The Tragically Hip - "Ahead by a Century". It's strange being back in Ottawa. This is the city I (mostly) grew up in: the one where I learned to multiply, to swim, to fall maybe a little bit in love. Visiting now, after years in other places, I see different things than I once did. I see the wide spaces between the buildings, the pockets of community, the specialness of the waters that run through it - and the gentleness of its passions. As kids vroom down Carling celebrating a Senators victory, they're answered with quiet hurrays, single waves. Even the Byward Market, on these nights, is far, far from the pubs of Britain (No Team Colours, No Singing of Songs).

The Tragically Hip are of course one of the most famous bands in Canada, and this is among their most famous songs. You'll almost certainly hear it if you listen to the radio all day. Or if you sit by a lake, leaves rustling, and listen to the music that comes wafting over.

They're Canada's REM, or maybe even their Pulp. A band that's been around too long to be consistently great (or even very good), but that at its peaks evokes and invokes the anglo central Canadian experience with just as much potency as The Group of Seven, In the Skin of a Lion, Blue, Robertson Davies, and The Littlest Hobo.

"Ahead by a Century" is memory painted in acoustic guitar and a clock's percussion, in maples and in pines. It's all the biggest things (revenge, doubt, longing, regret) and the smallest (hornets, rain, and - yes - dreams). You can listen to it with a stony heart - unmoved, angry, hot as clay. Or you can do the other thing: dip your toe into the water, smell the woodsmoke, remember.

[buy]

Paul Duncan - "Memory Curves". If "Ahead by a Century" is about clear-eyed remembering, lucid dreaming, "Memory Curves" is about the other. It's about the submerged, the hidden, the things that rise unwilled. It's not among but Above The Trees.

There's an expression: "It all came flooding back". The beginning of this song is about the "It". And the rest, guitars & trumpet & noise & creaks, is the "flooding back". It's a thousand dams breaking, gently, one by one. One landscape overwhelmed and the other left barren, dry, just vast coral reefs.

[buy Above the Trees]

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If you haven't heard, there's a new Okkervil River song at Pitchfork. I'm not quite convinced.

Keith Shore, guestblogger and designer of the Gramophone-header-graphic-with-the-gorilla, has a new website and a new exhibition with Jesse LeDoux at Giant Robot NY. A plethora of drawings & paintings & portraits of men with beards.

In a similar vein to Childish Gambino, The Hood Internet is a new (great) source of indie + chart hop mash-ups. Dude is cranking out some pretty awesome stuff, especially Spoon vs Ghostface and R. Kelly vs Broken Social Scene.

Can-crit demigod Michael Barclay's put online the full transcripts of his extensive, probing interviews with Arcade Fire early this year. They dig real deep into Neon Bible. Parts: 1 2 3.

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Voluminous, sincere thanks to The Morning News' Editors for their warm words. We're surprised, touched, and made very glad. I've been reading TMN since 2001, and in these years it's become the gold standard for writing on the web. Congratulations as well to Gorilla vs Bear; Chris is very rightfully commended for his curatorial sense, and it's his fine ears and general magnanimity that keep us coming back. And to latterday indie saints Daytrotter, rightfully recognized for their musical recordings, their writing, and their visual art.