Greetings and salutations! Every time I think we’ve broken a record for the gap between recording and production of this podcast, new circumstances arrive that put that record to lie! Picture it… Victoria Day, 2023… some two-and-a-half weeks ago… which, in contemporary click-bait terms may as well have been an eternity. Anywho… or is that anywhat??… this episode sees us taking on some of our favorite artists from la belle province… join us, if you dare!

A toast to this audio… with all the fingers and toes at your disposal… #bogmonstermusic

Be sure to goose this legitimately sick YouTube playlist while you’re at it…

Dan’s Notes

Born Dead Icons

Making emo kids listen to Motörhead and crust punks listen to The Wipers. Record Store Guy Core. Featuring ⅗ of Quebec City emotive HC band Jonah (who had releases on Great American Steak Religion Records, which we talked about last week) plus Pete Beaudoin of Gatineau’s Warfare State, took a turn to to the more rock’n’roll side while mixing in variety of influences from around the punk spectrum, and were not shy about wearing them on their sleeves. Released 3 LPs and a few 7”s during their run from 1999-2007, most of the band kept going under the name Complications through the late 00’s and 2010s afterward. Their sound could be loosely described as “rock’n’roll punk with a dark edge” but not in a posturing dress-up way like so many other ex hardcore kids who embrace guitar solos and long-haired 80’s style excess, but fused raging apocalyptic d-beat with tuneful rocking riffs in a way that appealed to a wide variety of the scene, not just the Discharge loving chain punk crowd or the serious Ebullitions style hardcore crowd or fans of more accessible straight up punk stuff. Their three albums and many EPs are definitely worth searching out, as well as the band that rose from their ashes Complications who are still active, to my knowledge.

Godspeed You! Black Emperor

What if those breakdowns in Neurosis songs were a whole band/when anarchists become Real Musicians. GYBE’s debut “f sharp a sharp infinity” is one of those rare records that blew pretty much every one I knew away whether they were into punk or metal or indie or classical or not all that into music but fans of the band’s anarchist politics, with a few members having ties to the hardcore and crust scenes as well as Montreal’s activist community. For a band whose music is entirely instrumental they always seemed to use whatever platforms given to them in all of the hype when their music started getting popular among fans of more mainstream “indie” type music started gravitating to their sound. It’s a rare band that draws the vocal admiration of both big time Hollywood directors and the Crimethinc Collective, but GYBE managed to do so throughout the 2000s and 2010s. There was a point in time where one could still bump into members of the band volunteering at anarchist bookstore Librairie Alternatif long after they had become relative stars of the Canadian indie scene, but that’s one of the things I always thought was so cool about the band. They would go from the stages of huge music festivals to playing on the front lines of antiglobalization protests right there on the streets, their music with a sound so very much their own and never afraid of using their platforms to platform the ideas they felt were important to them. Their music evokes a certain mood like no other, which is why they were so perfect on the soundtrack to films like 28 Days Later, and are one of the punkest bands with a full string and horn section anyway as well as one that seems like a pillar of the modern Montreal scene to me.

Me Mom And Morgentaler

I had an awkward ska phase in my  late teens like so many and these folks were the flagship band of said awkward phase. Mixing ska, punk, reggae, polka and jazz with lyrics in three languages and a theatrical circus-meets-performance-art-meets-intro-to sketch-comedy-101 live show, MMM were Montreal’s flagship skankers in a pre Stomp Records world. Their 1991 EP “Clown Heaven and Hell” is one of the first things I remember making a “personal copy” of in the CHSR record library, and the follow up full length Shiva Space Machine was in constant rotation during those awkward two-tone-shoe wearing years. Not available on Spotify but all of their recordings re up on bandcamp including a somewhat recent reunion track “Racist Friend 2020”. With their mix of sounds and lyrics in multiple languages (and heavy dose of accordion) they are just about the most Montreal band I can think of this side of say an Arcade Fire or a Grim Skunk or something. This live performance from CBC TV thirty years ago captures their vibe perfectly, awkward skits and all:

The Nils

Canadian Replacements, creators of That Montreal Sound, and victims of that unfortunate fate of so many bands – career killing record label fuckery. Formed by brothers Alex and Carlos Soria in the late 70’s, by the early 80’s they were the go-to opening band when big bands like The Ramones and The Clash passed through Montreal, while honing their melodic punk sounds to the point of attracting the attention of hip hop label Profile Records’ fledgling rock division Rockhouse Records. The nils signed an overly restrictive deal with Rockhouse and soon found they were stuck with minimal support or promotion on behalf of the label, and dropped off the map until the early 90’s when they were released from their deal and Montreal indie label Mag Wheel reissued their discography. The band reunited sporadically over the ensuing decade until Alex Soria’s passing in 2004, and their melodic sound was a huge influence on later Montreal bands like RISE, The Asexuals, and The Doughboys. Carlos Soria has put together a new lineup for the band since his brother’s passing and has toured off and on since, even releasing a new album in the 2010s and a new EP in 2022. It was seeing their name on the bill of a show organized in our hometown by friends of a similar 80’s scene vintage Neighbourhood Watch that was one of my inspirations for the topic of this week’s show.

Voivod

Voivod are a band that I have never been the most diehard fan of but between their heavy rotation on Muchmusic in my teen years, and a couple of very memorable live performances of different incarnations of the band they are one of the first that comes to mind for me when I think of bands from Quebec. Starting out as a brutal thrash band whose lyrics leaned towards dystopian sci-fi themes in the mid 80’s, they eventually morphed into more of a psychedelic alt rock sound in the 90’s after their cover of Syd Barrett era Pink Floyd song “Astronomy Domine” became a minor hit for them. Various lineup changes ensued, including one time Metallica bassist Jason Newstead joining for a bit, leading to the three piece version of the band I saw in the late 90’s opening for another popular band in Portland, and who mercilessly worked the room after their set guilt tripping anyone who expressed a love of their music into buying them rounds or taking them out to smoke behind the dumpster across the street. A couple of decades later they headlined one night of a big music festival in Halifax, with all of the surviving original lineup (without founding guitarist Piggy who had been so effectively guilt tripping drinks out of their fans at that Neurosis show in Portland, and who had passed away a couple of years prior),and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a band have more fun onstage, while paying tribute to their fallen comrade at the same time. Their set leaned more towards their earlier stuff, and the older crowd in attendance was super excited to thrash along with them, their singer beaming ear to ear from beginning to end while screaming about futuristic death robots. Like I said, they are not my favorite band ever but those two live experiences stand out so heavily in my mind that I had to include them as icons of the Quebec music scene.

Conditions Apply

A newer band made up of Montreal scene vets that could almost fit in the topic of tangled webs last week. I’ve been a fan of guitarist/vocalist Steve Lumpen’s many projects since his time in Ottawa’s Lumpen Proletariat in the early 90’s (alongside future acclaimed documentarian and podcaster Garth Mullin and some folks from other great Ottawa bands), through his stint in Vancouver’s Tea And Two Slices and the most excellent Ballast in the 00’s and then eventually in Montreal’s awesome pop-punkers Mental Fix in the 2010s, who would switch a few members and morph into the mighty Conditions Apply in the 2020s who have been playing around the Montreal scene for the past couple of years. They released their great debut full length “Rage And Ignorance” last year, and I’ve heard their sound described as “if Montreal had an East Bay” though they tend to lean more towards the gruffer side of that scene a la Filth or Econochrist but still with underlying melodies. As I mentioned, they’re a newer band but they’ve been playing more and more lately including this year’s Pouzza Fest and are definitely worth checking out.

Honorable Mentions

• Ripcordz – Party In The Parking Lot
• SCUM – So Much Hate
• Doughboys – Shine
• One Eyed God Prophecy – Fields Of Separate Realities

Maybe! But not today… #bogmonstermusic

Matt’s Notes

So… I’m at maybe even more of a disadvantage than normal this episode??

Besides the time-lag since the episode was recorded…

Besides the fact that I could literally have a job TOMORROW (or, you know, today… by the time you’re reading this… IF you’re reading this!)… or LITERALLY not at all…

It didn’t come up during the podcast… our respective abilities in French language! Mine is uh… non-existent… but I’ve tried to remedy that, somewhat, by putting my kids into French Immersion public school here in BC… Dan may have some proficiency as per that which a civil service gig may permit… my best friend Jon Bowie learned that sweet New Brunswick Government French… and some of my favorite people from Fredericton back in the day went to École Sainte-Anne… which was, from what I can tell, cooler in every single meaningful way than the crammed, sweating, Anglo monstrosity that was Fredericton High School in the mid-90’s… but my memories of that time are incomplete and perhaps just a tad biased!

