myboytheriotgirl

It’s undeniable: from Cootes Paradise at the edge of the valley to the Red Hill Valley in the east, the leaves are turning colours, and Megs and I think we’ll be in for quite a show this fall.

So, to get into that “light a fire and pass me my sweater” mood, we’ve got a few autumn-time selections for this week, plus a bunch of up-and-coming Canadian artists to warm us up. There’s a great new track from Regina’s Library Voices, who recently released their Summer of Lust album (worth a listen!), as well as music from Toronto’s Modern Superstitions, Evening Hymns, and Lou Canon, who shares a very pretty and timely duet with Hayden.

We also go international to hear from boy-girl duos Slow Club (UK), and Mates of State (USA), who both gifted the world with brand new albums this fall, and The Knife (Sweden). This particular brother-sister duo can please your ears as easily as they defy description, so we close out this week with the first two tracks off their seminal 2006 disc Silent Shout.

Tune in and throw us a lifeline next week as we try to avoid drowning in a deluge of new music from artists like Bjork, Wilco, Dum Dum Girls, and Ohbijou (who play This Ain’t Hollywood tonight)!

1. Fleet Foxes – Helplessness Blues (Helplessness Blues)
2. Library Voices – Generation Handclap (Summer of Lust)
3. Lou Canon – In Fall (Lou Canon)
4. Modern Superstitions – Love That Beats My Heart (All the Things We’ve Been Told)
5. Purity Ring – Belispeak (Split 7″)
6. Charlotte Gainsbourg – Terrible Angels (Terrible Angels – EP)
7. M83 – Claudia Lewis (Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming)
8. Atlas Sound – Te Amo (Parallax)
9. The Clientele – The Violet Hour (The Violet Hour)
10. Slow Club – Two Cousins (Paradise)
11. Evening Hymns – Broken Rifle (Out Of This Spark)
12. Mates of State – Palomino (Mountaintops)
13. The Knife – Silent Shout (Silent Shout)
14. The Knife – Neverland (Silent Shout)

Hej iedereen, welkom bij myboytheriotgirl. This week: three tracks off The Pack A.D.’s latest, Unpersons, plus a tip ‘o the hat to 2011 Polaris (& Juno & Grammy & Brit) winners Arcade Fire.

And [wikipop search=”Girls (band)”]Girls[/wikipop], [wikipop]Little Girls[/wikipop], and girlbands.

Sweden’s [wikipop]Tallest Man on Earth[/wikipop] goes to Spain, Whitehorse goes to the Emerald Isle, and Brazil’s [wikipop search=”CSS (band)”]CSS[/wikipop] break the law. Meanwhile, [wikipop]DJ Shadow[/wikipop] emerges from years in the dark with the truth: The Less You Know, The Better.

All this in one hour? You betcha.

1. The Pack A.D. – Haunt You (Unpersons)
2. The Rural Alberta Advantage – The Deathbridge in Lethbridge (Hometowns)
3. Girls – Alex (Father, Son, Holy Ghost)
4. The Tallest Man On Earth – King Of Spain (The Wild Hunt)
5. The Arcade Fire – The Suburbs (The Suburbs)
6. Ladytron – White Elephant (Gravity the Seducer)
7. Little Girls – Daydream (Cults EP)
8. The Pack A.D. – Seasick (Unpersons)
9. EMA – Breakfast (Past Life Martyed Saints)
10. Apparat – Sweet Unrest (The Devil’s Walk)
11. DJ Shadow – Run For Your Life (The Less You Know, The Better)
12. Cansei De Ser Sexy – Partners In Crime (La Liberación)
13. The Weakerthans – Tournament of Hearts (Reunion Tour)
14. Whitehorse – Emerald Isle (Whitehorse)
15. The Pack A.D. – Hear Me Out (Unpersons)

No one right now, but we’ll know in just a few hours! That’s right: the seemingly interminable wait between the announcement of the Polaris Music Prize shortlist and the gala is all but over. Tonight’s festivities will be webcast live thanks to Much Music, starting at 8pm.

Though Megan and I don’t have a great record in predicting the future, we find it hard to envision an scenario where the Grammy and Juno award winning The Suburbs by [wikipop]Arcade Fire[/wikipop] doesn’t take home the $30,000 prize.  But when the name of the game is to be hipper-than-hip, you can never be sure how the jury will vote.  So here’s hoping that if Arcarde Fire don’t take home the bacon, then [wikipop search=”Destroyer (band)”]Destroyer[/wikipop] does for Kaputt.

