Happy Christmas with Man in Argyle

I should have put up this video at least a week ago, but I completely forgot about it until a few hours ago. THIS is the reason why I own a satellite dish. You never know what's going to come through!

Happy Christmas Everyone!

Merry Christmas from Aunt Margaret!

This is my Aunt Margaret. The best way I can describe her is... well... she's special. She likes Michael Jackson and .... well.... that's pretty much it. She also phones my parents A LOT and likes to leave messages on the answering machine.

The other day, I went over to my parents' place with my laptop in tow. My dad had saved some of the messages where she was singing songs, so I recorded them with the full intention of putting them up here for your entertainment.

And they're very entertaining!

So this is my way of wishing all my readers a Merry Christmas. I hope you enjoy the soothing voice of my Aunt Margaret, and her extra-unique renditions of these popular songs.

Jingle Bells
Six Little Ducks / Frosty The Snowman
I'm Gonna Knock On Your Door / Bye Bye Love
Deck The Halls
Happy Trails

And in case you missed it, here is my Christmas appearance on Amateur Hour. There's some great stuff in there too!

Teaching Your Kids About Alcohol and Sex

Let's face it, you suck at parenting. Your kids are brats that are going to drink and fuck their way through their teenage years, and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

But wait! There is a solution! Buy an album that demonstrates how to talk to your kids about alcohol and sex. This will help soothe your worried mind and teach you how to sound like an un-cool parent in the process. The audio skits will demonstrate what you will say without cussing or screaming, and how your kids will eagerly await your intelligent and level-headed answers without stomping angrily out of the room.

And then you go do it, and it transpires NOTHING like how it sounds on the recordings.

But allow us to humour you anyway...


How To Talk About Alcohol: An Audiocassette for Parents of Preteens



Dig that hip music that starts off the cassette!

"I once had some beer... I didn't like it much" said no child ever in his peer group. The conversation more likely went something like, "Yeah, I've had beer... It's pretty good!"

"Most Canadian adults drink alcohol, and most of them drink responsibly." (First Nations people were excluded from this assumption)

The whole tape sounds extremely robotic.

Kid: "Dad, have you ever been drunk?"
Dad: "The answer is yes, and I'm not proud of it. I drank too much, and I just don't do that anymore."

See how that looks in a textual context? It looks good, as if it were written by a university graduate. However, when you put voices behind the lines, it sounds like a couple of robots interacting. The fact is, university graduates lose their concept of reality by drinking themselves into a stupor after a hard day of recording terrible educational cassettes.

Anyway, I could tear apart this entire cassette, but I think you'll get more enjoyment listening to it. Or you'll be bored as hell. The next album is 100% more interesting.

Listen to Side 1
Listen to Side 2


You and Your Children: Sex Instructions for your Children



There's no greater thing than to teach your kids how to have sex with each other. At least that's what the album cover was implying when I found this. The funniest thing about a record like this is how much more explicit it is in comparison to a Rusty Warren record which comes from the same era. I honestly find this more humorous and amusing than Rusty's crappy comedy albums. For instance...

Dad: "Mommy has a little opening between her legs"
Son: "Wait until I tell Nancy!"

Daughter: "You mean... you sort of... bleed???"
Mother: "Well, not exactly dear..."

Dad: "You mind if I smoke in your room?"
Son: "Why no dad! Go ahead!"
Dad: "Thanks!"

We also learn that blasting your supply of milky goodness into a woman's cooch is a "very holy" thing. When things start getting more explicit on this record, they start inserting religious jargon to cover up how extremely graphic the whole thing is. It would be so much easier if the family just rented a projector, an x-rated film, and showed that to the kids. As long as they eat crackers and drink wine while watching smut for educational purposes, all would be forgiven.

This record was annoying to transfer, mainly because there's a locking groove on each side after the first part ends. It'll sit there and chew away at your stylus until you get off your ass and move the stylus past the dead space to hear the next part. Also, there's a whole freakin' series of these records! After listening to this one, I'm tempted to go back to the thrift store and buy more of them for their 1950s 'Leave It To Beaver' dialogue.

