Kick Your Losing Habits

Key steps to cleaning up nice

We love underdogs, especially the dogs that clean up nice. In real life, we really like Patton Oswalt. But the fantasy plays better - we love a character that Patton Oswalt portrays in a movie. Movies about dirtbags who kick drugs and conquer the world play tidier in our conscience than the reality where the guy relapses and smacks his woman around in a meth den two years after learning the Windsor Knot. It’s how true stories become “based on actual events”.

Sammy Hagar was in a great band once,
long before he helped ruin Van Halen 

Here at Full Kicks, we celebrate the rock n roll underdog. The artists that we really hope are going to kick the world’s ass by the end of the movie and win the heart of the cute cheerleader / witty prostitute / young widow they deserve.  Our faves aren’t only the forgotten shoulda-been-huge guys like Emitt Rhodes and The Nerves or sidebar greats like Montrose (see left) but also bands that made it from the margins with a true Jerry Lee rebel spirit in their music like The Replacements and The Hold Steady. As far as what it means to be a rock n roll underdog today, almost anyone in tight jeans with a guitar fits the bill. It makes us reluctantly cheer for mediocre bands like Foo Fighters. At least they try.

Underdogs are among some great new stuff kicked out this past week. Nada Surf, a survivor from the one hit wonder MTV machine of the 90s issued their 7^th studio album called "The Stars Are Indifferent to Astronomy". It features what have become Nada Surf staples – fearlessly sentimental lyrics & lush Buffalo Tom-style guitar pop - enhanced this time out on guitar with the addition of former GBV melody smoker Doug Gillard. Good stuff from a persevering act who have put out quality sappy indie rock for the last 15 years. Bill Janovitz of Buffalo Tom once described their music as something to listen to while you’re doing the laundry. Nada Surf hits that same spot for me. "TSAItA" delivers swooning rockers “Clear Eye Clouded Mind” and stark ballads “When I was Young”, highlighted by centerpiece track “Jules and Jim”. Check it out.

Craig Finn is holding off on The Hold Steady for now. Following an impressive streak fronting the exhilarating neo-classic rock THS – one of the absolute best things to happen to rock n roll in years - the twitchy narrator has bumped up against the inevitable comedown on "Clear Heart Full Eyes", his 1^st solo album and he sucks his characters under with him. Fitted comfortably in a story friendly alt-country suit, Finn here deals with the aftermath. Yes, the title twists the Coach’s refrain from Friday Night Lights, and though he swears it is not a concept album about a TV show about High School football, Finn here is like a coach for his characters, guiding them through the rough spots and helping them find a way out. In THS songs, shit is blowing up and Finn is like an itchy Elvis Costello cheerleading the E Street Band. But "Clear Heart" brings the redemption if not limitless hope: through religion in “New Friend Jesus”, in the anonymity of a neutral site in “Rented Room” where “she fit me just right / my pillow still tastes like her perfume” and the odd release of album highlight “No Future”, a bittersweet Lucero–style chugger where he gets solid advice from Freddie Mercury and Johnny Rotten.  Check out Craig playing and talking "Clear Heart Full Eyes" here.   

As far as this week in Freddie Mercury and religious redemption goes, the incredible Foxy Shazam released “Welcome to the Church of Rock and Roll”, and for this I am eternally grateful. Seriously, these guys kill. Go see Foxy Shazam and you will be a believer – they put on a crazy show with the diminutive & nutty lead singer Eric Nally leading the charge through some Queen/Darkness/Prince inspired slayers.

High priest with
a high voice

The songs are catchy and the band is talented & tight. This new album is supersonic, commercial friendly and could make them huge. Though less of a rule breaker compared to previous efforts, “Church” has some brilliantly-coloured peacock rock like the rifftastic “I Like It”, driving trumpet-inflected gospel “Holy Touch”, sport rocker “Last Chance at Love” and the arresting “Forever Together”, where Nally
professes his love for his family and how hard it is to leave for a tour. The driving element throughout the Foxy Shazam experience - the pomp, ridiculous showmanship, catchy songs – is Nally’s voice. It is a soaring, huge star and its elbowed its way to front of stage here where it belongs.  "Church" is church, check it out. 

