After all the hoopla of getting this album into my hands, I finally downloaded it last week knowing that I would pick it up the next time I was in the store.
Can I just say that it’s interesting to download an album when someone did some further mixing to it? Plus he merged the tracks so they overlapped with one another when they were playing. I thought “Huh, that’s kind of a strange way to create the album. But I guess the Trews were just messing around.” Then once I bought the album the other night I realized that the guy who uploaded the album had done that. I guess he doesn’t care for two second gaps between songs!
This album is pretty great in a rocking kind of way. They have really honed their songwriting craft to the point where they are telling stories in their songs along with some killer melodies, great riffs and all around good tunes. I really can’t say if any tune stands out for me. They are all good. I envision this being a great summer time album as it’s a constant stream of hit after hit after hit. You know those albums with not one bad song on it? That’s the case with this one.
What else can I say? If you are into the classic rock vibe (as compared to old Aerosmith) then The Trews are for you. They also throw in some other musically themed tunes like one that is reminiscent of a rocked out cover version of a maritime song (Can’t Stop Laughing) or the classic ballad where men contemplate how they can love two women at the same time (always a classic scenario in rock circles; Man With Two Minds).
Give this album a try! You know what…scratch that. I am declaring this as the must have album for good music brought by some boys from Antigonish (but now based in Niagara Falls). They are also hitting up Ottawa in May so you are more than welcome to join us when we go all out for that night.
Bonus Mini-Review: Maren had the following to say about some band I have not heard of yet, but is making big news in the indie music world:
Have you heard of my new favourite band, Vampire Weekend?
First of all, they rock.
They’re four guys from NYC – went to Columbia – and play all sorts of crazy instruments. Reviewers have compared their sound to Paul Simon’s Graceland album, but I think they’re more urban/preppy/African hipster sounding.
I think it’s the perfect outside album…as in, we bought it in Miami and listened to it while cruising down the streets with the windows down.
So that’s that. Take a listen. Maren is known in some circles to be a fan of old school hip-hop, old school Michael Jackson and music with an edge to it. Her sister and brother tend to introduce her to some great indie stuff which she falls in love with and then passes onto me. Let’s just say that everytime I go over, there’s something exciting playing on their excellent soundsystem (whereas if you come to my place, chances are, you will hear classic rock. Which ain’t a bad thing. But it isn’t fresh like daisies on a spring day, which, for all you Ottawans, you won’t see until July.)
iplaying: Headstrong – Trapt (Trapt)
I do enjoy Blockbuster’s previously viewed deals. Buy 2, get one free? No problem! I picked up Spider-Man 3, 28 Weeks Later and Hot Fuzz last night. I had been wishing to pick up Spider-Man 3 Special Edition for awhile as I do enjoy the documentaries of my favourite superhero, but Vero pointed out that I would be paying $15 extra dollars for a documentary. I passed on that idea with the knowledge of the future; I’ll find one at a garage sale one day!
In my original review of Spider-Man 3, I talk about how the movie was pulled in too many directions. I still agree with my initial review, but I must admit that I enjoyed the film more the second time around compared to the first. I saw how things fit together a little more and all in all, I enjoyed watching it (until Peter Parker takes a turn for the worse in a horrible dance sequence…even Vero was groaning!). Vero enjoyed the film on her first viewing though. I think this shows that overall Spider-Man 3 (and X-Men 3 for that matter) are good flicks, but for comic book fans, it may be pushing the limit.
Vero is diligently working on her sister’s wedding video. She is quite the video editor I must say. Her work is of professional quality! I have inputted my thoughts on a few sequences and the choice of music, but other than that, have left her to her own devices. I told her that we should look into having a wedding video business (not that there aren’t a ton out there already!) but I was wondering how much they would charge in general. We should look into that.
