Hey Ocean! fills your guitar with pigeons

Hey Ocean‘s previous single, “A Song About California,” reached #2 on the MuchMore Top 10—an incredible feat for a band that is essentially unsigned (it shares the Pop Machine imprint with Said the Whale). Quick on the heels of that success, Hey Ocean! has released another video, this time for “Terribly Stable.” Unlike the glizy clip for “A Song About California,” the new video doesn’t feature the band at all, opting instead for goofy animation made out of paper cutouts. The cutouts are are only marginally discernible as human, meaning they can perform actions that would be to risqué if shot in live action: they get drunk, have sex (then film it), smoke from a hookah, and attack one another with a fire extinguisher. The video ends with a spiky-haired cutout sticking a bomb down the toilet, causing the building to blast off into space.

The song itself is a slightly surprisingly choice as a single, with dense, clattering percussion and funky strumming that’s a bit too fast to dance to. It’s not one of the catchier songs on It’s Easier to Be Somebody Else but it’s still a great tune, showing off Hey Ocean’s range and rhythmic virtuosity.

Click here to check out the video.

Also be sure to take a look at the band’s previous videos for “A Song About California” (here) and “Alleyways” (here). It’s Easier to Be Somebody Else is available now.

Hollerado’s new album still free, still kicks ass

The guys in Hollerado certainly have a flair for the dramatic: earlier this year, they released their (totally awesome) debut album, Record in a Bag, as a free download from their website. Then in February, they played a show every day of the month, rotating between the same seven venues (meaning the circuit was repeated four times). But their latest stunt is the craziest yet: at the end of this month, the band is playing a series of shows in China, starting in Beijing and ending in Shenzhen. It’s a crazy move for a group that is still unsigned, and hasn’t even done a cross-country tour since releasing its album. Still, I guess Hollerado is hoping to break into the great untapped Chinese indie rock market (that’s one 1.3 billion potential fans).

The band doesn’t have anything new in terms of recorded material, but I recently discovered the video for “Americanarama,” one of the catchiest tunes on Record in a Bag (and that’s saying something). The clip was actually shot long before the release of the album, and parodies the homogenized hypersexuality of American Apparel. The band is set up amid piles of boxes in a clothing factory, while revealingly dressed hipsters dance on top of tables. Dave Foley (of Kids in the Hall fame) stars, delivering a hysterical performance as the sleazy, sex-obsessed boss. The video ends with the guys stripping down to their Y-fronts for a photo session of their own.

Download: Record in a Bag

Beating like a hammer

After “Combat Baby” was released in 2003, an estimated 35% of Canadian women between the ages of 18 and 24 had a Metric button pinned to their backpack (citation needed). Unfortunately, the band’s latest single, “Help, I’m Alive,” is unlikely to return Emily Haines & co. to the same ubiquity they once enjoyed: the song is too dour to appeal to a mass audience, with lyrics that make Haines sound like she’s on the verge of a nervous breakdown the entire time (which, according to interviews, she was). It’s like an electrified version of Haines’s 2006 solo album Knives Don’t Have Your Back, an impression that’s confirmed by the acoustic version of the song, which is available as a free download from Metric’s MySpace.

The video looks like it was spliced together with minimal input from the band, editing together concert footage with random b-roll footage and disorienting computer-generated effects. Still, it’s weirdly compelling in a retro sort of way: some of the footage looks like it was culled from old black and white movies, while the simplistic effects appear stuck in the 1980s. The video bombards viewers with images of pulsing hearts as the song repeats its refrain, “My heart keeps beating like a hammer.” It’s a bit too literal, but it doesn’t a good job of recreating the song’s panic-attack inducing claustrophobia.

Check out the video here, courtesy of Stereogum.

“Help, I’m Alive” is available on the album Fantasies, which is out now via Last Gang.

