Sam Roberts Band: Collider

I first heard Sam Roberts on the radio nearly 10 years ago. When I first heard his debut single, "Brother Down," I thought he was more of a hip hop crossover artist. Chalk that up to my young mind's confusion but there was also not as much frame of reference for Roberts' brand of rhythmic delivery. Rhythm, whether an insistent boogie or a laid-back groove, is the backbone of this album, the vehicle from which Roberts delivers his sermonlike tunes. Few of the songs are hooky in a conventional way -- a quality that initially kept me from wanting to revisit it -- but while it's playing you'll find yourself tapping along, and then finally uncovering the wit and poetry of the lyrics. By now of course there wouldn't be any confusing Roberts for an MC, but this is definitely the sound of a singer-songwriter in a post-hiphop world.

Roberts has an old soul, and writes ably about unity and brotherhood, about commonality and understanding, about problems that plague all of us and the search for solutions. But he's observational, not preachy. Ultimately, it's also important to seek solutions for yourself: ("Don't forget where you came from / Don't forget who you are / They're all beating the same drum / You've been playin' guitar," from "Streets of Heaven (Promises Promises)") Community and individuality are of a whole in Robert's nuanced lyrical universe. And there is darkness, but there is also hope (the uncertain point of the great album-closer, "Tractor Beam Blues:" "Is love enough? Yes it is / Is hope enough? / I hope it is.")

Along the way he colours and shifts focus on the strange quirks of the world. It opens with some really great tracks. "The Last Crusade" is tense, feeling like a back against the wall. "Without a Map" is weary from running. "Let it In" is down and dirty, and "Graveyard Shift" is that moment when your exhaustion breaks and you get a second wind, when that mental block that kept you from solving that problem suddenly lifts and it all hits you, what you need to do. I love the end-of-the-rope lyrics of "No Arrows:" "Some days it's hard to give her / What she needs I can't deliver / Got no answers on my tongue, I / Got no arrows in my quiver."

Roberts could've been excused for taking all the credit for this album, but this is his first release credited to "Sam Roberts Band." He's very clearly the star, the leader, the preacher. Everything is in the service of his lyrics, and his lazy-lidded, world-weary vocal delivery is front and center. He's got a folkie's voice and a rocker's tool kit, a bit like Springsteen. The guitars are lush, helping the universalist sound achieve that warm-yet-cool feeling of floating free and occasionally being blinded by bright lights. It takes a stern-yet-spacey tone for the most part that is very enjoyable but not "accessible," so casual listeners might be put off; but put it on your shelf and come back when you have a moment to sit down with it, it'll impress. Sam is generous but right to credit the group as part of the process, they definitely make their contributions. Given what I said earlier about the album's rhythmic quality, the drums are the key ingredient beneath those space-borne guitars and horns.

Toward the end of the set comes the album's triumph, "I Feel You," which towers over all the other very-good-to-great songs, casting a shadow of awesomeness and acting as Roberts' most recent career highlight, with its squinching, fuzz-blasted, churning guitars, poetically obscure lyrics and dramatic chorus, Roberts outdoes any other song I've heard from him on this one, to the point where he namedrops Leonard Cohen and it feels totally deserved. In all it's a great summation of the difficult yet necessary act of understanding and being known -- of "Feeling" someone, or being felt.

I wouldn't say an album is great because the lyrics or the ideas behind them are great They need to be served by an enjoyable sense of musicianship, and that's Robert's strength. He's a songwriter above all else, and he has created some great ones on this piece. It's all material to work into lyrics, into metaphor and turn of phrase and some good choruses, backed by positively liquid instrumentation. He's astute enough to sense the troubles of the world and to put them down in words, but not arrogant enough to presume he knows the answers. And the music flows freely beneath all this, carrying it along on that wave of solidarity yet uncertainty.

Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca

Cover: Julia Nunes, "Runaround Sue"

Man, having forgotten why I dug ukelele-playing YouTube singer Julia Nunes, she goes and reminds me by posting this cover of the Serious Contender by Dion & The Belmonts, doing some bitchin' self-backed vocals and even hitting the "YEAH!" pretty great the second time.

Serious Contenders: Beatles, "Norwegian Wood (This Bird Has Flown)"

In slightly belated honor of John Lennon's birthday, but also because Fall always brings me back to this song.

As I've said before, when you're dealing with the Beatles, a very special definition has to be applied to "underrated." Pretty much every crumb of the Beatles' discography has been lauded by someone or other, and the few bits that are overlooked are deservedly so. The Rubber Soul period is generally considered a high point, but also as the border between the early pop songs and the later art-psychedelia, sometimes falls behind a bit. Nobody is going to forget it was a great album, but it's also easy to forget in light of what came after. The Beatles were constantly, rapidly mutating, especially after Help, so this is both a creative highwater mark (at the time) and a transitional period. Not a lot of bands have such moments combined as one. There's a lot going on on that record.

