Still Livin' In The Past-2006, that is...

The Awkward Stage-Heaven Is For Easy Girls
So this-(drumroll, please) was my second favourite album of 2006.

Ok, The Awkward Stage (more like the AWESOME stage!)….there seems to be an abundance of adjectives beginning with “A”, that I have the audacity to use in conjunction with The Awkward Stage…astonishing, astounding, amazing, awesome…ok, well, maybe not that many. Bottom line is: I love them-and if YOU love smart, well written, catchy, pop songs without the boring lyrics you’ve heard over and over again, you may love them as I do. Let's start at the beginning-where The Moron's Are Winning (title of first song). The record starts with a chorus…I love when they do that!! Hook you in right away with “There is war on and all of the morons are winning, they are winning year to year”. Every time I hear this song I imagine an american flag swaying slowly in the breeze with George W.'s face super-imposed upon it. Another sparkling moment occurs in the song Sad Girl Radio with the lyric "sad girls hate the mirror for all it shows, and don't show/sad girls find comfort in familiar t.v. shows/sad girls got secrets that nobody else knows." It reminds me of my mother asking me just why I felt the need to watch episode after episode of the O.C. and all I could think of was that it was "comforting".
I talked to Shane Nelken after he played here in London last fall and we became myspace pen-pals, so I asked him a few questions about the album.

Mosey: I'm a little worried about the title of the album. Can I be a feminist and still like an album called Heaven Is For Easy Girls??

Shane:Well, you might say it is a celebration of sorts of female sexuality from a slightly juvenile male P.O.V. I have always hated the stigmatization of sexuality in women. We are going to reclaim the word "slut" then take back the streets. I like to think that there is a special place in heaven reserved for enthusiastic sex positive women who take pity on lonely perverted comic book geeks like me. In a nutshell, the song is a love poem to an adult film star named Janine.

Mosey: And Jeanine also happens to be the name of your keyboard player?

Shane: Coincidence...She thought it was funny that the title song of the album mentioned her name over and over...fate?

Mosey: Definately. What I loved most about the album was that these extremely poppy hooky songs pop out at you first, but after a few listens, you start to really appreciate the hidden gems like Sad Girl Radio and T-Rexia Nervosa...T-Rexia reminded me of the sonic youth song Tunic(song for Karen)which is also about Karen Carpenter. Were you familiar with the Sonic Youth homage when you wrote it?

Shane: I'm glad you liked the song. What I can tell you about it is I saw the Todd Haynes film Superstar the Karen Carpenter story and was really moved. I am a sonic youth fan and of course knew the song tunic but had not made the connection at all until you mentioned it. I guess i didn't realize it was about KC. Been a long time since i heard it.
Her story is very tragic and I'm sure there are plenty more KC inspired songs out there. what's your favourite Carpenters song?

Mosey: I'd have to say "Superstar". Does that make me lame?? I just remember being a teenager and seeing the video of the Sonic Youth cover with Thurston standing there with one of those adorable skinny mics in the video.... Tall and shaggy and dressed up in a suit and tie, I fell in love!! it was so sad and....heartbreaking....and...hot!

Shane:Mine is definitely This Masquerade. which i believe was a
cover but I love her version.

Mosey: Yeah, her voice was so haunting...it could be because we know now that she was going through so much, but it really seems like you can feel the pain in her voice.

Shane: Her story is very tragic and I'm sure there are plenty more KC inspired songs out there.

Mosey: Yours is definately one of my favourites! I loved the sixties soul-type chorus of voices!! it sounds like Karen is singing with all the angels in heaven or something!

Shane: Yeah, I originally had just one female harmony accompaniment and it was my friend Kurt (co-producer/engineer) who deserves all the credit for the choral harmonies. I loved the idea of having a chorus of angels blaspheme.

Mosey: Thanks for answering my dumb questions...by the way, I was checking out your myspace friends, and I couldn't help but steal Borat from your list...

Shane: My Borat is your Borat.

