The end.

Well, this is the end of Music Is My Hot Chocolate. I apologize to all three of you who read this blog on a regular basis, but it takes up too much of my time and energy to write this blog as a daily expenditure of two or three hours. I managed to make it through an entire year, and by doing so achieved some measure of self-discipline (which is what the whole exercise was about to begin with), but now it's time to walk away and move on to projects that offer me more fulfillment. And more cash. As in any. Any at all.


So thank you for putting up with my raves and rants for the last twelve months. I hope you discovered some new music along the way, and possibly had a good laugh or two at the expense of some of the shittier albums in the last year.


Signing off,

Richard.

Viet Cong - Viet Cong

Viet Cong

Viet Cong

20 January 2015

Jagjaguwar/Flemish Eye

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

Calgarian post-punkers Viet Cong formed out of the artsy ashes of Women, a band that saw (possibly) a violent break up on stage during a show in 2010, and the death of guitarist Christopher Reimer a year and a half later. Surviving members formed two different bands: Pat Flegel formed Cindy Lee, while Matthew Flegel (bass, vocals) and Michael Wallace (drums) created the institution now known as Viet Cong, along with guitarists Scott Munro and Daniel Christiansen. Their 2013 self-released cassette EP, fittingly titled Cassette, made some waves on the college radio charts and was re-released the following year on Brooklyn label Mexican Summer. And now we have their first proper album, preceded by the single “Continental Shelf.”

 

The album consists of bleak post-punk, reminiscent of The Sound but denser and noisier, with occasional nods to the insular indie rock universe created by fellow Canadians Wolf Parade. Viet Cong would not seem out of place if included on a playlist titled “England, 1981.” Shorter tracks such as “Pointless Experience” and the aforementioned single are crisp little cookies that taste great but scratch your throat all the way down (that’s a good thing). The VC bring a noise that is visceral and cathartic, causing both uncomfortable tension and sweet release simultaneously. The album’s closer is its epic highlight: “Death” explores many different tempos and textures over more than eleven minutes, setting the bar very high for future releases by what is quickly becoming one of Canada’s great new underground bands.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

The Decemberists - What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

The Decemberists

What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World

20 January 2015

Capitol

 

3.5 stars out of 5

 

 

Portland-based prog-folkers The Decemberists have built a career upon elaborate artifice. Their albums are generally concept pieces, often with seafaring or military themes, in which leader Colin Meloy constructs elaborate first-person narratives from the point of view of characters who are, presumably, long dead (if they ever lived at all) from some sort of obsolete gold rush-era disease. As a concept, it all seems so trite and clichéd as to reek of bullshit, but Meloy delivers his insincere lyrics so sincerely that one can’t help but to be sucked into his ornate world of historical biography set to music.

 

As for the new record, What a Terrible/Beautiful World, it seems to be an attempt to recapture the magic the band had on their last great record, 2005’s Picaresque. This was also their last for Kill Rock Stars. After that they signed to Capitol, put out the incredibly dull and labouring The Crane Wife, and the rather forgettable exercise in loud(er) rock that was The Hazards of Love, as well as the mostly ignored The King Is Dead. In 2015 they seem to be again trying to recapture the form they had a decade before, and for the most part they succeed. They’ve traded in their Fairport Convention influences for a combination of Neil Young’s country records and, well, early Decemberists. The result is less concept and more pure songs, arranged and performed with exquisite attention to detail. Meloy—while he still enjoys weaving a good rustic tale of soldiers on horseback every now and then—throws himself into his songs, sounding less like an academic, giving you abstract concepts, and more like a singer, giving you an actual performance.