A beautiful place to get Lost

In Canada, Toronto is about as far as you can possibly get from anything approaching a natural wilderness. And that’s what makes it so surprising that one of the country’s best pastoral folk groups, Great Lake Swimmers, is Toronto-based. On the newly-released Lost Channels, the quintet sounds almost like a Newfie band, especially on the lead single “Pulling on a Line.” With high, harmonied verses and a deep, sea-shanty chorus, the song’s strummy mixture of guitars and mandolins sounds inherently nautical. Even when singing about a dirty metropolis, as they do on “Concrete Heart,” Great Lake Swimmers always come off as lush and organic, thanks to the largely acoustic arrangements that include a sawing fiddle and the occasional banjo. Best of all is “Everything is Moving So Fast,” a dreamy, mid-tempo groove that belies its title with reverb-soaked arpeggios and soothing vocal harmonies from singers Tony Dekker and Julie Fader.

The album’s only failing is its pacing: by stacking the slowest songs together at the end, Lost Channels finishes on somewhat of an anticlimax. The ballads are unfailingly gorgeous, but they could have more impact if interspersed between the more upbeat material towards the front of the disk. Still, its a minor complaint, since the quality of the songwriting never lags.

The band shot an appropriately rustic video for “Pulling on a Line,” featuring Tony Dekker singing the song from within a boat in the middle of a misty forest. The scene is lit with antique lamps, and features a bunch of children dressed as animals. It might come off as a little creepy if only the song weren’t so gorgeous; as it is, it’s more A Midsummer Night’s Dream than Friday the 13th.

Lost Channels is out now via Nettwerk.

There’s trouble down on 12th Street

I know, I’m pretty much the last one on this bandwagon. Sam Roberts‘s third full-length, Love at the End of the World, was released close to a year ago, and its second single, “Detroit ’67,” hit YouTube in October. Sam Roberts has always struck me as the successor to the Tragically Hip and Sloan: mainstream Canadian meat-and-potatoes rock that doesn’t totally suck. It’s not perhaps the most adventurous music in the world, but it’s an excellent way to start weaning pre-teens off of mall punk and onto less prefabricated music.

“Detroit ’67,” however, serves a much greater purpose. The song is based around a pounding honky tonk piano riff and Roberts’ enigmatic, swaggering vocal performance. With bluesy guitar leads and a massive shout-along chorus, it sounds like something the Rolling Stones would have written in, uh, ’67. The title suggests that the song is about Detroit’s 1967 race riots, but its actual scope is much broader. It comes off more like a series of free-association references to the city, from the auto industry to Motown to the seedy back streets. The song traces Detroit’s history across multiple eras, from pre-European Chippewa settlements to the present day. Although his perspective continually shifts, it always returns to the chorus’s question: “Does anyone here tonight remember those times? Can anyone here tonight just tell me what they felt like?”

The video is a perfect visual representation of the song, with grainy historical clips set against modern day footage of Sam Roberts and his band/posse/ entourage walking around Detroit. Interspersed are shots of Roberts pounding back shots in a pub and leading drunken sing-alongs—naturally, since “Detroit ’67” is a quintessential bar blues song.

Love at the End of the World won the Juno for best rock album of the year. That’s a bit of a dubious honour, but congratulations I guess. It was released last May via Universal.

You’re Nobunny till some bunny loves you

Nobunny is to rabbits as John Wayne Gacy Jr. is to clowns. Not to suggest that Nobunny is a serial killer, since he (probably) isn’t. But like the infamous murderer, he takes an ostensibly cute costume and perverts it, making it seem more creepy than lovable. He wears a bunny mask at all times, but its white fur is matted and gross, its nose a wolf-like snout. The mask covers only the top part of his face, revealing a scruffy stubble that makes him look like he’s been on a three-day bender. His music is equally unkempt, as he plays sloppy garage blues with ultra-lo-fi recording methods and buried, distorted vocals.

Many of his tunes are Check Berry-inspired 12-bar boogies, but Nobunny is no blues purist. “BoneYard” is equally influenced by bedroom electronica, with a canned electronic beat and warped vocal effects that at times blur the line between human voice and instrument. Similarly, “I Am a Girlfriend” features tinny keyboard leads and sampled spoken-word clips—a refreshing change from the live-off-the-floor anachronism that dominates the modern blues scene.

Both songs appear on Nobunny’s debut full-length, Love Visions, which was released late last year via Bubbledumb.

