Sloan!

Canadian power-pop group Sloan has achieved megastar status, with their albums routinely topping the charts, and winding up routinely on “greatest album ever” lists…in Canada. The quartet has been rocking out for 17 years. Their rejection of a major label sparked the indie-rock revolution, giving us groups like Broken Social Scene, The Arcade Fire, The New Pornographers, and Tegan and Sara, but it seems to have doomed them to obscurity in the United States.

Sloan is made up of Chris Murphy, Andrew Scott, Patrick Pentland, and Jay Ferguson. All four are singer/songwriters in their own right, and (with one exception) all four contribute to each album. While each of them have a default position within the band, they take turns on vocals, usually depending on who wrote the song, and each musician is entirely comfortable taking someone else’s part – they regularly switch out in their live shows.

Sloan grew out of the Halifax, Nova Scotia music scene. Formed in 1991, their debut album, Smeared, was a well-received grunge album, and they found a hit with the single “Underwhelmed,” which saw heavy play on on Canada’s MuchMusic station.

When Geffen pushed for the band to follow their Nirvana-influenced, grunge sound, Sloan responded instead with a power-pop album inspired by The Beatles and The Who. The band stood solidly by Twice Removed, and refused to back down until Geffen released the record. Ultimately, the label caved, but they refused to support the album promotionally and they dropped Sloan from the label. Regardless, Twice Removed was a smash hit, and continues top “greatest Canadian album” lists to this day.

Sloan founded their own label, murderecords, and they released a trio of albums over four years, each one garnering both widespread critical acclaim and massive commercial success. In 1996 they released One Chord to Another, and ’98 and ’99 saw the one-two punch of Navy Blues and Between the Bridges, more or less a love song to their hometown of Halifax.

I first heard of Sloan through the webcomic Sam and Fuzzy. The artist was listing his favorite bands; he mentioned Ben Folds Five, Reel Big Fish, The Pillows, and Sloan. Anyone who comes up with a list like that is on the fast track to earning my musical respect, so I checked out Sloan. I picked up their 2001 album Pretty Together for about $5 used. At first, I didn’t think that much of it (what the hell was wrong with me?), and I put it aside, until the band’s name kept popping up around me and not going away. I went back to Hastings – I was in a bad mood and ready for some good ol’ consumerism – and picked up (unwittingly) their late-90’s triple smash. I got One Chord to Another, Navy Blues, and Between the Bridges, for a grand total of less than $12. I think I paid $11. Looking back, it saddens me that they’re obscure enough around here that I could get away with that.

A whole new universe of rock possibility opened up in front of me. I was still tentative, but I thought that I liked what I was hearing. What finally hooked me was Navy Blues. The album opens with a fast, hard-hitting guitar riff and a two-part harmony that would pull in anyone. Trying to describe the opener, “She Says What She Means” is useless. It’s good, old-fashioned rock and roll, and it’s too awesome for words. The amazing thing is that the album kept going. “Seems So Heavy” has a bass line straight out of the late-Beatles McCartney catalogue. “Chester the Molester” is a bright, happy piano tune about the creepiest guy at the bar. As I kept going through the record, I realized that there wasn’t really a weak cut on it. I had my favorites, but nearly every song was a knock-out, and every song was at the very least good.

I went on to Between the Bridges. It was arranged in suites. That delighted me. The first four songs especially worked well, and the Beatles comparisons kept coming. Quiet opener “The N.S.” was almost a Lennon track, and the dense harmonies on “Don’t You Believe a Word” almost moved me to tears the first time I heard it (and have moved me to tears on occasion). People accuse Sloan of basically making compilation albums, but Between the Bridges is an incredibly cohesive work, and one of the most solid records that I’ve ever heard. One Chord to Another is perhaps the most varied musically, and if the cohesion of Bridges is an asset, then somehow variety becomes an asset on One Chord. I realized that if you sound this good, then nearly everything you do will be likable, even if you take two different approaches to your work.

This was also the album that made me notice Sloan’s lyrics – their early work in particular is known for being clever, charmingly self-deprecating, and true-to-life. Songs like “G Turns to D,” where the narrator is watching a girl tear him apart with her music onstage and wishing that he hadn’t taught her to play guitar, are as interesting lyrically as they are musically. Chris Murphy in particular, have a penchant for interesting lyrical situations and subtle wordplay.

