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ForeverAutumn
04-04-2005, 10:28 AM
A pretty disappointing show, in my opinion. Many of the awards were given outside of the televised show. Best Artist not worthy of television? Huh? :confused:

The highlight of the show was kd lang. What a set of chops this woman has! Why I don't own any of her CDs is beyond me. I'm going to have to change that very soon. She did a fantastic rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that brought the house down. Followed by Neil Young's Helpless. Sung better than Neil could have sung it IMHO. A wonderful tribute to Neil, who couldn't be there. And, a perfect choice for the location, Winnipeg (or as we Canucks affectionately refer to it...Winterpeg).

There was a very good tribute to The Tragically Hip who were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. A video of many Canadian artists and fans (and Prime Minister Martin) paying tribute to The Hip and congratulating them on this honour. My favourite moment in the video was when Barenaked Ladies referred to The Hip as their "Older Stoner Brothers". :) The Hip then sang two songs. Well done.

I don't understand how Alexisonfire won Best NEW Group, when they have two CDs under thier belt...the first one released in 2003. :confused:

Some folks around here may find interest in that Fiest (Leslie Fiest), previously a member of Broken Social Scene, walked away with two awards...New Artist of the year and Alternative Album of the year.

All in all, a pretty ho-hum event. If not for kd lang and The Tragically Hip, it would have been a total waste of time.

Entertainment Factor = 2.5 Smileys (only 1.5 if you discount kd's performance)
:D :D :)

Davey
04-04-2005, 10:44 AM
Did any Canadians watch the Juno Awards?
Hehehe, probably not many if kd lang is the best you can get to show ;)

Just kidding! She is a very fine singer, though I only have one of her CDs, the big popular mega million selling one with "Constant Craving" on it. She does do a knockout killer song with Jane Siberry that I love to death called "Calling All Angels", originally for the Until The End of the World soundtrack, but a more poduced version subsequently appeared on her most excellent When I Was A Boy CD a couple years later. Our New Zealand buddy chrisnz managed to get that version voted onto Volume 2 of our very first Rave Recs group comp.

BTW, I know it never was a big hit with you, but since you mentioned them I was just listening to You Forgot It In People this weekend and that is such a great album, still. Can't wait for the new Broken Social Scene. Also listened to another Canadian band from the left coast that a couple of us have been enjoying the last couple months, Black Mountain. Very cool sound with a lot of Led Zep and Stones and Mountain and Velvet Underground influences all distilled through a more modern stoner rock view. But definitely not too modern :)

Ex Lion Tamer
04-04-2005, 11:52 AM
A pretty disappointing show, in my opinion. Many of the awards were given outside of the televised show. Best Artist not worthy of television? Huh? :confused:

The highlight of the show was kd lang. What a set of chops this woman has! Why I don't own any of her CDs is beyond me. I'm going to have to change that very soon. She did a fantastic rendition of Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah that brought the house down. Followed by Neil Young's Helpless. Sung better than Neil could have sung it IMHO. A wonderful tribute to Neil, who couldn't be there. And, a perfect choice for the location, Winnipeg (or as we Canucks affectionately refer to it...Winterpeg).

There was a very good tribute to The Tragically Hip who were inducted into the Canadian Music Hall of Fame. A video of many Canadian artists and fans (and Prime Minister Martin) paying tribute to The Hip and congratulating them on this honour. My favourite moment in the video was when Barenaked Ladies referred to The Hip as their "Older Stoner Brothers". :) The Hip then sang two songs. Well done.

I don't understand how Alexisonfire won Best NEW Group, when they have two CDs under thier belt...the first one released in 2003. :confused:

Some folks around here may find interest in that Fiest (Leslie Fiest), previously a member of Broken Social Scene, walked away with two awards...New Artist of the year and Alternative Album of the year.

All in all, a pretty ho-hum event. If not for kd lang and The Tragically Hip, it would have been a total waste of time.

Entertainment Factor = 2.5 Smileys (only 1.5 if you discount kd's performance)
:D :D :)

Saw it, hoping that The Arcade Fire would win Best Alternative album/group (not sure what the award was) but that award wasn't televised and I gather that Feist woman won. Did you see her performance? Just her and an electric guitar singing pretty unintelligibly...then she stops about a minute and a half in, has a 15-second conversation with what I guess was a sound guy, then continues with no discernable difference in sound quality . Not sure what it was about. It sure didn't make me want to rush out and buy an album. I was curious enough to check her out at allmusic.com, where aI found a quite favourable review.

