The Ike Reilly Assissnation, The White Stripes, The New Pornographers

The Ike Reilly Assassination – We Belong to the Staggering Evening
(reviewed)

White Stripes – Icky Thump
(reviewed)

New Pornographers – Challengers
(reviewed)

Our 300th post and also our third year of existence, it’s been a long hard battle full of… well full of almost nothing whatsoever. Many failed ideas, many failed spin-offs, many weeks and months with no posts whatsoever but, well, we’re still sorta here I guess.

Jr. had a lady over on Saturday thus Burton and I stabbed out into the ether to cause the mayhem that two bulls with no social agenda could cause. The natural cause and effect of this lead us first to Best Buy then to Sears to buy a replacement belt for his vacuum.

We tried to recall what it was that we did in the old days, which naturally lead us to the bar. Majors on a Saturday is not the sort of place that would immediately lead one to think of the Ike Reilly Assassination, but Burt and I did our best to reincarnate it.

We had no intention of going for the drinking cycle (having at least one drink with whiskey, scotch, rum, vodka and gin) but some paths are best stumbled upon. For our part we did our best: rum and Coke into Grey Goose martini’s, Burt flirted with the waitress enough to stuff our olives with blue cheese, (her idea, Burton is allergic to blue cheese and broke into hives- the waitress just thought he was drunk) then off canon for a brandy Manhattan. The night was a wash so we finished it off with rum and Cokes before coming home to wine, scotch and a shitty movie.

It was a similar to the new Ike album. Ike has been one of my favorite artists for the past ten years, reminding me of the second coming of the Clash at points. We Belong to the Staggering Evening does not disappoint but it doesn’t do enough to move him along as an artist; he created Salesmen and Racists and then has let the rest of the albums piggyback off it. This is a good album to have on a random mix but not one to immediately grab for.

It’s been a week where I’ve felt like a social vampire feeding off whatever emotions are the most immediate. Always needing that thing that just isn’t quite there; that social interaction that fills my hunger for somewhere that stories come from. Through all of this the work of Graham Greene’s The End of the Affair has helped but left me starving.

The ‘Stripes album resonates off these feelings. The Bob Dylan-esque titled track 300 M.P.H Torrential Outpour Blues and Rag & Bone bring the album to life while Conquest seems to bury it. They will never be a band to sit down with and listen to their entire catalog in one sitting, but it is good music. I'm all but certain I will like this album more as it gets more spins.

To battle the week back I went to Barnes and Nobles to return a book, work on a screenplay and the next serial story that you will have to sit through in the next couple of months. Neither of them are coming easy, the screenplay because it’s just starting and is about a demon, an angel and a depressed man and the new serial story cos it requires me to work eyeball to eyeball with my computer. But it was liberating to work surrounded by people with my headphones on and to finally figure out where all the high school girls hang out at.

That said, there are few finer ways to break out of a funk then The New Pornographers Challengers. Typically New Porno albums hide poppy beats to betray depth in lyrics, a spirit that they don’t completely abandon with song like Myriad Harbour. However with this album they bring in some of the pathos from their solo careers with songs such as Failsafe and Adventures in Solitude. This is their best album since Mass Romantic.

Long effing article…

Finish it off with one of my favorite songs of all time: Broken Social Scene’s Anthems for a Seventeen-Year Old Girl.