What to Download Tuesday: Jack White

What can I say about Blunderbuss? Not much, actually, but that's not because there isn't a lot to say. If anything, Jack White's first solo LP promises to be the most written about, most dissected, most widely praised album of the year. And it's an album more than worthy of the attention. Not only does it have an epic rock 'n roll back story (i.e., "the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time" rebounds from the breakup of his generation defining band), but musically Blunderbuss is arguably as strong as anything White has done in nearly a decade. In his review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield calls Blunderbuss White's "most expansive and most masterful record since The White Stripes 2003 classic Elephant" while the Guardian's Alexis Petridis refers to it as "White at his most strange, contradictory, and unfathomable, and therefore at his best." Indeed, if you're already a fan of Jack's, then there is little doubt that you are going to love Blunderbuss. While I certainly wouldn't categorize it as the best record that he has ever worked on (that honor finds De Stijl and White Blood Cells in a tie), it is perhaps the most quintessentially "Jack White" Jack White album ever released. Similarly to what Wilco did on Wilco (The Album) or R.E.M. with Collapse Into Now, Blunderbuss might perhaps best be understood as a distillation of all of the various styles and genres that White has worked in or toyed with over the years into one defining statement, a kind of stylistic retrospective that one reviewer has surmised constitutes a "shaking up (of) his past (in order) to move forward into the future" (Michael Roffman, CoS). I'm not sure I buy the suggestion here that Blunderbuss serves as a transitional piece for White. Not only does the record seem like a fairly defined and sturdy moment all its own to me, but musically speaking Jack's future has always been rooted in the past; and on Blunderbuss it's simply his own past that takes precedence. The result is an album that, while perhaps scattered stylistically, seems about as confident and as comfortable a statement a first time solo artist could make. Of course, it helps when that first time solo artist is the coolest, weirdest, savviest rock star of our time.

As I suggested, there is much more to say about Blunderbuss. The brevity of my review is no reflection of the record itself or of my desire to say more about it. It is kind of a period of upheaval here at Cigarette Tricks. The postings have been a little thin the last few weeks, I know, and that is because there is some behind the scenes work that has been taking precedence. That should all change soon. In the meantime, be content with a great week in new releases, which in addition to Blunderbuss entails that Ty Segall & White Fence collaboration that we've been talking about, the self titled debut from the Deer Tick/Black Lips/Los Lobos "super group" Diamond Rugs, and the Waco Brothers collaboration with Nashville scenester Paul Burch, Great Chicago Fire.

Happy Record Store Day!

It's Record Store Day! How did that happen? It seems like it was just yesterday, or, well, March 24 actually, that we were looking ahead to all of the wonderful releases to-come. And now, poof, here we are. What did I do in that time? Ate some chips... watched a whole lot of Game of Thrones and Justified... bedazzled my jean jacket... scooped some cat litter... But nothing else, really. That can't be... God, I have nothing to show for a whole month of my life...no, a whole year... more... God, I am wasting my life... Anyway, it's Record Store Day, not Sober Reflection on How You're Wasting Your Life Day (that's typically what I do on my birthday). Today is a day for celebrating not only music but also those fine homo-sapiens who are still fighting the good physical release fight. So get in line, get ready to shove your fellow record lovers out of the way to get your mitts on that Buck Owens coloring book and whatever else you had your heart set-on. On my way to work this morning I saw them lined up down the block to get in to see the fine folks as Grooves. And that's just in boring old London Ont. I can only imagine that in bigger cities, such as King's Landing, Winterfell, and Lexington (did I mention I've been watching a lot of Game of Thrones and Justified?) things are even crazier. So get out there today and buy a record or two. It's your duty today as a music lover. But, please, if you don't mind, leave one of those Buck Owens coloring book for me. Check out the official Record Store Day site here.

R.I.P Levon Helm

The Band's Music from Big Pink and their second album, The Band (otherwise known as the "Brown Album") were in my parent's record collection. The latter, especially, I remember fixating over from a very young age. Not even necessarily the music itself, but the LP as a physical thing. In the case of the Brown Album it was that cover, the image of those five men, looking like a posse of cowboys from some dusty turn-of-the-century photo. Before I even knew what music really was, or who or what musicians even did, I was confronted with that image. And along with the covers for Sundown, Harvest, This Time, and a few other choice selections, it just feels burned into me. But if the cover peaked my curiosity for music, it's what was contained in those grooves of vinyl plastic that ultimately shaped my life its core. And Levon Helm's voice was so much a part of my musical education, my musical upbringing, that I simply feel inextricably tied to him, even as I never met him, never even saw him live. That formative experience of sitting by the record player in the basement, filing through what seem like an endless collection of records, and returning again-and-again to that band of cowboys, and those songs about a "Rag Mamma Rag," a place called Cripple Creek, and that one I didn't really understand but that went, "Laaaa La La La La La..." and was kind of sad. Levon Helm's twangy, rugged voice, so friendly and playful at times, so sorrowful at others, has just always been there with me. It helped instill in me a love and a passion for music. And without that I don't know where I'd be. So thanks Levon Helm.

