Cochlear Implant

Wale
Attention Deficit
(Allido/Interscope)
****
Unlike, say, Kanye West, Wale’s strut and ingenuity is his only real value. And although he does like to mention his name a lot, he is not like far too many other rappers: Wale’s obsession for megalomania doesn’t create the hype. After putting out several mixtapes, including 2008’s brilliant Seinfeld-themed Mixtape about Nothing, where he asked “what is the deal with this rap stuff? Since Napster, this game’s been crashing,” Wale has finally come out with his first ‘official’ release. Wale realizes that in an era where you can download Attention Deficit before you finish reading this review, his opportunity is solely based on taking the hip-hop world by storm and using media for good. Resisting the urge to make his personality the merchandise, Attention Disorder is a product filled with peppy beats and soul-inspired loops, driven by always shrewd, Tribe-Called-Quest- like rhymes of Wale. Download Wale’s mixtapes, buy this album.

TV Heart Attack with Sloan and Magneta Lane
The Starlite Room (10030-102 St.) Dec. 12, Doors @ 9pm
Tickets: $20 @ Ticketmaster, Megatunes and Blackbyrd

Although it’s not exactly like American Idol, touring as an emerging band is a lot like an audition.

Audiences are a fleeting bunch. We are all too aware of how an artist can be the new black one day and left for dead the next.

Even if the audition goes well night after night, success doesn’t often follow. The unfortunate reality exists: music is a cut-throat business and the avenues an artist paves and the connections a band creates make the difference between getting noticed and being forgotten.

Vancouver’s TV Heart Attack has a plan. They might not take over the rock world anytime soon, but they’re relentless in their pursuit of achieving their goals day after day. Through their connection with audiences and their ability to promote themselves, they’re building their own brand.

“When you’re touring across Canada and you’re hitting these cities — these towns — [and] it’s your first or second time going there, and the hours are long, is a pretty exciting time for us,” says TVHA frontman, Jason Corbett. “It can be tough, but to steal something from Jeff Buckley: ‘after awhile you’re like a football player who’s out of gas and you make moves that you never thought you had in you.’ You just base it on instinct.”

And while they have the opportunity to tour and play to crowds¬ — large or small — TVHA certainly hasn’t mailed it in with their efforts, as they’ve pursued every aspect of their band’s success. “There are people out there who are interested. There are people following us. You’ve got to keep working, keep giving them content. That could mean that you keep twittering or maintaining your online presence. Because there are people out there watching and listening. You’ve got music you have created and there are people who want to hear it….hopefully,” Corbett laughs.

TVHA’s latest, Lost in the Sway, has allowed for their fans to come en masse and things haven’t looked better for the foursome. Corbett admits that they are now doing a lot of condensed press and how, through meeting people and making positive connections, they’ve engineered some unbelievable opportunities through sincerity and networking.

“We’ve been doing so much press lately and it’s amazing. We’ve got a new video that should have cost us $150,000, but it only cost us a couple of thousand because of people we knew through networking. We’ve been really lucky. People in the film industry like us, people in the video game industry like us.

We’re in the new Vancouver Olympics video game by Sega – it’s going to be sold all over the world,” says Corbett. “We’re credited right on the back and in the rolling credits. That’s some major exposure. We’re even in NHL ’09 — it’s a really crazy feeling lately.”

“But you know what I’ve worked hard at? Being sincere with people. I see the way certain bands act towards people and I just cringe, and I can’t do that. Over the years I stuck to my guns about the way I treated people and it paid off, not that I expected any reward, but it’s sure nice when people come out of the woodwork for us.”

Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet
By Will Ferguson, Viking Canada. 398 pages, $32

I admit I get a tad jealous when I hear about people travelling the globe. So, naturally you’d think it would be mildly cheerless for me to read a celebrated author’s tales and talk to him about his extensive travels and the seemingly endless (and equally hilarious) stories that emerge from them. Canadian author and humourist, Will Ferguson’s latest, Beyond Belfast: A 560-Mile Walk Across Northern Ireland on Sore Feet is an Ulster Trail choose-your-own-adventure book where the “choices” were perhaps the worst ones, but certainly the most adventurous. Yet, if anything, after reading Beyond Belfast and speaking with its main voyager, I know that now more than ever, I need to travel — just not with Will Ferguson as my tour guide.

