Gigi - Maintenant

So for the last while, I've been having some serious envy issues toward Canada. You see, they have CBC whereas those of us who live in the Benighted States of America don't generally get such quality broadcasting. I used to enjoy CBC when I was younger and lived just this side of the
border, but I have since moved too far south to pick up their broadcasts. Some of the advantages are (for TV) Hockey night in Canada, which means a look at Don Cherry's sartorial choice of the week, which by itself is reason enough to emigrate north. It's like in the 80s when we'd all watch the Cosby Show to see what kind of ridiculous sweater Cliff would be wearing this week. Except better. Plus hockey. Anyway, and more to the point, CBC radio plays a metric shitload of really good music. Over the internets, I can really only pick up CBC 3, (which I am pondering fixing by purchasing a device which will let me listen to CBC 2 at night, which is a magical time when even unicorns cannot help but fucking go apeshit and gore people on their horns because the music is so good on CBC 2 at night) and so there I was. Listening to CBC 3 and this song came on. It was "Won't someone tell me" by Gigi. So taken was I, at that magical moment, that I decided on the spot that I must have this album. SO I GOT THE THING.

So, then. What's the deal with this band? Apparently some Canadian guy got his mitts on a couple of old plate reverbs like Phil Spector used to use to create his "wall of sound", and so he decided to make a Phil Spector record minus the murder and 3 foot high spaceball wigs. So over the course of a few years he wrote these songs and recorded them with whomever was around at the time and interested. The result was that he hit it out of the park. Not so much in that it sounds like Phil Spector produced it in the 60s, because it doesn't, or that the songs are derivative, because they're not, the greatness is in how he took this decades-old set of musical conventions and made them fresh again. That sound of old is just the thread that runs through these topically fairly modern sounding songs. I guess you could compare it to one of those new refrigerators that look like they're from the 50s, but without the kitsch. The songs are just good. Even though the songs were recorded over several years by a huge cast of people with a zillion different people singing, they mesh really well together. There's the plate reverb "air" sitting in the mix of course, and plenty of beats and arrangements contemporary to the 60s. The song structures aren't necessarily simplistic, and the lyrics aren't dumb. It draws stylistically, in fact, from a lot more than Spector's catalog. If Cruising with Reuben and the Jets is Zappa's reverent fun-poking at the cheesy music he loved when he was young, this is reverent evolution of AM radio gems. 15 tracks, 13 of them excellent. 2 I skip, and those are the 2 at the end. If you like Spector, or Bacharach, or Hugo Montenegro, and you don't get this album, you are a fool.