Regardless, we’ll play a selection by the act that that wins on this week’s show, which will also feature three tracks from Unpersons, the brand new disc from [wikipop]The Pack A.D.[/wikipop], and songs by boys who refer to themselves as [wikipop search=”Girls (band)”]Girls[/wikipop], and [wikipop search=”Little Girls (band)”]Little Girls[/wikipop].  See ya Wednesday!

It’s the first show of the new season/ school-year and it’s huge!  Like, two hours huge.

First off, to new listeners/students at McMaster (home to CFMU), welcome to Hamilton, we’re happy to have you!  Hopefully you had a chance to experience the amazingness of Supercrawl last weekend, and are now totally inoculated and will make many trips downtown over the course of your degree–remember, Westdale is nice, but there’s way more to Hamilton, and most of it is across the 403.

We’re Megan and Mike, and this is myboytheriotgirl, a weekly music digest that mixes tracks by new and independent artists with indie/alt favourites (see the tag cloud in the sidebar to get an idea of the artists we play—->). Our show is podcasted most Wednesdays, and we do our best to focus on Canadian and female artists. We also love requests, so don’t be shy!

This week we start off by firmly closing the door on summer by re-listening to a few of our favourite tracks from artists who released new albums this year, including a track from [wikipop]PJ Harvey[/wikipop]’s Mercury Award-winning Let England Shake. Since she’s the first artist to win two of the prestigious awards, we’ll hear some other material from her long and glittering recording history.

We also get to new music from Canadians [wikipop]Dan Mangan[/wikipop], [wikipop]Ohbijou[/wikipop], and Hamilton’s own husband-and-wife duo Whitehorse (who we managed to catch live as they prepared to tour across Canada).

Things wrap up with another recent fave from Vancouver’s [wikipop]The Pack A.D.[/wikipop], who just released their latest, Unpersons, yesterday.  It rocks, and because it does, we’ll be doing an album feature on it for next week’s show.

In the meantime, hit that little play button at the top of the post, and join us for a couple of hours as we gleefully consume some indie-rock.  I think by mid-terms we’ll be good friends!

1. Cults – Abducted (Cults)
2. Grouplove – Colours (Grouplove)
3. Sloan – Unkind (The Double Cross)
4. Beirut – Santa Fe (The Rip Tide)
5. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart – Belong (Belong)
6. Bon Iver – Towers (Bon Iver)
7. PJ Harvey – England (Let England Shake)
8. The National – Abel (Alligator)
9. Handsome Furs – Cheap Music (Sound Kapital)
10. You Say Party! We Say Die! – Stockholm syndrome part one (Hit the floor!)
11. You Say Party! We Say Die! – Stockholm syndrome part two (Hit the floor!)
12. Sarah MacDougall – sometimes you lose, sometimes you win (The Greatest Ones Alive)
13. The Naked And Famous – Young Blood (Passive Me, Aggressive You)
14. M83 – New Map (Hurry Up, We’re Dreaming)
15. Pat Jordache – Phantom Limb (Future Songs)
16. Colin Stetson – Red Horse (Judges II) (New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges)
17. Ohbijou – Anser (Metal Meets)
18. Pj Harvey & John Parish – Cracks In The Canvas (A Woman A Man Walked By)
19. Whitehorse – Killing Time Is Murder (Whitehorse)
20. Dan Mangan – Post-War Blues (Oh Fortune)
21. Graham Wright – Medicine Hat (The Lakes Of Alberta)
22. Squaresville – Girl (Not if you were the last square on earth)
23. Eleanor Friedberger – Early Earthquake (Last Summer)
24. St. Vincent – Strange Mercy (Strange Mercy)
25. Billy Bragg – Accident Waiting To Happen (Don’t Try This At Home)
26. The Smiths – The Headmaster Ritual (Meat Is Murder)
27. PJ Harvey – Joe (Dry)
28. Yeah Yeah Yeahs – Black Tongue (Fever To Tell)
29. Smashing Pumpkins – Cherub Rock (Siamese Dream)
30. The Pack A.D. – Sirens (Unpersons)

First off, a hearty thanks to Winged Beast Outfitters for designing (and outfitting) mbtrg with new banners for the blog! It’s long been a dream to have something [wikipop search=”Not_entirely_unlike”]almost, but not quite, entirely unlike a logo[/wikipop], and this series of banners will let us refresh and enliven the webspace every now and again.

