the Big Shiny late-90s/early-00s CanCon poll

ah at last my thread

good call cutting sloan and the hip, who loom larger than any of these bands imo

anyway let me be the first to say that early treble charger slaps

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xd6Ytvgz2wE

Lol I was def gonna post the "Red" video.

I highly recommend the first Don Vail album, which has some Treble Charger + Chore membership.

I've listened to more OLP than any of the other bands, but I'd rather not hear them ever again.

Drinking In LA wasn't a huge hit over here but it's basically never gone away. Everyone over the age of about 25 knows it.

My first instinct is to say that The Tea Party aged best (as per the other thread), but I'd have to indulge in some heavy duty nostalgia to reassess the lot of them.

Oh wait, it went top three here and was just ~in the air~ for a lot longer. Point is it was huge even if no one bothered to listen to another Bran Van 3000 song ever again. That alone puts them in a different category to any of the rest of these bands.

i love olp but they're like an inherently flawed band bc raine maida is their lead singer. they get better as they get big concept (happiness is not a fish that you can catch and spiritual machines are their twin peaks) but also way goofier

HOWEVER this video contains one of the most incredible drum performances i've ever seen in my life, jeremy taggart 4ever

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D6i9_LQQ-x0

I recall vaguely liking Moist as a 12 year old. I have no idea how any of their songs went, though.

David Usher apparently went on to have a minor hit covering the Manics' "If You Tolerate This..." which is exceptionally weird to me

i'm voting for matthew good though. i think he's made at least three masterpieces (beautiful midnight, avalanche, hospital music) and his other records all have good stuff on them. he's incredibly self-serious but i'm fine with it for some reason? i moved to canada for 10 months when i was 15 and saw the "weapon" video shortly after i got there and was blown away

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv0w8LIzo6I

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXvNEU5f4Bc

PICTURE yourself

ok i'm done

I kind of remember OLP and MGB as tonal polar opposites almost duking out in some way, though never explicitly I don't think, with Raine as the careening rafter-climbing pretty boy and Good as the sneering, self-hating loser who was above doing rock moves.

my fave MGB singles were the ones off of The Audio of Being, which is half-great but you can practically hear how miserable it was to make

I remember finding the MGB overly lacking in the angst department. But then again, Bush was my favourite band for a few months.

my fave MGB singles were the ones off of The Audio of Being, which is half-great but you can practically hear how miserable it was to make

― Simon H., Wednesday, April 3, 2019 5:37 AM (forty-two seconds ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

agreed on both counts. "carmelita" is prob their best song!

yeah, absolute snarler. nasty tones.

"carmelina"* lol

great video too, good was always uh good at maximizing the ideas he could get out of his videofact budget

not so successful that they actually made it big in the US.

I don't remember any of Our Lady Peace's songs, but Clumsy shifted quite a few units.

olp are an odd case, the title track of clumsy was kind of an alt rock hit in the u.s., and then they had a legit hit many years later with "somewhere out there," yet they're forgotten enough to qualify i think

I think I would die of embarrassment if I heard any of the Gravity singles today

i loooooved "innocent" at the time

re: music videos and working on a budget, Big Wreck did their best with some lighting and a long staircase

https://youtu.be/0JtB0Y9oM0I

my favorite fact about our lady peace that makes no sense: happiness is not a fish that you can catch ends with a drum duet between jeremy taggart and elvin jones

lmao just watching that "Automatic Flowers" video again and just...yeah, no, Maida is just too much. I can't with him at all. Idk why cause I like other bands with objectively worse frontpeople.

i don't blame anyone for not being able to deal with raine maida, you can hear his smug smile in every line he sings

skip to the perfect drumfill at 1:35 imo

I've owned the first Our Lady Peace and Moist CDs. I'm pretty sure I just got these from either columbia house or BMG, probably as my last picks in the X CDs for a penny thing. As I mentioned on the other thread, I spent a lot of time listening to Edges of Twilight, but relistening to it now, it doesn't really hold up.

Bran Van 3000's albums were really good, they really deserved to be more than just a one hit wonder.

I imagine I would recognize songs by most of these other bands (I kind of vaguely remember liking a I Mother Earth song that was getting radio airplay), but I can't say I ever got into any of them.

