Power Hour Playlist Project

taking artist discographies and distilling them down into compact hour-long playlists to inform and entertain both first-time listeners and long-time fans.

[powerhourplaylists]

New Music: February 17th, 2017

I know this blog was started to house my power-hour playlists, but I also keep a weekly playlist of songs from new releases and I figure that this is as good a place as any to keep track of them. Not sure exactly how much I will write about the music contained therein (I use a combonation of Spotify's New Release Radar, Allmusic's Featured Reviews, and AOTY's Release Calendar) because it's often new to me. I'll at least try to write a few lines about what I'm digging that week because, hey, content. 

 This week, I'm especially digging the new one from Meat Wave - took me a few songs to get through the muddy production, but I'm even digging that now. Also, shaggy-dog vintage-aping punk-rockers Future Virgins have a singles collection that is really quite delightful. As for stuff that I'm less familiar with already, Dutch Uncles' Big Baloon sounds fun in an off-kilter kind of way, and there's some electronic albums that sound very intruiging in here. Dig in, y'all!

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Cake

One look through the Allmusic reviews for Cake’s early output reveals a clear bias; instantly shoo’d away as “novelties,” “quirk-rock,” “too collegiate and arcane” and “a suburban, melodic white-funk-injected version of King Missile's performance art/standup comedy;” many shrugged, labeled them as one-hit-wonders post-The Distance and figured they’d fade away. 

Fortunately for those of us who weren’t so quick to dismiss Cake, they continued to consistently release some pretty great albums throughout the late-nineties and early-aughts. 

It’s downright bewildering to listen to my favourite Cake tracks and think that they could be so easily dismissed; sure, the genre-playfulness may come off as irritating to some listeners, but I’ve never felt like they were ever being disrespectful with their instrumentation. In fact, their sound to me has always seemed quite singular. 

No one ever seems to name-check their country-vibes when running down the expected list of “alternative,” “funk,” and “hip-hop” (huh?) when describing their music. Case in point: their cover of “Sad Songs & Waltzes” never betrays the pain found in Willie Nelson’s original, but instead offers a respectful update. 

I’ll never understand why their limited use of irony had the band shunned by so many as an act that “considers themselves above everyone else” when so many of their songs contain such a diverse range of tales. 

Unfortunately, they have so many great songs that limiting them to an hour, while keeping some of the hits, was extremely tough. Hopefully I can at least convince one or two that their output is worth another look.

[powerhourplaylists]

B.A. Johnston

Sometimes I want to describe B.A. Johnston as one of the top unsung Canadian songwriters of all-time, but it may be more apt to call him the best songwriter you didn’t know already snot-rocketed onto your friends at his many live-shows around the country. 

When I was in High School, my friend Greg showed up to school having seen B.A. Johnston live the night before; they told me of his songs about the Legend of Zelda and worrying about dying alone while your neighbors fucked to Moist CDs. Less than a year later, B.A. gave my (terrible) band one of our first shows ever - he even claimed to “like” our awful album once! 

When I moved to Toronto, one of the only constants in life was that B.A. would always be touring somewhere, and whether I was in Toronto, visiting home in Peterborough, or anywhere else in Ontario, there was probably a B.A. show either coming up, or one just past. 

I’d like to live long enough to see the funny-sad mini-masterpiece “Raised by the Wooden Spoon” become a nationally beloved song. 

B.A.’s power hour playlist is one to eat poutine to, one to beat Mega Man 2 to, and one to have a pizza party for one to. So scarf down your Pep and Ched, kick your Couche-Tard roommate out of your apartment, and press play.

[powerhourplaylists]

Jawbreaker

I’m not entirely sure when the first time I heard Schwarzenbach and co. I would love to have some great story about where I discovered them, but to be honest it was probably something lame, like hearing The Ataris cover "Boxcar” in High School. Sigh. At least Lagwagon did a dope “Want” cover, though; I digress.

Anyway, the story of Jawbreaker is as dramatic as their material, charting a lighting-quick rise-and-burnout, initial break-up in 1990, reformation, an increase of ambition, one absolute seminal recording with Albini, jump to the major labels and becoming Nirvana adjacent, subsequent bullshit-scene reactionary response (feat. crowd members sitting down, facing backwards, when band plays new material) and a final, misunderstood-at-the-time swan-song which became a cult-favourite years later. 