I kept up with Helm, and in many ways I got reacquainted with him in the 2000s. It was a wildly prolific decade for a man recovering from lung cancer treatment. In keeping with his history of musical collaboratoin, he assembled an impressive cast of players known as The Levon Helm Band, and hosted a stunning number live shows at his home studio in Woodstock NY. Calling the shows "Midnight Rambles," the names of the artists who took part over the years is a veritable who's-who of roots rock royalty -- from Leon Russell, Ramblin' Jack Elliot, and Robert Earl Keen, to Steve Earle, The Black Crowes, and Lucinda Williams. Inspired by these shows, Helm hit the studio in 2007 for the first time since the early '80s, producing Dirt Farmer, an Grammy winning album that featured Helm's take on such songs as Steve Earle's "The Mountain," Buddy Miller's "Wide River to Cross," and the Traditional "The Girl I Left Behind." Electric Dirt came just two years later, and it was another triumph. For starters, the track "Growing Trade," co-written by Helm along with Larry Campbell, was one of my favorite tracks from that year. And, oh yeah, Electric Dirt also won the inaugural Grammy Award for Best Americana Album in 2010, an award Helm for a second time for his ridiculously good 2011 live record Ramble at the Ryman. While Helm's voice had been damaged from years of lung cancer treatment, I honestly don't hear that on those last three records. His voice may sound like a little weakened, but no more so than any other road-worn performer his age. Most importantly, he sounds like Levon Helm -- and for this music fan that sounds like the spirit of music itself. And with those records coming some twenty-five years after his last studio effort, and after almost a decade of cancer treatment, they really are something to be thankful for.

Check out the New York Times obit for Helm here. Click after the jump for some performance clips over the years.

What to Download Tuesday: Spiritualized

Jason Pierce doesn't have an easy time making music. Spiritualized records, it seems, are almost always the products of suffering. From a debut album, Lazer Guided Melodies, crafted around the drawn out dissolution of Spaceman 3, to their 1997 masterpiece, Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space, which was written in the wake of frontman Peirce's messy breakup with girlfriend, and then Spiritualized keyboard player, Kate Radley (she left Pierce in 1995 for The Verve's Richard Ashcroft, so, yeah, maybe Pierce should just be thankful she left before he ended up doing something regrettable like Human Conditions). The last Spiritualized record, 2008's Songs In A & E, came on the heels of Pierce's near death experience after a bout with double pneumonia landed him in ICU battling type 1 respiratory failure. So, in the four years in between Songs In A & E and the release of the new Spiritualized record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light, you think life would have handed J Spaceman an easy one. But no. Instead,  Peirce was diagnosed with a life threatening liver disease ("My liver was gone, basically," he told The Guardian's Dave Simpson). He has spent the last couple of years undergoing an experimental drug therapy, taking a chemical cocktail originally given to leukemia patients to combat his degenerative liver disease. Sweet Heart Sweet Light, the seventh Spiritualized album, out today on Fat Possum, was made during this treatment process; and the irony of the fact that a man who used to be in a band whose motto was "taking drugs to make music to take drugs" made an album on life-saving medicines has not been lost on anyone, including Pierce himself. "I decided to make a record on these drugs," he joked with Simpson, adding, "[t]he further I get away from the treatment the more I feel it wasn't me making that record...It was like I wasn't in my own head."

