Apostle Of Hustle National Anthem Of Nowhere by: Greg DeGraves Mon:02-Jul-07 Label: Arts & Crafts Year: 2007 WB rating 60 out of 100

Dear Sirs,


Congratulations on the self-titled track from this, your second album, National Anthem of Nowhere.

Upon hearing this song my ears pricked like that of a dog when they hear the concluding run of a Jethro Tull flute solo, as if I’d uncovered the supposed grey period that Radiohead occupied between OK Computer and Kid A. While it would be atypical of my character to heap a mound of superlatives on the song, quite frankly I found it hard to restrain the unbridled feeling of hope that saturated my very being. I was awash in excitement; could it be that here in a little known Canadian band, a band better known because of Andrew Whiteman’s involvement with Broken Social Scene, that we find the filler to the void left between Arcade Fire and Radiohead releases?

Maybe the sickening, green-faced feeling of disappoint upon hearing your album was my own fault. I’d built you up to be a monolith, a glistening beacon of hope amongst the torrents of crap hiding under the guise of ‘indie rock’, but I felt ditched by my summer fling. As if, after nights of theorising, spooning and weird semi-occult like mating practices you had abandoned me for the head of the multicultural committee, neglecting the existential and immediate aspects of our connection, for a distant and predominately cold love.

I’m not racist. I see nothing wrong with infusing a little ‘world’ influence into your album, and sometimes you can be downright convincing in your inter-genre marriages. The Gomez-meets-The-Bees shuffle of ‘Chances Are’ proves this, its polite blend of Latino chic and pop convention was pleasing. While songs such as this may not fulfil the artistic expectations that were harboured by the early splendour of ‘National Anthem of Nowhere’, I could have been appeased by such a blend of art and pop; it could even have been some sort of Warhol-like fusion, the typically mundane enlivened by a few flashes of colour and piss.

Under this proviso tracks like ‘Justine, Beckoning’ work, its standard riff-driven rock brightened by the electro edge of the synth and the rhythmic, abstract melody. But other attempts are not nearly as successful; the faux-sounding ‘Cheap Like Sebastien’ is stale, better left for sop specialists like Youth Group. What were you thinking? As a simple pop band you don’t really deliver, there’s too much pomp and too little easy appeal for you to be a Warhol. He got other people to piss on his paintings and maybe that’s the difference, as on songs like this it seems you have raised a bent leg and relieved yourself. Besides it’s clear from the other side of National Anthem of Nowhere that pop art isn’t your intention anyway.

As I said before I’m not racist, but this other face of the album, all this mixed up South American business, is the main flaw on the record. In theory Cuban-World ambitions are fine, but adding a bossanova rhythm, the worms from the bottom of a Tequila bottle and an over-sized, cheap, upturned straw hat doesn’t make you Speedy Gonzales, much less Jose Gonzalez. Where the experimentation and bounce of ‘My Sword Hand’s Anger’ and ‘The Naked and Alone’ work because you are unafraid to shake down convention, these same qualities are overblown on tracks like the jarring ‘Haul Away’ and the plainly twisted ‘Rafaga!’. Just because you desire to border jump doesn’t give you the right to frazzle the melody, leaving it to purge itself, confused and thirsty for nutrition from the Peyote-fuelled wasteland that you call a song structure.

Let’s get back to me here, because as I said before a lot of this originates from my quick-fuck subscription to your charms – like that time I fell for that ‘free stress test’ and ended up in the same room as Tom Cruise, John Travolta and Beck discussing the merits of the tone scale as a piece of self-reflective psychoanalysis. You see, bands the ilk of Arcade Fire and Radiohead, the cream of the post-everything world, are defined by what they leave off an album as much as what they put on it. In such a test, you, sirs, are but infants.

I admit the measure is an extremely unfair one, but don’t get all sooky la-la about it, it’s actually a compliment. There is something in your band that is worthy of attention, perhaps even more so than Broken Social Scene. It’s just a horrendous injustice that this is all you’ve got to show for it, a work that a polite man would term as ‘full of potential’, whereas a prick like me would just shake his head, withdraw his hand and tell you to wake me when you’ve got 12 songs, not five.