Lesser (Known) Lights #7

Trans-Canada Highwaymen – Explosive Hits Vol. 1

I’m always a bit surprised when fans of a band don’t follow former band members when they set out on new musical adventures. If someone has given you joy as part of one outfit, it only seems logical to me that they might be able to do it again with another. Barenaked Ladies have 2.7 million monthly listeners on Spotify, and I think we can all agree that a big chunk of those people (myself included) are mostly listening to music made when Steven Page was the band’s co-frontman. (I wonder if there is still some bad blood there, since you would never know from the band’s Spotify bio that he was ever one of them.) Page on his own, however, has just over 5,500 listeners, and Trans-Canada Highwaymen – his supergroup with Moe Berg of The Pursuit of Happiness, Craig Northey of Odds and Chris Murphy of Sloan – has a mere 3,115 at this writing. And in the case of the latter at least, that means a whole lot of people are missing out on a giant heap of fun.

Now, even the idea of a Canadian supergroup seems pretty un-Canadian to me. Considering the gang’s middling commercial success, they’ll have to do until Drake, The Weeknd and Bieber join forces with whoever they pick to play George. (Sorry, Biebs fans – he’s Ringo in this scenario.) Mendes? Avril? Shania? Buble? My pick is Celine, medical concerns permitting – I’m pretty sure the album would be an unlistenable mess, but what a glorious mess it would be.

This album is wall-to-wall joy, starting with the throwback cover art in homage to those messily bright K-tel collections of the band members’ (and every other Canadian of the era) childhoods. After an entertaining opening track setting out a possibly fake story about how the band even exists, we get nothing but cover versions (my kryponite!) of classic Canadian pop songs of the 1960s and (mostly) 1970s. Part of the fun – assuming you share my definition of that word – was learning about the songs that were unfamiliar to me. But there was plenty I already knew here – many of them from those same K-tel collections – and hearing them in these faithful renditions was both nostalgic and revelatory. I never cared for Lighthouse’s “Pretty Lady”, but something about Berg’s clogged sinus delivery opened me up to its charms. Joni Mitchell’s “Raised on Robbery” is a honky tonk roof raiser, the cheese of Paul Anka’s “(I Believe) There’s Nothing Stronger Than Our Love” becomes less of a threat to your cholesterol level, and I apologise to Larry Evoy and the rest of Edward Bear for not recognizing that “You, Me and Mexico” is, indeed, a classic. And if they hadn’t already won me over completely, they sealed the deal with a high energy and not even slightly ironic take on “Heartbeat, It’s a Lovebeat” by, in the words of Mr. Pink in “Reservoir Dogs”, “Little Tony DeFranco and the DeFranco family”.

I haven’t had the chance to see them live yet, but I really hope their calendar and mine will align while they still feel like doing this. In concert, the band liberally mixes in tracks from their past bands, and any show where the setlist might include “Brian Wilson”, “She’s So Young”, “The Rest of My Life” and, especially, “Heterosexual Man” is a night that I’ll happily take a chance on. You should, too.

Lesser (Known) Lights #6

The Flashing Lights – Sweet Release

I’ve been listening to a lot of defunct Halifax-connected bands of late, having learned that the east coast city was a bastion of awesome power pop bands in the 1990s. While it’s given me a lot of joy, I’m a bit melancholy about it, too. Every time I discover a great Canadian band that passed on without me ever knowing them, my irritation grows with radio programmers of, well, pretty much every era. I don’t know if radio failed The Flashing Lights – I was barely paying attention to it when the band’s two albums came out in 1999 and 2001 – but someone did. Wikipedia claims they had a hit on modern rock stations in 1999 with “Half the Time”, but it was a quiet hit for certain. What matters to me is that I missed them, and in the musical wasteland that was 1999 – I mean, just read this list and weep – their music would have been much appreciated.

The songs have that easy grace that the best pop music has, a confidence in their quality as songs and in their execution as recording artists. There is certainly a commonality with fellow Haligonoans like Sloan, The SuperFriendz, Thrush Hermit and Cool Blue Halo, but name any great power pop act of the era – Teenage Fanclub, Matthew Sweet, Material Issue – and the echoes are there. They are a lot noisier than many power pop artists, and it’s that rock edge that distinguishes them. My favourite tune here is the album’s opener “Been Waiting”, with the rock star boastful chorus leading into directions to their gig that ends with a “left at the Burger King / Look for a murder scene”. Other great tracks include every bloody song on the album, and I refuse to pick another standout because it would only diminish the songs I don’t pick, and they deserve better than that. Their first album was also great, though a little rougher, and “Highschool” is my fave there. (It’s cool that the three guitarists let a guy their dads’ age play drums.) Just a fantastic band, and I only learned of their existence – and some of the bands they have led me to – because Spotify thought “Been Waiting” was the right song to follow the end of Josh Fix’s delightfully eccentric album “Free At Last”. And they were absolutely right, but I don’t even remember how I came to listen to the Fix record. Random discoveries can be the best.