Sweet Heart Sweet Light is a Spiritualized record. Unmistakably. It touches on all of the thematic hallmarks that Pierce has wrestled with since his days in Spaceman 3 -- primarily, death, desperation, Jesus and Rock 'n Roll -- and doing so in Pierce's trademark mash-up of the blues, gospel, psychedelia, and rock. And while Pierce has never made a bad record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light is hands-down the best thing he has done since Ladies and Gentlemen...We Are Floating in Space. It's the most immediate, most sincere, most fragile that Pierce has sounded on a record since that 1997 classic, and the batch of songs here is arguably the most varied and accessible batch of his career. I've already written a little bit about first single "Hey Jane" in previous posts. But it's a brilliant song, whose lyrical themes and musical brilliance are indicative of the album as a whole. At nine-minutes in length, "Hey Jane" starts out as a balls-out rocker, with the singer urgently wondering about the trials-and-tribulations of daily life, which the every person "Jane" of the title performs without any larger meaning or purpose, let alone even time to think about these things: "Said you ain't got time to search for...running so fast you get no place." Eventually things crash, for "Jane" and, musically, for the song itself. Around the three minute mark the song unravels into a mess of guitar and cymbal crashes. From here, "Hey Jane" transforms both musically and lyrically into a spine tingling meditation on human limitations, death and the redemptive power of love. And so by the time the refrain "Sweet heart, sweet light/sweet heart, love of my life" kicks in to close out the track out, what started out as a balls-out rocker has transformed into a thing of beauty and transcendence that, for me at least, hits me in the gut every time (and being absolutely winded by the AG Rojas directed video probably doesn't help with this feeling). It's quite a thing. And it's only one such moment on Sweet Heart Sweet Light, an an album that meditates over-and-over again on questions of human weakness and desperation, but which not only seeks solace from these existential limitations in music, but which still believes in, and searches for, that transcendent moment in music -- and in Rock 'n Roll in particular.

Album closer, "So Long, You Pretty Things," admits some defeat here. I was wrong to previously worry about the inclusion of Pierce's daughter, Poppy, here. The sense of both frailty and optimism that her voice brings at the opening of the track only highlights the overriding themes of the album. A nod to the Bowie classic, and in turn to era and the idea of rock 'n roll decadence, the first half of "So Long, You Pretty Things," meditates on failure and loss, with Pierce pleading to Jesus for guidance, hoping for a reason to go on. But just as the sense of defeat here seems insurmountable, the track suddenly transforms into an Oasis-style sing-along that both laments and celebrates the death of rock 'n roll dreams: "So long, you pretty things, God save your little soul/The music that you played so hard ain't on your radio/And all your dreams of diamond rings and all that rock 'n roll can bring you/Sail on, so long." And even as it marks another moment of failure -- i.e., the death of a scene, the inability of music to overcome inevitable defeat and loss -- it's another beautiful musical moment. At the very least, it makes me want to sing along. And that's what, at its best, Sweet Heart Sweet Light accomplishes: even as these songs let us know that we are all ultimately going to be losers at the game of life, they makes us all feel like beautiful losers for singing along.

Other notable new releases this week include Spencer Krug's new Moonface record with Finish band Siinai (that's one, like the Spiritualized record, that we've been looking forward to for some time). Twee-poppers Allo Darlin' release their sophomore record Europe and another Curb compilation looking to cash in on Hank III but which is still nevertheless worth checking out -- it features six covers and some outtakes from Hank's first two Curb records. Full list after the jump.

Cloud Nothings, "Stay Useless" Video

What better way to mark the end of the work week than with the Cloud Nothings anthemic ode to doing nothing, "Stay Useless," in our heads. The Cleveland band has released an animated video for the Attach on Memory standout, and it is a veritable Magic School Bus on acid. Directed by Jack Kubizne, the clip follows a Kenny-esque protagonist as he encounters a a roadblock or two on his way to school. It's a fun clip and the song will rock your socks off -- unless of course you're familiar with it already and have taken the necessary precautions to reinforce or tighten your socks accordingly. Either way, socks on or socks off, enjoy the "Stay Useless" video. Attach on Memory is out now on Carpark.

Yuck - "Chew"

Yuck never get mentioned without the phrase "'90s guitar driven rock" getting attached to them. See: just like that! It's because their music borrows from '90s guitar driven rock bands in the same way that Kristian Matsoon channels early Bob Dylan or a "Horse With No Name" impersonates Neil Young. Okay, well the latter is maybe not the best example: an America comparison is not exactly going to get you excited about a band. But don't forget people, America's records throughout the '70s were produced by George Martin. That's right, George "F-ing" Martin. Therefore, America = The Beatles of the 70s. Anyway, Yuck are better than America. The British band's self-titled 2011 debut was a veritable Dinosaur Jr., Built to Spill, Pavement mash-up, and today we have our first taste of new Yuck music since those eleven tracks: "Chew", a four minute rock nugget that again draws from every favorite band you had in the '90s, though this time goes quite heavy on Gish/Siamese Dream-era Smashing Pumpkins (yes, the good-era Smashing Pumpkins). It sounds great! Give it a listen below. Yuck are at Coachella for the next couple of weekends, with a few other dates scheduled in the state around those festival appearances. Check those out here.