My personal relationship with the band was a measured one, I dipped my toe into their most popular songs in High School (”Boxcar,” “Chesterfield King,” etc.) before easing myself into their discography by way of 24 Hour Revenge Therapy. I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it at the time, but over the years I returned and returned, eventually discovering the dark wonders of Bivouac and the studio-sheen of Dear You which almost betrayed the desperation of tracks like “Sluttering (May 4th)” but ended up sounding just perfect, regardless.

As always, I’ve attempted to balance Jawbreaker’s more popular tracks with some deeper cuts - though nothing too deep - for both new listeners and long-time appreciators. 

[powerhourplaylists]

The Sea and Cake

Are The Sea and Cake a super-group for music nerds? Formed with members of The Coctails (Archer Prewitt), Shrimp Boat (Sam Prekop and Eric Claridge), and Tortoise (John McEntire), they clearly come from Chicago indie-rock royalty, but at the same time those names aren’t echoing through many households either.  Regardless, I’ve always thought of them to be one of the most consistent long-running bands in indie-rock history.

What they are exactly, is a tough-to-pin-down exercise in genre-juggling; are they an indie-rock band with jazz overtones? A post-rock band with pop tendencies? Well, they’re all of the above plus more; there’s no reference point for a band like The Sea and Cake. Their music sounds wholly their own - when you hear a song from them, there’s no mistaking who it is. Beginning with their debut album in 1994, the band honed its elusive sound from post-rock indebted pop through to electronic-adorned smooth-rock and back again. There’s nary a dud in their entire run - though they’re surely an acquired taste - and so it was tough to narrow down to an hour. I gave it my best, and tried to illustrate as many facets of the band as I could; the hard-edged angular and experimental texture-kraut of “A Man Who Never Sees A Pretty Girl That He Doesn’t Love” to the shimmering “Four Corners” and downright catchy “Sporting Life.”

Hopefully the playlist turns a few ears onto their wonderful output. 

[powerhourplaylists]

Britney Spears

With 26 Power Hour playlists and counting currently, I am looking forward to posting them out there over the next few days/weeks. About two-thirds of my way into creating those 26 playlists, I realized that they were really dude-heavy, as well as indie/rock/punk/post-punk/etc. heavy. I could already imagine detractors; "What's wrong with pop? What's with all the dude-rock?" As such, I decided what discography would be better to take a head-first dive into than Britney Spears? 

 For one, I was utterly unfamiliar with her non-singles work; I mean, like everyone else I thought Toxic was a cracking pop song that thankfully ended up introducing me to the work of Miike Snow - but what were her underrated or overlooked songs? With a group of friends as research, I created the list that sits before you; and I have to tell you, after listening to the playlist a few times through, I'm a convert; this is a stacked little pack of pop-music perfection.

[powerhourplaylists]

Helvetia

To me, Helvetia are a band who are as consistent as they are underrated; I found out about the band when I heard that members would be joining one of my favourite bands of all time (Built to Spill.) So of course, I dove into their discography as soon as I could. 

Helvetia rose from the ashes of another great band, Duster. Taking that act's shoegazing tendancies and adding a dollop of lo-fi textures while mixing in some indie-pop and psychedelic overtones, Helvetia have honed their winning combonation of styles over the course of eight albums. They're all absolutely wonderful, and I have spend days just mainlining through every single one of them - and I'll certainly spend days doing that again in the future.

For now, here's my attempt at distilling their fantastic run of albums down into an hour for the uninitiated; I hope it inspires you to take a dive head-first into their output.

[powerhourplaylists]

Fugazi

An hour of Fugazi... 'nuff said.

[powerhourplaylists]

The Smiths

It all started with The Smiths; I was never a big fan of the band, and when a good friend of mine (Greg LeGros) picked Strangeways Here We Come to be discussed on our now-defunct podcast Time Bandits, I realized that there was more to the band than I had maybe assumed prior.

So, I took a page from The A.V. Club’s book (who used to have a great feature called Power Hour) and tried to distill the band’s output into a 60 minute mix - the key thing with a Power Hour (to me) is that it should both cater to new fans (i.e. contain at least a few “hits” or memorable songs that the uninitiated will recognize) while also including some deeper-cuts (for long-time listeners and to pull in the new listeners without scaring them away.)

That’s what I tried to do here; as with every single Power Hour playlist that will follow, that means cutting some fan-favourites, singles, and other major milestones that might have purists crying foul. Such is the way of the Power Hour.