All I need is this right now

It’s hard to describe Hannah Georgas‘s music without selling her short. Take a song like “The National,” the swooning centrepiece of her debut EP, The Beat Stuff. Over a plucked banjo and soothing, wordless harmonies, Georgas describes listening to the National (the band, not the CBC show with Peter Mansbridge as I first imagined) and hoping to reunite with an ex-lover. The song works within a familiar folk pop template without anything gimmicky or even particularly original about it—it’s just a flat-out brilliant song.

It speaks volumes about the strength of Hannah’s songwriting that “The National” doesn’t simply overshadow everything else on the EP. “All I Need” begins with gentle ukulele arpeggios, gradually swelling to a propulsive climax that is the closest the EP gets to breaking the traditional singer-songwriter mold. Hannah even lets loose with a few screams on the song’s repeated coda, “All I need is this right…NOW!” On “Mama’s Boy,” Georgas takes a cue from Alanis Morissette and plays the “woman scorned” card—unlike Alanis, she manages to do it with her dignity intact; its sneering chorus of “I guess it’s easy to get over an asshole” is the best romantic exorcism you could ever ask for.

She also shot a video for the EP’s title track, showing her singing the tune while walking around the seawall in Vancouver’s Stanley Park. Spencer Schoening of Said the Whale makes a cameo playing percussion (is that a bucket?) and being generally awesome.

The Beat Stuff is out now via Upper Management. She will be heading into the studio soon to work on her debut LP with producers Howard Redekopp (the New Pornographers, Tegan and Sara) and Ryan Guldemond (Mother Mother).

A back-to-school gift (six months belated)

Prairie Cat writes cutesy, twee pop songs, but his deadpan delivery prevents them from ever sounding silly or disposable. Even when singing quirky tunes like “Grumpy Forever” and “Trust Don’t Rust,” Prairie Cat (whose real name is Cary Pratt – get it?) always comes off like the straight man. I was a big fan of his debut EP, 2007’s Attacks!, but I hadn’t heard much of him since then, given his limited touring schedule.

I’m not sure how I missed it, but Prairie Cat released a free back-to-school EP last fall, bundling two new songs from his forthcoming album. The mini-collection is called Summer’s Done, and it includes the bouncy piano pop ditty “Just Cuz” and the shimmering, synth-driven “It Began/Ended with Sparks.” Both songs concern a break-up, but neither one sounds too bummed out about it; “It Began/Ended with Sparks” in particular features a campy but surprisingly sweet dialogue between a boy and girl as they bring their relationship to an amicable conclusion (“I never wanted to leave you”).

Download: Summer’s Done

There’s also a slightly creepy video for “Just Cuz,” featuring a many-limbed Cary Pratt playing piano, drums, and trumpet at the same time, while still having a hand free to feed himself what looks like a Twinkie.

There are no concrete details about the upcoming album other than that it will be released this fall via Fuzzy Logic Recordings, and a Canadian tour will follow.

Spent a week in a dusty library

Camera Obscura will probably never top the genius that was “Lloyd, I’m Ready to be Heartbroken.” It’s a near-impossible precedent to live up to, but the group’s new single, “French Nevy,” isn’t far off. It’s everything that Glaswegian twee-pop should be, with dewey-eyed strings, shimmering guitars, and wistfully romantic lyrics (“You with your dietary restriction / Said you loved with me a load of conviction”). Like the best moments of 2006’s Let’s Get Out of This Country, the song is pounding and anthemic, but its grandeur is kept in check by Tracyanne Campell’s ever-restrained vocals.

What really cements the song’s brilliance is the music video, which hit the net today via Pitchfork. Interspersed with band performance clips, the video portrays a whirlwind holiday romance with quick-cut clips, coming off like a series of idyllic holiday snapshots. The video follows the couple from first kiss to last, and despite having only three minutes to show the full romantic arc, it’s surprisingly understated; there’s no big blow-out, just subtle body language to show the lovers’ emotions. In terms of sheer poignancy, “French Navy” takes the medium of the three-minute music video about as far as it can go.

Check out the video here courtesy of Pitchfork.

“French Navy” will be released on 7″ and CD single on April 13. The full-length, My Maudlin Career, will follow a week later (April 20/21) via 4AD.