“I’m not a good traveller because my mind wanders,” says Ferguson. “If you travelled with me expect to get lost and know that your first goal is to meet people, to hell with the itinerary. If something else comes up contrary to plan, go that way. If you meet people and the entire trip turns, that’s what happens. I mean, you don’t take stupid risks, even though I do more than I should, but the thing is to follow where the trip will take you, not impose an itinerary on the trip.”

And now that I have a nicely-sorted, slightly frightening, yet quite engaging litany of expectations for the Will Ferguson Adventure Co., I now know why they let the professionals set up travel agendas.

“I wrote a guidebook once — it’s now out of print — and I got a letter from someone saying ‘Dude, you led me and my girlfriend into the ocean with your directions’. It turns out I got left and right confused, a pretty important detail. That’s when I realized I’m not cut out for guidebook writing,” Ferguson laughs. “I like writing memoirs. Guidebook writing is completely different than writing memoir. It’s a completely different part of your brain. Some people are great at writing guidebooks. They know when the train left, how much the hotel costs, what the admission is, what the main sites are. I’m not like that, I wander away. Guidebook writers are the really great travellers, they’re efficient. I’m a terrible traveler. I’m always lost, I’m always missing steps, and I’m showing up when the museums are closed.”

Ferguson might not excel at travelling safe or according to any sort of plan whatsoever, but the tales he heaves from the misadventures are hilariously rewarding to the reader. His passion for travel and escapade is no secret, yet he understands that his talents lie in the way in which a story is crafted and delivered, not how immediately impressionable the trip might be.

“It’s not the story, it’s the telling – it’s how you tell them. I have a friend who took a trip across Mongolia and it is the most boring story I`ve ever heard. You’ll never want to go to Mongolia after listening to him. But my neighbour talked about going to the mall with her kids and her husband over Christmas and she’d taken her baby out of the carriage, but they were still using the carriage to open doors and slam things around. She told us about the horrified looks on faces. It took her 20 minutes to tell us the story and we were in tears because we were laughing so hard about it. It was a trip to the mall — and we wanted to hear more,” Ferguson says. “It’s really not where you go and how you do it. It’s how you tell it.”

Mike Soret is warming to the idea of celebrating the holidays with friends instead of drinking alone

THE MOLESTICS
Featuring Ben Sures. New City Likwid Lounge (10081 Jasper Ave). Wed, Dec 9 (doors @ 8pm).

The holiday season can be many things: a time of merriment and a time of celebration, a time of family and friends, a time to show our appreciation for all the pleasures life has given us. Or it can mean a miserable week spent in the company of our malfunctioning families, an obnoxiously cheerful reminder of why Christmas is not the most wonderful time of the year.

Mike Soret, former frontman of the veteran Canadian punk/swing band The Molestics, is definitely one of those people who finds Yuletide ... well ... interesting. “I can relate a lot to Festivus,” he says, referring to the misanthropic anti-holiday invented by Seinfeld’s Frank Costanza. “I spent every Christmas in the cubbyhole under the stairs while my Ukrainian family got drunk and fought the whole night long. I think a lot of people from Edmonton can relate to that.

“Before the band,” he continues, “I put on a medieval Christmas pageant called The Second Shepherd’s Play for seven consecutive years as a way to forget to my Festivus-like Christmas. I had to go back 600 years to find a time where I liked Christmas! When I was in The Molestics, I had a traditional Christmas — turned off the lights and tried to drink myself to death. That was a ritual I picked up from a friend who had it as a New Year’s tradition. I’ve never gone out for New Year’s before or since the band. Christmas is a time for friends and family, and if your memories of friends and family are like mine, your ritual will be the result.”

Luckily Soret’s Scroogelike personality is tempered by his flair for showmanship and his ability to engage an audience — both onstage and in print. His memoir Confessions of a Local Celebrity (recently published in a beautifully designed paperback edition, the precise dimensions of a 45 single, by Edmonton’s Belgravian Press) is a highly readable, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny tale of life as a musician in Vancouver. Most of the book covers The Molestics’ Vancouver glory days in the late ’90s, when the band was popular enough for Soret to achieve a limited amount of local fame. The Molestics were heavily influenced by “hokum jazz,” a style of music built on farce and slapstick humour that laughs in the face of “real” music, and he brings the same healthy disrespect for literary writing to Confessions of a Local Celebrity. But who cares about critical prestige so long as you’re entertaining your audience?
“It’s the job of the entertainer to be interesting ... to be entertaining,” he says. “It doesn’t matter if the audience likes you or dislikes you, whether you lose them or the music guts them — those are just subgenres. The main qualifier is that it entertains them. Somehow, probably because it’s really important to me, I can entertain people. I entertain even if it is not entertaining at all!