Part 1: How Babies Are Born
Part 2: Menstruation
Part 3: Problems of Growing Boys
Part 4: Marriage Union

Since Christmas is right around the corner and I haven't made a single Christmas entry as of yet, you'll be happy to hear that I'm doing a Christmas special on Amateur Hour on December 17th. 95.9 FM Winnipeg, 5:00 PM. I'll be bringing some ghosts of Classical Gas Emissions Christmas past, and of course some Christmas future!

Songs Sung Like Poo: Neil Diamond Tragedies

You know my 'in queue' boxes are quite full when I can pair up tribute albums of Neil Diamond. Let's face it, Neil isn't exactly the first artist you'd expect to find a crappy tribute album of. The first one is actually Elvis.

I really do like Neil Diamond... Well, at least his very early stuff. After he released Sweet Caroline, he became more of an adult contemporary artist as opposed to the rockin' 60 pop guy he started off as. He had some extremely stale albums in the 1990s. If you're gonna get into Neil Diamond, stay away from that era.


The Heartlite Band - Music of Neil Diamond


The first one on the list was purchased at Dollarama. Every once in a while, you can find a pretty cool album there. This isn't one of them. There's a lot of focus on Neil's shitty output such as "You Don't Bring Me Flowers" and "Love on the Rocks". The only real good thing about this CD is the cover which has Neil's name in that gold foil stuff that doesn't show up when you scan it. Hence the crappy photograph I took.

The guy singing on Cracklin' Rosie sounds like he's having trouble hitting those low notes, and the producer put absolutely no effects on his voice. And what kind of ending is that? It sounds like the band said "Fuck this shit, it's good enough."

Listen to Cracklin' Rosie


Avenue Recordings - A Tribute to Neil Diamond


When I think of Neil Diamond, I think of guns, the US Army, cheeseburgers, and Mickey Mouse. These guys made the PERFECT album cover to represent the songs on this record. Well... maybe just the Mickey Mouse.

This is another appearance from my buddies at Avenue of America (in this case, it's just "Avenue Recordings" since this record came from England). I've reviewed a bunch of their shitty 8-tracks in the past. Up until this moment in time, I thought they were an 8-track only company. After all, any idiot with an 8-track recorder could release their garage band's piece of crap cover album. Perhaps AOA saved up enough cash from 8-track sales to press a record. Due to the credits on the label, we can point our Neil-Diamond-inspired guns at one person named Alan Caddy, who arranged, conducted, and produced this album. I'm surprised he didn't give himself writing credits, although he claims copyright on the back of the album. Copy Right? More like Copy Wrong.

While Alan was in his drunken stupor creating the album cover, he forgot to list the first song on the album. Fucking dumbass.

Anyway, I've brought you two Mickey Mouse recordings from this English record without British accents... The apparent bonus track "Shilo", and the atrocious "Solitary Man" which sounds NOTHING like what it should when it starts, and due to the incorrect lyrics, makes the singer have a threesome with at least one other man.

Listen to Shilo
Listen to Solitary Man

As a side note, the Neil Diamond CD came shrink wrapped with a Bee Gees tribute album. I haven't listened to it yet because I don't like the Bee Gees at the best of times.

German Nudie Records

During the summer, I seemed to have the luck of stumbling across quite a few German records. I haven't the slightest clue about German culture, but it appears that the women enjoy doing the most mundane activities while naked. Perhaps I'm living in the wrong country.

Click on the images to see the unedited versions.





Just look at how fucking happy they are! They're nothing like all those porn magazine models making that "I'm a bitch" face. I think I'll be moving to Austria in the near future.

Two of these records are brought to you by the same company that makes universal remote controls and batteries.

I picked one song off the 'naked lady with the umbrella' album, simply because it had yodelling in it.

Listen to Yodelling German Guy

On December 17th, I'll be doing a Christmas special on Amateur Hour. You should book your vacation time now so you can fly down to Winnipeg and listen to 95.9 FM at 5:00!

Horrible Peking Opera Record

THIS RECORD IS REALLY FUCKING ANNOYING. What a way to start off a blog entry! Just cut all the shit and get to the point. This ten inch record is like Chinese torture. Wait.... it IS chinese torture! My poor ears have torn themselves from my head and flushed themselves down the toilet.

I got this in a batch of free records, and I hate it. They've taken two annoying things (chinese singers and opera music) and have put them together into this ugly collection of noise. I don't know if this is a play, a musical or a movie, but it should be thrown in the garbage.