All of this made me pull out my copy of Pretty Together again. I suddenly knew what to make of it. It was dark, but it was mature, and the thick harmonies that I had fallen in love with were now paired with flowing, Jeff Lynne-esque chord changes that gave me chills.

And then we fell in love and lived happily ever after. I hunted down all of their studio albums, I’m working on the rest, and there’s only one record in the bunch that’s even questionable. There’s too much about Sloan to recommend them to really encapsulate in one place; all that I can do is ask you to go find out for yourself. Start with Navy Blues.

Hang on Little Tomato

Pink Martini has been fairly successful for a band that with as little critical attention as theirs. They broke into the Billboard charts, nearly topping the independent chart with their third album Hey Eugene! due to exposure through National Public Radio. The eleven-piece ensemble draws heavy inspiration from the feel of Old Hollywood, and their sophomore release Hang On Little Tomato reflects that clearly.

Hang On Little Tomato alternately invokes the feel of a Katherine Hepburn screwball comedy, or the shadowy streets of a Bogart noire. When discussing their infuences, the band is every bit as likely to mention Pedro Almodovar as Jimmy Scott. But despite incorporating sounds that developed after the Old Hollywood period, it is hard to say that Pink Martini has “modernized” the sound. If anything, the music feels even more timeless because of what it has accumulated over the years.

If one pillar of the Pink Martini sound is reminiscence, the other is variety. The band is clearly rooted in jazz tradition and seems most at home playing Latin jazz, particularly bossa, but repetition is nowhere to be found in its idiom. Their style careens wildly from conga to slow swing to blues, then revels in harp-fueled balladry before diving into a cabaret number. Nearly every song promises a novel style or approach. Every bit as impressive as the band’s musical versatility is the linguistic prowess of vocalist China Forbes, who sings in English, Spanish, French, Italian, Japanese, and Croatian on the album.

Beyond the craftsmanship of the album, the music is just fun. The plaintive bass walk of “Veronique” pulls you into its rainy world, while you can almost feel the clarinet solo on the title track giving you a warm hug. Every song offers something uniquely exciting, lifting you on plumes of crescendoing strings before bringing you back down into the streets to play in the square. The moods vary as wildly as the styles presented, each one as sincere and intriguing as the one before it.

There may be a couple of tracks on which Forbes’s voice doesn’t seem quite suited to the style, but that’s largely attributable to the incredible range of styles presented, and greatly overshadowed by the album’s strokes of brilliance. Hang On Little Tomato is an incredible and varied experience, blending expert musicianship with a profound sense of fun.

Unwrapped

Nonfiction television programming has seen a bit of a boom in recent years, partially due to the explosion in popularity of reality television. Extending far beyond the simple origins of The Real World and Survivor, the programming that has spun out of peoples’ desire to see other people live their lives is fascinating. In a sense, The Food Channel’s Unwrapped builds on this voyeuristic tendency to fascinating and positive effect.

 

There is a distinction to be made between types of reality shows. “Competition” reality shows, such as Survivor or Big Brother, differ wildly from “documentary” reality shows, such as Hogan Knows Best or Newlyweds. However, they all focus on the same thing: Peoples’ desire to see real human beings reacting to their environment. The idea behind reality programming is that we as people want to see other people behave in a genuine fashion.

 

Unwrapped is more of a straight documentary program, but it clearly benefits from the primary lesson of reality shows – that people want to know what goes on behind the scenes of everyday situations. In Unwrapped, a famous obsessive-compulsive and evident plastic surgery patient Marc Summers leads audiences on a tour of the secret lives of their favorite foods. That may not sound like a terrific premise for a show, but it turns out to be fascinating.

 

The show discusses a wide variety of foods, typically mass-produced. It goes behind the scenes to show the manufacture of said foods, but it always includes a little something extra. For instance, an episode on chocolate shows Hershey’s manufacturing lines, but it also shows hand-crafted European chocolates, a man living in a Colonial-style living history setting who makes his own chocolate from the beans to the finished product, and a history of chocolate dating back to the Mayans and cacao.

 

Unwrapped’s subject matter is supremely interesting, and Summer’s narration, while at times a little forced, is frequently engaging as he takes viewers behind the scenes for the manufacture of everything from bubble gum to frozen ice cream treats. Summers seems to have a sincere appreciation for his genuinely interesting subject matter.