Power to the Pop, People

The Steve Adamyk Band "Forever Won't Wait"
Okay okay, so in my first blog post, in slobbering praise of power pop killers Mother's Children, I slammed Ottawa. Home of senators and Senators and automaton CBC reporters (seriously, they tutor the slower robots in over-enunciation). But this remote, cold ass cold, solid river-ed town has become a hot bed (though likely lonely bed) of balls out, punk pop n roll. The Steve Adamyk Band sounds like name of a fake jazz trio that has a regular Sunday gig at a cougar pub in the Beaches, but they bring it early and often on "Forever Won't Wait", their second full length and first on Portland's Dirtnap Records, not coincidentally the label that put out one of the absolute best albums of the last 10 years - Exploding Hearts "Guitar Romantic".

"Forever Won't Wait" is a speed pop - 11 songs in 23 minutes - throwdown stuffed with quick-set hooks & instantly indelible melodies. Each chorus threatens to lap the next song's verse. The mid album cycle of the title track, "Election Day" and "I Only Wanted You to Know" are perfect punk pop up there with the best of the genre. Why is this type of music marginalized? I dunno. I remember a reviewer comparing power pop to baseball card gum. But fuck that shit. The Beatles invented power pop. Big Star songs still sound great. Same with Cheap Trick. Okay, so SAB doesn't make heavy movies with their music like The National or pour all the needles on the table like The Hold Steady, but in this instant gratification society, why don't more people dose up on music like this? It confounds me. "Forever Won't Wait" is a smash-cut greatest hits reel - exciting, fun, rocking and relentless - and then they drop the mic and walk away. I'll drink to that.  

Stream this shit if you have to, but just buy it. Support real music.
Also! This is a great sampler you can download from Dirtnap with great tunes from Montreal's Sonic Avenues and another mighty fine Ottawa product, garage rockers White Wires and more. FOR FREE! Son

From the Caves – The ABCs of Rock n Roll

Free, man

I thought it would be a useful to establish some framework for this Full Kicks blog; to try to define as objectively as possible my necessarily subjective rock n roll view. Let's start with what makes good classic rock. Here goes.


It’s very difficult to separate art from history. Early man scratched on cave walls not to legitimize anthropology grants for hairy professors of the future, but to communicate in the now. 


Bastard child of legitimate art, rock n roll music is part of this tradition – the need to express ourselves in more than words and gestures, to help us make some sense out of all of the shit going on around us. The popular music landscape has changed so much over the last decade, and there are now so many sub-genres it's impossible to speculate on the future impact of the "rock" artists of today. But if we focus on classic rock or at least pre-1990 rock n roll, we can build a template for how to be considered good classic rock.

Taste in everything be damned

What is it that makes some music worthy of a somewhat regular spin or at least makes you happy to hear it on the radio or in a movie? The easy answer is well, ‘REM is better than REO Speedwagon’. True, absolutely. The cop-out answer is “it’s a matter of taste” and yes, while that is also somewhat true, most people just have no fucking taste (see right). 

Brushing this so-called matter of taste aside, it’s songs about how humans somehow relate to each other and somehow can’t ever really relate to each other that resonate deepest and longest. Songs about getting paid/ getting drunk/ rocking until dropping/ trying to get laid/ getting laid/ getting dumped/ getting drunk again/never getting laid ever again endure. We’ve all been through, or are currently mid-cycle in, these common situations and we can sing along in character.

While the themes are pretty common, rock n roll music remains a personal relationship. You can share the magic with 300 people at Lee’s Palace on a Thursday in September or as a part of bigger or smaller communities as you like, but it’s a unique connection your nervous system makes with the sound and the energy. A great song rushes almost dangerously through us. We feel like we are in the song and its tone and mood become our tone and mood. It’s an exhilarating invasion.

ABCs to sing with me

For our purposes, the rock n roll breaks into 3 categories:

1. Artists and songs that transcend time and are interminably relatable for future generations.
2. Artists that become the musical equivalent of had to be there jokes. Not to say they are less important, but that they live on in a time capsule dug into the bunkers of a world gone by. They can be still be appreciated, but require context like hallucinogenic drugs or a particularly unrighteous war.
3. Artists and songs that instantly and transcendentally suck, but no one seems to be bothered.

A. is for apple & stuff

Love songs or specifically, songs about falling in and then out of love, age drastically differently. They can come across as sappy or overwrought and hokey. In the right hands, however, love songs can be impervious to shifts in music and popular culture.