Anton Newcombe: Great Hegelian or Greatest Hegelian?

You may not know this, but neo-psychedelic-retro-rock genius, Anton Newcombe, has a lot in common with nineteenth-century German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Case in point, they both think Paul McCartney is a "c*%t." No joke: the Brain Jonestown Massacre frontman talks about it here and I believe Hegel addresses it somewhere in the preface of The Phenomenology of Spirit -- you know that Hegel, always gossiping about the Brits and never afraid to drop the c-word! What a guy! But that's not all these two rockers have in common: they also both really like the word Aufheben. Hegel likes it so much that he makes the concept of Aufhebung (or sublation) one of the cornerstones of his philosophy of history -- a simultaneous overcoming while at the same time preserving that constitutes the dialectical progression of history. Similarly, Newcombe likes the word so much that he's picked it as the name for the new BJM record. Aufheben, BJM's thirteenth studio full-length, will be out May 1 on Cargo Records in the UK and "a" Records in North America. Really looking forward to this one. As you can hear for yourself, the first single "I Wanna Hold Your Other Hand" sounds great -- as accessible as BJM have sounded in years. And the studio lineup for this record includes original member Matt Hollywood, along with Will Caruthers from Spaceman 3/Spiritualized. The album art and track listing for Aufheben can be found after the jump, and 2012 tour dates can be found here. I know these guys have a well-earned reputation as being a train wreck live, but the last time I saw them in 2010 it was an amazing show. No drugged-out shenanigans, no kicking the shit out of each other, just mind blowing rock, hit-after-hit. I should also note that on some of the dates in August BJM are accompanied by The Magic Castles, whose self titled debut, which came out last month, has been in heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman WM-FX421.

And, hey, while we're not too far from the topic of Spiritualized, once you've listened to "I Wanna Hold Your Other Hand," head on over to NPR to where the highly anticipated new Spiritualized record, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (out next week) is streaming in full.

Lambchop, "2b2" Video

Mr. M, by Nashville veteran "weirdos" Lambchop, is hands-down one of the best record of the year thus far. In fact, it's hands-down one of the best records in recent memory -- a complex and emotional tour de force that Jayson Green has described as "a rare album: one where you lean in and listen, because you want to learn something" (via The Village Voice). And while it's not exactly an album chalk-full of singles, today we have the second official video from Mr. M, the Nick Spiger directed, European-tour documenting clip for album track number two,"2B2." Watch it below. And after the jump watch the first video from Mr. M, for the track"Gone Tomorrow." That one is for all the wrestling fan's out there.

What to Download Tuesday: Good, Pinsent & Keelor

You might have noticed things have been a little quiet here on Cigarette Tricks since last week (though, in case you missed it, on Saturday I posted a few thoughts on Mark Sultan live, which you can read here). In my defense, I've been swamped trying to complete the revisions on this John Carter II: The Medallion Stallion script. Seriously, folks, this movie promises to be even more off the hook than the first! Unfortunately, these time constraints will impact my "What to Download" feature for this week as well. Fortunately, I've already provided some background on this pick in a previous post. While the news of the collaboration between Canadian acting legend Gordon Pinsent and Canadian country-rockers Travis Good and Greg Keelor (of The Sadies and Blue Rodeo respectively) sounded strange and unexpected, the finished product is about as familiar and comfortable as your favorite sweater. Not only does Down and Out in Upalong recall the folk-country side of Good and Keelor's main projects, but even more so it brings to mind Gordon Lightfoot and, to get even more specific, The Unintended's (a side project featuring Good and Keelor, along with Rick White and Dallas Good)  2006 split album "...Play Lightfoot." Good and Keelor have taken Pinsent's words and his tales of Newfoundland and tailored them into their own Lightfoot-esque brand of Canadiana. In short, for anyone immersed in or brought up on the likes of Lightfoot, Young, and Blue Rodeo, this record should feel like an old friend. Standouts include "Peter Easten," "Easy Ridge," and "Old Part of Town." Also, I should note, when I first heard about this project I was a little worried about the Pinsent spoken-word parts. Fortunately, the spoken-word pieces are keep completely separate from the melodic pieces, with the latter comprising the first eleven tunes and the former making up the second part of the record.

