SOUNDTRACK: THE TRAGICALLY HIP-Up To Here (1989).
Up to Here is a pretty big leap from their first EP. There’s more guitar soloing (not grandiose solos, just little guitar noodling in the songs “Blow at High Dough,” which was used wonderfully for the show Made in Canada (also known as The Industry).
Downie’s voice is more in keeping with what we’d come to know later, and lyrically the songs are esoteric and interesting.
“Blow at High Dough” opens the disc with a very cool guitar intro (“They shot a movie once, in my hometown”) “I Believe in You (Or I’ll Be Leaving You Tonight)” a not terribly good song has some proto-Downieisms: spoken passages, stories in a breakdown of the song, but the subject matter is not that exciting. Of course, it’s hard to sound good when you’re followed by “New Orleans is Sinking” another fantastic song that still sounds great today (especially in their live versions).
“38 Years Old” is a surprisingly moving song with some slides guitars…a nod to their country/folk roots that they tend to bury under raw rock guitars.
But even some of the less memorable, less exciting songs have great aspects to them. Songs like “She Didn’t Know” are pretty standard rock songs. Better than average, but not exceptional. But the band puts little things into them that bring them up from the mundane: the guitar licks, the backing vocals (slightly R.E.M.-ish).
Even “Boots to Hears” which sounds a bit too much like John Mellencamp in the intro really wins you over by the end (the lyrics are great). For what really is a debut album, it’s solid and shows great songwriting skills and promise.
They still haven’t quite gotten the hang of cover art yet, though.
[READ: January 26, 2011] “You Go First”
This was the first of four flash fictions in this issue. Flash fiction doesn’t really have a definition per se (except that it is very short). There are some masters of flash fiction who can write very compelling stories with astonishing brevity. These stories are all short (one magazine page a piece), but they feel kind of bloated compared to the writers like Lydia Davis.
Gibb’s story actually feels a lot longer than it is. It opens with us meeting the narrator’s next door neighbors, Carl the cremator, his obese wife Brenda and their son Jason. The narrator doesn’t really like Jason, but he’s the only person who will hang out her because he wasn’t around for her birthday party last year. At that party, her hippie parents encouraged everyone to play a game called Getting to Know Our Bodies. (more…)
I Just Read About That... 