Stoner/Desert Rock group Queens Of The Stone Age released a new single last week, titled Easy Street. It comes off as lighter fare from Josh Homme and co, evoking the style of a tired and tweaked out David Byrne.

I have long planned to write about a QOTSA album for a while. Now seems as good a time as any!

Queens Of The Stone Age – Era Vulgaris

Spotify Link
YouTube Link

I was a late comer to the music of Queens Of The Stone Age. The first song I recall hearing of theirs was a remix of No One Knows made by UNKLE. It was featured on a great snowboarding game I had on the Sony PS2 called SSX3. It was also on a James Lavelle Global Underground Mix CD. That remix still kills the original, which itself is a fun song. I only really got into them around 2005, when I saw them at the Saddledome opening for Nine Inch Nails.

QOTSA’s biggest album to date – Songs For The Deaf – came out a few years before that in 2002. I dove into that album head-first after seeing QOTSA play live. Their follow-up to that album – Lullabies To Paralyze – was just released in the summer of 2005. The big hit on Lullabies is called Little Sister, which features enough cowbell to make the likes of Christopher Walken content. Yet, it didn’t do as much for me.

Then Era Vulgaris came out in June 2007, and I was hooked from the first track. This was the band’s fifth proper album, and it was properly hard, grinding, gritty and weird.

This, here, is a formative album for me. And it was released 30 years ago now, on June 26th, 1995.

Though they have been one of my favourite groups since I first got this album at the age of 15/16, I have only seen them once live. That was back in October 2000, if memory serves, at Max Bell Arena. After the opening act finished, Ed and Tom came out and started doing their thing on the decks and synths. They pressed keys and twisted nobs and did whatever they do to make their music play, bouncing around and bobbing their heads the whole time. I did the same, seated in the side seats of the arena. I’ve never been a floor or mosh pit kind of guy – I prefer to take in the experience of it all from a safe distance. As a Fly on the wall, essentially.

Fluke – The Second Bite

YouTube Link
Spotify Link
Bandcamp Link

Many of my favourite electronic groups seem to come from England, and Fluke is no exception. The group was formed in Buckinghamshire (could that possibly sound any more English?) by trio John Fugler, Mike Tournier, and Mike Bryant in the late 1980s. Over their four main album releases, which came out between 1991 and 1997, the band became a founding member of a slew of different subgenres under the electronic music umbrella as well as a key part of the mainstream British Electronica boom in the 1990s.

Fluke is a band I have been meaning to feature quite a while now. I have enjoyed their music since I first heard Atom Bomb and Absurd in the mid-1990s. Then I purchased Risotto – the album the two tracks are on – and it quickly became one of my desert island discs. The best track on the album – out of an album full of great songs – is Kitten Moon. The track has a long, slowly building yet subversive tempo change in the middle that is almost imperceptible except for how your body starts bouncing quicker along with your head bobbing more aggressively, to keep up with the pace. This has been one of my favourite tracks on any album for nearly three decades now.

I would have talked about Risotto a long time back, except it sadly is not available in its entirety on Spotify or YouTube or any of the other streaming services from what I can see – at least within Canada. I have tried to piece it together on Spotify myself, with a playlist, from singles and tracks on compilations and other sources, but one song named AMP is just not on the service at all.

Devin Townsend – Empath

YouTube Link

Spotify Link

Wall of sound. Operatic vocals. The heaviest and hardest Metal. Beautifully deranged arrangements. There are many, many ways to describe the music of Devin Townsend. When you look at his entire career, or even many of his albums, he cannot be pigeonholed in to one definitive genre or style. Heavy Devy is simply Heavy Devy. Musically, Townsend is a master of production, guitar, and vocals in a way that sets him apart from just about any comparison you could attempt. The man is a musical genius on par with Trent Reznor, which is high praise in my books. However, Devin Townsend has an insane vocal range and self-effacing sense of humour that puts him in another realm.

