For The Singing Lamb October 11, 2009.
I must begin my review of the debut album from Silver Starling by complaining about CD packaging companies. I do not know when this trend of sticking a disc in a sleeve inside another sleeve tucked into the side of the overall package, which is then wrapped in air-tight plastic began. But I do not enjoy having to search for the disc – it is impossible to look dignified when you are holding a case upside down and shaking it, hoping the CD will drop to the floor. And it only sets the potential listener up for a great amount of disappointment when, as with this particular disc, you feel that the music was not worth the struggle.
This particular impossible-to-open disc, the self-titled Silver Starling album, was inspired largely by the fight of a man (a close friend of many of the group members) against eventually fatal pancreatic cancer. And while this five-piece band from Montreal captures the sense of mourning and wistful affection very well, they failed to leave out an equal sense of inevitable gloom and depression that weighs down most of their overly similar tracks. In other words, the listener was subjected to the nausea of chemo, as well as the fond remembrance of a departed friend.
Maybe it’s just birthing pains for the group, which is composed solely of excellent musicians and several familiar faces – namely Marcus Paquin, who fronts the group, and his wife Marika Anthony-Shaw, who split her time working with Silver Starling and playing viola with Arcade Fire’s Neon Bible tour. Other members include Liam O’Neil, Gab Lambert and Peter X, all of whom are well known in the world of vaguely indie music.
Listening to the songs, you can certainly hear references to that Arcade Fire-y sound. Happiness is represented by fifth intervals on the glockenspiel, and melancholy by husky voices and hushed drums. Overall, it’s a nice sound – but not one that fans of Stars, Arcade Fire, or The New Pornographers will find particularly groundbreaking.
The other problem with this album, besides predictability in style, is the inability to determine when one song stops and another one begins. Seriously. On my first listen to this album, I labored under the impression that I was listening to one fifteen minute song, one that would likely continue until the end of the disc. It wasn’t until I got up and checked the player that I realized I was five songs in, and hadn’t been surprised, delighted, or hooked in at all yet.
Something of a hook appears around the middle of the album (where, actually, I usually find my favourite songs will end up). The tracks “Ghosts” provided the one, only, singular, solitary song that was not out to depress me, and its jauntiness was a refreshing change. Following on its heels was “Love and a Broken Heart”, and these two songs combined represented to me the only tracks that offered any kind of optimism and warmth.
All things considered, this was not the best album I have listened to in a long time. However, it might be interesting to watch what happens to this group, as they (hopefully) continue to produce albums. It may be that this group of talented musicians just hasn’t found their own sound yet – this is something that comes with time. Or, perhaps, on their next album, they should consider writing about butterflies and rainbows instead of death and despair.
Monday, January 25, 2010
Equal Rights - Not So Equal Yet
My father was born and brought up in the 1950s – a time when women were kept in the home. He was raised traditionally, with a mother who would have a hot meal on the table every night, a clean home always, and seldom openly disagreed with her husband.
My father grew up, and got married. He considered himself much more open-minded than his father had been, and fully supported the women’s rights movement. He would do a few dishes, perhaps take the garbage out, and then settle down to his paper. My mother famously asked him once, “Do you really think you’re done for the evening?” and my father looked up and said, “But I helped!” My mother was of the opinion that household tasks were to be shared equally – and Dad would soon come to realize that the best way to keep the peace was to help out.
Now, I live with my boyfriend – a truly lovely human being, who believes firmly in equality for all, and supports me in all that I do. When I ask him why it is that I still seem to end up being in charge of keeping our home tidy, he claims to not live up to my cleaning standards. If I have to do the job over again, what is the point in him even attempting it in the first place?
Two generations later, and the reasoning may have changed, but I am still somehow stuck scrubbing our toilet.
The Economist tells me that women are doing better than I think they are – the cover of their first issue this year was Rosie the Riveter doing her familiar flex, with the triumphant “We Did It!” caption. The message is clear – women have made it, have arrived, and are now truly equal. They follow this by saying women now make up 50% of the job market, and by 2011 there will be 2.6 million more female than male university students in America. However, what they leave out is interesting. Are they forgetting that women still only earn 80 cents on the male dollar? And when they say that women are in control of many powerful corporations, they neglect to tell us that only 15 of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women.
In a recent issue of ELLE magazine, Rachel Combe reports on a study from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, which says that women have experienced a steady erosion of happiness from the 1970s – we are now notably less happy than men (clearly a shady state of affairs). Does the women’s movement have anything to do with our sudden sadness? Consider the 1970s – a time when “girl power” was hitting its stride, when “I am Woman, hear me roar” was an anthem for the hope felt by women who wanted equal rights and equal pay. And it’s been one long bout of not doing as well as we hoped since then. And above and beyond that, we are still doing the double shift of working at work and then coming home to make the dinner, clean the house, and take care of the kids. We are also expected to do it cheerfully, and to rejoice in the fact that, quite literally, we have the opportunity to do twice as much as our mothers did. It’s no wonder we’re feeling depressed.
Our troubles really began with the shift away from matriarchal rule. In prehistoric, so-called primitive societies that operated under a hunter-gatherer method of life, women were in a position of power. And why was this? Essentially, because women can make babies – and as the child bearers, were responsible for making sure a tribe didn’t die out. In many of those societies, the history of the tribe was passed down through the “wise women” who were responsible for remembering the tribe’s history, which could go back for 45 to 50 generations. “Civilized” societies have tended to be male-dominated, and that may have had a lot to do with the fact that men were no longer in danger of being killed by sabre-tooth tigers. It is telling that the first place in the US women got the vote was in the Montana territories. Again, this was a situation where men were in daily danger of being killed – it was a rough life out there in Wild West Montana. And as that was the case, it was natural that women be in a position of more importance in the community. Really, where we went wrong is inviting men to come home reliably at the end of each day.
One of our biggest troubles in the here and now is complacency – this feeling that we have gotten to a certain point, and feel that we no longer have any right to complain about a lack of equality. After all, compared to so many less fortunate women, we are so lucky! We do not have to live in fear of honor killings or genital mutilation, and in theory we are able to do anything we want. What is therefore so sad is that we still seem to find it difficult to really assert our own personal power. I have yet to talk to a female friend who says she would be comfortable earning more than her (future) husband – that things are just so much more natural and easy if women are kept in a lower earning bracket. On our own sliding scale of equality, we are still allowing men to dictate how far we can go.
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