I always found it kind of odd that for as big as Our Lady Peace was in Canada, it took until Big Shiny Tunes 6 (From 2001) for them to show up on one of those comps.

I noticed that too! Must have been a label issue or something.

It's wild that BV3000 had a single with Curtis fucking Mayfield.

I mostly know Pluto for this song, which I was a fan of as a kid:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeDs-jZBh5s

Also I noticed you left Bif Naked off this list.

lmao fuck I specifically meant to include them! (tbf though I never found them any...good, really)

I remember listening a lot to this 1998 Edge compilation, which looks like it was angling to tag along on the success of BST1/2. They put OLP right up front.

https://i.ebayimg.com/images/g/4PcAAOSwoFVabinq/s-l640.jpg

Big Sugar, fuck. Bloozy Canadiana is pretty bleak.

I still love the first Big Wreck album, so I voted for them here. I really love the song Under the Lighthouse, its like a pre-emptive Interstate Love Song.

Also when winter turns to spring I invariably end up listening to Drinking in LA about 50,000 times in a row. It's a beautiful day.

Also - didn't Pluto include members who went on to form the New Pornographers? Or am I thinking of a different band?

simon you were talking about bif naked (who i had never heard of) when you were talking about this poll on facebook!

if Bran Van 3000 win this poll it means UK ilxors voted as that was a megahit here

bif naked did kinda suck it's true

Also - didn't Pluto include members who went on to form the New Pornographers? Or am I thinking of a different band?

associated acts to New Pornos, acc to Wikipedia:
Pretty Girls Make Graves, Destroyer, AC Newman, Limblifter, Superconductor, Age of Electric, Zumpano

(no idea what the PGMG connection is?)

I really enjoy Big Wreck whenever I hear them.

xp tbf that's not really an exhaustive list, for ex Neko Case was in Cub and Maow and neither of those are there

was kinda surprised Drinking in LA wasn't a hit in the US cos I associate it with a trip to the west coast in 1999 but tbf we started off in Vancouver BC so I assume it must've been there that it was playing in bars all the time

Are any of the Big Wreckers Americans or were they all just studying at Berklee when they formed?

Ha, wow, I don't remember this video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EtBYIghz6MU

oh god I remember these literal kids now.

also, someone get fgti in here

Though Pluto almost made it on the strength of "Paste" alone. Likewise The Killjoys on the strength of "Today I Hate Everyone"

My principal conclusions after going back through the MGB discography afresh is a) man, that guy wrote a lot of good songs that are more melodically clever than I remembered and b) Warne Livesey is a very dull producer who did them no favors. Loser Anthems is their most distinctive-sounding record and it's the only one he wasn't involved with. (OTOH he has a songwriting credit on the Mark Hollis solo album so he can't be all bad.)

I need to admit that I cannot remember how a single MGB song sounds. I'm not sure I consciously knew one at the time.

I'd be surprised if you put on "Load Me Up" or "Apparitions" and didn't have at least the slightest twinge of recognition.

Gob

I revisited a bunch of MGB singles the other day and while his songwriting does tend to surpass his contemporaries', the intervening decades haven't helped me warm up to his voice at all. And the production does indeed suck, although MGB are hardly alone on this one (I'd love me some Albinized CanCon).

I remember OLP working with THE Bob Rock was an actual talking point when Gravity came out.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2KJDl-T-y4

JENNI
KILLED HER DAD WITH HER CAR
NOW SHE'S A MILLIONAIRE

idk i love the sound of those mgb records. they definitely sound like the '90s though

I tried to listen to Limblifter this morning but I just get nothing out of that guy's voice.

holy shit this thread is too much

keep clicking songs and having intense flashbacks to childhood

fucking i mother earth lmao

Def the most ridiculous of these bands

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

re the convo upthread, as a rural boy in 90s ontario i can tell you with absolute confidence that leloup, colocs, etc had zero penetration in my tiny circle, and in fact i did not really hear any of these artists/bands until the past couple of years bc of dating francophone person. like, even living in mtl and largely hanging out w/ anglos i still didn't get any exposure. but all of these BST bands i was at least very intimately familiar with their heavy rotation muchmusic/bst offerings.

still really split on who to vote for, OLP or Moist prob the most honest to me at the time (in that order chronologically, i think?), kinda wanna vote bran van for the most interesting career to me retrospectively, and kinda wanna vote holly mcnarland because numb just fuckin bangs

BV3000 had that one wild song where the video was just people making out for like 4 minutes. i think i liked the song but i was far too repressed to not feel deeply uncomfortable watching the video. maybe that was the point!