If Pitchfork slags your album, that is usually a sign that it might be pretty good. The magazine has a penchant for being so over this thing before the thing is even released. On release, the music mag(rag?) gave:

Tool’s Lataralus a rating of 1.9

Nine Inch Nails’ The Fragile faired a touch better with a 2.0

Moby’s Play managed to receive a whopping 5 out of ten

The Go! Team – Thunder, Lightning, Strike

YouTube Link

Spotify Link

Bandcamp Link

I feel like I have done enough recent album picks for a while. So, let’s go back into my wheelhouse of listening to things that came out at least two decades ago.

Thunder, Lightning, Strike by the Go! Team was first released back in 2004. It still sounds like an anachronism: it could have been released by an indie band yesterday, or the back in the 1960s or 1970s. It doesn’t fit to a specific period or era, so it is always fresh and ready to be discovered.

The Go! Team is an odd project started by one guy – Ian Parton – creating the recordings and adding samples from different songs and live sources as well, compiling what would eventually become this album. The live band was actually recruited and put together after Thunder, Lightning, Strike was released.

So, what does this sound like? Imagine the Jackson 5 and the Ramones got together and made the soundtrack for a bunch of Peanuts cartoons from the 1960s. That should give you some idea of the crazy energy and genuine warmth this album exudes.

Thanks to tickets gifted by my aunt and uncle, my wife Kate and I joined them to see The Guess Who play at the Saddledome on Monday, June 8th. The four of us weren’t the only people there, as it was so packed it must have been a sold-out show, or close to it.

It was a somewhat strange experience going to this show. It has been a while since I felt like a young person at an event. That feeling was a frequent occurrence when I was in my twenties and going to whisky festivals in Calgary, but it is a rare thing now, at the ripe old age of forty-five.

The most difficult thing about the show was the lineup to get in. That luckily went smoothly despite the metal detectors constantly setting off from all the canes and walkers, replaced hips, and shrapnel from the Korean War the many individuals ahead of us had. I could smell just as much from weed smoke wafting around the stands as the last concert I saw at the ‘Dome, so that must be a universal thing now, regardless of age and demographic.

The opener for the night was Don Felder from the Eagles. He is still a solid performer and sounded great, though I am a big fan and barely know any of his music. He was, of course, obligated to end his set with Hotel California. There would have been riots otherwise, with the crowd of Boomers eyeing to tear down the Saddledome before the new arena is finished going up to replace it.

But I was there for The Guess Who.

This band has gone through quite a few iterations over the 60+ years it has been together, on, and off. The live band that is currently touring contains its two most famous members: Burton Cummings and Randy Bachman.

No, that sixty years is not at typo. Cummings – still singing melodiously at nearly 78 years old – noted during the show that he and Bachman first played in Calgary together in 1966.

Cummings, Bachman, and their backing band played through 19 songs in total for the performance. They performed 17 straight before leaving the stage only to come back for a two song encore before the lights turned up, and it was time to go home.

Jambinai is a band from South Korea – but they are about as far from K-POP as one can possibly get. There are no teen idols here – Jambinai is more of a post-rock band with some jazz and folk influences thrown in for good measure. The music Jambinai creates ranges from deep, melodic and introspective to noise-driven dissonance made with a fusion of instruments wailing notes that merge the sound of a bleating air horn with nails scraping down a chalkboard. In a good way.

When it comes to Canadian Bands from that were big in the 1990s, everybody thinks of The Tragically Hip. Others that might come to mind are Our Lady Peace, Moist, The Odds, Barenaked Ladies, Big Sugar, The Tea Party, and so on. It was a pretty good time for Canadian Rock and Alternative music, wasn’t it?

The Canadian band that been living rent-free in my brain since they first I first heard them back then is the Headstones. This band, along with Nine Inch Nails, created the music that helped me survive the (mostly self-inflicted) trials and tribulations of teenagedom.

I remember first hearing the Headstones music when my parents got a 24 pack of Labatts beer, and it had a compact disc inside. The song on the CD was the Headstones’ first single: When Something Stands For Nothing. I was hooked on that song from the first play.

And this one’s for nothing
And this one’s for fun
And this one’s about rock n’ roll
And comic books and bubble gum

Coming at us from Montreal, Quebec is Chill ’em all by DJ Champion. This album will turn 20 years old in November of this year. Crazy, right?

Even though it was originally released in the fall, there is something about the music that makes it a soundtrack for – and celebration of – summer vibes.