Looking Back

Well it's another new year. Before we get into some of the stuff Charge might be up to in the coming year, I thought, damn, we did some pretty awesome things in 2011.

The Defiant Ones came out in February, our first full-length album. Following up on our EP We Haven't Been Properly Introduced from the summer of 2011, the album gave us a chance to really stretch out and try a lot of different things. From the alt-punk riffage of opener "Last Door Down" to the spaghetti western bombast of the closing title track, it's wide-ranging and intense. Lithium Magazine gave it a rave review, saying we had "a rugged flare for bringing raw yet melodic sounds of alternative rock to life alongside the boisterous style of indie darlings like The National and Band of Skulls. 'The Defiant Ones' also features dynamic drum beats, punchy bass lines, jagged guitars, and haunting piano passages." ExploreMusic.com picked "Young Love" for an Indie Track of the Day, and CBC Radio 3 featured "The Real Heart". Late in the year, blogger T.O. Snob chose "Desdemona" as #4 for his Best Songs of 2011. Pretty sweet, and everyone seems to have a different fave.

We did our first real video for "Charge!!", a short and punchy take of the band sweating out the track, directed by Paul Thompson. Check it!



Jason and I got over to the UK to play some dates in Liverpool for the International Pop Overthrow, including a hilarious stint with Japanese tourists in the Cavern Pub.

Then we got to do it all over again the fall for the International Pop Overthrow right here in Toronto!

That was a pretty intense gig. I'd just had surgery for a hiatal hernia two weeks before (which you can read all about here). Sure I was recovering, but they'd made a knot out of the top of my stomach, so maybe playing was pushing it. We did have a really good show, but hoooo I was feeling that the next day!

What else happened?

We played a boat.

We played a garage.

We played a mess of club shows and wrapped the year up with a great benefit gig for Sick Kids where the bands raised nearly a grand for charity!

All in all a pretty solid year.

What's coming next? Well, that's for the next post!

Benefit for Sick Kids Foundation, Friday December 2nd

Charge of the Light Brigade is playing a great benefit show this Friday, December 2nd, for Toronto's Sick Kids Foundation. It's a great opportunity to help out children experiencing all kinds of challenges. Sick Kids is a landmark hospital, one of the leading institutions for advanced care for children. While we're fortunate to be living under a public health care system, there is always more that could be done. The Foundation is involved actively in research, child health, learning and care.

We're glad to be a part of what's going to be a great night. I've been lucky to be involved in a few fundraisers around Christmas over the past couple of years, and they're always a great time. This one's organized by Toronto roots rockers The Alter Kakers. There's four bands playing, and it's happening at Lee's Palace this Friday. Charge is first up, at 9:30pm. Here's our video for "Charge!!", if you haven't seen it:



The Alter Kakers are next up at 10:30pm. They've been perennial chart toppers on Jango radio, and are bound to put on a great show:



Little Creatures are the third band at 11:30pm. They were featured on the History Channel's What's In a Name show this fall, when they took on their new moniker. Pretty fun episode, and it showcases their great pop songcraft really well. Can't embed the video, but go see it here. And here's them live:



Angela Saini and the Residents round out the night at 12:30am with her infectious singer-songwriter confessionals:



Should be a great night for an awesome cause! Tickets are $10. Pick 'em up at the door, or buy direct from any of the bands. Charge's tickets are on-sale in advance at our online store. And we're throwing in the complete album The Defiant Ones if you pick up a ticket direct from us.

Lastly, it'll be an interesting night when Charge takes the stage. Our regular drummer Owen Tennyson ran into a scheduling snafu, so for this night only we're reuniting with our founding drummer Zack Mykula. Owen's fab, and we'll be missing him, but Zack's an awesome drummer in his own right. I'm looking forward to hitting the stage with him playing on the songs he recorded, now that The Defiant Ones has been released. Bettin' it's gonna be pretty spectacular. Hope to see ya there!

Pepper Spray Cop meets The Defiant Ones

I really like the design of Charge's album cover for The Defiant Ones. Colin Viebrock did an amazing job capturing our anarchic mishmash sensibility, sort of bleak Pythonesque collage. So I was very amused to see in my in-box this morning a note from Colin linking to this instant classic from the exploding pepper-spray cop meme, using an image that appeared as part of our cover art. The act of the cop is of course unconscionable. But it's amazing to see how that act is exploding through the culture as a touchstone for people's anger and disgust at our financier overlords. Here's a great collection of images from the meme. The way the image is playing out reminds me of this classic image from the sixties, except evil and totally ass-backwards, which typifies the current crush-the-majority zeitgeist.

