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Donovan Woods, Hard Settle Ain't Trouble, Picture You, Put On Cologne, Radical Face, Shane Burke, The Amazing, The Breathless Boy, Welcome Home
Let’s take a mellow moment and turn our ears to the acoustic side of poprock. Our four featured songs have a stripped down feel, unhurried, and certainly not cranked to eleven. The Amazing are an example of the neo-folk roots revival apparently going on Sweden over the past decade (I’m thinking here of other Swedish acts like The Tallest Man on Earth), though their most recent Picture You album expands their sound in a more poppy direction, both melodically and instrumentally. But “The Headless Boy” is more a throwback to their earlier material, a delightful, almost Donovanesque tune with some lovely harmonies in the chorus.
Donovan Woods is one those breathy singer-songwriters with whom you can pull up the covers and settle in for the night. And while he might sound a little bit like those breathy others, his subject matter is decidedly different, tracking a bit deeper and more realistically the actual ups and downs of relationships and life’s disasters or disappointments. His most recent album, Hard Settle, Ain’t Trouble features the beautiful and moving “They Don’t Make Anything in that Town,” which is pretty self explanatory. A great song exemplifying his Canadian roots (Sarnia, Ontario) is “My Cousin has a Grey Cup Ring.” But featured here is “Put on, Cologne” from his 2013 record, Don’t Get Too Grand. Why? Because it’s wonderfully weird. The title? No, I’m not sure what it means or refers to. All that is clear is that he has got a real problem with somebody’s ‘stupid European boyfriend’. It is a song that seems to really capture the irrational frustration of unrequited love.
Radical Face have put out a number interesting records, including their just-released The Leaves. But the song here, “Welcome Home,” comes from their 2007 album Ghost. There is something otherworldly about this tune, the way the march-like drumming and swirling vocals combine, which is probably why they used it in French TV’s The Departed, a creepy enigmatic (but riveting) show about people who died but somehow inexplicably returned years later. And I love the cover of this album.Welcome Home
Last up is Colorodoan Shane Burke, a man with an amazing voice. Generally, a lot of his material would not really fall under the poprock mantle, but “I Go Crazy” has a great rollicking feel and a trebly guitar intro and leadline that threads it way through the song. A worthwhile boundary stretch to finish things off. I Go Crazy
You can explore more of what The Amazing, Donovan Woods, Radical Face, and Shane Burke have to offer on their websites and Facebook pages.
I was minding my own business enjoying John D. Macdonald’s The Quick Red Fox when the protagonist Travis McGee pulled into Sausalito as part of his latest adventure and suddenly I was thinking of a song I hadn’t thought of for decades: Diesel’s “Sausalito Summernight.” I distinctly remember hearing this song on the radio in 1981 and playing it at some of the first high school dances I deejayed for a mobile sound company. Diesel joined the lonely ranks of Dutch hitmakers in the United States, groups like the Shocking Blue (“Venus”) and Golden Earring (“Radar Love,” “Twilight Zone”). Looking back now, the song sounds incredibly tightly focused and executed – the addictive lead line that propels the song never lets up, the multilayered vocals are drenched in reverb, and so on. It’s like a soft drink that is just too sweet. But I still love it.
Portage and Main is a downtown Winnipeg intersection, which turned 150 years old just last month. Portage and Main, the band, reside in Vancouver and sport a laid-back country feel on a lot of their material but “Better Man” breaks out from the pack with a Blue Rodeo-like punch: great organ, super electric guitar lines, catchy tune.
Whitehorse is the capital of the Yukon territory and the largest town in Canada’s north. It boasts 20 hours of sunlight on summer days. Whitehorse, the band, can be found in Hamilton, Ontario, offering up a sound that borrows from roots and vintage 1950s twang electric guitar but with songs that defy categorization. “Sweet Disaster” is from their 2015 Leave No Bridge Unburned album: a cool mood piece that builds from some sparse drums, piano and rumbly electric guitar into a breakout chorus.
Django Django caught my ear for their totally unique songs and sound – one part New Order bass synth, another part oddly retuned Brothers Four vocals, strung together with some killer Ventures-like guitar lines. It all sounds vaguely familiar while being completely original. It is hard to single out just a few songs to feature from their records, despite the fact that it is still a rather sparse catalogue (just two albums, an EP, and some remixes).
Everything Everything are another band with a unique sound that attend closely to songwriting, taking songs places you don’t expect. Their best material builds out a song from some interesting ideas, putting them together and taking them apart repeatedly. Key examples would include “Kemosabe” and “Duet” from 2013’s Arc. The transitions between the verses and pre-chorus and chorus of the former are exquisite, pivoting on careful vocal arrangements and the word ‘hey’. The latter kicks off with a string section that reminds me of Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” in general ambience, transitioning on the phrase “but I don’t know what’s real or what’s going on” into a very different sounding song, then shifting again into the chorus. 2015’s Get to Heaven continues to develop their sound with great singles like “Distant Past” and “Regret” but the song that really stuck in my head was the more unusual “Spring / Summer / Winter / Dread” with its intimations of both joy and dread. There is something 1980s going on with it, though I can’t quite put my finger on what it is.
