Popular Music 2006 Through !*@#Exclaim! (or, The Stench of Redemption)

There’s a big shopping mall in the suburb of Vancouver near where I work.  Around noon every day I mosey on over there to have lunch and a break from the office.

Often I pick up a free throwaway tabloid newsprint magazine on the music scene called exclaim! (or as stated on the cover page                          “!*@#EXCLAIM!”), published in Toronto, Canada.  It’s well written and comprehensive enough to be aimed at a college audience or young musicians.  I’m just a little bit older than that now, but I still enjoy reading about where pop/rock is these days.  This little magazine goes further afield than I do though…

The latest issue provides its picks of 2006 in different categories along with its usual raft of music reviews.  I thought I would ruminate on some of those and also make this an appreciative review of this shopping mall periodical.

My own musical biases may be indicated by my personal three top albums of the last 5 years or so: Welcome Interstate Managers (2003) by Fountains of Wayne, Yours, Mine and Ours (2003) by The Pernice Brothers, and “The Green Album” (2001) by Weezer.  These three shine lyrically and melodically, the people sing like they mean it, and they rock on top of everything else, which is all I basically ask for.

But to give you a small taste of different aspects of the current music industry as portrayed in exclaim!, here’s some ad copy for one album of many distributed by a company in Quebec.  The band is called Deicide.  The title is The Stench of Redemption.  Here’s what they say:

The Stench of Redemption is the next era in the rich and long history of the band.  With the new additions of Jack Owen (Cannibal Corpse) and Ralph Santolla (Death, Iced Earth) on guitars, they are hellbent on raising the bar when it comes to brutality entwined with blasphemy.

I was so glad to hear they are working on raising that particular bar…

This is not going to be a rant about the evils of death/thrash metal or whatever that is, or the music industry in general, and I don’t want this small excerpt to create a mistaken impression of exclaim!  But I am really curious about people who like this music (or say they do).  There’s a kind of crazed rebelliousness about it.  The natural evolution of a close affinity to this music would seem to be suicide or murder, or maybe suddenly taking up a really conservative lifestyle, which might be tough to do with all the tattoos on the face.

Here are exclaim!’s 2006 top picks in the various categories they cover:

In “Electronic” number one is Scale by Herbert.  His previous claim to fame apparently was a concept album about industrial food production.

In “Hip-Hop”, we have Fishscale by Ghostface Killah.  Most hip-hop or rap just sounds like prison music to me, but the reviewer calls this album “a head-spinning marvel of street story-telling,” and that’s probably where the merit of this kind of music resides.

In “Metal/Hardcore”, No Heroes by Converge takes the top spot.  (I don’t see Deicide anywhere on the list, although bands like Decapitated and Napalm Death are represented.)  One band member says of it, “I was trying to conjure up the feeling of shows we went to when we were younger.  Not the commercial hardcore shows that happen these days but basement and hall shows — raw, sweaty and very communal.”

Maybe there’s the secret attraction of this music, the coming together of the disaffected and the outcast, or those who posture as such.  Many may well sport the T-shirt I saw on a kid the other day: “All my heroes are evil.”

In the “Punk” category, the leader is Hidden World by Fucked Up.  That’s got to be the perfect punk rock band name.  A Toronto band, you can expect “a pulverizing swathe of feral cries and rasping overtones.”  I have a fondness for punk music, or at least the more poppy versions of it from bands like Treble Charger.  I admire the young energy, the sheer barn-burning, driving all-out tempo of the form.

Ah, “Folk/Country/Blues”… this is getting to be more my end of things.  Top of the list for 2006 is Neko Case’s Fox Confessor Brings the Flood.  Unfortunately, though I know the name, I don’t know the music, which I will correct one of these days.  The reviewer says of the album, “It is where like-minded musicians have come together and worked a magic… that takes bits of Americana, bluegrass, folk and whatever other genre the musicians were channelling that day.”

At “Pop/Rock” I’m home at last, only to find that the top album picked is Return to Cookie Mountain by TV On the Radio.  I’m so out of it, I know them not.  They are described as an experimental five-piece New York band who create an “apocalyptic soundscape of buzzing guitars, urgent, clanky percussion and swooping shards of white noise through which [the singers’] soaring falsettos… fight to be heard.”  I hope it’s better than it sounds.

I am glad to see on the list Beck’s The Information, which I bought recently and like a lot, and Everything All The Time by Band of Horses, which I keep meaning to get, but haven’t yet.

Then the tabloid goes on with its regular reviews in all those same departments along with articles about Web 2.0, history of the band Pulp, and how to find a good vocal teacher.  This is a good rag.  I’m happy to report, too, that there’s a review of the Pernice Brothers new album Live A Little, although the reviewer thought that “for all the impassioned playing, it’s a little too easy to ignore.”

For anyone interested, exclaim!‘s website is: www.exclaim.ca.

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