An extremely close runner-up for record of the week is M. Ward's A Wasteland Companion, an album that also feels like an old friend. I rambled on a little bit about how I was looking forward to this one back in February, and the finished product feels like return to form after the slightly scattered 2009 Hold Time. Full list of new releases is after the jump.

The Fresh & Onlys - "Do What I Came To Do"

There's been more than a few shout-outs to San Fransisco bands in the last week or so on Cigarette Tricks, so let's keep the theme going and have a listen to one of the Bay-area's best, The Fresh & Onlys, and their new track, "Do What I Came To Do." It's taken from the new Mexican Summer/Software Records 2012 sampler, Stash Rituals, a collection that also features cuts from the likes of Light Asylum, Napolian, Slava (it is available for streaming here). "Do What I Came To Do" is the Fresh & Onlys in straight-out rocker mode, channeling bands like Television and the New York Dolls, adding some horns into the mix, and achieving a sound that is much brighter and more polished than what we're used to from these guys (and girl). It sounds great! The song apparently will only be available on the Stash Rituals sampler -- i.e., it won't appear on the next Fresh & Onlys LP, their follow-up to 2010's very excellent Play It Strange. According to this recent interview with Stereogum, we can expect that record in the fall, with an EP coming sometime before then, possibly in May. For now, go on and do what you came to do and enjoy "Do What I Came To Do."

Jarvis Takes Manhattan, April 5-11!

Oh to live in New York. For the next week or so at least, especially if you're a Pulp fan. The band is visiting the city next week to play their first North American shows in over a decade; and in the build up singer Jarvis Cocker has arrived a week early and has a series of  Jarvis-centered events planned around the city. Starting tomorrow, April 5, until Sunday, he's unearthing his Relaxed Muscle side-project for a series of shows at the Whitney Museum. As Art in America reports, Relaxed Muscle will "play live on Whitey Museum's fourth floor...alongside (British dancer, choreographer, artist) Michael Clark's dance company, organized as a part of the Whitney's Biennial." Tickets are required to attend, and advanced tickets are already gone, but the Whitney website encourages "anyone unable to get entry tickets to join the stand-by line which forms a half-hour before each performance." So that sounds promising. And while I normally don't get too excited about anything involving modern dancers, the chance to see Jarvis in a fairly intimate setting, let alone Jarvis as his hilariously named Relaxed Muscle alter-ego, Darren Spooner, barking the lyric "drugs, Mary, fucking drugs!" at an entourage of modern dancers would just be too strange to pass up.

Then, lucky New York Pulp fans, once we're done at the Whitney tomorrow night, April 5th, Jarvis and his Relaxed Muscle bandmate Jason Buckle will be performing a DJ set at the Tribecca Grand Hotel as part of an exhibition after party for the opening of photographer Jesse Frohman's Kurt Cobain exhibit at the Morrison Hotel Gallery. New York band The Virgins (remember The Virgins?!) will also be performing a live set at that event. Then, of course, Pulp takes the stage at Radio City Music Hall for two shows next week: Tuesday April 10 (with the Chromatics opening) and Wednesday April 11 (Jeffrey Lewis opening). Then they're off to do a couple of sets at Coachella as well as few other dates around the Golden State. After that, if appears the North American tour is finito

So enjoy, New Yorkers. The rest of us? Well, for now let's just listen to Relaxed Muscle track "Mary" after the jump and hope for more Pulp dates to be announced.

***Update April 5: While these aren't the tour updates I was hoping for, Jarvis has been in the news this morning. First, he is shockingly not a fan of the X-Factor and has some very sage views of why TV singing competitions are antithetical to "good music" (read about that here). Secondly, Gigwise is reporting that Jarvis has teased us with the possibility that there might be new Pulp material to-come in the future. The band's last studio record was the Scott Walker-produced We Love Life in 2001.