Alright, between the time I wrote that last sentence and this one, some time has passed. Enough time to make me realize that there seems to be a serious interest in the Ottawa area for wedding videographers. Now, I don’t know how busy they are persay, but they do make some fair coin. Minimum $800 for a day’s shooting and editing! Even if we did this just for fun, that would be a nice little extra income, PLUS there would be benefits of having our business (for tax purposes…awww yeah!)
I must admit that I’m excited for this prospect. Who knows what more we’ll find out?
The weekend was one where we buy a lot of beans, arm ourselves with a candle and bunker down. That’s right…yet again, we had some snow fall on us. It wasn’t a little snowdrift mind you, it was what I would like to call the mother of all storms. In fact, my manager just told me that on Saturday night we had snow, sleet, slush, thunder, lightning and frogs fall from the sky. No joke.
On Friday night, knowing that a storm was coming our way, I headed home to bunker down but Trish was brave enough to head over to our place. Vero’s plans got canceled due to the impending storm so she came over also and we headed out to the Barley Mow pub (after introducing Trish to the amazing Flight of the Conchords television show). Now, as we remember from our last trip to the Barley Mow pub, it wasn’t the best in service. But Trish wanted some pub food so I figured we would chance it.
Luckily, we had great, fast service and my meal wasn’t bad at all. You can’t go wrong with fish and chips. I don’t think Vero enjoyed her lasagna for one as it was a little too crispy (as in it’s been under the heat lamp since 2PM).
We headed home and continued our quest to watch the last season of Friends. We were triumphant and we also convinced Trish to spend the night as the roads were too bad to drive in. No one should take the chance! I think she secretly didn’t want to go home because of the fear that her driveway would not be plowed at her apartment.
The next day the weather wasn’t TOO BAD and really, there wasn’t TOO much snow on the ground. Only 20 cms I would say. Our neighbour was nice enough to shovel our walkway the night before so our boots weren’t TOO snowy to the trek to the truck. We went to Broadways for breakfast around 1:30 but my thoughts of breakfast being served until 3PM were wrong. They end at 1PM. No worries on my part, I am not a big fan of breakfast. The others were pretty bummed out though. I had a good Cajun Beef Melt along with a caesar salad. Not bad, not bad at all. Actually, now that I think of it, I’m surprised that I went to Broadways after the horrible service and food we had the time before also! Was I looking for punishment this weekend?
We headed home and felt the need to relax and watch movies for the rest of the day. We watched a few films in the afternoon, and then because I was going stir crazy, decided to take a flying leap into the backyard into the snow. There is at least five feet of snow in the backyard. Unfortunately, it was pretty hard underneath so I didn’t get the effect I was going for as we didn’t fall too far into it. It was quite hilarious to have Trish, Vero and I exploring the planet Hoth in my backyard though. The neighbours that it was quite funny.
After a great supper prepared by Mike and Vero, we settled down with some old videocassettes I had. Trish and I had this appreciation of popping in blank videocassettes and wondering what we would find on them. We ended up finding old episodes of ER, Dawson’s Creek, Joey, a documentary on Britney Spears…all in all…a treasure-trove of good times from five years ago. Afterwards we popped in some winter-fun movies like Ski School 2 and then The Shining (as Trish wanted to emulate the feeling of being stranded in the snow). I definitely fell asleep half way through The Shining as it’s not the most action packed film I’ve ever seen.
Sunday had me awake fairly early in the morning after a good sleep and I realized that I would have to get out there and shovel the driveway so that Vero could go to her play practice. It was already canceled the day before so I knew it would be important for her to head out to Sunday’s practice. I had my doubts as to whether or not there would be another practice today considering even Trish’s church was canceled! If the Lord’s house is canceled, you know it’s some bad weather!
I must admit that I felt like David vs. Goliath when I opened up the garage door into the snow mountain which lay before me. Our gracious neighbour had already shoveled the hard stuff at the end of the driveway which was great but I still had to contemplate how I would approach this precarious scenario. You see, like most people in Canada this winter, you probably have a snowbank on the edge of your driveway which is approximately fifteen feet tall. For those of you who don’t know measurements, think of five hobbits standing on top of each other and that’s how this thing is.