Lesser (Known) Lights #5

Sobs – Air Guitar

I’ve mentioned Sobs before, and hopefully they’ll become big stars, so I want to say something more substantive before I don’t have a series to place them in. (Classic Songs of My Late Middle Age Revisited?) They’re an adorably dorky band from Singapore, making a version of pop that blends elements of bedroom, jangle and garage with the kind of awkward sharing that even Olivia Rodrigo in her most confessional mode is too cool and glib for. The lyrics are loopily vague at times, but generally fall into the “first love fears, confusions and disappointments” and “trying-to-figure-shit-out young person” categories. Front lady Celine Autumn’s voice is disconcertingly little girl high, but it lends credibility to her apparent bewilderment about the entanglements she finds herself in. There is no escaping the bubblegum of it all, and they can be kind of twee, but the guitars are just too forward to be truly twee. At times it feels like Celine is channelling the cultural appropriation version of Gwen Stefani, and as if to prove that is exactly what she’s doing, the record’s last track is a cover of Gwen’s “Cool”.

I love the bass line on “Dealbreaker”, and there are songs with tinker toy sounds, fuzzy guitars and the kind of shredding that comes from guitarists who feel obligated to give it a try but their hearts aren’t really in it. Sobs are too normal to be pretentious, and although the production is of high quality, it’s not so slick that you can’t imagine the teen movie scenario of a garage band finding their way when the nerdy girl steps up to take command of the mic. My favourite tracks are “Air Guitar” and “Burn Book”, which both seem to best blend the rock star dreams of the men in the band with Celine’s manic pixie dream girl knockoffs. But Celine is no one’s muse but her own, and she has a confidence in her artistry that her narrators lack in their lives. Sobs will evolve, and maybe I won’t follow them, but their hopeful-sounding pop is a perfect tonic for a grim day right now – just don’t listen too closely to her confused words.

Lesser (Known) Lights #4

The Go-Go’s – Swim with the Go-Go’s

Counting those no longer in use, there are between 218,000 and 470,000 words in the English language. Spotify reportedly has over 11,000,000 artists and creators on the service. Considering this ratio, the not unlimited ways in which those words can be combined and the inherent limitations in naming something (special shout-out to The The for finding a clever workaround), it’s no surprise that there are a lot of situations where two bands have the same name.

I happen to love the 1980s version of The Go-Go’s, but I’ve lately developed considerable affection for their early 1960s doppelgänger. The band is pretty unknown even for an active hunter of the obscure like me: most of what I know about them comes from the fantastic podcast “Bizarre Albums”, which describes how they became hired guns on an album aimed at capitalizing on the television hit “The Munsters” (some decent tracks, but the charms of its conceit quickly wear thin). Both records were released in 1964, and both are on Spotify and barely listened to.

“Swim with the Go-Go’s” is an absolute hoot. Although the sound and themes are pure surf pop, the lyrics delight in pricking the bubble of SoCal surfer dude narcissism that marked the hit tunes of the era. “(They Call Him) Chicken of the Sea” is about a guy who spends his time at the beach but can’t swim. The homoeroticism of young fit shirtless men spending all their time together is (possibly unintentionally) brought to the fore when they sing “If it weren’t for the girls, we’d have a lot of fun” in “At the Beach”, while at the same time the song plays up their aimless peacocking for those girls’ attentions. And “Peek-A-Boo Swimsuit” highlights the objectification of women in the genre, with the girl merely a vessel so the narrator “can be alone with your skintight polka dot peek-a-boo swimsuit”.

The highlight is “Goodbye Winter”, which satirizes surf music’s incessant male gaze eight years before John Berger and then Laura Mulvey wrote about it. The narrator is overjoyed because he has found the accessory he needs to bring back the highs of summer: a girl who will “wax my surfboard” (that could be a euphemism), “watch me swim”, cook wieners for him (another euphemism?), listen “to every word I say” and basically bury her entire personality in order to “join in everything I do”.

I don’t know if these guys were feminists, but they were definitely swimming in a different pool than the Beach Boys and others of that ilk, so the fact that the album flopped despite having great harmonies, the backing of a major label and the services of a multiple Grammy-winning producer is maybe not all that surprising. And that’s unfortunate: just like Emily Lou in “Goodbye Winter”, listening to either version of The Go-Go’s can chase away the gloom of a cold day.