 

It’s a relief to see this once great band finally making baby steps back towards those qualities which made them great in the first place: melody and melancholy, with a healthy dose of knowing winks. While Terrible/Beautiful doesn’t quite match Picaresque in terms of immediate gratification and relevance, it’s certainly a good attempt.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Sleater-Kinney - No Cities to Love

Sleater-Kinney

No Cities to Love

20 January 2015

Sub Pop

 

4.5 stars out of 5

 

 

It’s been a decade since we last heard from legendary riot grrrls Sleater-Kinney, in the form of their 2005 monster of an album, The Woods. In the time since then, drummer Janet Weiss became a member of the Jicks, backing up Stephen Malkmus, while Corin Tucker put out two albums under the banner of Corin Tucker Band. And, of course, Carrie Brownstein formed Wild Flag with Mary Timony, and became a household name for her acting skills as the star of Portlandia. October of last year saw Sleater-Kinney release a box set containing their entire remastered discography, including the single “Bury Our Friends,” a teaser from the upcoming album, No Cities to Love.

 

The album will be out in less than a week, and, to be perfectly frank, it’s the best thing they’ve ever done. For a band with such a quality back catalogue, that’s saying a lot. Tucker and Brownstein interweave their guitar parts with a new urgency. Their compositions seem liberated. They don’t shy away from soaring pop choruses when the opportunity presents itself, such as in “Hey Darling.” If they feel like going intricate and complex, such as in “Fade,” they let themselves do it. If they want to rock out and get down with their social commentary rock ‘n’ roll bad selves, such as in “Price Tag,” they go right ahead and rock the fuck out. And—take this moment to let out a theatrical “gasp!”—if the want to put bass parts in their songs, they do exactly that.

 

Often when a band reunites after a long hiatus, it’s for nostalgia. Or cash. Or both. Sleater-Kinney’s reunion seems to arisen from the fact that its members had never stopped creating, and had so much energy pent up inside that it was bound to explode into a new album and tour. No Cities to Love will be among the top half dozen or so rock ‘n’ roll albums you hear this year, if not among the top one.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Panda Bear - Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

Panda Bear

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper

9 January 2015

Domino

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

The fifth solo album by Animal Collective founding member Panda Bear (né Noah Lennox), the partially eponymous Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper, was preceded by a mixtape called PB vs. GR on September 11^th of last year, as well as the Mr Noah EP, a pair of singles, and the interactive website located at www.pbvsgr.com. All this hype-building is fine and good for sales, but really doesn’t mean fuck all when it comes to the quality of the actual finished product. For an artist who is undeniably one of the most influential in pop music over the last decade and a bit, every new release is met with very high expectations from the listening public. His previous LP, 2011’s Tomboy, suffered from the dizzying heights achieved by the album that preceded it, 2007’s Person Pitch, as well as Animal Collective’s unparalleled 2009 album Merriweather Post Pavilion.

 

So how does Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper measure up? Favourably, but that assessment doesn’t mean equivalency. Mr. Lennox gives us some very strong psychedelic pop experiments, such as the tongue-twisting single “Boys Latin” and the meanderingly elegant “Come to Your Senses,” but overall the album has a sense of self-satisfaction, rather than the exciting experimental abandon of his best work from the 2007-09 period. I’m not implying arrogance on the part of the artist; rather, Lennox seems to be more interested in refining his technique rather than pursuing fearless exploration. That said, there’s some great stuff here apart from the busy pop tunes. “Lonely Wanderer” is a delicate manifestation of a desert world mostly without beats. “Acid Wash” is a warped Christmas carol, something you’d likely hear sung in a church by a choir if it weren’t for the polyrhythmic noise samples and gratuitous delays.

 

Panda Bear Meets the Grim Reaper is by no means a weak record. It is, in fact, a very good record. But it is doomed to live in the shadow of its older brothers, Merriweather PP and Person Pitch. If you were to approach it without context, having no familiarity with Panda Bear’s body of work, you will likely be floored by the imaginative presentation of Lennox’s delicious psychedelia. If you’re a fan, you probably don’t give a crap about this review anyway because you’ve already listened to the album twenty times in the last week and have made up your own mind that it’s another classic in the Animal Collective cannon.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Dan Mangan + Blacksmith - Club Meds

Dan Mangan + Blacksmith

Club Meds

13 January 2015

Arts & Crafts

 

4 stars out of 5

 

 

I first encountered Dan Mangan in 2006, when he wrote a comment on my MySpace  wall regarding my own music. (If you’re under twenty-five you will probably have no idea what I just said.) Back then he was a singer-songwriter largely unknown outside of his native Vancouver, but he had begun to garner a following among the Canadian campus radio faithful with his first self-released CD, Postcards & Daydreaming. After that he signed to Arts & Crafts and began winning Junos. Over the last couple of records he’s accumulated a full band to record and tour with him, comprised primarily of Kenton Loewen on drums, Gord Grdina on guitar, and my old hometown friend John Walsh on bass.

