“We sing about lobsters.”

“Is that something you relate to?” I asked.

“No, I don’t like songs about things.” Said Owl Farm founder Chris Lyon in a phone interview. “I prefer just abstract lyrics, nonsense. Like, I’m just really wary when people try and sell you stuff in their songs, like an attitude or something.”

I suppose it’s just a coincidence that the Kingston based Owl Farm’s eponymous debut album features songs like, “45 Seconds To Lobster”, “Lobster Stomp”, and their second album, Don’t Stop, begins with a tune called “Like Water For Lobster”. Or is it?

Nah, Owl Farm just seems to have a fun, goofy vibe inherent in their otherwise seriously well written songs, leading one fan to describe them as “a mix between Frank Zappa and Tenacious D,” according to Lyon.

Lyon began Owl Farm in Fall 2007, when a friend of his working at The Tragically Hip studio in Kingston let him come in and use the studio when no one else was using it.

“I’d go in there and lay down tracks and I’d write a bunch of songs. As the recordings started taking shape, I just talked to some friends of mine I’d played with over the years and they got on board.”

The first Owl Farm record featured Lyon playing most of the instruments. Once the full band was assembled, they began gigging and working on the second album, Don’t Stop, this time featuring everyone on their respective instruments. Since it’s release, Owl Farm have been touring around Kingston’s neighboring cities promoting Don’t Stop.

“It’s two hours to Toronto, it’s two hours to Ottawa and two hours to Montreal, so you can kind of play all three cities, and four including Kingston.”

On Wednesday the group will play their second official Toronto show, this time at Rancho Relaxo alongside Truman Peyote and Two Year Touqe. Perfect timing too, since the band just landed at number one on CIUT’s top 30. Pretty impressive, eh? Almost as impressive as…lobster…yeah…

http://www.myspace.com/owlfarmband

This week’s band of the week is new but is basically just another project from an indie rock icon who’s been prolifically releasing work for the last twenty or so years. They’ve released two full-length albums (that kick ass) in something like a year and a half and they’ve got another one due in a couples months. This week’s band of the week is…

BOSTON SPACESHIPS!!!

The indie rock icon in question is of course Guided By Voices genius savant Robert Pollard. For the last couple years he’s been relentlessly releasing solo-albums that have met with little enthusiasm from the rock community. The last two Boston Spaceships albums find Pollard not simply back in form, but (I’m gonna say it and I mean it) in better form than ever. True, GBV’s Bee Thousand, Alien Lanes and Mag Earwig are hallmarks of lo-fi 90s indie rock, but I swear the last two Boston Spaceships albums Brown Submarine and These Planets Are Blasted are better than anything I’ve heard from GBV.

Regardless of what pseudonym he’s writing under, Pollard is classic Pollard. His weird/awesome delivery, his wacked out wordplay lyrics and kooky hook-filled compositions remain unchanged, but with Boston Spaceships the songs are longer (2:00 minutes average) and more song-like than the fragmented 50-second GBV snippets. The fidelity is a little higher, but it never approaches “polished”, and the band behind him seriously knows how to rock (though with GBV, Pollard was often backed by some pretty strong musicians).

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FJjpA5lkVAI]

What’s always been great about Pollard’s work is that it basks in the glory, freedom and weirdness of rock and roll and never gets mired in obtuse experimentalism or passing trends. While the rest of indie-rock might be jerkin’ around with glockenspiels, computerized drum-machine beats, vocoders and sampling (and true, many artists jerking around with the aforementioned have produced some seriously cool music), Pollard’s just kept pumping out smashing riffs, infectious choruses and all-around damn good songs. While no one can ignore the change that comes with the passage of time, with enough talent and chutzpa, some can withstand it and still be awesome. Pollard and his Boston Spaceships so totally qualify.

http://www.myspace.com/bostonspaceships

http://www.bostonspaceships.com/

Last night’s Still Life Still album release show at The Horseshoe really did feel like a momentous occasion of sorts. The Horseshoe was packed, Kevin Drew was there along with most of the cooler people in Toronto and magic was in the air. Not to mention, I don’t think I’ve ever seen as many beautiful indie chicks in one room as I did last night. It was seriously like…damn. Even the show’s host People Of Canada joked at one point, “I was asked to host the Still Life Still show and I said, “Those are the guys that, like, all the beautiful girls come see, right? Yeah, I’ll think about it.”" So someone yells, “play the song you wrote for your girlfriend.” And he did (very cute song, btw).

I am soooo sorry I missed Boxes and Bags, if anyone doesn’t know that they’re awesome at this point then just know that they are awesome and you should totally go to their next show cuz it’ll be awesome.

I made it in time to see Dinosaur Bones and they played a solid set. Not as good as their incredible NXNE performance but still very solid. After the set I was talking to lead singer Ben Fox for a bit and all these girls kept coming over to talk to him so I had to head off and bug other people between sets (like Simone from Audio Blood Media – btw, did you know she just can’t resist guys with beards? I mean, take a look at her ex…)

Still Life Still’s crowd was huge and impenetrable. The band played a pretty sick set. “T-Shirts” and “Pastel” in particular had the crowd going nuts, jumping around, dancing onstage, doing a little moshing at the front, it was intense. They played some strange, slow song for the encore that ended with everyone singing along with a line that was something like, “you should’ve fucked me.” They really did look like rockstars up onstage, it felt like they’d “made it” to some extent. It was a beautiful thing to see them get to where they deserved to be after 10 years together.