Lesser (Known) Lights #3

The Bears – The Bears

In one of the mid-credits scenes from the third “Guardians of the Galaxy” film, the reconstituted titular heroes are discussing favourite musical artists. Adam Warlock has the most out-there choice with Adrian Belew, citing both his solo outings and his work with King Crimson. But why no love for The Bears? Their self-titled debut album from 1987 was a favourite of mine at the time, and when I looked it up again after the streaming era began, our reacquaintance was, for my part at least (I can’t speak for the band), a joyful one.

The Bears came together after former members of The Raisins joined up with Belew, who had produced the band’s one album, after King Crimson was, well, dissolved by leader Robert Fripp. The result is a sort of eccentric power pop: it has the power pop markers of hooky melodies, vocal harmonies and generally sunny-sounding tunes, but with the kind of weird little musical flourishes that one would expect from a band that included a guy who once co-wrote a song called “Larks’ Tongues in Aspic Part III”. (I also loved the stylized cover art – the chin on Rob Fetters is Tony Robbinsesque.) The album didn’t sell very well, and though CFNY played the song “Trust” for a time, the album didn’t make the station’s list of the year’s top 100 releases. Favourite tunes here include “Fear Is Never Boring”, “Man Behind The Curtain”, “Figure It Out” and, yes, “Trust”. I could live just fine without some tracks – it’s 36 years and counting of being mildly annoyed by “Wavelength” – but aren’t most records like that?

After 1988’s “Rise and Shine” also faltered commercially, they split up, but have twice reunited to release new albums and play some shows. And now they are largely overlooked, and not just by Adam Warlock: the band has roughly 1500 monthly listeners on Spotify, yet over 66 million people spent some time this past month listening to Ariana Grande smother drunk sparrows. “Guardians of the Galaxy Volume 3” had the chance to help change this, but dropped the ball. For shame, James Gunn. For shame.

Lesser (Known) Lights #2

We Are The Fury – Venus

Sometimes you come to a band in an unusual way. I’m a fan of the writer David Foster Wallace, whose 1996 novel “Infinite Jest” is one of those books which lots of people start but can’t finish. (It took awhile, but I made it to the end. Many have been helped in this task by the Infinite Summer challenge.) Browsing the Wikipedia entry for the novel, I learned about this band from Ohio that named an EP after it. The EP was great, so I of course checked out their only album, “Venus”, and was not disappointed. Rolling Stone called them an “Artist to Watch” in 2007, but the album either tanked hard or the band imploded because there was no follow up until they dropped a few singles in 2018/19. I saw it described somewhere as glam punk, and I think that’s spot on: there are echoes of bands like New York Dolls filtered through an emo sensibility with a hair metal band’s confidence and a garage band aesthetic, coming out on the other side with something that at times feels like The Strokes on Ritalin. They remind me very much of a band I already know, but that band’s name is just beyond the fingertips of my dwindling memory. There are certainly some rock star cliches here – yes, I’m pretty sure cowbell makes an appearance – but it’s done in a playful, we’re-in-on-the-joke kind of way. The record is frenetic, except for the obligatory power ballads, which are fine but don’t stand out like the bangers. Fave tracks include “Now You Know”, “Camera Tricks”, “Still Don’t Know Your Name”, “Saturday Night” and “You’re My Halo (Prom Song)”. A good listen from needle drop to the last howl: if you love Jet’s “Are You Gonna Be My Girl” (and who are these heathens who don’t?), this is an album for you.

Lesser (Known) Lights #1

Mike Viola – Lurch

It’s been barely six weeks since I first learned of the existence of Mike Viola, and two albums in I can certify actual fan hood. You’ve heard him already even if you didn’t know it: he was the voice of the lead singer of The Wonders in “That Thing You Do!”, including the Oscar-nominated #41 (I remain stunned that this glorious tune wasn’t even a top 40 hit) title track. I won’t judge his whole ouvre here – there are six more albums waiting for me on Spotify – but “Lurch” is a gloriously sunny pop record. He was pals with the late Adam Schesinger of Fountains of Wayne (who wrote “That Thing You Do!”), and sometimes plays in the same pool as FoW, with bouncy melodies and clever lyrical turns of phrase. He uses odd instruments at times – I swear there’s a glockenspiel on one track – but it is always in service of the song. I don’t think there’s a dud on this, but “The Strawberry Blonde” is a true standout, as are “So Much Better”, “When I Hold You In My Arms”, “You’re Alright But You Never Admit When You’re Wrong” and “Something Electric”. This is crisp, breath-stealing, should-be-on-the-soundtrack-to-an-indie-coming-of-age-love-story power pop, and a record that will end with you thinking of going back to the beginning to listen to the whole thing over again.