 

Perhaps due to the widespread necessity of food, Unwrapped has a larger following than you would expect for a show with such a didactic premise. Frequent surprises, such as the sheer number of things still done by hand in factories today, along with charming histories and insightful interviews make Unwrapped worth watching. While you might think that it would turn you away from these foods, knowing the stories behind them somehow makes them more personable. Watching Unwrapped is like hearing an old friend really open up for the first time, and almost as interesting.

Evildoers, You Face The Tick

The Tick was one of the 29 shows that aired in Family Guy’s time slot in the 19 months from November 2003 to May 2005. While Fox has a horrible track record with show cancellation, the span of time was a particularly horrible era. Family Guy marks the first time that home video sales of a show have pulled it out of cancellation. Additionally, The Tick, Wonderfalls, Firefly, and Greg the Bunny have all gone on to become cult favorites. (Firefly‘s fan base was so vocal that the show was adapted into a motion picture that continued the story. Another classic Fox cancellation cock-up, Arrested Development, is rumored to be in talks for a film now, as well, after finding a staggering second life in DVD sales.) The time span saw Fox throw away an impressive number of promising show premises, and The Tick was one of the most exciting of them all.

The Tick was originally conceived as a comic book by Ben Edlund in 1987. He’s a superhero, incredibly tall, nigh-invulnerable, and every bit as oblivious to reality as he is committed to fighting crime. Over the course of the comic, a Saturday-morning cartoon, and the live-action show, he’s sent up nearly every superhero trope in existence. The Tick features a vibrant cast of heroes and villains alike, but the biggest draw is The Tick himself, whose pseudo-inspirational narrations and self-aware philosophical musings lie in sharp contrast to his apparent ineptitude.

 

The 2001 incarnation of the show features The Tick (played by Patrick Warburton, known for his voice work on shows such as Family Guy and for playing Elaine’s boyfriend Putty on Seinfeld) and Arthur, his sidekick (David Burke), a former accountant in a flying moth suit who gets pulled unwillingly into The Tick’s adventuring lifestyle. Also featured are Captain Liberty (Liz Vassey), a hyper-patriotic, undersexed pastiche of the role of women in comics, and Batmanuel (Nestor Carbonell, who played that creepy guy with the knives in Smokin’ Aces), an apathetic, oversexed narcissist.

Whereas previous incarnations of The Tick focused on parody superhero action, the 2001 show adopts more of a sitcom approach. A couple of early episodes features actual crimefighting, but by and large, the show focuses on the absurdities of costumed heroes trying to live their lives in the middle of the city (aptly named The City) that they have sworn to protect. The altered format was adopted for a number of reasons, primarily budget and more than likely congruity in a prime-time slot. The show loses a lot of what makes the original work, but it brings a fair bit of fresh fun to the idea in the process. Gone are most of the city’s costumed crimefighters. An episode of the cartoon might feature dozens of deluded, tights-wearing vigilantes, and every episode had at least one distinctly absurdist villain for The Tick to fight. Heroes like The Human Bullet, Bi-Polar Bear, and The Sewer Urchin did battle with Chairface Chippendale, Zipperneck, The Multiple Santa, and El Seed (an ambulatory sunflower with a revolutionary streak). Trying to work out the logistics of portraying a skyscraper-sized clown on a live-action television show quickly makes it understandable that most of The Tick‘s action sequences were removed. However, that sort of action has always been central to The Tick. The ridiculous costumes, ludicrous powers, and impossibly obscure weaknesses assigned to our modern myths have always been central to The Tick schtick.

 

Regardless of these losses, The Tick shines. What it loses by not being a cartoon it makes up for by not being aired on Saturday morning. Topics that were only hinted at or ignored completely by the original series are confronted full-on in this show. Possibly the most consistently amusing addition is the analysis of the sexual hangups present – perhaps even required – in the sort of people who would hop around a city in pajamas battling evil. At first glance, it would seem like they’ve taken an old character and turned him into a venue for a tired sex comedy, but the outlandish situations, snappy writing, and The Tick’s wide-eyed innocence make it a whole new experience.