With titles such as "Telling the Family's Revolutionary History" and "The Poor Man's Child Shares The Household Burden From Early Age", you'll be sure to grab your puke bucket and heave. This music is PAINFUL. It's the equivalent of putting your pet goat and some rocks in to a blender, and putting it on LOW speed while someone is standing beside you smashing trashcan lids together. You can actually pick out the moment when they turn on the blender.

My turntable has crawled into a corner, and is sobbing uncontrollably.

Listen to Chinese Woman in Heat!
Listen to Goat and Rocks in Blender!

Stompin' Wrong Connors

I seem to have begun recording videos of "interesting" karaoke singers. Here's a guy who is singing a classic song by a dead Canadian country singer named Stompin' Tom Connors. If you're not familiar with Stompin' Tom, go check out some of his stuff. He should have written us a new National Anthem instead of the shitty, constantly-being-modified "O Canada". I'd personally vouch for "The Ketchup Song" to be the replacement.

Anyway, here's our wonderful songster performing and stomping the hell out of "Rubberhead"



...and if you want to compare, here's the Stompin' Tom version.

The Love Story of Michael & Ana

I hope you guys are bored at work today (and maybe tomorrow). I've got something great to entertain you!

I found these 4 items in a huge box that contained cassettes, CDs, book, and floppies. I'm kicking myself for not taking pictures of the box these came in, because the items were quite telling of the person who owned them. It contained a LOT of Spanish language teaching materials and cassettes of the band UB40.

Most of the floppies contained Spanish language tests and exams... except these three. These disks have a collection of emails that were sent to the owner (Ana) from a lover named Michael. Michael's writing style is unique, humorous, and highly entertaining. Dare I say that this collection of writings is more interesting and addictive than Agnes's journal which I posted years ago.

The emails come to a dead halt just before Christmas. What happens afterwards is anybody's guess. As a bonus, you also get to hear Ana's answering machine tape.

Feel free to put your workload aside, and waste some of your employer's time by reading this moving, heartfelt, and humorous love story.

CLICK HERE TO READ!

Shannon's Stay at the Aspen Achievement Academy

Before I dive into this entry... Remember how I said I was making another appearance on Amateur hour? Well, you can listen to it here! I played some stuff that hasn't been covered yet, so it's well worth a listen.

And now, let's move on...

Sometimes I come across the most bizarre shit. This is one of those things that just makes me laugh and shake my head.

These are letters that belonged to a woman named Shannon. She received them from friends she made while staying at the Aspen Achievement Academy. So what is the Aspen Achievement Academy? Well, here's a snippet from Wikipedia:

Aspen Achievement Academy enrolled adolescent males and females, ages 13-17, with a history of moderate to severe emotional and behavioral problems, such as low self-esteem, academic underachievement, substance abuse, and family conflict. The program had a flexible length of stay, with a minimum of 35 days. Some parents use the services of a teen escort company to transport their children to the site.

Isn't that FUN?

So for your reading enjoyment, I'm posting scans of the letters Shannon received.

From Erin:


From Kelsey:


From Molly:


From Rachel:


From Lena:



...and a hand-drawn picture of Jim Morrison!

I really wish I could blog 24/7. There's so much stuff sitting here that I'm just dying to share with all of you! Alas, you'll have to wait until I have time.

Album Review: Ben Century - Unwanted

There's one major difference between this album and every other album I've reviewed on Classical Gas Emissions.... I made this one! Well, I sorta made this one too, but "Unwanted" is a more serious attempt at musicianship than that other piece of junk which is a compilation of songs I recorded as a kid.

Speaking of which, it's been a dream of mine to record and release an album since I was about 7 years old. This was my first attempt:



It sold a total of one copy! In those days, I didn't have a dual tape deck so I just played and sang the songs every time I wanted to make a copy. I even spliced the cassette myself to eliminate all the dead space! Each song is about 30 seconds long, and there's even a couple of instrumentals!