The two solitudes feel as real in the mid-20’s as they did in the late 90’s… nearly every band or artist in this episode playlist plays in punk music’s lingua franca namely… English… or, rather, would this be Englishes? Or English for whom?

The academicish part of me wants very badly to go further down this rabbithole…

But… suffice it to say… some of my most colorful memories of punk music and life generally involved a four-month period of living in a converted industrial space in the St. Henri neighborhood in Montreal with some likeminded Maritimers in the summer of 2001… culminating, at least for me, in experiencing both the first taste of call centre employment and the September 11 terror attacks… one formative very personally, and the other globally… during that time visiting it seemed a great many improvised music venues, drinking vast quantities of excellent local beer, and travelling endlessly on the Metro…

So… I’m back on my heels… these notes are weeks late… and I feel that late on Tuesday night the week is only just getting started with me… so… I better get on with it!

The Sainte Catherines

I’ve brought these guys up many times throughout the run of our little show so far.

What to add here? Not much!

Except they’re a band that… while slightly younger than myself and/or of the… millennial cohort… mild shudder… they’ve done all the right things, even while ostensibly staying below the radar in mainstream Canadian punk or alternative music…

And their album Fireworks from 2010, reissued in 2022, was one of my favourite things to listen to in late 2022 and early 2023… when I was more than a little adrift from various things… there was and is a relatability there… and some kind of stability in chaos that was hinted at… which really appealed… and still does… I throw this on pretty regularly halfway through the year…

To my mind, they are the closest our country has to a band like Leatherface… gravel-throated, weird-nearly-literary lyrics… going for the throat… catchy and churning… and a thousand other similar aphorisms… I wouldn’t want to try and attempt “music journalism” but hopefully by watching some of these clips you will get the idea…

Yesterday’s Ring

With the assistance of Discogs… NOT just a place to shovel out hundreds of dollars on rare and obscure vinyl… I confirmed that there was significant overlap between The Sainte Catherines… the “mother ship” if you will… YR… and Medictation… who we’ll get to in a bit…

Last episode, we talked about artists who worked across a wide range of projects… and each member of Yesterday’s Ring certainly qualify…

I copied the personnel from all three in Discogs and pasted them into a Word doc, and then went through member by member…

This is where it begins to get a bit complicated!

Six members of the SC were in YR… two of whom were in Medictation as well… so… two members in three of the same bands; six members in two of the same bands; four of whom were only in two of the bands… with fourteen members who were only in one of the three bands…

I didn’t dare click on the links for any of the individuals besides Hugo… see below… because that would truly have required an academic endeavor in Québécois punk and alternative which, frankly, I am not capable of at this point…

BUT! To speak specifically to YR… I fell in love with their fantastic record from last year, Goodbye Nightlife… which I’ve discussed elsewhere on this podcast… it’s the folksy, sad dad sound that grabs me… that took hold late last year and had me hooked into the early months of 2023… and when I’m thinking of hotel rooms, brief relationships, bouts of binge-drinking and sobriety… navigating unemployment, fatherhood, and my forties… let’s just say this was and is a good soundtrack for all of that…

It feels like I’ve been in good company…

Plus, it’s more of a raucous affair! El Rancho sounds like it was recorded in a small space with lots of background hoots and hollers… many of the songs en Francais… I’m not prepared to dive further into the biographical ideas, cause time is short, I’m not making any pretenses at “music journalism”, and it pleases me that there is still much to be discovered with this band, the SC, and various webs their individual and shared members shared in this veritable musical metaverse in la belle province…

Medictation

Hugo and Frédéric from the Sainte Catherines and Yesterday’s Ring formed a group with Dickie and Graeme from Leatherface! And, according to Discogs, several other folks… who are no doubt awesome!