Another major addition is Patrick Warburton’s performance. He captures the character’s naivety and exuberance with such gusto that it feels like the character was written for him. Warburton’s Tick is joyfully oblivious, but not overtly stupid – exactly the way The Tick needs to be played. When Batmanuel mentions saving a bus of cheerleaders, he adds, “I saved them three times that night, if you know what I mean.” The rest of the conversation barely pauses while Warburton delivers an eager, enthusiastic, “Nope!” That sort of gag is easy to overplay, but it’s a brief interlude in a fast-paced conversation that takes place largely in spite of The Tick’s presence. Warburton is equally adept at dead-panning The Tick’s more eloquent moments. At one point, he has to convince a trepidacious Arthur to spring into action to save Jimmy Carter: “Destiny dressed you this morning, and now Fear is trying to pull your pants down! If you give up, if you give in, you’ll be standing there, exposed, with Fear laughing at your dangling unmentionables!”

 

The live-action show also deals with a wider variety of themes, from bureaucracy (The Tick finds he needs a license to fight crime, but doesn’t have a secret identity to put on the form) to social injustice (The Tick and Arthur are accepted into a Justice League-type organization that turns out to be wildly misogynistic) to watching your heroes falter (Arthur’s childhood icon The Immortal dies in bed with Captain Liberty). Classic comics clichés such as Clark Kent/Superman’s pair-of-glasses-as-a-disguise are lampooned in the show, but all in all this show is closer to the comic in its satire, and maybe even broader in scope. Driven by great characters, memorable dialogue, and great (if not perfect) use of the superhero gimmick, The Tick is a spectacular show that never got a fair chance.

Frisky Dingo follows a superhero named Awesome-X (in reality, multi-billionaire playboy Xander Crews) and the villain Killface in their respective attempts to save and destroy the world. At first glance it appears to be standard [adult swim] fare, but its colorful characters and gleefully convoluted plot quickly prove it to be much more. And, despite its lack of critical attention compared to the rest of the [adult swim] catalog, it proves to be one of the most consistently funny shows in the block.

The idea of “awkward spectacle as comedy” seems to be a recurring theme throughout [adult swim], and at times it feels like a cynical ploy, an attempt to see exactly how much nothing the Cartoon Network execs can put on television and still draw an audience. To some extent (especially during the early days of Aqua Teen), they deserve credit for pushing the envelope, but as shows like 12 oz. Mouse, Tom Goes to the Mayor, Tim and Eric Awesome Show Great Job, and Xavier: Renegade Angel lean more and more heavily on stilted, uncomfortable surrealism, it begins to feel less like an innovation and more like a crutch.

It was into this environment that Frisky Dingo debuted, and in its first few minutes, it seemed doomed to follow the same pattern. Killface, the villain and seeming protagonist of the show, outlines his plans for Earth’s destruction and then sits motionless for a full twenty-five seconds before anything else happens – a gimmick that would be amusing if it were still novel. When Killface blows someone in half a few seconds later, it seems as though the show will be a retread of the awkward silences and over-the-top violence that used to make adult swim fascinating before they became its stock-in-trade. All in all, it’s a decidedly inauspicious start, but Frisky Dingo soon transcends the trends of standard late-night cartoon fare.

Part of the fun of the show lies in its characters. Xander Crews and Killface are both completely amoral – Killface is a spot-on parody of the motiveless, why-the-hell-does-he want to destroy the world villain, and Xander is a spoiled rich kid whose superhero career has been primarily about how awesome it is to fly around and shoot things than it has been some overarching need for justice. Crews’s employees include Stan, a friend of his (dead) parents with big plans for the company and a boardroom full of clones of himself, Watley, an employee whom he convinces to undergo gene therapy to become a villain for a line of Awesome-X dolls. Killface’s camp includes his nearly mute, hip-hop fixated son Simon, and a UCLA film student-turned geisha-turned assassin named Valerie. The characters are vibrant and constantly changing, a large part of the show’s appeal.

The other selling point of the show is its ever-shifting plot, which feels as frantic as Arrested Development and as twisted as the last 30 years of Days of Our Lives crammed into two seasons. One of the shows main themes is the shifting balance of power, as long-suffering victims become supervillains and Crews winds up at the mercy of a group of Dungeons and Dragons players. People switch sides nearly every episode, and no-one ever really seems in charge, but that’s part of the anarchic beauty of the show. The second season opened with Killface making a presidential run after his initial attempt at destroying Earth wound up curing global warming, and the season has been largely concerned with his and Xander’s bid for the presidency. The show is currently breaking, but it comes back on March 30-just enough time to catch up.