So what was the main motivation for finally recording and releasing my own album? It was actually the last band I was in. This band constantly teedered and toddered between the names "Apathy" and "Tone Deaf". We actually recorded an "album", but I was at the mercy of the guitar player who wanted to remain in control. To him, I was just a mere vocalist and occasional lyricist. My attempts to have more input on the songs and mixing of the album were turned down like a blister-covered hooker. Because of my lack of input, we ended up with classic songs such as "Fred The Mouse" and the entire album was mixed in mono.

I had more input in my previous band Proper Motion - who's name came from us making fun of the drummer, and a fictitious story of him sitting in the corner masturbating. I wrote a good half of the songs, most of the lyrics, and had some input from the other members to fine-craft our songs into the excellent compositions they were. I still enjoy those songs today, and I'm quite proud of the accomplishments we had as a band.

Anyway, let's get back to the Apathy/Tone Deaf story. The drummer and myself were frustrated with the guitar player and bass player (who were brothers) because they didn't want to go out and play live. Instead, they preferred to sit in the basement and record more albums in mono. The drummer and I came to a point where we'd had enough of the bullshit and quit the band. I still get negative feelings when I listen to those recordings, and I think I actually hate the majority of the songs.

From the day I quit that band, I decided I'd had enough of dealing with shithead band members, their stupid songs, and their shitty mixing jobs. I decided I wanted to record an album all by myself. I started in 2004 and finished last weekend. Yes, it took ten years, although there was a 4 year break in there to focus on raising my son (because his dumbass mother couldn't be bothered). I wrote all the songs, played all the instruments, and sang all the vocals (with two minor exceptions).

So, do I have songs called "Fred the Mouse" that are recorded in mono? HELL NO. I've seen enough bad examples of what NOT to do which I've posted on this blog over the last 7 years. I was able to figure out how to do things BETTER. So the album sounds good, and the songs aren't stupid. One of the songs was written when I was 18 years old. You can tell which one it is because of the dated lyric "I was sitting alone, waiting by the phone". Nobody waits by their phones anymore because we have this new technology called CELL PHONES!!! Just put it into your pocket and wait for it to vibrate pleasure into your pelvis.

Some of you may be saying, "HEY! That album cover looks familiar!" Yes it does, because I originally posted it here. I stole from my own blog! Not only did I steal the cover from my own blog, the liner notes read like one of my blog entries! I should probably sue myself into the depths of my own rectum!



Just look at that fucking craftsmanship!

You can listen to a generous sampling of it here!

It's supposed to be popping up on Amazon any day, and I'll be putting the links up when it does. Until then, you can order a copy directly from createspace. Besides, if you order from createspace, I get more royalty.

Buy it from createspace! Buy it now! You'll love it!

As for touring, I'm not doing it because I don't have the means to. I have a son to raise, but I get a few days off here and there, so I may go out and play a bit for publicity. Even if I don't sell 500 copies, it's an accomplishment that I've dreamed about for decades, and I finally did it. It's a great sense of accomplishment for me, and I'm glad I followed through on it even though it took so long.

In other news, I'll be once again appearing on Kent Davies' Amateur Hour On September 24th. So all you Winnipeggers be sure to tune in to 95.9 FM at 5:00 PM. And for those who don't live in Winnipeg, you'll just have to wait for the podcast version. Poor you.

New Album: Polished Turds

When you throw away your computer, you should probably format the hard drive first. If you don't, your contents are likely to end up on Classical Gas Emissions, and that's exactly what's happening in this entry.

First, I must tell you that in the 7 years I've been writing this blog, I've never had more fun putting together an entry than I did with this one. Every bit of putting this content together was fun and enjoyable!

So what did I find?



This computer belonged to a guy named Kellen Guilbault, who I may add is a fantastic guitar player. Kellen recorded a whole bunch of songs, many of them being classic rock covers. These were all multitrack recordings that were made with a piece of software called Cubase.



I initially found a handful of poorly mixed songs that were in various stages of completeness. After the excitement of finding these, I dug around in the .wav files sitting in the software's default recording folder and found more hidden gems, totalling over 80 minutes of "music".

Now although Kellen is a damn good guitar player, that's pretty much all that's enjoyable about these recordings with a few exceptions. The timing is off, many of the tracks were recorded with a cheap microphone, and Kellen isn't a very good singer. For a couple of songs, he sought out the aid of a female singer (name unknown) who does a better job. I also believe that Kellen's brother Marc is the one playing the drums.

