Bonnie Dobson - Winter's Going

Wow. Never has spring seemed so daunting. Just listen to the song; it's a slow-moving anxiety attack. Through harmless work banter today, I was reminded of my few months on St. John's wort. I never needed it, of course, because I am not clinically depressed. But this was after 'depression' had finally been defined as affliction over emotion by people like Dateline NBC. Being naive, I ascribed.

This was my first year of university. Life became so much more... touchy. In a lot of ways. The side effects were mostly placebo'd I now realize, and I've never quite recovered somehow. There was a reason why I insisted on listening to "Dock Of The Bay" twice everyday on my commute.

The following September, 9/11 happened and Dateline began to fear-monger in other, more proactive ways. Lectures and conversations forever-after seemed to be anchored by a certain context. My campus life never really evolved. Short of three friends, two profs, and a pot smoking hamster, WLU held very little in the way of a social scene for me. More just sitting in corners, befriending smokers, or looking sad in front of the boarded-up noodle hut. I had better luck at Western mainly because I stole a pen almost everyday I made it to campus from the store my ex-girlfriend worked at.

Traditionally, I think of spring as the rebirth, but maybe I am wrong. In winter, it's easy to hide. Seems easier to act brash and knowingly fuck up. It's easier still to make excuses when the sun sets before the evening news.

And yes, I realize I've again said little or nothing about the actual music. In this case, I feel it's justified- the song itself is powerful enough that upon first listen, you'll hear it or something without needing my alliterated adjectives or pop culture pulls.

Buy Bonnie Dobson

Okay, here's my gimmicky plea: I (for now) have a surplus of time on my hands. I (for now) am feeling generous. I (for now) will send anyone of you who e-mails me, a free mixed CD in the mail. All you have to do is provide me an adjective, or a theme, as vague as can be... I'll do the rest.

This is an exercise for me to overcome certain aspects of self-concsiousness... seems silly, yes I know, but I have my reasons. If you're interested, e-mail me at kam [at] uc [dot] org with your address, and your adjective and I'll do the rest. (this offer is only valid for north america)

-kam

Lately, I can’t open a magazine, hit a website, or overhear hoboes talking without hearing about "disposable formats". Everyone’s up in arms about what is the disposable format – “make music online only; save the industry”, “crack down on illegal downloading; save the industry”, “think green, no jewel case; use an eco-pak”, “those blintzes were terrible”.

I don’t think CDs are disposable, but CD singles are done. They’re dead as…dead, and there’s no excuse for the screw job anybody growing up in the 90’s had to endure. I remember paying up to $16.99 for an Ash single, just to own three songs that were b-sides. Songs that, right out of the gate, can be deemed inferior to the rest of a bands oeuvre. People mention Oasis and the quality of their B-sides, but Noel Gallagher has admitted that he did that on purpose (saving some single-worthy tracks for b-sides), just so we suckers would believe that he was a genius. That’s also why, incidentally, The Masterplan is Oasis’ best album.

Anyway, I’m digressing in my first paragraph but, believe it or not, I'm going somewhere with this. The first time I heard Sloan’s “I Am the Cancer”; I heard the rarer acoustic version of the song from Sloan’s Live at a Sloan Party, a CD that was included as a U.S. incentive to buy their One Chord To Another album. I remember thinking “Wow, this doesn’t sound like Sloan”. I, at that time, had perceived Sloan to be…well…a bunch of dorks. When I bought Smeared and heard this version, I liked it more. It sounded “cool”.

Sloan - I Am The Cancer

It’s still my favorite song of theirs, so when I found a copy of the I Am The Cancer single, I bought it. “Why do you want that Sloan single?” the entire staff of Zero (a.k.a. Kam) asked. Two reasons:

1. One weird trend I have in “collecting” is that if there’s a possible way to own a single for my favourite song by a band, I usually go to great lengths to do so. I have no idea why. Perhaps I’m trying to prove to the song that I like it best. I want it to know, so I single it out, spend money on it, and…kiss it. Or something. There’s one example of this that cost me a little too much money, and anyone who knows me can probably guess what band it was and what song it was for.

2. Sloan singles are pretty hard to come by, and I dig the fact that they used to do stuff like this; the b-side of the single I bought:

Sloan - Rag Doll

They were flat out trying to sound like My Bloody Valentine. They were trying to be cool. That’s really endearing. Most people don’t know this side of Sloan, and that’s cool. The problem is that it seems like every time a band is trying to find their footing, or trying to sound cool, it’s archived on the goddamn “Waybackmachine”. I guess I’m just saying that no format is disposable, as MP3s are superb for their utter randomness, CD singles for their forgotten 4th tracks and CDs for their…omnipresence?

Except for 3” CD singles; that’s just fucking garbage.

Spend money on Smeared by a bunch of dorks.

-Kevin

Sometimes it is easy to capture an era. Like, if I were to pull up to your basement apartment, get out of my Plymouth Horizon wearing Hypercolor, while carrying an Oopie Ball, you'd be like "oh yeah, it's 1992".

Alas, I was not much more than an ickle firstie when I left my Oopie next to the electric heater one February evening, potentially starting a fire, and having my privileges to the Atari with the 300 baud Pocket-Modem revoked. Back then, the "internet" wasn't so much about blogs, or dressing up Zwinky, but more about ASCII art of the Snorks. So... I can't much relate to what 1991 would have truly been like for a conscious young adult, short of the prevailing trends in my brother's mixed tapes at the time, which may have just been Waxtrax! samplers.

I digress... my late teens were spent mired in the throes of convenience store retail. A Cold War radio, a Game Boy held together by scotch tape, and a rack of out of fashion schoolyard collectables (Pogs? Crazy Bones? Digimon? These words mean nothing to us in 2007).

I ran this store with two lackeys, Dave and Scott. We were literally the gateway into Elmira's nightlife, because that's where the townies came to buy their smokes and mixer. I've probably never been invited out more in my life. But we were happy to just stay in the backroom and play UNO. Somehow it was never dull, because if the drone of our rudimentary existentialism ever ceased, the hum of the Coke coolers kept us company.

It's safe for me to say that as the turn of the century loomed, my life was basically the film "Clerks". I can say this unabashedly because, well... who the hell would ever want to admit to that?

Soul Asylum - Can't Even Tell

"i know you know i wanna know how i feel"

One listen to "Can't Even Tell" and it just sounds like the nineties. You can feel the overcast emotion filtered through the rum & OK Soda piss breaks, even if you weren't there. The whole thing grinds like when you first learned stick in the mall parking lot after-hours that one Sunday.

See, that's the thing about the nineties, it was fashionable to be sloppy and under-produced, while still posing metaphysical questions like you were writing your crush's name on the school's brick wall with a stone. We began to realize that we don't really know anything about anything, and will we ever?

I'm guessing no. Pick up four. Then...: "UNO!".

Buy the "Clerks" soundtrack. Sit through all of "Violent Mood Swings" without hating the 90s, and I'll send you my famous banana bread recipe.

-kam