And here's Colin's design from the inside cover of The Defiant Ones, for our own cheery take on the glamour-show that is war (see more images from the cover-art on the pages of our website). The background photo that appears in both images is actually an archival photo from the Battle of Gettysburg during the Civil War. Some conflicts just keep echoing through history.

The Occupy Movement's message sometimes seems confused. I went to check out the original site at Zuccotti Park when I was in NYC at the beginning of October. There was a motley collection of protestors, drum-banging hippies (argh), and yes crazy-people with out-to-lunch placards, but there was an energy to it, and the conviction that people need to stand up and say enough. There are so many things going wrong around the world right now, from the economy to the environment, it's clear the problems are huge. And NOBODY in power is DOING ANYTHING. Then when the cops resort to such casually blatant thug tactics, it's obvious that we're in one of those spasmodic moments when the values at the top and below are totally misaligned. I'm still angry about the self-interested douche that was elected Toronto's mayor by scared, self-interested people. Something's gotta give. Vote the fuckers out.

I survived the Toronto IPO

Well I can now say gigging after surgery is totally possible. Recommended? No. But doable? You bet your sweet ass!

Charge played the Toronto edition of the International Pop Overthrow on Thursday, November 10th. We were in classic post-infirmary shape. I'd just had major surgery to fix a hiatal hernia, or tear in my diaphragm, two weeks before. Owen was getting over laryngitis, nasty enough on its own, but he has to keep an eye on these things, having suffered through a collapsed lung in his twenties. Yipes! Jason was totally fine, except for the fistful of tequilas he'd been handed by an overzealous fan just before his other band Clockwise hit the stage that same night. In spite of all that, or maybe partly fuelled by it, we put on a rockin' tight set. David Bash, the always affable host and organizer of the IPO events, remarked how Charge can "play any kind of pop song", something we really pride ourselves on. Sometimes we're punky, sometimes progressive, but it's always hung on a power-pop skeleton. That's just the way we roll.

I've been experimenting with playing keys as part of my set-up in the band, but this time we kept it lean and mean. Festivals are always about tight turnovers between bands, and I didn't want the added strain when not in top form. But it made the gig really free and easy for us, not having to sweat all those other parts. The stripped-down power-trio works well for what we do, and as we blasted through everything from "Charge!!" and "Last Door Down" to "Young Love" and even a wrenchingly minimal "The Defiant Ones", the audience was with it every step of the way.

Boy was I sore the next day though.

Really looking forward to our next show, playing a benefit for the Toronto Sick Kids Foundation at Lee's Palace on Friday, December 2nd. It's going to be fun. We're appearing with Toronto roots-rockers The Alter Kakers, the slick pop of Little Creatures, and the cool acoustic stylings of Angela Saini and the Residents. And another change-up for us: Owen's tied up with a different gig, so Charge will be appearing one night only with our original drummer, Zack Mykula. Can't wait to reunite with one of Toronto's great up-and-coming musicians. Seriously, Zack can wail.

We've got a great deal going for tickets for the benefit. If you pick one up direct from the band, you can get a ticket to the show and download our album The Defiant Ones for $10. Buy tickets here. A good cause, four bands, and a free album. Makes a great stocking stuffer too! Seriously, benefit shows are a great way to do something nice around the holidays. Your support makes a difference.

And by December, I should be fully ready to rip again. Okay, poor choice of words. You know what I mean. See ya there!

Ramblin' Pete and the iTunes Vampire

Pete Townshend, rock legend and guitarist extraordinaire for The Who, loves a little controversy. His latest jab came at the inaugural John Peel Lecture, put on by BBC 6 Music, where he called Apple a "digital vampire" bleeding artists. He made a number of points in a rambling, somewhat confusing diatribe, and I've been sorting through his thoughts in a few discussions since reading about it yesterday.

First up, he called file-sharing theft and a dilution of copyright. I love his line that "that people who downloaded his music without paying for it 'may as well come and steal my son's bike while they're at it'". I couldn't agree more.