What to Download Tuesday: White Fence

Tim Presley is a busy man. It wasn't but three posts ago that we were introducing his new White Fence project with Ty Segall. And today marks the release of the first volume of his double 2012 White Fence LP, Family Perfume. As I suggested in my previous post on Presley, he is all over the place stylistically in the various projects he is involved with. That said, Family Perfume, Vol. 1 stays firmly in the lo-fi neo-pscyedelia realm, wearing its influences on its sleeve (Syd Barrett and Skip Spence, with some nods to the likes of The Beatles and Donovan in their more experimental or trippy moments). But this record doesn't sound like a simple redux of 60s/70s psychedelia. It somehow retains the stamp of being a 2012 Bay-area garage rock take on the genre. And while the casual music fan might be put off by various interludes of experimentation (some songs disintegrate into distortion and reverb, others have mistakes and false starts left in the final cut), the patient listener will be rewarded by an album of rich melodies and instrumentation. Tracks "Balance Yr Heart," "Hope! Servitude, I Have No!," and "A Hermes Blues" standout, but the album as a whole hangs together nicely, a collection of tunes that sound both experimental and poppy, imitative and intimate, familiar and strange. Read Ty Segall's thoughts on Family Perfume, Vol 1 over on the Woodist website because, well, it's some pretty great rock 'n' roll rambling that somehow captures just how exciting this record is. For instance, "[t]his is freak your fucking mom out cause she caught you naked in the back yard blasting this shit rock. This is not a joke. This is the hit factory...And this is just vol. one." Indeed, Vol. 2 will be out May 15th. With the Chromatics release last week and this White Fence record, 2012 is shaping up to be a good year for double records! And be sure to catch White Fence in concert if you can. He's scheduled for gigs with Ty Segall and The Strange Boys throughout the spring, including a Toronto date on May 12th which will also feature Father John Misty.

Lots of other great releases this week as well. Deerhunter guitarist Lockett Pundt releases the second Lotus Plaza record, Spooky Action at a Distance. It's a very close runner up in the "record of the week" category. Be sure to give it a listen. Also, the Screaming Females fourth record, Ugly, is sounding great and will likely do big things for them. In addition, the full list after the jump features the likes of Bear In Heaven, Black Mountain, Orbital, Great Lake Swimmers and more. It's a great week for new releases so get listening!

Mark Sultan, CTO, April 5th

Hey London Ont. It's been awhile, am I right? How's it going? Huh, what's that?! You're mad at me?!! Why?!!! I let you down? Wha...I... Oh, yeah, okay: I guess I have kind of dropped the ball recently in terms of being a "local music blogger" and reporting on shows happening in-and-around town. I've failed to take note of a couple of really exciting concerts this past month -- most egregiously my beloved Julie Doiron ft. my beloved Daniel Romano at the APK Live on March 10. I'm ashamed of myself -- I truly am -- but I had a lot of crazy things going on in my life in March (not the least of which was the release of my new movie, John Carter, in which I play the title character, John Carter) and I just kind of forgot to write about the local scene. I know, yikes! But, hey, we all make mistakes. Who amongst us hasn't intended to keep the local concert going public informed on when Julie Doiron was in town and then failed to do so because they were busy traveling the globe, promoting their new movie? And, seriously, that movie was supposed to have been my big breakthrough, but then then it just did nothing at the box office. To be honest, I kind of feel like I wasted my time with that whole thing.

Anyway, the good news is that April is a new month, and as a part of my New Month's Resolution I promise that Cigarette Tricks will try to stay more on top of local shows. And what better way to start than with news that Mark Sultan will play Call The Office this week! That's right, the prolific Montreal garage rocker, perhaps best known as BBQ in The King Khan & BBQ Show, though a member of literally too many other collaborative projects to name here (but some are listed here), will play the Office in just two day's time, this Thursday night, April 5th. Sultan most recently released the very rockin' double release Whatever I Want and Whenever I Want under his own name late last year. Thursday night's show at Call The Office seems to have come up last minute. It has yet to be posted on the club's website and no details as far as door cost or set times have been advertised. Regardless, the Facebook poster for the event is here and whatever the cost might be it's going to be worth it. Not only will the show itself be great, but being hungover on Good Friday is a great way to observe the fact that the Jesus was killed by the Easter Bunny, but not before he got in the line "You're just like all Easter bunnies; can't take a punch to the crotch." Or something like that. I think. Wait, what's this holiday about?

Moving on, though. Given my above resolution, I should also mention that the most recent line-up of ska-punk-reggae legends, The English Beat, are playing the Office tomorrow night, Wednesday April 4th. Details for that event can be found here, and there is also a link to a Free Press write up about that show here. And as if that wasn't enough, there's another show in town this week worth noting: Saskatoon's The Deep Dark Woods play the APK Live on Saturday April 7th. Tickets for that show are $10 advance, Guelph band Lowlands to open. Doors open at 9 pm.

***Update April 7:  Some thoughts on the Mark Sultan show after the jump.