Now, the problem gets compounded when for every shovelful of snow you throw on top, half a shovelful falls back down due to the sheer size of the mountain of snow. Sigh…very aggravating. After two hours, we finally made it through the onslaught. There are definitely times that I wonder about the usefulness of a snowblower. 😉 I also would like to say that I really miss my old neighbour Barry who had a snowblower.
From reading the newspapers this morning, the city of Ottawa had 52 cm fall on them between the time of Friday – Saturday. The fun we had in the backyard on Saturday night is invisible to our eyes now as so much snow fell on top of it. I was talking to our neighbour who works for the Ottawa Police force and he indicated that there were talks of shutting the city down…essential service were having a hard time getting around the city. Quite the storm…but we felt the peace of a nice warm house in which we can ignore the outside world for a few hours…
Now if only my shoulders weren’t sore today from shoveling all that snow!
iplaying: Bring It All Back – The Tragically Hip (Road Apples)
Maren took a photo of this down in Florida somewhere. She recommended it as a future album cover!
Last night I set forth to record my new song, 705. I’ve alluded to this song before in this post where I performed it for my family.
I first moved my recording console up into my bedroom. I have felt quite uninspired down in the dark, dank basement. Maybe as a teenager, it’s another story and the basement is your haven for guitar rock greatness, but I feel that I just don’t want to jam out down there, let alone record. I also think I got a lot of this thought process once seeing Troy’s music studio in the daylight!
So after setting up the mics and whatnot, I ripped into another ditty which I am tentatively calling E Jump. I just throw in random names to log a song and usually write what key it’s written in so I can figure it out later. I’ve had this tune for the past six months and thought I should record it before forgetting about it.
Then I followed up with 705. It took me a few takes to get it right and the worst part was that I kept messing up the last verse. I hate the last verse…it doesn’t flow well, I don’t like the lyrical content…bah! I put it in there as a placeholder to finish the song because it sounded dumb when I had the entire song written except for the final verse where I just hummed it. I will get inspired some other day to finally revamp the last verse.
My new microphone, the Shure SM58 is a dream. I had only used it once and that was for a live recording over the Christmas holidays so I didn’t get to see the real power of it until now. My vocals are amazing on this thing. They were so amazing that my headphones kept shorting out on the right side because of it’s awesome power. Alright, maybe the volume was set too high. Either way, I am very pleased with the outcome of this new purchase.
So after laying down the rhythm and vocals, I figured no song is good unless there is a lead to it. I had come up with a simple lead the week before and figured I would lay it to a track just for fun. In the end, the lead isn’t really what I envision for the song, but it will be good for now.
Essentially what I want this song to become is one of the classic rock tunes, much like in the vein of Mississippi Woman by Mountain, maybe some China Grove by the Doobie Brothers, 850 Commando by Matt Mays, and Hot Metal on the 401 by the Sam Roberts Band. I am searching for that classic rock vibe so I wanted to get this down acoustically to send to Troy so he can help me in my search for the ultimate tone for this song. I have trouble envisioning a song from acoustic to electric format…something Billy Corgan is amazing at if you’ve ever heard his acoustic demos to his albums. So this is my next evolutionary step in music theory…hopefully Troy and can help me in my quest to hone my songwriting ~ music wise. I think my lyrics have come a long way from the teenage years…I like to try and write an actual story to my tunes. That’s a new shift and it’s coming along nicely.
In the end, I laid the tracks down, brought the recording console to connect to the Macbook, imported the tracks, converted it to MP3 and brought it over to Rob and Janice’s house last night. Carrie was the first to listen and she thought it was catchy. Success! Janice listened to it and was frustrated with me because she didn’t know whether or not to believe me considering I had already fooled them last year with the classic Canadian Idol April Fool’s joke. (Can I just say that I am loving the WordPress software I use to maintain this site for the sole reason that the search function is way better than Blogger? I can hyperlink a bunch of my old posts here!). So I had a good laugh with Janice at the sheer fact that she didn’t know whether or not to believe me because she thought the track was really good. It’s interesting to think that some of my friends definitely know how I play guitar and sing, but some others don’t have a clue. For example, I was in the car the other day with Philipp and I popped in The Stomper to listen to and he had no idea.