“I’ll even tell you a secret. I shouldn’t even tell you the trick, but I will. Here it is: you got the microphone, so you’ve got this advantage. Everyone came to see you and you’ve got the microphone. If someone isn’t having a good time, you can break them down. And then I encourage people to drink. It works for me. Why the hell not have a good time? Isn’t that what you came for?”

Perhaps Soret learned a few things about entertainment in that childhood cubbyhole, listening to the muted sounds of inebriated relatives and witnessed tortured holiday rituals. There’s no question that he looks at the holidays differently now than he did years ago; this year, Soret says, he no longer wants to be alone over the holidays.

“I’ll make Christmas better for everyone by absolving the crowd of their dysfunction,” he says. “The role I play onstage says that it’s okay to be screwed up after what we all went through. Might as well make the best of it.”

THE VIC CHESNUTT BAND
w/ Liz Durrett. The Starlite Room (10030-102 St). Sun, Nov 22 (8pm). Tickets: $20, available through Ticketmaster (451-8000/ticketmaster.com).

“I play music because I inherited this gift,” Vic Chesnutt says over the phone from his Georgia home. “Music has an indescribable impact on me. I find listening and playing it and almost religious experience. It soothes the savage beast — I mean, it is a cliché and it is very true. Something about the way two or three tones come together creates magic and can change things in a big way.”

Sure, Chesnutt’s a bit obsessed with the idea of writing music — probably now more than ever. He penned his first melody when he was five, thousands of others since then that haven’t been recorded, and thousands more wandering his mind that still haven’t even been put down on paper. He says that as he watched his mother write songs and play music as a child, he became educated and inspired. The role music and the people close to him have played in his life started before he could even talk, it seems, and continue to this day.

“I hit it off with these guys immediately,” Chesnutt says, referring to Guy Picciotto and members of A Silver Mt. Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor who “back him up” on his latest two albums and current tour. “I’d never met them before we recorded [the 2007 album] North Star Deserter — I didn’t know them personally, but I definitely knew their music. We had a great deal in common both musically and intellectually. It just worked. I’m very lucky to be a part of it.”

It is an overpoweringly beautiful thing to see someone this confident in his art, especially considering the circumstances Chesnutt has faced to get where he’s at. At 18, he was involved in an auto accident that left him paralyzed from the waist down, and although this catastrophe dramatically changed the way in which he lived his life, it didn’t stand in the way of his passion and dedication to his craft. And like most of his material, Chesnutt’s most recent album, At the Cut, stares mortality square in the face. His themes are almost exclusively death and loss, yet there’s a quietly inspiring tone of optimism and hope running through these songs as well. At the Cut and Chesnutt’s new family came at an important time at his life.

“I mean, if I hadn’t broken my neck,” he says, “I’d still be playing music. But meeting these guys — the guys from Silver Mt. Zion and Guy, from Fugazi — was a real boost to my spirits. I was depressed before and I didn’t know what I was doing with my life and with my career. They really gave me a boost — it saved my life.”

The effects have been sonic as well as spiritual for Chesnutt. As anyone who listens to Godspeed can attest to, their distinctive, harrowing arrangements have enough energy and sensation to make something as ordinary as a bus ride seem larger than life; combined that sound with a singer-songwriter as raw and honest as Chesnutt is a potent synergy.

“Playing with those guys is a joyous occasion, man, absolutely joyous,” Chesnutt says. “It’s heavy and really emotional at times. But we laugh and smile a lot because we are interacting and basically jamming. This live show with this band is the best you can get anywhere — At the Cut doesn’t even touch the live show, really. I am a million times better on the stage than on record too because It’s a more complex, emotional thing.

“My longtime fans can’t believe the power of this new band, and the rock ’n’ rollers think it’s the most powerful band a singer/songwriter has ever had. And they’re right — there’s no doubt about that. There has never been a folk singer with a band this powerful. I mean it. It is an emotional experience. Now is not the time not to miss me.”