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Music to make merry by this Christmas

For most of you, Christmas in Montreal is a familiar experience—a lot of shopping, for starters, so hopefully this page will be of use to those with music lovers on your lists. But what of the holiday season on other worlds? Ever wonder? Of course you do. The answer lies in the Christmas on Mars DVD/CD (Warner), created, peopled and scored by neo-psych visionaries the Flaming Lips. Frontman Wayne Coyne began making this largely black and white feature back in 2001—appropriately, given this spaced oddity’s debt to Kubrick’s sci-fi classic. He only completed it last year, so here it is at last.

For more earthbound ideas, some interesting items lurk among the multitude of maudlin seasonal discs. Verve/Remixed: Christmas (Verve/Universal) is a holiday variant in the respectable series, with hymns and jingles by jazz figures Count Basie, Nina Simone, Ella Fitzgerald and more worked anew by folks like the Heavy, the Orb, Oh No and Brazilian Girls. The originals are on the companion Unmixed disc, making for a great twosome.

Seminal garage rock revivalists the Fleshtones are still at it, and their rep as peerless party-starters gets a boost with Stocking Stuffer (Yep Roc/Outside), a revved-up rave-up saluting the Man in Red. Then there’s We Wish You a Metal Xmas and a Headbanging New Year (Armoury), the hair farmer’s holiday playlist, with cameos by Alice Cooper, his highness Lemmy Kilmister, Ronnie James Dio (on a hilariously lugubrious “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen”) and Dave Grohl.

Speaking of Grohl, catch him and his band playing 18 tunes on Foo Fighters’ Live at Wembley Stadium DVD (RCA/Sony BMG). A more substantial package is If All Goes Wrong (Coming Home), a two-DVD set for Smashing Pumpkins fans, with a documentary, a featurette and footage of their 2007 show at San Francisco’s famous Fillmore room. From the same era comes White Zombie’s Let Sleeping Corpses Lie package (Geffen/Universal), four CDs with 64 tracks from across the monster-mecha-metalists’ 10-year career—“Thunder Kiss ’65” and so much more—plus a DVD with videos, live footage and more.

White Zombie owes no small debt to the creepy costumed capers of Kiss, who’ve released Ikons (Mercury/Universal), a 56-track set of four CDs, each of which spotlights a different founding member of the, ahem, iconic monsters of rock.

Wrap up some rap

For the hip hop head this holiday, there’s Wu: The Story of the Wu-Tang Clan (Legacy/Sony BMG), a competent if incomplete overview of the various configurations of RZA, GZA, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, Method Man and of course Ol’ Dirty Bastard, God rest his nasty soul. He’s the only one absent from the live reassembly captured on the Live at Montreux 2007 DVD (Eagle Rock), nice back-up for the audio disc.

Riding the soul train back to its roots, there’s a stop to be made in the Land of the Rising Sun—the Earth Wind & Fire DVD Live in Japan (Eagle Vision), a DVD and accompanying CD of their 1990 Heritage tour, captured at the Tokyo Dome (what, Budokan was booked?).

Going further back, you get to the best stuff. Detroit’s legendary label Motown, home to the Supremes, Jackson 5, the Four Tops and Marvin Gaye—and later, Michael Jackson, Rick James and Erykah Badu—celebrates a half-century of solid soul gold next year. In honour of that, they’ve released the amazing Motown: The Complete No. 1’s (Motown/Universal). Living up to that title requires 192 tracks over 10 CDs, and there they are, sweetened by photo booklets, all tucked in a replica of the label’s original headquarters, Hitsville USA.

Comparable in size and far wider in scope is Revolutions in Sound: Warner Bros. Records, the First 50 Years, the music conglomerate’s toast to its own half-century—199 songs over 10 CDs, including roster cornerstones from Frank Sinatra through Jimi Hendrix to Madonna.

Fans of Ms. Ciccone’s dawn-of-MTV contemporaries, Duran Duran, might appreciate a copy of a new DVD in Eagle Rock’s Classic Albums series, this one an interview-laden look at the making of the band’s signature album, Rio. Also of note is the DVD release of Wild Combination: A Portrait of Arthur Russell (Plexifilm/Sonic Unyon) a nuanced study of the deviant disco dude, now deceased, that generated some heat around its screening at Pop Montreal a couple of months ago.

