, though, it feels a little disingenuous to be singing about coming up on the streets when they’ve been living in mansions for far longer than they were ever drifting through Hollywood. The nostalgia-laced lyrics wouldn’t matter so much if the music was a little rougher around the edges, but at this point Mötley Crüe is a pretty solid, professional band, and there’s not a whole lot of energy bursting from this album. In the end, there’s too much middle-of-the-road, modern-rock riffing and it drags down the occasional highlight like the heavy grooving on “White Trash Circus.”
Watermelon Slim and the Workers
No Paid Holidays
Northern Blues
MARIA KOTOVYCH / maria@vueweekly.com
Okay. Let’s get one thing straight—under no circumstances is it a good idea to pronounce “horsie” as “hawsie” and then rhyme it with “posse.” Never. But this linguistic aberration certainly doesn’t impact Watermelon Slim’s ability to produce a soulful, gritty blues album bursting with naked, honest realism and a harmonica that just won’t quit. No Paid Holidays is full of subtle touches as well: in “I’ve Got a Toothache,” Slim mirrors his lyrics about pain and insomnia with a deliberately slow, dragging delivery, reflecting the molasses-like passage of time that anyone would feel in a similar state. The instruments on this CD are no slouch, either: in particular, the electric slide guitar in “Bubba’s Blues” deserves special accolades. The playing is subtle yet strong, offering a solid base around which the other musical lines can revolve. This guitar acts very much like a tasteful centerpiece that beautifies a table without drawing undue attention to itself; however, remove the centerpiece, and you immediately note its absence. It’s just another subtle touch that works well—so well.
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