I personally have a soft spot for Rubber Soul-era Beatles. Abbey Road may be my favourite album but Rubber Soul is the one I feel can take me back to a specific time and place. There was one fall in high school, grade 10, where I listened to these tracks incessantly. I was just getting my legs as someone who had opinions about music, and these songs really opened my taste up a bit. Especially this one. There's something so warm and welcoming about that acoustic strum and that twanging sitar. And it melds so perfectly with Lennon's lyrical story, where he seems just to be lying back and unloading, pontificating, extemporizing: "I once had a girl / Or should I say she once had me?" Great opening line and the rest of the song doesn't let down. Lennon apes Dylan, admittedly, shoving off choruses for refrains, and it works, because he's got a narrative to tell, and it's a damn good one. The song is as warm yet off-kilter as a song about attempted seduction and arson ought to be.

Raphael Saadiq: Stone Rollin'

At first I was interested in it as a matter of retro. The twinkling piano and twanging guitar of "Day Dreams" sounds awesomely anachronistic in 2011, and Stone Rollin' as a whole seems like a textbook case study for retro music. The call-and-answer guitar of "Radio" sounds very jukebox, and there's something so 70's about the oozing sex appeal of the title track (an ode to Boo-tay.)

But of course, there is no textbook, no standard method, and Saadiq borrows and rearranges and takes and leaves elements of the past like any artist of today: here and there is Chuck Berry or Ben E. King or Marvin Gaye or Prince, but of course it's really all Raphael. Is retro an acknowledgment that the old ideas are better than the newer ones? An attempt to strip music down to basics? Or just dusting off a few tricks and techniques that never lost their effectiveness? Maybe it's an assertion of individuality: there's such a wealth of influence in the past, that you can stand out in the present by mining it. If you're as good as Raphael, buddy, you can work it.

The groove is the thing. I love the break neck opener "Heart Attack," where the man throws himself headlong into the song sparks fly from the guitars. On songs like "Go To Hell" and "Over You," Saadiq sings with pure urgency and immediacy. He's got that rhythm & blues intuition and spirit that makes superstars out of plenty talented singers, (Cee-Lo comes to mind) but his hook is his ability to push his vocals right to the brink, matched thunder-rolling drums, funked-up guitars and, of all damn things, pipes and winds airing the sound out.

It's no wonder to me that so much music has at least some retro aspect to it. Though Stone Rollin' doesn't harken to a specific time, it calls back to a lot of familiar song styles and binds them together excellently based on their common ground, that R&B soul funk that flows in the veins of much music, African-American or otherwise. IT sets something off in the mind: familiar but fresh, inviting and exciting at once. It's got a good hard groove, and it rolls.


Buy this album now: iTunes // Amazon.com // Amazon.ca

Serious Contenders: Sam Cooke, "Another Saturday Night"

Relevant??????

Well, okay. It's certainly no stretch to observe the awesomeness of this breezy anthem. Early rock/R&B was often about the confidence of the singer's delivery, standing his ground against the rhythm and the lyrics. Cooke exhibits this exceptionally, offhandedly sighing "If I could meet 'em I could get 'em / But as yet I haven't met 'em." and positively owning the fact that he "Ain't got nobody." Way more sprightly than a lyric sheet might convey, and even the lyrics themselves are a touch more upbeat than a similarly-themed blues song might be, yet it's that combo of joy and sadness that often makes music from this era work.

Cover: Foo Fighters, "Band on the Run"

Pretty much a perfect cover: it highlights what's so awesome about the original while also making it comfortably a product of the cover band. A great workout for the Foos' style. Not much more can be said. Well done.

Serious Contenders: Queen, "Another One Bites the Dust"

The under-appreciated overachiever of Queen's catalogue. It isn't bombastic like "Bohemian Rhapsody," the hard rockitude of "We Will Rock You" or operatic beauty of "We Are The Champions." It doesn't even have David Bowie singing on it! But propelled with little more than an irresistible bass and Freddie Mercury's razor-tinged delivery, it works awesomely. When listening to this song you can't help but feel the groove. John Deacon and Roger Taylor, I salute you.

Freddy, for his part, owns the shit out of this song. It's a testament to his ability as a vocalist: This is the Queen song you figure you could probably do at Karaoke, but you'll still just embarrass yourself. It takes a lot of confidence, an inherent ineffable ballsiness to really nail those verses.

It's too often derided as "the disco song," which is a lame detraction since mixing hard rock with disco pretty much always yields positive results (see above, KISS' "I Was Made For Loving You" and Rolling Stones' "Miss You.") Something about rocking out to a solid beat just makes sense.