The Beatles owned and continue to own love. They explored love in all its forms through a variety of characters so expertly that it’s almost impossible to imagine pop culture existing without them. The Beatles haven’t recorded together in 40 years, but their career genius is that regardless of your birthdate, their music is with you every step of your life; from the innocence of childhood to pubescent exuberance and on into incense & peppermints (and divorce & rehab) and on down the long and winding road. And the songs are not only stand up today, they stand out. Grab an old Beatles album, not a greatest hits, but listen to the album tracks – it’s tough, there were so many hits – like Paul’s lullaby “Golden Slumbers” or “Every Little Thing” or John’s “I’m Only Sleeping”. These are not obscure songs, but just subtle reminders of what makes them so great, they made their hard work seem effortless.

The perfect pop ‘hook’ is often the sad turn of the melody, catchy songs stick in your head, but it’s the rare and masterful hook that sets the barb in your heart and don’t let go. The Beach Boys’ “Help Me Rhonda” is a tidy example of this phenomenon and my favourite hook of all time.  The opening to the verse is an aw-shucks jingle to missing your girl until the plea gets more urgent as the chord goes minor for “Rhonda you like so fine“. Chills for me, just thinking about that part. That is my personal relationship with that song. When you get to Beach Boy Appreciation Age you discover that the easy, oceanic beauty of the early Beach Boys songs came from the mind of one sad man, essentially crippled by his gift and his inability to communicate through any other means than his music. Your appreciation grows when you start to identify with the scruffy man sitting at his piano in a sandbox trying in vain to get his shit together. He seemed profoundly strange but also weirdly hopeful. Considered an eccentric in a peer group that did not easily fend off its demons, the fact that Brian Wilson has found a balance whereby he can enjoy his legacy while still alive is remarkable. News that The Beach Boys will tour for their 50^th anniversary this year is also remarkable. And listening to his music provides blissful escape from a perverse world. I can dig that. Forever.

The Rolling Stones certainly had some hippy moments, but like Brando in a musical, it never quite suited them as well as being cheeky and rebellious did. Mick and Keith never (honestly) apologized for writing songs like Under My Thumb and Brown Sugar that objectified women (or in the case of Some Girls, objectified actual objects - groupies) and as they now say “reinforced negative stereotypes”. Back in the 70s enough people seemingly saw the joke. While Jesse Jackson was outraged by the lyrics referring to the sexual appetites of black women in Some Girls and called for a boycott of the album, SNL’s Garrett Morris asked Mick “where are these women!?”. The Stones clearly recognized the value in being the bad boys of rock n roll. Where Jerry Lee Lewis was actually crazy, The Stones perfected looking wasted and badass and sexy. BTW, they wrote a shit load of great songs and were one of the best live bands ever.

cruel to B. kind division

What keeps a really good B artist from A status? Whether or not you want to hear that song again, sing those words in your head another time. Overtly political music is problematic for me and even the good stuff is almost immediately B category. It just doesn’t age well. And it can be exhausting to listen to songs that are trying to teach us something. Fuck it, I don’t want to spend my precious and increasingly elusive entertainment hours hearing how corrupt the system is, I learned that long ago in the song called real life.

The one band whose politically infused music has aged/should continue to age pretty well is one of the all-time champions of rock n roll, The Clash. The Clash evolved from angry garage rocking upstarts into a taut, dexterous band whose heart pumped the pulse of the streets of the world. But, if we ever cared, we don’t remember just what it was that pissed them off so much, we just loved their conviction. And they looked so fucking cool. 

This photo is actually black & white,
rock n roll animal magnetism makes it appear colour

The rise of punk rock in England was framed as a socio-political rebellion, but really it was just a kick in the balls to the stadium-rocking hair farmers who had become the establishment, bands that pushed their fans away from the stage and relegated them to passive worship. “God Save the Queen” was a ‘fuck you’ to rock n roll royalty. Punk rock brought the fans face to face with, on stage with, and even into the band. It was primitive, sexy and easy to do, and the kids were alright with it.

C. listers & c words

It's here that we come back to that pesky matter of taste. My C list is brief because I don't like to think of these tired acts, but still there is plenty of music that some people consider classic or cool, that I just never want to hear again, including; any Steve Miller, almost all of Rod Stewart's painstakingly crafted art, most of the crappy blooze poetry of Jim Morrison & The Doors, Pink Floyd, even Rush I can definitely live without.

• Until next week, when I return with reviews and stuff about some exciting upcoming tours and releases, I want you to check this out, just cuz its so awesome.

