Hot Hot Heat – My (life in) music lists

Playlist: O Canada – 45 indie and alternative Canadian anthems

Happy Canada Day everyone!

This is one of those holidays that I love and have always appreciated but have even more so in recent years. I am blessed to live in a beautiful country and one that is relatively safe and free. And though I haven’t gotten downtown to take in the festivities that our nation’s capital puts on for quite some time, I do try to observe the birthdate of my country in my own way, usually by spending time outside, hiking or biking, tending the bbq, enjoying a brew or two or three, and taking in a closer (to me) fireworks display. The weather forecast is looking a bit rough to start today so I’m not sure yet what we’ll get up to but I plan to enjoy the holiday nonetheless.

I often try to do a post on these pages to observe the return of Canada Day in some way, so I’m actually surprised I haven’t done a playlist yet, something I am remedying this year. And honestly, I slapped this one together pretty quickly and it was really easy to do so because there’s lots of great material to pull from. These 45 songs represent some of my favourite tunes by some of my favourite Canadian artists from the last four or five decades. I start the almost three hours of great tunes with the “alternate” Canadian anthem by North Vancouver’s Spirit of the West and end it with my favourite song by Kingston’s The Tragically Hip, the band that for nearly twenty years was indisputably Canada’s band and its frontman Gord Downey, our poet laureate. In between those two tunes, you’ll find alt rock classics from the 80s and 90s (Grapes of Wrath, 54.40, Sloan, Northern Pikes), as well as a slew of tunes from the Canadian indie rock renaissance from the mid-2000s (Stars, Metric, Dears, Arcade Fire) when the ears from around the world seemed to be turned in our direction, and of course, more recent stuff as well (Alvvays, Elliott Brood, Nap Eyes, Tallies). There are bands and artists here representing almost all of the ten provinces but unfortunately, none from the three territories.

So this is mostly for all of my fellow Canadians out there but like my home country, I would welcome anyone from around the world to come and enjoy our riches. I invite you all to put this playlist on, along with your red and white clothes and maple leaf temporary tattoos, and enjoy the music, whether you’re out barbecuing, enjoying a cold one, out for a swim in your pool, sitting on your porch, out for a hike, camping out, or looking for a parking spot close to a Canada Day celebration somewheres.

Cheers!

For those who don’t use Apple Music, here is the entire playlist, with links to YouTube videos:

“Home for a rest” Spirit Of The West (North Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Archie, marry me” Alvvays (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island)
“Stay out” Elliott Brood (Toronto, Ontario)
“Ageless beauty” Stars (Montreal, Quebec)
“Rosy and grey” The Lowest Of The Low (Toronto, Ontario)
“When the night feels my song” Bedouin Soundclash (Kingston, Ontario)
“Don’t haunt this place” The Rural Alberta Advantage (Toronto, Ontario)
“Everything you’ve done wrong” Sloan (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
“The safety dance” Men Without Hats (Montreal, Quebec)
“Follow me down” Nap Eyes (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
“I go blind” 54-40 (Tsawwassen, British Columbia)
“Mari-Mac” Great Big Sea (St John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador)
“Hare tarot lies” No Joy (Montreal, Quebec)
“Red” Treble Charger (Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario)
“Weighty ghost” Wintersleep (Halifax, Nova Scotia)
“I’m an adult now” The Pursuit of Happiness (Toronto, Ontario)
“I wanna be in the cavalry” Corb Lund (Taber, Alberta)
“Teenland” The Northern Pikes (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan)
“Sprawl II (Mountains beyond mountains)” Arcade Fire (Montreal, Quebec)
“Claire” Rheostatics (Etobicoke, Ontario)
“Still” Great Lake Swimmers (Wainfleet, Ontario)
“Don’t walk away, Eileen” Sam Roberts (Westmount, Quebec)
“Temptation” The Tea Party (Windsor, Ontario)
“Tournament of hearts” The Weakerthans (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
“Lost in the plot” The Dears (Montreal, Quebec)
“All the things I wasn’t” The Grapes of Wrath (Kelowna, British Columbia)
“Infamous” Basia Bulat (Toronto, Ontario)
“Spiritual pollution” Pure (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Greater than consequence” Amos the Transparent (Ottawa, Ontario)
“Ordinary people” The Box (Montreal, Quebec)
“Memorize the city” The Organ (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Walking with a ghost” Tegan and Sara (Calgary, Alberta)
“Breathing underwater” Metric (Toronto, Ontario)
“Made for TV” King Apparatus (London, Ontario)
“Use it” The New Pornographers (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Rossland Square” Cuff The Duke (Oshawa, Ontario)
“Eat my brain” Odds (Vancouver, British Columbia)
“Goodnight goodnight” Hot Hot Heat (Victoria, British Columbia)
“The ghosts that haunt me” Crash Test Dummies (Winnipeg, Manitoba)
“Paper girl” July Talk (Toronto, Ontario)
“Don’t you know” Elephant Stone (Montreal, Quebec)
“Brian Wilson” Barenaked Ladies (Scarborough, Ontario)
“Mother” Tallies (Toronto, Ontario)
“Swing your heartache” Young Galaxy (Montreal, Quebec)
“Courage (for Hugh MacLennan)” The Tragically Hip (Kingston, Ontario)

And here is the promised link to the Apple Music playlist.

If you’re interested in checking out any of the other playlists I’ve created and shared on these pages, you can peruse them here.

Best tunes of 2002: #12 Hot Hot Heat “Bandages”

<< #13 | #11 >>

Through several posts in my Best tunes of 2001 series, I mentioned the beginnings of an indie rock renaissance, one that was intrinsically tied to a garage rock and post-punk revival. This will become a common theme that I have and will likely continue to touch on through this series on my favourite tunes of 2002 and onwards through future series for 2003 and 2004. They say that everything is cyclical. Who ‘they’ are is still a mystery but you can almost see how the indie rockers of the early 2000s were raised on a steady diet of Joy Division and Bauhaus, perhaps not directly, but even through older siblings constantly blasting the tunes on their record players in their bedrooms. But it didn’t stop there. The indie rock scene evolved just as it did the first time, slowly through the dark dredge of post-punk into the jittery freneticism of the new wave.

I remember being fascinated as I started to hear new music that was oh so familiar to me, sounding very much like the music of my youth. One of the first of these, borne of reflections of Elvis Costello and Talking Heads through blurred and foggy mirrors, a young Canadian quartet sported this same restlessness and angsty geek rock. This was Hot Hot Heat.

The band formed in 1999 in British Columbia, on the west coast of Canada. The best known lineup of Steve Bays, Dustin Hawthorne, Paul Hawley, and Dante DeCaro stabilized in 2000, were signed to SubPop in 2001, and their debut, “Make up the breakdown”, appeared a year after that. The first single to be released was, of course, this synth heavy number called “Bandages”. The drumming and bass line kept a simple beat and the guitars angular and staccato, almost ska-like in feel, while Steve Bays yelped and rasped up nonsense.

“These bandages are anonymity
I’ve been shaking from making an awful decision
I’ve been running and running
Feels like my head is spinning round and round, around, around, around, around, around“

“Bandages” clocked in at 3 minutes and a third but felt only a third that long. It was catchy and danceable and despite all the retro feels, was as fresh as a hot shower and a mint pillow. And man does it leave you breathless. I can only imagine what it did to dancefloors around that time.