Album du jour #21 - Sticks and Stones

Ok, so I've decided to revive the ADJ thing, but in a different way. Before I was trying to give people a a feel for the weirdness of my music tastes by pulling up a random sampling, and also to force myself to pay attention to music that has been languishing on my hard drive, appreciated less than fully.

But I have increasingly gotten into checking out different types of music, so I didn't feel the need - and I couldn't come up with a damn thing worth saying about Air's latest album, for instance. Only the music I hated was fun to write about, and that wasn't fun to listen to.

So I'm going to shift from helping myself out by subjecting myself to different music, to helping everyone else out by talking about albums that I feel are tragically unknown; championing the subaltern, that is me! Besides, some people I had never heard of decided that my site was worth linking to, but only the music part of it.

Mocky - Navy Brown Blues (2006)

Allow me to quote Wikipedia's lines describing the twisted and sordid tale of Mocky's heritage:
"Mocky is a pop music perfomer (born Dominic Salole) in Saskatchewan who later moved to Ottawa and then Toronto, Canada. He later moved to Berlin, Germany. His father is of Somali descent but born in present-day Yemen, his mother is from England."

From a background like that, what kind of music would you expect him to make? Neo-funk/soul, obviously! But the word "funk" is so inexorably entangled with 70s cultural markers that it is hard to think about what it might just be. There are some bands that are doing funk that is very retro in style but very quality - Soullive comes to mind (I ran into a guy who played some gigs with them the other night). Mocky adds a whole new dimension to funk, however, which is why he was the perfect figure to work on Jamie Lidell's breathtaking Multiply, and to help fuse Lidell's techno inclinations with the strangely soulful potential in his voice.



Navy Brown Blues is not quite on the same level as Multiply - which I think was one of the 10 best albums in 2005 - but it is more accessable and uplifting. The best tracks are the opening "Tears of Joy", and those on which he has collaborators: Fightin' Away the Tears (w/ Feist), In the Meantime (w/ Jamie Lidell), and Elementary (w/ Taylor Savvy). Nothing really drags, except maybe the title track. This is just one of those albums that I can't imagine anyone really disliking, unless they abjectly refuse to listen to anything that doesn't sound like "white people music" (ironic given the ethnicity of those involved). On the converse, I'm very suspicious of any band that features that makes any reference to the arctic or antarctic in its name or song titles. This includes all polar phenomenon - the auroras, etc.


In any case, I am extremely excited by this strange convergence of Canadian artists interested in electronica/soul/funk, and I hope that the Lidell/Feist/Mocky work produces many more wonderful albums...maybe under the moniker The New Funkographers. That's kind of funny.

Speaking of things that people need to watch/listen to more, if you have HBO, then do yourself a damn favour and WATCH THE FLIGHT OF THE CONCHORDS. It is such an amazingly funny show. Basically it is about a band of two guys from New Zealand who live together in New York, and it might be the first show to really attempt the half show/half musical thing since Cop Rock. Except, this is about musicians so it makes sense, and it is fucking hilarious, so it is enjoyable. I tried to compel my roommates to watch the second episode when it aired on Sunday, but re-runs of cartoons were more pressing, apparently. It pains me the things that get watched on my poor second TV upstairs....

Randomness:

The new shorts that I'm wearing today have two beverage coasters in them. Why are there coasters in my pockets?!? I don't get this. Oh, and the coasters have recipes for tropical mixed drinks on them too.

The fortune cookie I got from lunch reads: "Life is like a dogsled team. If you aren't the lead dog, the scenery never changes." Which is definitely my favourite fortune cookie about staring at asses since the "Stare at ass - learn chinese, good bye" one I got four years ago.

I lost my only pair of glasses on the way to work today! That's great.