After the show a bunch of us made it over to Ben’s place around Dundas West where everyone chilled, talked, danced, broke bottles, wore cool hats, and played Snakes and Ladders.

I left the house at about 6:50 hoping to get a haircut at Yonge and Lawrence cuz my Jew-fro is starting to fro out at the sides. I got down there to find the place closed, as I should have expected it to probably be at 7:30 pm on a Wednesday. I was also planning to go postering for my show on Sept. 2nd but that got moved to today also because someone told me to go to a copying place that was also closed and so I should just go tomorrow (which is now today). So yeah, nothing got done. So now on to my night: my choices were Sneaky Dees for What’s Poppin’ or Horseshoe for The Balconies, who’s myspace I had checked out and been impressed by. Guess which won?

This band of the week are a bunch of boys from this great city of ours, Toronto. Made up of several talented persons who have been working around the scene for quite a couple years, this band is finally ready to raise themselves up to meet the national (and hopefully, soon, international) consciousness as a musical force to be reckoned with. With grand melodies and an even grander name, the band of the week is…

I wonder if in certain situations, it’s more profitable to make a movie so horrible that it’s actually hilarious than it is to make one that’s actually good. The story behind The Room is that this dude named Tommy Wiseau somehow found six million dollars to make this movie which he directed, wrote, produced and starred in. It was released in 2003 and has since developed a cult following for being hilariously awful and nonsensical. At screenings, audience members will often yell out lines at the movie, sometimes pointing out absurdities (“…the candles” -what candles?! -”…the music” -what music?!) or such, kind of like Rocky Horror. It premiered last month at The Royal and was brought back for an August show after the first screening was a big success.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sOwgN-APgAQ]

Still Life Still

Girl Come Too

(Arts and Crafts; 2009)

7.9/10.0

Two years ago I was in a band called The Fancy Claps, and one night we were playing a benefit show at The Cat’s Eye, a small U of T venue near Museum station. The band on the bill after us was called Still Life Still. I knew absolutely nothing about them. After we’d finished our set, my bandmates left and my friends and I were about to, but for some reason, I thought I’d stick around and see just one song by this band to see if they were any good. And that was all it took.

Not only did I stay and dance throughout the entire set, but after they finished, I went up, met the band, and told them I thought they were amazing and that I wanted to join. Unfortunately, lead singer/guitarist Brendan Saarinen-Pernar didn’t let me, as he was happy with the lineup as it was and I figured that was alright, considering I had my own music to work on anyways. So I hung on as a fan, following them as they went from playing coffee shops out in who knows where to the Drake Hotel to NXNE showcases alongside The Stills and Most Serene Republic. And now I’m sitting here in my room in Thornhill listening to their debut album, Girls Come Too, released by Arts and Crafts, the label they were seemingly destined to be on.

So, while there was no danger of Grubtunes giving Girls Come Too a bad review unless producers Kevin Drew and Martin Davis Kinack totally wrangled the band’s sound, this is still a review and not just my heaping praise upon the band. Thankfully though, Drew and Davis Kinack did an amazing production job and SLS sound better than ever. Not that SLS don’t sound great live, but Drew and Kinack take the band’s sound and throw it through an indie-rock kaleidoscope, colouring the album with gorgeous, dreamy textures evocative of My Bloody Valentine and (expectedly) Broken Social Scene, mixed to subtle, scrappy perfection by the always-incredible Noah Mintz.

Fans of SLS already know and love most of the songs on the album: the spacey, ambient “Planets”, the sex-istentialist “Danse Cave”, the frantic romantic “Knives In Cartoons”, the bouncy pop about messy love of “T-Shirts” and the post-millennial brand of longing for human connection in the desperate “Pastel”. The lesser-to-unknown tracks keep in line for the most part with SLS’s 90s guitar-heavy, synth-padded, warm, bedroom comfort sound, though “Kid” stands out from the pack with Johnny Marr-style guitars and Saarinen-Pernar’s most narrative-like lyrics as opposed to his usual impressionistic poetry splotches about sex and life in the city. “Wild Bees” is also notable for its fragile vocals and some of the album’s most striking lyrics, like, “You could pull the curtains/ Right around your face/ If we’re all just wild wild wild wild bees/ Trying to make a home and taste that honey.”

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zzteOrNyJTg]

The only flaw – if it even is a flaw, particularly in the digital age – of Girls Come Too, is that it feels more like a well-assembled compilation than a start-to-finish album. The mix of pop-driven and more-ambient songs gives Girls Come Too variety, but perhaps because the album is made up of numerous cherry picked songs written over the span of several years, it never feels entirely unified. Even so, when the songs cherry picked are as strong as these, it’s hard to lodge much of a complaint.

Still Life Still are still a young band, despite the fact that they’ve been together for a solid decade, and this, their first album, is likely only setting the stage for a long and fruitful career, the way the debuts of all the lasting great indie bands have. Girls Come Too marks not only the grand arrival of one of the best band’s Toronto has produced yet (no easy statement in 2009), but the official arrival of the next generation of Toronto’s music scene that supported and have been supported by SLS for years now. If it’s this good at the start, I can only imagine what heights it’ll reach in the future.

Still Life Still will be playing an album release show at The Horseshoe on Friday, August 28th. Those who pre-order the album now will be put on the guestlist.

http://www.myspace.com/stilllifestill

Click here to buy Girls Come Too from the Arts and Crafts online store.

-”What do we want!?”