As to Apple being a vampire skimming 30% off the lifeblood of artists, I think that's a stretch. iTunes is a store, and they have their own costs to cover. The deal is pretty comparable to most of the digital storefronts out there, and arguably lightyears better than the huge cuts and byzantine (yea nefarious even) accounting of the record labels over the years. The money from subscription services like Spotify and Rdio is absolutely terrible, in addition.

Townshend does lob one interesting notion out there though. In the spirit of John Peel's channel of open discovery for new artists on his renowned radio show, he suggests that Apple should hire label scouts and marketers to dig out and assist the best underground emerging artists they can find. Doing so would turn the massive iTunes spotlight away from major label artists that dominate the store's features and spread a little limelight to struggling lesser known acts. It's an interesting idea, and one that attempts to address the ongoing problem of finding good filters for music discovery. There is more music being made and distributed than ever before, which is tremendously exciting. Except that it's almost impossible to sift through it all. And the traditional outlets for discovering new music have become too homogenous (radio) or too outmoded and niche (magazines and print). We won't even talk about what's happened to music television.

Apple and other stores could take on this curatorial role more. As Now's Benjamin Boles suggested in a brief Twitter exchange we had, it'd be akin to what customers expect from an indie record store more than any other typical music store. But Apple and Amazon are probably not interested. Someone could really run with this idea but the thing about Apple doing it is their fantastic reach. iTunes pretty much is the world of digital music sales. Other stores like Amazon have a stake, but iTunes is much larger. And then there are the subscription services, which may yet allow for some kind of curation to unfold. I'm loving my Rdio subscription for checking out new releases. If the social dimension of Rdio and Spotify were to grow, something that Facebook is very keen to see happen, perhaps a bleeding edge of crowd discovery could occur there. Apple's Ping social network was a feeble attempt at just that. So very feeble.

The difference between a Facebook/Spotify model and a potential Apple/neo-Peel discovery channel is social (what are my friends listening to?) versus curated (though Townshend is at pains to note that John Peel gave pretty much any record at least one shot on the air). And that's where we're stuck today. How do you find something that's new *and* good?

The Sliceman Cometh

Happy Halloween! Hope you're enjoying a spooky evening!

What's with the creepy anatomy, you ask? Well I decided to take my Frankenstein's monster costume to the next level this year, by getting actual surgery. Can't wait to throw the door open to trick-or-treaters, cast my hoodie wide and reveal a bellyful of incisions and surgical tape. The kids love it!

Seriously I actually did undergo surgery for a hiatal hernia last Thursday, a rotten condition surprisingly common among singers. Somewhere along the way, though I really couldn't say how, I developed a tear in my diaphragm, and consequently my stomach was slipping through the hole above to where my esophagus is. It definitely doesn't belong there. The hernia leads to pain, discomfort and acid reflux, which can damage one's vocal cords. Chester Benington of Linkin Park is one of the better known sufferers. He says he was actually vomiting while performing, sometimes the strain was so bad. I never experienced anything that extreme, but it did hurt like a sonofabitch, I'd developed a constant cough and my throat was deteriorating, affecting my singing stamina. Not good.

It took awhile to zero in on the problem, and an even longer while to convince my medical practitioners to do anything. I was ultimately treated by an excellent surgeon, Dr. Teodor Grantcharov, at Toronto's St. Mike's Hospital, but even he needed to monitor the situation for two years before he felt surgery was warranted. Testing was a joy. There's the endoscopy, where you're partially sedated so they can send a camera inside a large tube down your throat to see directly what's going on in your stomach. There's a specific test for acid reflux, where they insert a small tube up your nose, down your throat and into your stomach, attaching to a small wearable tracking computer. This contraption you get to keep running through your schnoz and into your gut for a full 24 hours, while it monitors the amount of acid coming up out of your stomach and into your esophagus. "Just do everything normally," they say. Yeah, uh huh. Oddly this test didn't do much for me, indicating I wasn't experiencing reflux. My aching stomach, sore throat, and acidic belches told a different story, but hey, the computer doesn't lie. After two years of endoscopies my esophagus was starting to look like the inside of a blood sausage. With reflux. So the doctor agreed surgery would be a good idea.