Though it was released in May of 2015, is it really too late for Cheers Elephant’s “Airliner” to race up the charts? There have been slow building hits in the past. Crowded House’s “Don’t Dream It’s Over” did not take off on its initial release, only catching on with radio months later. “Airliner” is certainly deserving of such late recognition. The opening verse is delivered with a compressed vocal sound that channels 1970s AM radio and holds the listener in check until the chorus drops with a killer hook. As the band drops out momentarily, a rainbow-like harmony vocal sustains a chorus of longing for escape from the mundane ground in favour of the ease of flight on an airliner. As the chorus laments, “I walk around kicking trash up off the ground and I say I want my seat on an airliner …” The graphic for the single riffs off the 1960s ‘flight as party’ motif recently re-popularized in TV shows like Mad Men.
In the late 1980s and early 1990s I had the pleasure of acting as a roadie of sorts for a guitar-god friend of mine whose band had a brief blast of Canadian music fame. Bruno Gerussi’s Medallion was the brainchild of Vancouver Province rock writer Tom Harrison, an outlet for his love of 1960s garage rock and various forms of 1970s alternative rock and roll. In 1989 they were signed to WEA Canada and released one album, In Search of the Fourth Chord.
They took their name from Canadian actor Bruno Gerussi, who starred for 18 years as Nick Adonidas, a beachcomber on British Columbia’s coastline in one of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s most successful shows, The Beachcombers. At the same time he hosted a cooking show where he would wear a very large medallion around his neck, thus the name of the band. I was at the show at the Town Pump in Vancouver where Nick actually met the band and heard some of their music. I’m not sure it was really his style. As a band, BGM showcased all the classic 1960s and 1970s underground sounds but, frankly, sounded too good to be garage rock and too polished to be punk, while Tom’s singing was more like talking. Reading the liner notes for BGM’s sole album, the record sounds surprisingly coherent given the changing line-up of players. In terms of songs, both “Ginger’s Alright” and “Tell Me What You Found” stand out for me, the former for the tune and the latter for the musical arrangement. Ginger’s Alright Tell Me What You Found
BGM eventually morphed into Little Games, a moniker taken from the Yardbirds’ record of the same name. However, their recording contract with WEA lapsed and Little Games’ only record, Guitar Damage, would be released on the band’s own BGM Record label. And that was a shame, because in so many ways Guitar Damage was a more solid record. For instance, unlike BGM, Little Games had a stable line-up of players, Tom was actually singing more than just talking his way through the songs, and the song selection itself was strong in terms of covers and original material. I particularly liked the band’s composition “Muswell Hill Ray,” a name-dropping tribute to songs by the Kinks’ Ray Davies, as well as their cover of the Standells’ garage rock classic, “Sometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White.” Muswell Hill RaySometimes Good Guys Don’t Wear White
My new favourite music blog, 
But Spin-O-Rama, released in 2014, marked the return of the Primitives in all their glory. Roughly 30 minutes of all-new, original material in their signature chimey-guitar and reverby vocal style – it was like they never left. The opening track is the album’s title track: “Spin-O-Rama” is a classic Primitives’ arrangement featuring trebly solo guitar and a feel that is reminiscent of the 1960s without being reduced to it. A great single! Other strong, single-like songs include “Lose the Reason” (with vocals from both Tracy and Paul), “Petals” (which sounds like it fell off the running order of either of the first two albums), and “Dandelion Seed.” Other highlights include “Follow the Sun Down,” with its great chunky 60s vibe, and “Working Isn’t Working,” a droll response to the drudgery of conventional work, sung by Paul. Primitives’ albums always featured a song or two sung by Paul but Spin-O-Rama increases the ratio: of the 11 songs here, Paul sings solo on three and with Tracy on two. Additionally, Paul also sings on the extra track paired with the single “Spin-O-Rama,” “Up So High,” which is driven by a fantastic buzzy guitar sound. The album wraps up with an altered reprise of the title track in “Let’s Go Round Again.” It is refreshing to have such a great band return to active duty in top form. The Primitives’ Spin-O-Rama does not disappoint. Keep up with the Primitives on their 
I was one of those armchair parents with all the answers about how to bring up children before I was actually responsible for any. But parenting is more exhausting, exhilarating and unpredictable than anything I have ever done. Nobody really admits how complicated raising kids can be. Nor are we very honest about what childhood is really like for either the kids or the parents, as most accounts are either cloaked in denial or sentimentality. When it comes to music, songs about kids are some of the worst. Happily, the four songs featured here either commit to having fun, being not that serious, or do something unusual.
A statement that seems as obvious today as when Bacharach and David wrote it in 1965. As the crushing weight of refugees from the world’s war zones threatens to overwhelm the goodwill of the West’s welfare states, we need love to help find a safe space for the displaced of our times, the children, their parents, and those without family or friends. Our three contributions focus on that ever so scarce commodity that cannot really be priced: love.
Poprock Record 