So I have a feeling this weekend may be spent noodling around with recording and jamming considering there’s a storm coming our way. If anyone wants to join us, come on out!
Unfortunately I just got word that I did not pass the competition for a promotion in my level at work.
Ah well…that is disappointing. I guess it’s disappointing because I thought I did really well in the interview, but clearly, something went wrong.
Also a little disheartening to realize that another long process awaits me. It is quite a tedious process to go through to get a promotion around here…sometimes competitions taking upwards to a year later.
No worries though! I shall schedule a post-board to discuss where I went wrong, readjust my thought patterns and go forth for the next competition!
Three things…
New Nine Inch Nails album – I decided to just order the double CD instead of the deluxe package because heck, I’m sane. But unfortunately, there was a snag in the plans. Total cost for the CD – $10. Excellent. Go to order it, put all the appropriate information in (by the way, can I just say how much I love Paypal?) and then get dinged with the cost of the shipping and handling. $13. ARGH! It’s more than the actual album. Nooo!!! So even though I had it in my heart to order directly from Trent and Co., I don’t think I can bring myself to dish out $13 in shipping. They’ll figure out a better method of distribution of the physical medium in the future (I’m hoping).
The new Trews album came out about three weeks ago and I pre-ordered it from the website. In the end, it cost me $36 with the shipping and handling, but I got a t-shirt with it as well as an autographed copy of it. So yeah, I figured “What the heck, this will support the band and it’s worth my cash for a sweet rock n’ roll t-shirt.” Unfortunately for me the weeks went by and I didn’t see it. In the end, the company informed me that Canada Post must have lost it (and I guess this was confirmed considering a Canada Post employee gave me a call to see if I received it or not) so I just cancelled my order. I cancelled my order moreso for the fact that the person I was dealing with at the company said “Listen dude, if you don’t get it by Thursday, let me know and I’ll ship one off to you pronto!”. I thought this was great of them. They realize something happened, and they would fix it in the best way they could.
However come the Thursday, I let them know that I didn’t get it and it wasn’t until Monday that I got a response. They said they would ship off a new one, but the they followed up with an email saying that they jumped the gun and they would first have to follow up with Canada Post to see if I received the item and that could take 5 business days. This was the point where I said I would like to cancel the order. Bureaucracy…bah! So I’m out a t-shirt but I get my cash back (well, I sure hope I will!) and I get to finally pick up the new Trews disc tomorrow. Yay!
Ticketmaster…or Ticketbastard. Argh, I hate ’em. We want to get some tix to see The Trews when they come to town, right? So the tickets are $25 each. But Ticketmaster (through the web) tacks on an additional $9 per ticket PLUS some random other convenience fee which essentially adds another buck each. LUDICROUS! I can’t believe it! The same thing happened when Mike and I went to order Raine Maida tickets. I refused to pay that and had Mike pick some up downtown at the local record store. What was the damage? I think they charged us $1 handling fee. No problems there!
So now I have these great Ticketmaster gift cards which Mike’s parents and Maureen got me for Christmas and I hesitate in using them for the sole reason that there’s the principle of matters and the principle sayeth “Guys, if you’re only paying $25 for a ticket, why the heck should anyone get away with highway robbery?”
I’m going to talk to Ticketmaster to see what the scoop is. I have a feeling it may be an issue of simply going to the box office and buying the tickets there for a lower price. I shall get to the bottom of this.
Let us not forget the great service Pearl Jam did for us back in 1994 concerning Ticketmaster.
iplaying: 8 Ghosts I – Nine Inch Nails (Ghosts I-IV)