Generally thought the show sucked. The MC was terrible, the crowd was over-the-top excited to the point of embarrasment. Never much of a Hip fan, so I found the tribute to them was mostly goofy, I mean Wayne Gretzky with a recorded message, Paul Martin??? what the f*ck is he doing? You think he's a Hip fan, or maybe just a cheap opportunist? And Gord Downey struck me as pretentious almost to Bono-esque proportions. kd was in good voice as usual, and she did sing "Helpless" better than Neil ever could, but then again, I could probably sing it better than Neil ever could. But couldn't she have put some shoes on? It was nice to see Ron Sexsmith win for songwriter of the year, but then they ruin it by not giving him adult-alternative (whatever that means) album of the year. And is Billy Talent really the best we can do? The answer of course is no! But just like the U.S. music industry, the best music is largely ignored in this country too. I find it ironic that this show was on the same day that Time Magazine (Canada) puts The Arcade Fire on the cover and trumpets Canada's indie-bands as the hottest in the world, and then they are ignored by the Juno commitee.

Davey
04-04-2005, 12:07 PM
Saw it, hoping that The Arcade Fire would win Best Alternative album/group....
Hey, have you ever been watching TV and a song comes on and catches you so much by surprize that it takes a minute to realize who it is? Yeah, me too!

Hehehe, have you seen the video for "Rebellion (Lies)"? Friday night I manged to catch this season's final episode of Battlestar Galactica (which turned into a very good series I think) over on the SciFi channel and was cruising through the channels to see if anything else would catch my eye, and all of a sudden I'm watching this surreal video of Arcade Fire walking down the street with some kids, cutting to shots of them playing in a house, and lots of weird senseless stuff going on, slightly reminiscent of Monty Python or something. Pretty odd, but I wanna see it again. I guess it just premiered on MTV. You know, they're always right on top of the most happening stuff. Well, within a year anyway ;)

http://www.mtv.com/music/video/premiere/arcade_fire/images/376x140.jpg
Edit: so I just looked it up at emptv and so can you - actually is kind of cool but I can't crank it at work...and it does beg to be cranked!
http://www.mtv.com/music/video/premiere/arcade_fire/

audiobill
04-04-2005, 02:53 PM
Nice review of the show that I happened to miss.

k.d. really does have superb "chops". She's one of my wife's favourite singers.

Personally, when I found out uncle Neil was ill and would not be at the show; I disconnected; the awards show fell off of my radar.

Sounds like some of the best awards were kept off of the tele anyway -- too bad.


Cheers,
Bill

N.P., Ray Lamontagne's "Burn" (great song, btw :) )

ForeverAutumn
04-04-2005, 03:30 PM
And is Billy Talent really the best we can do?

I don't understand the Juno Committee's infatuation with Billy Talent. My husband and I were actually discussing this last night during the show. I was peeved when they won New Group last year. And to give them both Group of the Year and Album of the Year this year just makes no sense to me. We have way better talent than that in this country. Unfortunately, that talent wasn't even recognized with nominations, much less wins. But the Juno nominations are based on record sales and there is a massive marketing wheel rolling along behind Billy Talent. I don't know why, but there it is.

I totally agree with your assessment of Gord Downie. There's a time and place and the Junos wasn't either. But I was listening to Road Apples earlier today, and that's just a killer album. :)

You don't really want to hear my opinion of Paul Martin...that time and place thing. ;)

Ex Lion Tamer
04-04-2005, 03:38 PM
Hehehe, have you seen the video for "Rebellion (Lies)"?


Yeah I saw it at the MTV site a few weeks ago after one of those crazy Obner Arcade Fire disciples posted about it, I even thought I posted a link here, but I couldn't find it so I guess not. I've since seen it on Musique Plus, which is the French Canadian version of Much Music which is the Canadian version of MTV. Haven't seen it on MM yet, makes sense it's on Musique Plus first since they are from Montreal. All in all it's a pretty ameteuir looking video, which is just fine by me. Still love the song though.

Let me ask YOU something: Next big thing (can you say Radiohead), or this week's fad, that disappears as quickly as they arrived? My guess...closer to , the former than the latter.