Cheer from here

If someone special mentioned they’d caught Bob Dylan’s recent Bell Centre show, they might like a DVD of Steve Gammond’s documentary Down the Tracks: The Music That Influenced Bob Dylan (Eagle Rock). It’s a look at Dylan’s inspirations, featuring interviews and archival footage of folks like Woody Guthrie, Leadbelly, Hank Williams and more. If country music’s your gift recipient’s bag, by the way, keep an eye out for new DVDs in the Live From Austin TX series (New West), such as Merle Haggard in ’78, Waylon Jennings in ’84 and Lucinda Williams in 1989.

Keeping things Canadian, you can grab a copy of the Deluxe Edition of The Reminder (Arts & Crafts/EMI), Feist’s Juno-winning, worldwide hit album. The second disc here includes four videos, a jam with Constantines, and remixes by Chromeo, Boys Noize and Grizzly Bear.

From even closer to home is Éric Trudel’s book Les 101 disques qui ont marqué le Québec (Trécarré/Ici), an exhaustive and finely researched overview of music de chez nous, from Joseph Saucier’s smash hit of 1910, “Un Canadien errant,” through Alys Robi, Félix Leclerc, Oscar Peterson, Leonard Cohen, Robert Charlebois, Offenbach, the Nils, Corey Hart, Celine Dion and Rufus Wainwright. The tome makes a nice two-fer when wrapped up with a copy of the double disc Moi mes chansons (Musicor), featuring 40 highlight tunes related to the book.

Also on the local tip is X (Tacca/Select), a retrospective from genre-jumping pop cellist Jorane—two CDs, one of 10 tracks from the last decade, as selected by her fans, the other of soundtrack work and unreleased material. For a more familiar take on music with strings, grab one or more of the Analekta label’s inspired Christmas cards, designed by renowned local artist Carlito Dalceggio. It comes with a CD of violinist Angèle Dubeau and her ensemble la Pietà performing Bach, Schubert and a medley of traditional songs for the season.

Kids in a candy store

Justice’s new documentary is a barrage of firearms, mock religiosity and half-naked scenester chicks

ROAD HOGS: Justice

by JACK OATMON

“Well, it’s not really about us,” Gaspard Augé of Justice says with a smirk as we have a cigarette outside Metropolis just before the press screening of their new documentary, A Cross the Universe (Ed Banger/Warner) on the day of their most recent Montreal show. “It’s about Roger and Bouchon. It sort of follows them along our tour.”

Bouchon is the volatile, bald tour manager with a lunatic glare and a fetish for the United States’ self-sufficient, fanatical approach to armament. He stocks the group with booze and arms them to the teeth with shotguns, Berettas, ammunition and a Smith & Wesson Model 500, which we learn is the most powerful handgun available for public purchase. Then, following a few firing-range lessons, they’re off in the classic rock-band tour bus to do the archetypal rock band tour across the U.S. and Canada—minus the rock, of course.

Roger is the calm, reflective bus driver who navigates the band of juvenile Frenchmen along their adventure. He sings soothing folk classics in his cartoon baritone as he drives across the boundless landscapes between shows. He tells us that the Guinness Book of World Records’ lowest voice is currently eight hertz. “I think I can beat that,” he says. It seems believable. He shepherds his frivolous charges around goodheartedly, stopping to help a disturbed lady off the street as she tries to get run over by a transfer truck, for instance.

Meanwhile, Augé and his partner in Justice, Xavier de Rosnay, fire guns and swill whiskey and investigate multi-million-dollar real estate offers and fuck droves of young girls—Augé even gets married to one mouthy little tart in a shotgun wedding in Nevada. “We never saw that girl again,” hums Roger, underlining the crux of the film. The two soft-spoken stars are dragged around between contrasting polarities, the madness of Bouchon and the steady hand of Roger. They remain largely in the background of the loose narrative, but seem to go along with whatever comes their way, the stooges.

This all fits well with their ongoing desire to keep their message obscure in all of their work. “Our image and the symbolism, they’re something that we’ve always wanted to leave ambiguous, and we’re still letting people make their own decisions about it,” says Augé. The clashes of Christian imagery and the limitless hedonism of the club, the austerity of classical music and the immediacy of electro, have always been Justice’s primary gimmick. “We like to approach things from different extremes and different directions and see how people react.”