Alongside such universal facts as 'triangles are three-sided' and 'this post backfired horribly' is the irrefutable truth that when reading reviews of The Choir Practice you will find comparisons to Langley School Music Project, The Polyphonic Spree, The Mama's and The Papa's and The Beach Boys. Every last one. Actually, Connie astutely pointed out in her live-review.
She says that

...Reviews keep touting [The Choir Practice] as the grown-up Langley Schools Music Project (just because they're a choir?).

To which I reply Yes. Yes, that's exactly why: because that's the primary basis of their entire identity. They're an indie band who decided to drop the bass and replace instrumentation with vocals on top of existing vocals. They're a band whose clear overriding element is not eclectic complexity but straight forward vocal syncopation.

Recently Gawker posted quite literally the most masterfully written obituary ever via the British newspaper "The Telegraph" which reads as follows:

Count Gottfried von Bismarck, who was found dead on Monday aged 44, was a louche German aristocrat with a multi-faceted history as a pleasure-seeking heroin addict, hell-raising alcoholic, flamboyant waster and a reckless and extravagant host of homosexual orgies.

Be still my heart! The poised penmanship! The phrasing! It's not even so much the "host of homosexual orgies" bit, it's the little touches! "Flamboyant waster", "hell-raising alcoholic". An indifferent waster? A bit of a 'conventional' host of homosexual orgies? Offers you a cup of tea but just doesn't put in the time to decorate? Never! It's poetic genius. The decision to streamline through with dash-filled punctuation was a masterstroke, in my opinion, as the character doesn't even pause for breath as he pedantically steamrolls through the absurdity of his life. I'm telling you, I'm in misty-eyed awe here.

Clearly this is an art form that has yet to be tapped successfully. Until now! I am here today to go forward in my quest for gimmick blog concepts and modernise the obituary for generations to come: in the form of derisory reviews!

Sometime between 1911 and 1913, French novelist Gustav Flaubert published a short work titled "The Dictionary of Received Ideas" in which he essentially explains the world in two-sentences-or-less encyclopaedic entries. From "OMEGA: Second letter of the Greek alphabet" to "SYPHILIS: Everybody is more or less infected with it." The art of turning opinions in to fact through mere phrasing is sadly a dead one but lucky for you it's one that I intend to recover. After all, how many unbiased and level-headed beliefs can one internet hold? How many times have you read a review and thought to yourself, "Sure that's a fine opinion but what ever happened to good old fashioned to-the-point arrant indoctrination for the masses?" And so with that I propose the first Vancouver encyclopaedia of accepted ideas beginning with the letter "C" which involves a by-numbers list of aesthetic facts.

So what's happening in the world, then? While Lewis Libby is being spared from his prison sentence through some kind of bizarre divine intervention and further inquiries are taking place regarding the failed UK car bombing as the terror threat level climbs to critical, Vancouver does not fail to put its name in the papers: we're getting our one and only Kwik-E-Mart, guys! Just when you thought that thickly accented 'thankyou, come again' jokes were getting a little stale, now you will never escape them as they pull you screaming in to an endless pit of mid-nineties colloquialisms!

Photo from Flikr user rdr07

Somewhat recently Roger Ebert posted one of his regular Question and Answer sessions of numerous replies and rebuttals, mostly boring, on the nature of film media. But one question stood out:

Q. I was saddened to read that you consider video games an inherently inferior medium to film and literature, despite your admitted lack of familiarity with the great works of the medium. This strikes me as especially perplexing, given how receptive you have been in the past to other oft-maligned media such as comic books and animation. Was not film itself once a new field of art? Did it not also take decades for its academic respectability to be recognized? ...

To which Ebert replied:

A. I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

This raises an interesting dilemma for a city with such a stronghold on video game production. Are we producing creative material that is considered barely passable as an art form?

I think that if I ever somehow progress to the point where I have even a fraction of the amount of talent similar to that of musical legends from the past, I'd genuinely die happily. And this is essentially what Victoria band The Paper Cranes have successfully managed. Having gained exactly a fraction of musical talent inspired by the likes of The Cure's first album as well as by The Cure's second album, The Paper Cranes are nothing short of a musical melting pot of influences: from the Robert Smith-like tormented love lyrics, to the Robert Smith-like melodic yelp vocals combined (bizarrely) with an occasional change of pace in the form of Dexy's Midnight Runners-like rollicking background instrumentation as seen in the song "I'll Love You Until My Veins Explode ...". If The Paper Cranes do set themselves apart from New Wave past or present in any way it's in its subtleties. And these are almost entirely based within the vocal composition made up primarily through the slight flexibility of tempo and occasionally well-placed vocal lilts. Unfortunately these subtleties are too few and far between to make them anything more than a vaguely successful addition to the slew of New Wave mimickers.
In any case, they will be holding a show on Auguest 17th at Richards on Richards.

Alternative opinion:
the paper cranes make the beatles sound like a pile of horse shit.
-Jean Roux - Insound.com