Finch Platte
04-04-2005, 04:14 PM
Arcade Fire sucks. And they have tin ears as well. :p

fp

Davey
04-04-2005, 04:19 PM
Let me ask YOU something: Next big thing (can you say Radiohead), or this week's fad, that disappears as quickly as they arrived? My guess...closer to , the former than the latter.
That is a good question and probably worthy of being posted on its own since it won't get much attention down here. But I seriously doubt Arcade Fire is gonna have a lot of staying power. Just too eclectic to go mainstream, even if they did get a major label deal and some big name producer. Be fun to see it happen if they kept their charm intact. Just don't see it though. Look at Broken Social Scene. They broke pretty hard initially and had similar early distribution problems after receiving a lot of buzz, but recovered and went on to score very heavily with both fans and critics. Even scored a song in an episode of that HBO show and probably some others. But where are they on the mass consciousness scale? Probably nowhere. The Arcade Fire is riding a lot of publicity generated because of stories related to how the the internet ezines and blogs were responsible for breaking their album wide open in the underground scene, but it's still the underground scene. Radiohead had their Kid A album debut at #1 on Billboard. That's a lot of discs moving in the first week. About like the number that the Arcade Fire has moved in the last 7 (?)months, even though they are an indie sensation. Big difference. There was a time between OK Computer and Kid A when Radiohead was maybe the biggest serious rock band in the world. For a short time. OK Computer was being almost universally acclaimed as the album of the decade. They had rotation on primetime MTV, not the latest indie happenings segment or whatever they call it where they stick stuff like the Arcade Fire video. But who knows. These things are so dynamic. A couple big media stories and a major label deal and some hot new songs and they may be around for quite awhile. I think that they would still need a stronger singer to break much bigger but you can do a lot in the studio with a major label recording budget. They do already have much more buzz behind them than the Broken Social Scene that I mentioned, although I do favor BSS over AF. And apparently are selling out concerts wherever they go. We should do a poll to see how much of the older crowd here have heard them and actually like them. We know Finchy threw his copy over the fence. And it has only been released in Europe for a month or so now. Maybe they'll be even bigger abroad :)

tentoze
04-04-2005, 06:43 PM
We should do a poll to see how much of the older crowd here have heard them and actually like them.
I'm probably about as old as it gets around here, and with no indie-cred to start with, but, my 2 pesos:

A silly album performed in a dismissable manner. Not as silly as another album last year named after fruit in a floating vessel, but after about 5 songs, it went on the same never-to-be-played again stack at Fortress Tozenstein.

Davey
04-04-2005, 07:24 PM
A silly album performed in a dismissable manner.
Yeah, well who asked you anyway? Oh wait, I did! Don't you find those pretentious Decemberists fellows kind of silly too? Hehehe, I just found out that Petra Haden is the violinist on Picaresque and is now a full time member of the band. Cool :)

Ex Lion Tamer
04-04-2005, 07:46 PM
They do already have much more buzz behind them than the Broken Social Scene that I mentioned, although I do favor BSS over AF. And apparently are selling out concerts wherever they go. And it has only been released in Europe for a month or so now. Maybe they'll be even bigger abroad :)

According to the article in Time (Canada) that I've referenced a few times in the past few days the buzz for their shows in London is substantial...Jarvis Cocker and Thom Yorke at a show in London. Bowie, Byrne and others at a show in NY. I may not have been paying as much attention at the time but I don't think BSS came close to the hype surrounding the Fire. Plus, You Forgot It In People was the second album, not a debut. I just can't recall an indie label debut album that has created a buzz like this. Trotting out Radiohead was probably way over the top, but I wouldn't be surprised if Funeral sales numbers approach those of Pablo Honey. Your point is well taken about the singer's voice and its (lack of) potential for mass appeal, but I have been surprised at the people I've played the album for, people who have no interest in indie-rock, who's reactions have been generally positive. A big part of all this hype is a function of Pitchfork's huge endorsement, and you know how quickly the nuts at P-Fork can turn on a dime. So these guys could and probably will be yesterdays news before we know it. But I just have this feeling that they have an epic, consensus 5-star album in them, I hope so anyway, because, with all due respect to Tentoze, I really like what I hear so far.

tentoze
04-04-2005, 08:29 PM
Yeah, well who asked you anyway? Oh wait, I did! Don't you find those pretentious Decemberists fellows kind of silly too? Hehehe, I just found out that Petra Haden is the violinist on Picaresque and is now a full time member of the band. Cool :)
It's all very personal, as we know......if it gets your attention and holds it, then it's good music. The test here might be to reconvene in, say, 18 months, and see how much staying power these two groups have had then. I've heard that the current Picaresque tour with Okkervil River opening is exceptional. If I quit squandering money on gear, I could probably afford to catch it in LA or somewhere.............:rolleyes: