TGIF Hodge Podge – Scarecrow Boat + Royal City + Wilco
Memorial Day weekend is finally here. Hopefully all of you have plenty of parties and BBQ’s to attend to this weekend, and it’s likely that everyone reading this today has already checked out mentally and is ready for the weekend to arrive. In observance of that, and due to the fact that I have a huge job interview to prepare for later this afternoon, today’s Hodge Podge is going to be a brief affair. Fear not, though, because I still have a couple of kick-ass tracks for you to download that should help get you in a weekend state of mind.
Before I get into “real” music that is actually “relevant,” I wanted to take a second to mention a fictitious band that captured my attention recently. The band I speak of is Scarecrow Boat (or is it Mouse Rat?) from the NBC comedy Parks and Recreation. Unfortunately the show has gotten a bit of a bad rap, and I’ll be the first to admit that I was one of the haters after the first couple of episodes. Since then things have really picked up, and the season finale that I finally got around to watching last night on the DVR was absolutely hilarious. Those of you who watch the show probably got a kick out of the use of Andy’s band to poke a bit of fun at popular music; I know I did. For those who don’t watch, I kindly ask you to forget what you are about to listen to because it is admittedly terrible. But in any event, just for fun, here is a download of Scarecrow Boat’s “hit,” “The Pit.” Enjoy. Or not.
Alt-country has come a long way as a genre over the last several years, at least as it pertains to “indie” artists. Sure, it has always been around, but not too long ago it was Whiskeytown, Uncle Tupelo, and just a handful of other relevant acts falling wholly under the moniker. Lately it seems as though alt-country has taken over the indie world, with seemingly every other artist you come across drawing roots from the genre. Personally I have always been a closet fan of country music, so I have no problem at all with this phenomenon, but I can’t help but notice how much the lines between country and rock have been blurred as a result. A lot of popular indie acts have been skewing far more to the “country” side of things and all but dropping the “alt” portion. It’s a bit ironic to me since I grew up listening to a lot of metal, and any good metal head from the 80’s knows that country is the antithesis of rock music (at least what I listened to as a child, with the ideology of country being in stark contrast to the excess and glam of 80’s hair metal). But like I said, I was always a country fan on the inside, so I’ll take it.
That brief discussion of the gentrification of country music (is country the new rock??) leads me to the first track of the day. Royal City was a band that was way ahead of their time, having been straddling and sometimes crossing the line between rock and country long before the term alt-country was in the mental dictionary of hipsters everywhere. Formed in Guelph, Ontario in 1999 as the brainchild of Jim Guthrie (who has since played with Islands and Human Highway) and former punker Aaron Riches, the band later moved on to Toronto where the legend truly began to take root. The band put out three under the radar releases between 2000 and 2004 before disbanding for good. It’s a real shame they aren’t still making music together, because they are the kind of band that would be far more popular today than they were while they were still around. Luckily for those of us who missed them the first time around, Asthmatic Kitty is releasing a retrospective spanning the band’s entire career that is set to release on June 23rd. Now is the perfect time to get into a band that you should have been listening to for years. When your friends ask about them, just pretend you knew the whole time. I won’t tell.
Royal City – “Can’t You Hear Me Calling”
Last week’s Wilco rant resulted in some minor backlash from a few readers as well as from some personal friends of mine. Not to mention the slightly discourteous comment that one reader left for me over the weekend. Not that I feel the need to appease the Wilco-loving masses or to backtrack on what I wrote previously, but I want to reiterate that I do like the band. It’s just that I don’t think that they are different from or better than any of the other bands that I enjoy listening to. In any event, listening to the stream of their new album that was streaming last week inspired me to go back and revisit some of their older work that had been wasting away in my iTunes library. When digging through my own personal Wilco archives, one song always seems to come to mind as an all-time favorite track. During the summer of 2002, shortly after the release of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, I became addicted to “Jesus, Etc.” Something about the song’s quiet beauty always stuck with me, and the line “The last cigarette is all you can get, turning your orbit around” is a favorite lyric of mine. So to conclude the day, I leave you with my personal favorite Wilco tune; a spectacular track from a pretty decent (but not legendary) band.
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