• And finally, I want to send a heartfelt please fuck off to the synthetic pop dance music that attacks me while I lather myself at the gym! People - this is sex with robots and rock n roll is sex with humans! Let’s stick to our own.

Guided by Voices “Let's Go Eat the Factory”

Full disclosure: I am a GBV superfan and unabashed lover of the golden age of indie rock. That said, it was easy to be skeptical about another 90s reunion and about a new Guided by Voices album. Initially reunited for Matador's 21st birthday in September 2010 in Las Vegas, the 'classic lineup' GBV extended the party through a U.S. tour and some festival dates. The Matador Vegas show was a triumph and the rest of reunion shows were by all accounts revelatory and enthusiastically received. The show I saw in Detroit was incredibly fun, a 2.5 hour fan love-in. They drank/I drank, Bob sang/I sang, they conquered/I was conquered. But to expect that band to imprint a new batch of songs with the magic of the early material was a stretch.   

Mitch Mitchell takes a break from smoking & guitar
windmills to meet GBV fans in Detroit, Oct/10.



The New Year brings Let's Go Eat the Factory and right from the hop I can say the new album will not win this franchise a ton of new fans. Bob Pollard took a swipe at reaching a bigger audience 10+ years ago with line-up changes, major league producers, major label albums and wide-eyed, shoulda hits like Teenage FBI and Glad Girls. Now 54, I don't think he gives a shit about expanding the fanbase. Bob Pollard puts out a quarterly album rain or shine, so he was due to issue something right about now anyway.

But in an expletive and a word - it's fucking great.

The thing that separates LGEtF from his prolific & frustratingly unfiltered solo work is that there is a communal spirit here. While still capable of stunning highs, too much of Pollard's post-GBV output comes off workmanlike - a couple of guys fleshing out his dictaphone hums. This new/old GBV is a collaborative effort, brimming with the adventurous spirit of their early 90's work and proof of the benefits of Bob letting his pals in on the vision. The years removed have shown Tobin Sprout's importance to those 'classic era' GBV albums and his plaintive, innocent sound is an old sweater here, providing dynamic balance with the psych pop twists of Pollard's stranger songs. He brings 5 songs to the 21 song set, highlighted by the shapeshifting "Spiderfighter", a drone popper in which he sings of an 'old clown in old cloths', only to turn to gear down to an effective lone piano and stark refrain 'now is the time I make up your mind'. More familiar territory for Sprout is the chugging "Waves" lead by a melodic bass line and the effective, childlike ballad "Who Invented the Sun".  

LGEtF is a grower. On first listen, it sounds like vintage GBV - crescendos of melody bursting out through a bedrock of growling guitars in lower mid-fi sound quality. The hooks are not obvious or all that easy, but there is something here for everyone. On first spin, the jingling "Doughnut for a Snowman" and perfect warm pop of "Chocolate Boy" jump up to be noticed but it's the next few laps that reveal the full treasures of this album. "Imperial Racehorsing" is a strange nugget, triumphant with trumpets announcing a Beatlesque outro. More surprising flourishes abound throughout with pianos and horns figuring prominently. "Either Nelson" is rollicking fun: 'I challenge you to rock / I challenge you to proper drinking' Pollard declares while a silly fake-jazz piano works hard to make a mess of a simple melody. "My Europa" and "The Room Taking Shape" together take less than three minutes of your time, but like some of my favourite Pollard songs throughout the years and countless albums are lo-fi ballad snippets that drift by through a few listens but eventually sink in and become indelible testaments to just how masterful a songwriter he is. 

The strongest track on the album is thematic centrepiece "The Unsinkable Fats Domino". A gem that would easily fit into their marathon encores, it best captures the spirit of the reunion. Inspired by the story of Fats waiting on his roof to be rescued during Hurricane Katrina: 'above the swell they found him / on common grounds that drown them', the image of an aging legend refusing to succumb to rising tides suits Pollard and his mates well here. LGEtF isn't quite an instant classic GBV album, but 15 years later, it picks up the plot at a logical spot. Far from sounding like a second run, this is a confident, interesting and dense artistic statement and I'll drink to that.  



...and stay tuned, Guided by Voices will issue the next chapter of the new classic era later this year with a new album entitled Class Clown Spots A UFO (Bob likes to start with the title). And of course, he will also be releasing a solo record in March called Mouseman Cloud.