Three brief pieces of music news in our week off:

(1): PJ Harvey has won another Mercury Prize.  That’s right, earlier this week Polly Jean became the first artist to win the prestigious prize twice, this time for Let England Shake (the [wikipop search=”Mercury Prize”]Mercury[/wikipop] is to Britons what the Polaris Prize is to Canadians). Almost exactly ten years back, she beat out Radiohead and Gorillaz for the prize with Stories from the City, Stories from the Sea.

In honour of this unprecedented win for an artist we love here at mbtrg, next week we’ll sample tracks from Polly’s long career, including one from her 1992 debut, Dry. In the meantime, maybe you should re-enjoy the first single off Let England Shake, the disturbing yet catchy “The Words that Maketh Murder.”

(2) And on the subject of female artists who are anything but conventional, we were also pumped this week to hear that the entirety of the new [wikipop search=”St. Vincent (musician)”]St. Vincent[/wikipop] album, Strange Mercy, was being streamed for free on the NPR website. It comes out next Tuesday, and if you’re the daring type, you should give it a listen–it’s what pop sounds like on Venus.

Here’s the comically dark first video from the album, “Cruel”:

(3)Don’t forget that the James North Supercrawl is this Saturday! The stages schedule is now posted, and festivities start at 1pm. Highlights include the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra w/ [wikipop]Basia Bulat[/wikipop] at 7pm, [wikipop search=”Plants and Animals (band)”]Plants and Animals[/wikipop] at 8pm, and headliners [wikipop]Broken Social Scene[/wikipop] at 10.30pm.

For our part, we’ll start lobbying Mother Nature for nice weather, and hopefully organizers will not be operating on “Hamilton Concert Time” and stick reasonably close to the schedule.  One way or another, we’ll see you there!

And so it begins.

This morning marks the beginning of the school-year, at least here in Ontario, and we tip our hats to all those intrepid students on their way to fill up their brains with book-learnin’ and whatnot.

The back-to-school festivities at McMaster have pre-empted myboytheriotgirl this week, but we’ll be back next week with a two-hour show to welcome people back into the classrooms.

In the meantime, Megan and Stirling helped me dedicate a couple of tracks to everyone facing the end of summer today. Not that it will make it any easier to strap on that ‘ol backpack and make the trek to school, but maybe, just maybe, listening to a few indie-pop tracks will expand your mind’s capacity open up and swallow ideas.  Mental [wikipop]calisthenics[/wikipop], if you will.

First off, off the irresistible Billy Bragg’s first solo album we hear a song that goes to show you that things haven’t changed all that much since 1983:

Then, Camera Obscura gives us an example of the wrong (or right?) attitude to bring with you on the first day of school:

And finally, a B-side from The Knife asks us, “Who wants to be ordinary/Who wants to be sweet/Who wants to know mid-term”?  Ahhhh, life’s eternal questions translate well into Swedish…

End of summer keeps on rolling, and we visit some musical laboratories in Canada and abroad, and umm, probably across time.

New [wikipop]CSS[/wikipop] is at least catchy, and a neat-o Diamond Rings remix of a [wikipop]Junior Boys[/wikipop] track in time for Supercrawl (be there!). We’d play it next week, but we’re off for McMaster Welcome Week festivities.

Then quick stops in 1977, 1983, and 1991 to step in on the synthy sounds of Kraftwerk, The Orb and The Cure, respectively. Is [wikipop]John Maus[/wikipop] from this decade? You decide, because he is one of the minds who travel through time. And “Quantum Leap” is mind-blowing.

Then we have a quick (read: long) stop in on The Chemical Brothers circa 1998 and their remix of a [wikipop]Spiritualized[/wikipop] song, before a request for some of Chicago’s [wikipop]The Sea and Cake[/wikipop] (mmm…).

Like we said, a week off for Welcome Week, and back with new Dan Mangan, The Naked and Famous, and St. Vincent. See ya at Supercrawl!