And since I'm not a real music journalist, I'll leave you with this quote from allmusic about the album(in case you weren't already convinced)

"If you can listen to the title track and not end up with the hook stuck in your head all day, you are made of strong stuff indeed. Heaven Is for Easy Girls is the kind of record that will leave you with a warm feeling inside and a goofy grin on your face; it also lends more credence to the belief that Vancouver is the center of the guitar pop universe."

Mosey's Top 10 of 2006-second installment

Author’s Note:
If you’ll remember from the end of my first installment of the top ten, I had a hard time with #5. I woke up this morning, after several strange, choppy dreams about wall-to-wall carpeting, with Kimya Dawson’s song, “Underground”, in my head, so I took it as a sign.

5. Kimya Dawson-Remember That I Love You

So, quick recap if you don’t know who the hell Kimya Dawson is: she was in the cool, quirky, self-effacing, self-proclaimed “anti-folk” outfit The Moldy Peaches in her formative years, who sang silly songs and wore silly outfits onstage. I love that they wanted to call themselves “anti-folk” when I could write an article on how Remember That I Love You is so neo-Bob Dylan folk, complete with colossal narratives and politics-on-sleeve lyrics….but I’ll save that for another post. For the record (tee-hee, pun!) I wrestled with putting the following records at #5: The Born Ruffian’s EP, Tokyo Police Club’s EP, and Cat Power’s The Greatest, but decided on Kimya because of the following lyric from the song “Giants”: “I like giants/especially girl giants/cause all girls feel too big sometimes regardless of their size”. WARNING!! These songs will glue themselves to the inside of your medulla oblongata, and you will not be able to pry them loose!!

(I inputed “cranium” into Thesauras.com and it gave me “medulla oblongata” so I don’t know what the fuck it means! Long Live The Internet!!)

4.Band Of Horses-Everything All The Time

Magnet magazine suggested we could call them “My Morning Jr.”, and the sound is similar to My Morning Jacket, but I think Band Of Horses comes off with a much more nostalgic, romantic sentiment. Let me paint a little picture for you: when Everything All The Time came out, in March of 2006, I liked it a lot. At the record store where I work, someone kept throwing it on, and as spring turned to summer, that like grew to love. When fall came around, the play copy got buried under piles of other c.d.’s, and like one of Leonard Cohen’s sentimental one-night stands, Band Of Horses became a sweet, covert memory. It remained thus buried, until one fateful evening while watching an old episode of The O.C….and my love for Everything All The Time suddenly came rushing out in a flood of love and neediness! (such is the perplexing nature of love!) I so missed those opening notes that signaled the beginning of the song “funeral” that I was almost weak with desire! Oh, Wherefore Art Thou, Band Of Horses, and when will I see thee again? I cried into the unforgiving wind. Luckily, I went to work the next day and secured myself a copy. Sometimes I sleep with it under my pillow.

3. Amy Millan-Honey From The Tombs

Okay, so I’m finally ready to admit that I’m not a huge Broken Social Scene fan….I liked the song “Lover’s Spit” but that’s about it…I would probably agree if someone said they were overrated…but don’t tell anyone I said that. I think that in the case of BSS, the sum of its parts is greater than the whole (whatever that means, I’m no good at math). I’m not sure why I love this album so much. The songwriting is solid, the instrumentation is cool…it’s sortof a country-pop album, but more rock/pop than Neko Case. Oh, I just remembered…she talks about drinkin’ all the time! That’s the country in the record! Whenever I listen to it I think to myself: “I have to write more songs about whiskey and wine!”. I get all excited, sit down with my guitar and…it doesn’t come out as bad-ass as the Jenny Whiteley-penned song Baby I. When Millan laments: “Sometimes I feel like my only friend is a whiskey glass”…I know exactly what she’s talking about.
(One of my favourite live shows of 2006 was when I saw Amy Millan at NXNE, in Toronto, sometime in the summer. She had a plethora of extremely talented musicians/friends backing her up for most of the set. The pinnacle, however, was the song: Pour Me Up Another, where she stood alone on an empty stage with her finger picking soft chords on her guitar. I remember exclaiming to my friend: (loudly, as I had been drinking), “IS THIS SONG ON THE ALBUM?? I DON’T REMEMBER IT!!!” 'Nuff said.

