Foo Fighters have added a second set of dates to their 2011 Wasting Light tour, with good news for Canadians on the west coast. Dave Grohl’s mob play Vancouver, BC on 25 October and Calgary, AB on 27 October, then Edmonton a day later. Foo Fighters will be supported for these shows by Mariachi el Bronx.

The west coast dates are addition to the first set of Foo Fighters dates, with the band already scheduled to play Toronto and Montreal. Support for Toronto and Montreal comes from Canadian hardcore band Fucked Up and 90′s Canadian local heroes Doughboys.

Updated Foo Fighters Canadian dates:
9/8 Toronto, ON
10/8 Montreal, QC
25/10 Vancouver, BC
27/10 Calgary, AB
28/10 Edmonton, AB

Tickets are on sale via Ticketmaster. Full tour dates available at FooFighters.com.

Title: Under Great White Northern Lights
Artist: The White Stripes
Label: Warner/Third Man Records
Release Date: 16 March 2010
In One Word: Disappointing

Those whom the gods wish to destroy, they first make great. And The White Stripes once were a truly great band, often mentioned in the same breath as the Strokes but completely undeserving of such treatment. The first four albums were of unparalleled excellence, each a different limb and expression of the garage rock philosophy; over-distorted and stroppy (self-titled debut), bluesy and miserable (De Stijl), noisy and earnest (White Blood Cells), and dark and lingering (Elephant). Then we had drifting with only occasional flashes of brilliance (Get Behind Me Satan) and straight-up moribund nonsense (Icky Thump). Then, on the brink of a tour, they suddenly pulled out of all their dates, and we fans were left bewildered and bored as Jack White spent the next few years playing awful classic rock in the Raconteurs and the indescribably dull, miserable Dead Weather. As the White Stripes fainted off into darkness and obscurity, we were left wondering what we’d missed with that fateful tour that never happened.

Under Great White Northern Lights shows us that the answer is ‘not much’.  It was recorded during their Canadian tour in 2007 promoting Icky Thump, and is also a film released under the same name. The album carries with it none of the aesthetic delights of the White Stripes in person; no bold strands of red and white, no elaborate stage, no glances of mischievous energy between Jack and Meg. We’re left with a minimalist document to put the money to Jack’s own self-imposed, endlessly repeated ‘just the music, bare and simple’ philosophy, and, for the first time ever, it’s hugely disappointing.

The best songs are facsimilies of the versions given on their previous live DVD, Under Blackpool Lights. It opens with renditions of “Let’s Shake Hands” and “Black Math” which sound like they were recorded in that time, all the tumbling eccentricity and energy of alienation still present. But then we start “Little Ghost”, easily the worst song from Get Behind Me Satan, a mandolin-laden Appalachian-folk song about falling in love with a ghost, but not in any sort of profound, longing-for-the-past sense, but just a straight-up, spooky-ooh-in’t-this-a-bit-strange sense. It’s the kind of horrible, teeth-bearingly sunny folk song that you see performed by third-rate Christians folk bands and you’re left longing for that moment, either 90 seconds ago or five years ago, when you were listening to Black Math. The best they have to offer us is the past.

The album then tries to get into a hard, garage groove. The spontaneity of White Stripes shows, with their lack of set lists, is lost and indiscernible as it is blatantly obvious that all these songs have been recorded at various concerts. Some old, unusual classics are wheeled out, like “The Union Forever” and “Jolene” . But these are just reminders of better times in the distant past, when they were formidable.  These songs when put on this album are just like cruel postcards from an ex-lover. Or, more accurately, finding a picture of you and this lover, in Paris, bathing in beauty, and then finding out that that lover is now a heroin-addicted North Korean prison guard, in the grimmest of all possible worlds, and the beauty of the memory serves only to mock you and itself. So, the album can’t win. We’re then given a quick tour through the new stuff, including that horrible, musical mess and lyrical meander through fields of sheer meaninglessness, Icky Thump, and the repetitive soul-dirge of “I’m Slowly Turning into You”, which does mercilessly brief moments of brilliance, which fade away heartbreakingly quickly. Then there’s a version of “Fell in Love with a Girl” which sounds like a cover of the insipid Joss Stone version from a few years back.

I’m writing this from Scotland, and bagpipes introduce and conclude this record. There is also the cod-scotch folk song “Prickly Thorn (But Sweetly Worn)” on the album. I think these two things are about as good an example as you can get as to what is currently wrong with the White Stripes. After years of sparse minimalism, the White Stripes realised their self-imposed limits could only take them so far. And, as the rot set in and creative enterprise became increasingly hard, they turn to gimmicks, relying on the eccentricity which once merely bolstered their appeal, and turning this oddness into their defining feature. The songs spill out all over the album, floppy and confused, into the void, uncertain where they are going, and what they will do there, or why they’re going there at all. When once they thrashed about with angst and the beautiful, timeless vitality of being young and feeling alone (the basis for all garage rock), they now thrash against the bars of the cage they built for themselves.

© James Hampson, Music Vice

Title: One Life Stand
Artist: Hot Chip
Label: EMI
Released: 2 February 2010
In one word: Vocals

One Life Stand is an album made to be listened to in Aberdeen, Scotland. It is icy yet warm and familiar, with a sense of being frozen and timeless, as if it could belong anywhere. It’s also comfortingly monochrome; the songs all form a sort of melancholic soup onto which you project your own thoughts and feelings, much like the Aberdonian landscape.

Which is not to say the songs aren’t individually brilliant. The title track caves in from robust, falsely uncaring interrogation into a weeping request for monogamy. Or listen to the way Alexis sings “You are my loveline” on “Hand Me Down Your Love” and try to imagine ever turning him away. God, it makes you shake. It’s a truly unique voice, quivering and feeble in the corner but much too beautiful to ignore, like a kitten. Alexis Taylor so immensely surpasses Amy Winehouse, Duffy etc etc as the greatest soul singer of our age. He is David Byrne crossed with Fontella Bass, in that he has total confidence only in his own insecurities and failings. Like all the best music (or art, or friends, or anything), it makes the deficiencies we’re all burdened with feel like blessings.

Loneliness, confusion and an ever-shifting sense of identity, in the world of Hot Chip, seem like the things everyone should choose to feel. With a voice this beautiful, anything can be sold. The nerdy and the lonesome made epic heroes through sheer beauty of expression alone; tears are mightier than the pen.

“The synths only exist to bubble and hiss in dutiful appreciation underneath the pure, virginal serenity of the vocals.”

Voices dominate this record. The synths on previous Hot Chip records have been what made them hits, think of “Boy From School” or “Over and Over”, and then the midpoint, “Ready For The Floor”, where vocals and synths hit parity in the most beautiful way possible. But on this album the voices have taken over. The synths only exist to bubble and hiss in dutiful appreciation underneath the pure, virginal serenity of the vocals. Like Ibsen’s Peer Gynt is, as all Educating Rita fans know, a play for voices, so this is an album for voices. Voices to nestle in your ears on another walk home, voices to buttress you at your weakest moments, voices to settle chest pains. Voices, such voices.

© James Hampson, Music Vice