1. CSS – Hits Me Like A Rock (La Liberación)
2. Young Galaxy – We Have Everything (Shapeshifting)
3. Austra – Alone, Together (STROKED: A Tribute To Is This It)
4. Junior Boys – A Truly Happy Ending (Diamond Rings Remix)
5. Destroyer – Suicide Demo For Kara Walker (Kaputt)
6. The Orb – Little Fluffy Clouds (The Orb’s Adventures Beyond The Ultraworld)
7. Kraftwerk – Trans-Europe Express (Trans-Europe Express)
8. M83 – 0078h (Dead Cities, Red Seas & Lost Ghosts)
9. John Maus – Quantum Leap (We Must Become The Pitiless Censors Of Ourselves)
10. The Cure – The Walk (Japanese Whispers)
11. The Chemical Brothers – I Think I’m In Love (Chemical Brothers Vocal Remix) (Brother’s Gonna Work It Out)
12. The Sea and Cake – Weekend (Car Alarm)

We’ll post the latest episode tonight or tomorrow, but in the meantime check out the latest project from husband-and-wife team Luke Doucet and Melissa McClelland.  They are minor music royalty in this country,  and they’ve put aside their respective solo work for a spell to collaborate together as Whitehorse. UPDATE: If you want to see Luke and Melissa live, Whitehorse will be playing a show at the Casbah tonight (Aug 30)–no cover, 9pm doors.

Here’s the teaser-trailer for their selftitled EP, just out yesterday.

I’ve got their cover of Springsteen’s “I’m on Fire” firmly stuck in my head this morning, so I thought I’d share it with you (for a limited time at least…I think it’s slowing down the load-time of the site).

Whitehorse – I’m On Fire

We had to break the laws of physics to play fourteen songs this week, but somehow it worked. You’d think we’d have to speed things up to fit that much music into an hour, but we did the opposite instead: things are always a little slower at this point of the summer, so these tracks are meant as an accompaniment to the wind-downs that inevitably creep up on you in late August.

[wikipop]Yo La Tengo[/wikipop] starts us off with a track from 2006’s perfectly titled I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass, and by continually playing [wikipop]Cat Power[/wikipop] tunes, we hope to impel the creative spirit of Chan Marshall and finally get a new album (we’ve been waiting since 2008!).

A request by Scott is fulfilled–Edinburgh’s Withered Hand‘s latest album was out in March–and we’ll get to another request (from Michael) next week. Basia Bulat also gets some time since she’ll be reprising her beautiful performance with the Hamilton Philharmonic Orchestra at Supercrawl this September 10th.

And we end with a nod to next week’s show which will be feature a slew of more electronic-focused artists, including fellow Supercrawl performers [wikipop]Junior Boys[/wikipop], as well as new music from [wikipop search=”CSS (band)”]CSS[/wikipop] and [wikipop]John Maus[/wikipop].  See ya next week!

1. Yo La Tengo – Black Flowers (I Am Not Afraid Of You And I Will Beat Your Ass)
2. PJ Harvey – Hanging In The Wire (Let England Shake)
3. Lana Del Rey – Video Games (Video Games – Single)
4. Cat Power – Free (You Are Free)
5. Wild Nothing – Live In Dreams (Gemini)
6. Basia Bulat – Run (Heart of My Own)
7. Withered Hand – No Cigarettes (You’re Not Alone)
8. Portugal. The Man – All Your Light (In The Mountain, In the Cloud)
9. The Kills – You Don’t Own The Road (Blood Pressures)
10. Brilliant Colors – Value Lines (Again And Again)
11. The Drums – Money (Portamento)
12. Hooded Fang – Esp (Tosta Mista)
13. Air France – It Feels Good To Be Around You (It Feels Good To Be Around You)
14. Four Tet – Locked (FabricLive.59)

With the passing of Jack Layton early this morning, I imagine many, many Canadians feel the same way Megan and I do right now. Along with a sudden sense of emptiness there’s also that overwhelming feeling that the cosmos has a very sick sense of humour. For all his years of dedicated, passionate campaigning for a socially just Canada, Jack got to enjoy the fruits of his considerable labours for only a fleeting moment.

There’s not much to say about Jack that hasn’t already been said, but it’s worth reaffirming the fact that millions of citizens (partisan or not) share his positive vision for our country.  If part of his legacy is that this dream of a better Canada continues to grow in his absence, then we’ll swallow the bitter with the sweet, and whisper a quiet thanks to one of the country’s last honest politicians.

Here are a couple of tracks dedicated to you, Jack–we certainly won’t forget you.