Billy Talent - Billy Talent II

Billy Talent came to my attention in the summer of 2007 when their song “Red Flag” started popping up in my Pandora station for Mclusky. They aren't actually that similar to Mclusky except that they play high energy punk rock and are pretty angry. I kept intending to buy the album but their videos were kind of emo so it never was at the top of my list. This week I happened to find it in a Newbury Comics for a song, so I took it home after a stirring barbershop rendition of The Chemical Brother’s “Star Guitar.”

This album came out in 2006 and like most Canadian things it sounds like the best possible version of things that were happening on the US pop charts five years before. Musically they are pop punk, but with a strong admixture of late 90s Emo and early Nu-Metal. None of these are particularly inspiring genres. But just as their “pop punk” influences tend more toward awesome acts like The Living End* instead of urethra-shatteringly terrible acts like New Found Glory, Billy Talent pulls the best from these other, similarly tarnished genres. This mixture of really troubling influences makes for stressful listening if you care about music. It is like watching a movie where the protagonist keeps doing things that could result in their death, but don’t. "Look Out! Why are you picking up a hitchhiker? oh good he's just a mild mannered college student going home for thanksgiving. No you can't go inside! Oh good they're just thankful their boy got  home ok. What are you DOING?! You can't keep turkey leftovers inside the car for the rest of the four hour drive! That is not responsible food handling technique! The food has not been kept below 40 degrees! That food is in the danger zone! oh how nice they put in an ice pack, everything is OK. DON'T MICROWAVE THAT! THERE IS A BIT OF TINFOIL ON THE BAKED POTATO!" 

Many of the songs have a very Coheed and Cambria aspect, with a use of varying tone colors, tempos, interspersed with fun driving guitar driven sections. Though there are some vocal similarities I am happy to report they are mostly restricted to the backing vocals, which was always a Coheed strong suit, and do not pertain to that special sound of being raped by a weasel that Coheed seemed to love so very much. The lead vocals show more of a pop punk influence from acts like The Living End.# The Nu Metal influence comes in the rhythm section, where the use of double bass drums kind of off-sets the simple bass guitar parts, and in the song writing, with a certain over-reliance on textured hooks. Unlike Nu Metal, where these hooks tend to be the only thing that happens musically in a given five minute period of sludgy bullshit, where you come to love the hook as the desert nomad comes to love every grubby, filthy spot of water in the desert because they represent the only variation in the unremitting theme of bareness that surrounds him on every side, pressing into his skull with the monotonous drone of strums and bass parts that seem to have been invented only to give the musicians wrist exercises between masturbation sessions spent stroking the flowing locks of their Chad Kroger Real Doll...uh...

Unlike any of that, Billy Talent’s music has things going for it other than the admittedly varied hooks, such as melodic sophistication, a superb use of tone color and dynamics, and at the very least is over quickly. As a result, Billy Talent’s songs are not like engaging in an awkward 8 minute conversation with a depressed person you just met, who insists on telling you every aspect of their objectively mediocre childhood, from their parents who were mean but not abusive, to their friends who were just kind of cold, to their own continued obsession with the talent of musicians whose phallus they are too busy methaphorically felating to even try to emulate... Which is a good thing. Unless you like that kind of thing.I dunno. 

Musically the band has some obvious flaws, some exposed beams in the final structure, but I kind of have a hard on for the way they stray so close to the flame and survive. How many pop punk albums use polyphony? That’s pretty fun. How often have you listened to polyphony and thought "wow! polyphony! that isn't sad or pretentious at all!" It is a delicate balance Billy Talent maintains surprisingly well.  

Still, I must admit, what puts this band over the edge onto the positive side is the lyrics. Its not that they are particularly brilliant, or walk in any new fields. It is that they are political in a kind of old school punk kind of way. They aren't singing about the democratic party or anything, or how much they love Canada’s healthcare system, but about youth in revolt, lack of identity, and how much they hate hipsters (hey, it was 2006, we all hated hipsters). Old standards, sure, and delivered with only a workmanlike level of talent, but by focusing on things other than themselves it elevates the music beyond any of the genres they drew from into an area where it is possible to respect them. I don’t want to say that they transcend their influences, as that might imply a higher level of achievement, but they have certainly integrated their influences and used them to produce something new and uniquely their own. If you absolutely hate all manifestations of their influences, you will probably find more to hate there than love, but there is a spark here that makes this music more than a homunculus crafted from Pop Punk, Emo and Nu Metal. At this stage it may be a Frankenstein’s Monster, but the creation lives and breathes and longs for more. For my money the result is fascinating and maddening., and I am intregued to see if anything else they produced was as good. 

*fuck you and you're "The Living End is Rockabilly." I love them but if The Living End is Rockabilly then my underwear is a Chevy because of the pair of fuzzy dice I hung there

#As Rockabilly as Taylor Swift is country

+there is no third footnote. 

Baxter - Self Titled

The thing I know least well how to deal with is mediocrity. It is a perennial truism of reviewers that the worst things are neither good nor bad but uninteresting, but it does not really help one resolve what to DO with the boring ones. It is not a problem we have in daily life. Let’s say you have a coworker, let us call him Mike, who shows up every day, usually on time, does a decent amount of work with only a few glaring errors, and is not particularly unpleasant to be around. How do you feel about Mike? He’s alright, you will probably get to know him, ask him the odd question around the office, maybe he goes out to lunch with the gang once a week. You would probably not recommend that they be fired or killed. Conversely, if you have a coworker, let us call him Steve, who comes in when the fuck ever, always leaves early, has heinous flatulence, and whose work was so bad as to be counter productive, you would want them fired, not placed in some kind of “so bad it is good” category.
            Baxter is definitely a Mike. The band is another Sweedish electronica outfit in the vein of Massive Attack, except with none of the interesting features of said outfit. While Massive Attack has intricate, fast paced rhythms expertly layered with rich, creamy melodies and deeply insiteful lyrics, Baxter has moderately interesting beats backing perfectly acceptable melodies in support of lyrics that are, you know, ok. They aren’t bad. They aren’t even predictable. They’re just not that interesting. Its not like they are rhying on “ing” or some other heinous sin against god and nature, and the songs are musically competent. I would say that they even use their tools well. There’s some interesting literary construction on “Television,” and a very nice use of overdubbing on
Political.” There’s just so many other bands out there and I dunno if I seem myself ever going “Man, I really wanna listen to Baxter!”
            So what do I do here? Do I sell off this CD? Gift it? Leave it in a public place for someone to find? It’s a shame cos there are interesting things I could say about this band. Like the fact that the main song writer was in a previous band called Salt that made some waves in the American charts with a song called “Bluster.” Except I looked up “Bluster” and it was to grunge what this album is to cool electronica. I dunno it’s fine, I guess, if you are into grunge you’d probably like it. Its not genre defying or anything.
            So Fuck. I mean I only bought this album because it had a minimalist cover design and the band had the same name as Ron Burgundy’s dog. But it turns out the album art was like that because apparently in Sweeden all album art is designed by Ikea, and the band is certainly not a tiny Buddha, covered in hair. Meh.