The procedure to fix a hiatal hernia is pretty crazy. It's called a laparascopic Nissen fundoplication. Several small incisions are made in the abdomen, for inserting a camera and surgical instruments. The abdomen is inflated with carbon dioxide gas to give the doctors more room to do their work. They stitch up the tear in the diaphragm, repairing the hernia. Then they wrap the upper portion of the stomach around the esophagus to reinforce the opening, creating more constriction so food and stomach acids stay where they're supposed to. You can end up with a full wrap, where the stomach is wrapped like a scarf around the esophagus, or a partial, where instead of a full 360 degrees one gets 270 degrees of coverage from wrapping the stomach like a shirt collar, pulling it forward from either side of the esophagus but not entirely enveloping it. The partial is probably better for a singer, as the full fundoplication can create strain by stretching the esophagus, making swallowing difficult. I got a partial, as it turns out I've got a big esophagus (ladies, take note!).

Afterward, it's a gradual recovery. I'll be back to my normal routine more or less in a week, which is good, seeing as the band has a gig at the Toronto International Pop Overthrow a week Thursday. I do have to stick to a soft food diet for the better part of a month, slowly reintroducing normal food back into my system. I'm pretty sore right now, but I already feel like the strain my throat was experiencing may be improving. We'll see!

Odd moments and fun facts:

• General anesthetic can cause some nasty reactions after the fact. I had cold sweats and severe nausea. But it was short-lived.
• It takes six people to shift a 400-pound man (one of my roommates at the hospital). It doesn't usually go well.
• Surgery leads to nightmares. Or it has for me, at least. The past two nights I've been at home, I've woken from creepy nightmares where a well-dressed Victorian couple wearing strangely featureless plaster masks were looming over me. I hardly ever have scary dreams, so two in a row is pretty weird.
• They don't like to give you the good pain killers to take home anymore. I got Tylenol 2s. Seriously?
• Finding dried blood in your navel is pretty gross.
• My bassist's wife Grace wished me luck saying "in bocca al lupo", which literally means "in the wolf's mouth". Sort of like "break a leg" is the implied meaning. The traditional reply is "crepi il lupo", which means "to hell with the wolf". Italian's a strange language. I read that the whole exchange may in some way be derived from the Red Riding Hood narrative, where she's swallowed by the wolf and then cut free and is fine. Maybe? Anyway, colourful as hell. And I definitely feel like the wolf chewed me and spat me back up.

So that's the dilly. Pretty sure come next Thursday, November 10th I'll be able to deliver the full rock at the Rivoli. Looking forward to getting back up and singing, reflux free.

Once more into the breach...

Been an interesting summer with some pretty cool gigs. Amongst other shows, Charge of the Light Brigade played a boat, and a garage, neither of which I can say I've ever done before. Photos will be up in the next few days. They were both pretty damn fun. Being out in the middle of Lake Ontario rockin' it is a wild experience, and the garage show was something I'd never done back in my punk-rock high-school band days, so it was high time we got that off the ground. Played to a pile of people wandering by on their way to the Ex on a gorgeous sunny afternoon. Good times.

Right now's pretty sweet, too. Charge is in rotation on CBC Radio 3, and we've picked up some great coverage and play this summer:

- Lithium Magazine called the band "Canada's next indie rock sensation"
- T.O. Snob picked The Defiant Ones for his best albums of the year so far
- ExploreMusic.com picked "Young Love" as a featured track
- InsideToronto published a long interview with the band
- An eclectic playlist as chosen by us appeared at TheArtistMixTapes.com

We've got a great show coming up with Clockwise at Mitzi's Sister on Thursday, September 15th. I'm teaching myself keyboards leading up to that gig, so believe me, this one's gonna be a treat. Or completely insane. Probably both. I've dabbled with keys a little over the years, but never tried to seriously incorporate them myself into performing. Our producer Marc Koecher is such a damned good keyboardist, what with the classical training and all, that it seemed silly to even try. But he's a busy man, and keys-types are a rare commodity out there these days. So what's a singer-guitar-slinger to do but add one more weapon to the arsenal? Mastering the art of switch-hitting between guitar and keys is the most challenging part, even more than singing with keys actually. But it's loads of fun, too, and opening up some new avenues for our songs. Can't wait to break this stuff out for real. Cya there!