This was Dickie’s final recorded music… which is major in and of itself… one of the visuals I’ve included here presents a tribute to their late guitarist… “Stalingrad”…. and it is the final track on their album Warm Places… which Dickie also sings on… Dickie’s health deteriorated rapidly after the album was recorded, and they toured Canada and the UK with additional musicians in his place…

This is music that is of the moment and for eternity… it sticks to the ribs like a well-placed knife… it hums with the joy of everyday things… and the terror of incipient mortality… which of course is merely me projecting on it… but this tension, this ebb and flow of becoming and unbecoming… is part of this music’s appeal…

To quote some nameless sage of years gone past who I have googled specifically for this post:

La vie est un beau rêve, mais ne vous réveillez pas.

That is: Life is a beautiful dream, but don’t wake up.

Amen, and Amen again, friends.

Hugo Mudie

For the purpose of the specific Québécois webs we are spinning on this episode, Hugo is at the centre of all three of the previously noted bands… plus he has a solo album out earlier this year… each song has its own visual… I’ll be honest, I haven’t dove that far into his new album AS YET… although the tracks I’ve explored are indeed fantastic… this is where I’ll admit to being a schmuck… or is that a schlemiel??… who prefers the more… uh… English language stuff he’s put out…

BUT, my own cultural ineptitude aside… he’s a powerful singer… who’s covered all kinds of ground… his videos convey humor and humility and warmth and… uh… hilarity…

He’s maybe going through a new wave weirdness vibe right now… or perhaps I’m drawing that assumption cause his latest record is called Bad Vibrations and the cover pays homage to Iggy Pop’s Lust for Life… but from the tracks I’ve checked, this casual observation is maybe valid… will I die on that particular hill? I will not. As I think I’ve mentioned, I’ve made no claim to being a music journalist… or a musicologist…

Anyway, this young singer… I call him that, cause for all his accomplishments, he’s a good three years younger than me… and anyone younger than me is by default fully and completely young… is packing talent to spare…

So what? He’s also a talented visual artist. His IG and his website and his Bandcamp are all worth checking out. And there are links, particularly on the Bandcamp, to check out the downright flabbergasting variety of musical projects… Powernap… for the title alone, is of particular interest…

This uh… talented younger middle-aged dude is probably tired of me tagging him on IG. And rightfully so! This will probably… possibly… maybe not… be the last time for awhile! Bravo, pal… and keep on keeping it unreal!

Corey Hart, and Arcade Fire, and Bands with the Word “Wolf” in their Names

So now for the non-Sainte Catherines associated artists… at least as far as I’m aware… which came up during the podcast:

Corey Hart! Early musical memories, for sure… including early music VIDEO memories… which are important, especially among the late Gen X cohort… or, as I refer to us, the Greatest Generation… imagine an early 80’s Canadian pop music landscape absent Never Surrender, Sunglasses at Night, or Boy in the Box… you can’t! Try and name any Corey song besides those three…that might take awhile… but uh… hooray for Corey all the same! A three-hit wonder is exactly three times better than a one-hit wonder. So… bravo!!

I dug the first couple of Arcade Fire albums enough to download them on iTunes back in 2006 or 2007?? And I’ve never really bothered with them since. I’m sure they’ve made some great music. But… life is short… and there are other artists I’d rather give my time and attention to! I saw them the third and final time I saw U2… at Magnetic Hill in Moncton, New Brunswick… in the mud… on a cloudy afternoon… where I was standing close enough to the stage to see them (as well as Bono and Co. later) but without any seating my legs were numb… and I was nowhere near the concession so I was depressingly sober… having said that… they were giving it! The nine fiddle players and six tambourine players and the flautist were taking the gig seriously! They were having joy, they were having fun… and that lifted an otherwise murky spectacle! I understand the singer has lately been called out for some shitty misogynous actions aligned with his superstar status of the past decade and half… so… boo to that… and in total, that is pretty much all I’ve ever thought about the Arcade Fire… and then some…

Finally, I could have sworn there were more than the two bands with “wolf” in their name from Montreal from around the millennium that I was able to Google. I was pleased to see that Wolf Parade is on SubPop and appears to still be putting out edgy, weird indie guitar rock… AIDS Wolf appears to now be defunct… and while I respect electro-noise rock as much as anyone, I won’t necessarily be going down an AIDS Wolf Discogs rabbithole anytime soon… but… then again, you never know… moods change… and dollars can fly quickly when they do…

We hope you find whatever kind of freedom you are looking for this week!! And in general!! We will try and see you sooner than later next time!!

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

---

Filed under: Uncategorized - @ June 8, 2023 10:08 pm