Arkells: Michigan Left

Michigan Left, the second album from Arkells, is a lot easier for me to love than their first. I reviewed that one, Jackson Square, early on in the site's life, saying that I loved a lot of the songs on it, but a number of the songs were skippable to me, including "Pulling Punches" which was a radio hit before I ever picked up the album. At the time, I was experimenting with how much negativity I wanted to include in my reviews, because although I was being honest, I was also nitpicking some. Even the songs I didn't like on that album had their virtues, they just weren't ones that resonated with me. I hope you bought it. "John Lennon" is a particularly excellent song, as are all the highlights from that one.

The good news about Michigan Left is that it's a better album. Maybe the best moments aren't as brilliant, and it doesn't give as broad a view of their abilities, but it's an excellent set of songs from head to toe. On this album, the band fulfills their promise of "black and blue eyed soul" by infusing their sound with a easygoing beat and a heavy stomp. Most of the songs are actually based more around bass riffs and drumbeats, accentuated (rather than led) by by the pianos and guitars. That's not to say they're not there, and not well used... there's a subtlety to the sound that is really welcoming and invites repeated listens, usually a simple ringing and progression splashing in and out, swirling around the vocals. It makes the album into good white-boy soul, a guarded sincerity not usually executed in radio rock these days. It helps that Max Kerman has a good basic voice: he doesn't strain his boundaries too much, but he forms a good foundation, with those drums and bass, on tracks like "Book Club," "Where U Goin" (with its neat call-and answer lyric that laps itself.) The album is loaded with great hooky choruses, including the title track's "Decorations will be wasted..." bit. Just about every track offers similar pleasure: "Kiss Cam" and "Bloodlines" feature sing-along choruses, matching sprightly melodies with reflective or weighty content. This is coffee-house sized stadium rock. Intimate yet huge.

Occasionally, they even go big, with the moody quiet-loud of "One Foot Out The Door" and the fiery loud-loud of "Whistleblower," which are standout tracks stylistically. The album concludes with a warm, soft-focus tune called "Agent Zero," suggesting we all "turn the lights down low, turn the lights down low." Quite nice.

My favourite tracks are "Coffee" and "On Paper." "Coffee" has a whole lowdown dark Film Noir feel. It begins with a stuttering guitar intro, which takes A Flock of Seagulls' "I Ran" and wrings it for all it's worth. "On Paper," in addition to having one of those great hooky refrains ("I can't keep up, always playing catchup...") exemplifies one of the best aspects of the band, going back to their first album: their songwriting. They're not just capable of writing damn catchy hooks or measuring and balancing all the different instruments to make an effective sonic experience. They also craft great stories, usually by way of setting a scene, outlining specific characters, moods, and problems without seeming like they are too wrapped up in telling a story to forgo the formal framework of their songs: Kerman's vocal performance goes a long way to helping this.

In essence, what I'm saying is that Arkells have it all on this album. It sounds good, it makes you feel good, and it feels like a real accomplishment for the group. It's a great rock and roll album for people that have lost faith that there's anything left to do in rock and roll.

Buy this album now: Itunes Canada // Amazon.com
// Amazon.ca

Arkells: Jackson Square

When you're down on your luck, striking out at a party or on the outs with your woman, stumbling out of a bar at 3 AM steadying yourself against a brick wall to get your bearings while you piss and trying to remember which way is home -- and worse, you're not certain you've made the right choices in life and know you can't go back -- your theme song is "John Lennon" by The Arkells. It captures a snapshot of too many wasted nights and fucked-up romances. It has that right balance between staggering weight and light bouncy rock, between self-deprecation and triumphant anthem. And if no other song on Jackson Square gets into you, I think this one will. It's not even that easy of a song, constantly shuffling its pace around and playing with its refrain, without ever sounding like anything but a rock classic... which it would be even without name-checking the young icon in its amazing singalong refrain "I'm John Lennon / In '67".

The Arkells (or maybe just "Arkells" or perhaps "some Arkells") play a good brand of everyman rock that traces its genes back to that mythical, possibly nonexistent era in the late-mid-60's before psychedelia had gripped every band and the only thing combatting the British Invasion was Motown. The sticker on the CD proclaims it as "Black and Blue Eyed Soul" and it definitely has that rough edge to it, for better or worse, but its best moments feature irresistible grooves.

It took a while for me to get into, though. It opens with a trio of songs that don't do it for me, most especially "Pullin' Punches," which sounds a bit too much like what everyone expects a hit rock single to sound like in the 2000's: Foo Fighters or Kings of Leon. But the band is better than that, and is eager to prove itself (despite its ode to slacking off, "Oh, the Boss is Coming!") "The Ballad of Hugo Chavez," "Tragic Flaw" and "No Champagne Socialist" swing along with great ease. "Chavez" borrows the guitars from The Beatles' "Getting Better," and puts them to hard work. "Tragic Flaw" sounds like an earthy, fleshed-out, soulful version of The Offspring, with its tense beat and riff adding to the lyrical study of a jealous guy trying to reassure himself. "Champagne Socialist," about the importance of practicing what you preach, takes flight with harmonica breaks while the guitars bubble under the verses like boiling water.

The album's a bit prone to filler: there's a couple tracks I'd rather not hear, but the band does often get hot. "I'm Not The Sun" is one of the most powerful ballads I've heard in years, where Max Kerman's vocals carry a serious burden while the guitars climbs the walls and absolve him. His voice does have a soulful quality that sometimes seems overworked, but usually adds the right weight to the song. With his delivery, the refrain of "John Lennon" comes off as both celebratory and resentful: it was indeed a complicated time to be a Beatle that year.

It all culminates with the hot-shit rave of "Blueprint," a song about getting over your personal obstacles and bettering yourself -- yeah, from the band that earlier was singing about slacking while the boss was off, and about wanting your girlfriend to wear baggy sweatsuits so dudes don't check her out. In a way, the album does seem to contain a through-line about personal betterment and overcoming. That is, the struggle to stay true to yourself, without sinking too deep into your own flaws, and that's a weirdly self-conscious subject to write rock music about. Then again, I could be reading too much into it.

I wonder about the band's status as a "retro" act, that dismissive and diminishing notion. Their album cover and name sorta call up images of the early 60's, of Phil Spector or Berry Gordy, but in sound, like I said, it's nostalgia for the never-was. Maybe the title, a shout-out to a depressingly-deserted mall in their hometown of Hamilton, ON, is a signal about their intentions to rebuild and improve the ideas about the past into something tangible and real. Like Locksley, they call up a time that didn't actually happen. So in the 2000's, when music can be (and frequently is) anything, I do dig records that go back and give us what we think we remember hearing. All this is in the service of what that music from the longago-times was trying to do: grow up but keep rocking. Here's music with some life in it. Some heart and soul. Embrace.