Another Author’s Note: (hey, I’m getting about as sick of these pretentious ramblings as you are, BELIEVE ME!) However I wanted to apologize for not including #’s 1 and 2, and give you the excuse that I’m tired…(and o.k. truth is, I want to waste my time watching YET ANOTHER old episode of the O.C.)

Mosey's Top 10 of 2006-first installment

10. Joanna Newsom-Y’s

This is one of those haunting records that grows on you--slowly, creeping up inch by inch. Also, this is going to sound extremely cheesy, but I think It’s helped me to grow (yikes, worse than I thought). Now look, see-(I start snapping here) it used to be I only liked pop music….there was a time that I couldn’t even follow a Bjork song… “where is this going?” I would ask myself, then throw the cd across my living room in annoyance. Now I feel like I finally understand! There are hooks, in the work of both Bjork and Newsom that seem to dig into you slowly instead of catching you quick and frying you up for dinner. My favourite part occurs in the last song, where Newsom’s voice reaches a feverish squeak while repeating the phrase “and I miss your precious heart” over and over again. Plus it’s got lots of harp!

9. Emily Haines-Knives Don’t Have Your Back

This grew on me too….so much so that after only a couple of listens, I actually convinced a friend not to buy it. I take it back! It’s not really pop music, see…the piano sort of meanders around. Sometimes chugging a rhythm, sometimes not so much. If you listen closely, between the low notes of the piano, you can hear the sound of a rocking chair on a porch far, far away. I love the darkness of this record, and Haines’ low raspy voice breathing: “this call costs a fortune and it’s late where you live” in Crowd Surf Off A Cliff.

8. Sufjan Stevens-Avalanche and Christmas Songs

I love this prolific bastard…though with each album he seems to get further and further away from his “plan” to write an album dedicated to each of the states in the United States-still I wouldn’t put it past him. Avalanche is the outtakes from his previous album Illinoise, but I think I like it better….it’s possibly more of a pop album. The Christmas album is not as annoying as it sounds…Stevens mostly makes cute pop songs that mention Christmas. It’s a limited edition 3 cd set with awesome packaging including stickers and the cords to play along with all the songs!

7. Jolie Holland-Springtime Can Kill You

The first song kills me-it’s about taking the bus home after staying at your (new?) lover’s house the night before and how everything seems to be drenched in sunlight and coated in honey. She’s “still dressed up from the night before, silken hose and an old parisian coat” sigh. Couple this with the pretty, drowsy barroom voice of Holland and you’ve struck gold. It’s dark and sad too-the song Stubborn Beast is subtitled pleading bitterly with fate and includes one of my favourite lines from the album: “But like a stubborn beast when the barn is on fire, I might resist you when you try to save my life”

6. Neko Case-Fox Confessor Brings The Flood

I’m pretty sure that Neko is the re-incarnation of Patsy Cline. I’m probably not the first to postulate this, however, but I never read music magazines anymore so who knows. I’m just realizing that the dates work-Cline died in a plane crash in 1963, Case was born in 1970. C’est possible! Cline was never punk rock enough to get banned from the Grand Ole Opry, I guess, but the 50’s were tamer times. So Maybe Neko is Cline crossed with the ghost of Sid Vicious. Case also has a heap of indie cred hip-ness by way of: first, going to art school in Vancouver, second: playing drums in the punk band Maow, and third: singing with indie-rock darlings The New Pornographers and alt-country heroes The Sadies. But fuck all that, this album is brilliant. Thanks to Case, people everywhere are holdin’ out for That Teenage Feelin’.

authors note:Mosey thought this top ten might be getting a bit wordy and hard to digest in one sitting, so she will hold you in suspense (that's right I'm grabbing you there) until the final installment....and also she hasn't completely decided on number 5...