brandon flowers- flamingo (2.5/5)

“Welcome to Las Vegas!” shouts Brandon Flowers in the opening moments of his brand new solo effort Flamingo. Much has been written about Las Vegas over the years of pop music. Frank Sinatra and the rest of the rat pack created an entire genre surrounding the glitz of one of the most bizarre places on earth. But this isn’t Sinatra’s Vegas; this is Celine Dion’s Vegas. Tacky, sanitized and saccharine in it’s naïveté. For Flowers, Vegas seems to be a place of cliché where the house will always win and every stripper and prostitute is there because she’s putting herself through medical school or supporting her children from a marriage gone bad. Flowers has little to offer to the cultural discussion of either Las Vegas or of pop music in general. This album is formulaic, trite and completely conventional. For someone who grew up in Las Vegas, Flowers seems to have little interesting to say about it. Instead he languishes in silliness and prescriptive ideas about love and sex and the strip. He appears to be looking for love and a better relationship with his father and is ever in search of God and the hooker with a heart of gold. But there is no subtext here, no interesting lyrical word play – just a lot of pop cliché.

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kathryn calder- are you my mother? (5/5)

Kathryn Calder is the other female voice filling out The New Pornographers and prior to that she spent a good chunk of her early career singing with the haunting band Immaculate Machine; but Kathryn Calder is more than the sum of the cool bands she’s played in. On her first solo album Calder recounts with deep honesty the two years she spent caring for her terminally ill mother. Do not be fooled by the melancholy of the subject matter, Calder herself acknowledges that Are You My Mother? is not a eulogy. It is instead a celebration of life and loving someone so much that their death can cause your heart to implode. It is an album full of joy, deep deep sadness and a little bit of cheeky humour. Listening to this album for the first time it may be easy to write Calder off as another sad Canadian indie rock girl with a piano but to dismiss her so completely would be a disservice to this stunningly beautiful record.

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wolf parade- expo 86 (3/5)

Spencer Krug deserves some mega kudos for pulling a reasonably good pop record out of the mire of a terrible first impression: Expo 86’s opening offering, ‘Cloud Shadow On The Mountain,’ is a bizarre song. It sounds like suddenly Wolf Parade has become a hobby garage band playing bad covers of obscure Oasis songs on Sunday afternoons while their wives sit beside them cheering them on and gossiping about their sons’ sexy hockey coach. Fortunately for those listeners brave enough to slog through those surprising 4 minutes a pleasant afternoon of pop music meets them on the other side. The true standouts on this album fall in the middle (‘Ghost Pressure’ and ‘Pobody’s Nerfect’) and build from more contemporary indie fare on the first half of the album into a lovely pop crescendo. ‘Yulia’ is hands-down the best song on Expo 86 and there is little chance that you won’t be bobbing your head along to this lovely little track as you cycle through the hipster neighbourhoods of your town. But Expo 86 is not a great record. Wolf Parade has stopped asking listeners to ask what’s next; instead they are creating competent and interesting but not surprising indie pop music with not a synth or yelped lead vocal out of place. Apologies to the Queen Mary surprised and Krug and pals have been coasting since then.

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robyn- body talk 1 (1/5)

Body Talk 1 is a strange album: despite it being total shit people seem to love it. Has ironic interest gone so far that irony can no longer truly exist? Has kitsch and retro ’90s boredom really become the most interesting genre on the planet? Pop music should be thrilling and joyful and exuberant and in the grand scheme of truly great pop albums (even truly ok albums) does Robyn deserve the love she’s been getting? No. Honestly, no. The only thing remarkable about this album is how spectacularly unremarkable this album is.

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justin rutledge- the early widows (5/5)

As summer approaches music blogs explode with promises of “hot summer” releases, hype machines overheat and explode. Suddenly it’s very easy for a whole slew of excellent albums to get lost in the shuffle of big bass-y noise and Lady Gaga’s new video. Justin Rutledge’s The Early Widows is one of those excellent albums. Rutledge, Canada’s sexiest troubadour, has penned the best album of the first half of the year and if his spot on the Polaris Prize long-list is any predictor The Early Widows will win out as one of the best albums of 2010.

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