Independent News

All good things must come to an end, but for local band Desiderata the end was something unexpected. After an extended hiatus to pay bills racked up from ceaseless touring, Desiderata released its newest album, Alcohawk, in February and seemed poised to regain its place in Edmonton's music scene. Unfortunately, explains the group's singer Blair Drover, the timing was off.

On the surface, Elizabeth Shepherd appears to be a jazz artist: she's playing at the Yardbird Suite, the piano is her instrument of choice and her playing taps into the sort of night-time emotions that the jazz classics often delved into. But dig a little deeper and it becomes clear that Shepherd's connection with jazz is primarily in the unwillingness to reduce the music to a series of rules and clichés, much like the greats of the genre's past. As her bio says, "Depending on what the song calls for, Shepherd always draws upon her roots, be it Salvation Army origins, poetic singer-songwriter lyricism, the modal inflections of world music, simple and sassy pop, infectiously deep hip-hop grooves or the harmonic complexities of jazz." Shepherd spoke with Vue Weekly recently about the creation of her third full-length album, Heavy Falls the Night.

Sat, May 22 (10 am) / Hip Hop in the Park 2010 The third week of May is Hip Hop Appreciation Week, and Saturday's Hip Hop in the Park will mark the culmination of a week's worth of events and a celebration of all things hip hop, from rapping and breakdancing to graffiti writing and fashion.

Now that the era of silent films is long behind us, people who make movies must consider how sound and music contribute to a film’s emotional reaction. Classical music, certainly not devoid of an ability to evoke powerful feelings, frequently offers a sonic backdrop to motion pictures. This upcoming Edmonton Symphony Orchestra presents classical music that past movie-makers have included in their works.

Fucked Up / Fri, May 14 / Avenue Theatre

There's not a lot of point in arguing the merits of the Rolling Stones' Exile on Main St: nearly 40 years after its debut, the double album has gained a legion of fans, its dirty, rough-and-tumble rock 'n' roll standing the test of time to the point that it's finally seeing a re-release, remastered and with a bonus disc of unearthed tracks from the same period ... sort of.

LCD Soundsystem stands out among dance bands because of its emotional range; few groups display equal ability to deal in both self-reflexive irony and genuine pathos. Main man James Murphy serves up healthy doses of both on his third full-length album, This Is Happening. On tracks like "You Wanted A Hit" and "Pow Pow," Murphy's vocals sound like he's making fun of himself and his audience, and then along comes the nostalgic melancholy of "All I Want," which borders on the downright sappy. This curious combination of tone makes the record hugely intriguing. It can also be a little unfriendly—only one track, the radio-ready "Drunk Girls," is under five minutes long, while many clock in well over seven minutes. Still, if the rumours are true and This Is Happening turns out to be LCD Soundsystem's last album, Murphy will leave music (or at least this persona) at the height of his powers.

I wonder if the pioneers of electronic instruments foresaw just how quiet and intimate they could make music. Not having to plug into an amp or pound a drum can make things so much smaller and private, qualities on ample display in Courier News's debut EP. Recorded at home, it displays the songwriting pedigree of members Alexa Dirks and Matt Schellenberg thanks to the careful placement and expansive but soft melodies that electronics can afford. For a brief taste, this is a little lacking in hooks, but the duo is quite adept at setting a mood, and Fixtures often feels like a rainy day stuck indoors with a trusted partner.

Boom! That's the sound of Meat Loaf's latest, which was pretty much the sound of his greatest, too. There's a lot of bombast and melody, plus TV's Dr House on piano, American Idol's Kara DioGuardi on vocals and Steve Vai and Brian May on guitars, which is ridiculous, but also pretty fun.

You might call the folk-tinged pop of  Bronze Leaf atmospheric, but it hardly seems evocative of something so wide open; rather, the space created here seems more like the empty air between two people in a room, people with a certain intimacy who are still at a loss with what to do with another. Partly that comes from Amy Macdonald's voice, as substantial and affective as lingering perfume, partly from the full but unordained playing of bandmates Eric Cheng and Matthew Israelson, partly from Macdonald's knack with lyrical detail (she sings of "windbreaker skin" and people looking like a "sunlit dog"). However the combination comes together, though, the result is always something gorgeously melancholic and somewhat ephemeral, like a lover's last words hanging in the air.

If I had not witnessed the  pummeling of Maya Miller's drums and Becky Black's  throbbing, heavy guitar myself, I would not have believed it possible for only two people to make such forceful, harmonized noise. But that's exactly what Black and Miller have accomplished with each of the three albums they've put out in the last three years—solid, synchronized, tightly-packed rock and with an almost constant touring schedule, it seems to be what the crowd wants. 

Prince & the Revolution

Danny Gokey

There are ghosts haunting the cleverly designed, box-strewn home where Housebound claustrophobically keeps its action, but the important one isn't the spirit that's making the lights flicker and the phone ring: it's the ghost of past misdeeds that's hanging over our wounded couple's heads.

This Sunday, the EsQuire Alberta Men’s Chorus will perform the choir’s inaugural concert. The first half of the concert will have the men’s choir singing standard choral works, such as some pieces by Brahms. Then, in the second half, the power-tools come out—the Chorus will premiere a work called “Construction – A Power Tool Concerto,” a work composed specifically for this occasion and for these, well, instruments. This concerto is exactly what the name suggests: a musical work played on the kinds of instruments and implements you’d normally see at construction sites.

WILD GAME: Where the wild things are Precious little in our lives is wild anymore, wild in the sense that it includes a deep, symbiotic relationship with a wilderness free from the trappings of urban society. Consumption of wild foods is a central component of this relationship. Indeed, for the majority of humanity's existence wild foods were our only sustenance. Vegetation—berries, roots, leaves—was one part of the hunter-gatherer diet, but wild game possessed a greater caloric return per unit of effort. More bang for the buck. The buck, in these circumstances, might have been Megaloceros, also known as the Irish elk. With giant antlers spanning more than three metres, it would have been formidable prey to Paleolithic hunters. A successful hunt, though, could produce hundreds of kilos of meat, thus ensuring the human clan's short-term survival. read more...

In the wake of the massive oil spill in the Gulf, a number of Alberta economists, in addition to Ed Stelmach himself, have advocated that the landlocked nature of the Alberta tar sands makes them a safer choice when making an oil investment. The claims made include a "localized" impact if an oil spill does occur; increased reclamation targets for environments disturbed by oil projects; and technologies creating a greater reduction in greenhouse gases.

Queer activists, organized as Severely Queer, in Edmonton have organized a talk accompanied by a workshop to discuss how cities are organized and how place affects peoples' understanding of themselves.