 

Club Meds is an expansive, multi-textured record that sees Mangan pushing his songwriting into new, often very intricate and sombre places. While in no way goth, the music of Club Meds definitely recreates the melancholy of those weeks upon grey weeks of ceaseless Vancouver rain. Mangan’s vocals are more emotive than ever, especially on tracks like “XVI” and “Forgetery,” which sound somewhat like the January pages of the diary of a seasonal affective disorder sufferer. But Mangan’s world of melancholia is inclusive, not alienating: he’s set out tea for two, and is inviting you to come over and discuss your troubles with him on this rainy afternoon.

 

If you’re looking for another cute, light, indie folk tune like “Robots,” you’d be better off just queueing up Nice, Nice, Very Nice on your iTunes and reliving the past. Mangan certainly isn’t interested in revisiting his former incarnations with Club Meds. There’s nothing light or cute to be found here. Instead, Mangan has created his strongest suite of songs yet, ambitious without being pretentious, and insistent without being bombastic. Club Meds further solidifies Mangan’s status as one of Canada’s better singer-songwriters.

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger

Belle and Sebastian - Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

Belle and Sebastian

Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance

19 January 2015

Matador

 

3.5 stars out of 5

 

 

Glaswegian twee institution Belle and Sebastian are about to drop their ninth album, Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance, and the world will go on as usual afterwards. I’m pretty certain that there’s no obscure Mayan tablet that predicts that the release of this album will trigger global famine, pestilence, and/or disease. Nor will humanity as a whole achieve an elevated state of enlightenment through dishing out a few bucks for Stuart Murdoch & Co.’s newest recording. Indeed, what follows that fateful day, a mere week from now, will in all likelihood fall somewhere in between these two possibilities.

 

So what’s the deal with Girls? Well, Murdoch has decided that Cyndi Lauper was right all along: they just want to have fun, by means of shaking their booties on the dance floor. Tracks like “The Party Line” and “Enter Sylvia Plath” see the former world champions of twee dipping their toes into the great, heavily-chlorinated, indie disco pool. At other moments B&S sound like a somewhat exhausted iteration of their old selves—not that they’ve run out of ideas, but that they seem audibly tired. Murdoch sounds like he hasn’t slept in a few weeks on several tracks, such as the otherwise majestic “The Cat with the Cream.” (Too many yerba mate-infused party drinks and all-night dance-a-thons, Stu? Perhaps some sort of Sundance celebrity orgy hangover? I understand. I, too, am forty-something and can’t keep up with the young whippersnappers anymore. Just accept it and advance to the next square on the great board game of life.) Elsewhere, Murdoch grows bolder with messages of overt Christianity with “Ever Had a Little Faith?” but this isn’t as bold as his wholesale theft of Arcade Fire’s entire bag of tricks on “Play for Today.”

 

Myself, I’m perhaps an oddity among B&S fans, in that my favourite album of theirs is not If You’re Feeling Sinister, but The Life Pursuit. I can tell you that Girls in Peacetime Want to Dance has neither the glorious pop glee of the latter, nor the beautiful handmade cynicism of the former. Yes, a band is allowed to explore new directions—in this case, over-produced, ‘80s-influenced, pop excess—but by no means is its fan base obliged to follow it down every new road. I can’t see any B&S fanatic drooling over Girls like they would Tigermilk. That said, the bongo-saturated “Perfect Couples” is a pretty great tune, a sort of hypothetical: what if Odelay!-era Beck covered Duran Duran?

 

reviewed by Richard Krueger