UHH matthew good covered cloudbusting in 2015, feat. holly mcnarland????????????????? ok im voting for her

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Next to no discussion about the Odds and they sneak in for second place. Good band, occasionally great, and there's nothing embarrassing in their catalogue (even "Wendy Under The Stars" holds up) like any of the other acts that I was familiar with in this poll , so that's why they got my vote.

The only song I remember by them is "Heterosexual Man" tbh, which I do think of as a bit embarrassing.

It did have Kids in the Hall in the video tbf.

I guess it's a bit embarrassing, but I never took it as anything more than Gen X irony, and the video reflected that.

It was definitely ironic. I just don't think the by-the-numbers rock track or the joke have held up that great. Tbf, though, I doubt they were going for timelessness. It did give me a smile at 14.

told you who would win any why, Simon.

xp It's a safe bet that the by-the-numbers rock sound was imposed upon them by record company higher-ups (We'll let you self-produce but there had better be a radio-friendly hit)...they still managed to get Robert Quine and Warren Zevon to guest on the album.

Hm, maybe I should listen to more of the album.

A Tea Party song came on when I was out in the car today ("Temptation"). I reflexively reached to turn it off as always, thought of this poll and left it on. As they say in Newfoundland, lord thunderin' Jesus.

Oor was right, it's true

anyway 6 people voted for MGB in an ILM poll so my work was worthwhile

https://exclaim.ca/music/article/r_i_p_big_wreck_guitarist_brian_doherty

Big Wreck guitarist Brian Doherty has passed at only 51. Crank "That Song" this weekend in his honour.

:(

sadly it took the prompt for me to listen to their well-thought-of album from 2017 and it's quite a bit proggier, more psychedelic and colorful than the stuff they got famous with

if I thought anyone but brad and I would vote in it I would do a Matt Good singles poll. it's like a semi-secret history of alt-rock.

In the wilderness the only place to find freedom is in the dictionary
Under "F"

1. Odds won this poll righ?
2. Ton of cdn indie music at this time but not in this particular marketing strategy worthy of a thread?

Almost certainly!

In fact a fair number of bands that would presumably qualify were cited itt

if I thought anyone but brad and I would vote in it I would do a Matt Good singles poll. it's like a semi-secret history of alt-rock.

― Simon H., Wednesday, September 25, 2019 11:11 PM (yesterday) bookmarkflaglink

i found me a reason
so check me tomorrow

honestly i have no idea what i'd vote for? "future is x-rated"?????

"indestructible"??? "carmelina"??? "load me up"????

I even love "Rico" which, iirc, he completely hates.

everybody's gotta be something
me i'm garbage!

also love "Anti Pop" which instantly joins the pantheon of "singles tossed off spitefully when the band was told their album did not have a single" which is one of my favorite genres of song and I am thinking of polling

*sends my manager an e-mail* "Do I have to pretend to like Matthew Good? I do? OK thanks"

I guess he does a pretty reasonable Foo Fighters impression

lol

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s64LD9K-Fy0

rusty on rita and friends in late 95? 96?, doing "misogyny"

We heard the Tea Party's "The River" on the radio the other day. Weirdly, although I still hear the obvious Zep influence, I didn't hear Jim Morrison at all, although that's what it seemed like at the time and it's who Martin was always slammed for imitating. The vocals just sounded like post-Vedder alt-rock. Single holds up well enough.

J englishman + Late 90's + Canadian = Not Jenny Englishman alias Esthero, surely?

Quick discogs search revealed that it's Esthero's brother.

OLP's Is Anybody Home? has become one of my pandemic anthem. Happiness is one of the very first albums I bought.

thinking about "carmelina" again