After gathering up the songs, I transferred them to my own PC and put them into my preferred choice of multitrack software: Multitrack Studio. I remixed them and put some much-needed effects on the tracks. I could have fixed many of them with extensive editing, but editing is tedious and I would have to send Kellen a bill for my time (I found his address on his resume). Plus, the songs are extremely entertaining in their original sloppy, out-of-sync form.

We've got a bunch of Led Zeppelin covers, a couple of Stones and Beatles songs, and a handfull of other well-known classic rockers. There's also a few of Kellen's originals in this collection. The quality of the songs is all over the place, ranging from excellent to down-right-fucking-awful.

The best ones here are Kellen's "Song Zero", Neil Young's "The Needle and the Damage Done" and The Rolling Stones' "Gimme Shelter" which lacked vocal tracks, so I sang them all and mixed them in. This is the only song I did editing on, since there was a bar missing which rendered the song useless for recording the second verse of vocals.

The worst ones are "You Shook Me All Night Long" and "House of the Rising Sun". They're absolutely atrocious renditions.

Since I did such a fantastic job remixing these songs, I Christened the collection with the name "Polished Turds" and made a nice album cover using a couple of photos I found on the hard drive.



Here's some options for your enjoyment:

Download the entire collection! (You WON'T be sorry)
Listen to "While My Guitar Gently Weeps"
Listen to "The Wind Cries Mary"

If you're wanting to know how much I improved the sound, feel free to hear the original mix of "While My Guitar Gently Weeps".

And that's pretty much it!

On September 24th, I'll be making another appearance on Amateur Hour. In the next couple of weeks, I'm also planning on releasing the album I recorded, so there's lots of exciting things coming up! Stay tuned...

New Artists: August 2014

I have a new feature on this site... New Artists! I've signed up with a website who distributes new artists to websites and blogs for review. In other words, all the audio digitizing, MP3 tagging and artwork scanning is all done by the artist. All I have to do is listen to it and figure out if I want to review it. Easy!

These poor guys don't know what hit them. This isn't Rolling Stone magazine, it's Classical Gas Emissions. All my loyal readers know what's coming, so I should probably quit typing all this intro crap and get to the artists who are desperately waiting for me to feature their content...


Phil Beatty - The Day of the Lord's Return



We all knew this was coming. It was inevitable that I would be featuring a Christian artist with my new-found source of blogging badness.

The band plays perfectly fine. Phil sounds perfectly fine. The backup singers sound extremely sexy. But the lyrics and the production are EXTREMELY CORNY.

I'm bringing you the song "America Needs To Pray". Why does America need to pray? Because fuck all those other countries. They don't need God's help. America does! We don't worship Buddha, Allah, Zeus, or any of those other bullshit Gods. We worship Christ, because he's the only one that matters, right? RIGHT! So America rules, and everybody else drools.

Listen to American Needs To Pray


Vangueety



Vangueety apparently has degrees in music performance and music production. Perhaps I'm fucking retarded and deaf, but I'm just not hearing any professionalism in the recording. Vangueety is also visually impared which proves my point for the umpteenth time... Just because you have a disability, it doesn't mean you're a talented musician.

The album cover (if that actually is an album cover) shows Vangueety holding an electric guitar. The only thing I heard that even REMOTELY resembles a guitar in his music is a Sitar. Now, I may not have a professional degree in music like Vangueety does, but the last time I played my electric guitar, it didn't sound like it came from India. But you need to remember, this opinion is coming from an UNEDUCATED musician. My guitar might actually sound like a Sitar, but I may be just too stupid to realize it.

So please feel free to enjoy the music of a REAL musician!

Listen to How


Ahmed El-Motassem - This Song May Be Monitored For Your Protection



Well, I monitored the song, and I've decided to ignore protection. You guys are gonna suffer along with me on this one.

According to the press release,

"Fans of Lou Reed, Kate Bush, Tom Waits, Patti Smith, Leonard Cohen ... are likely to find something to love about this record."

I enjoy all those artists just fine, but this record sucks. Perhaps if you play the songs "Lisa Says", "Wuthering Heights", "Hang On St. Christopher", "Because The Night", and "Everybody Knows" all at the same time, you might get something that sounds almost as bad as this Ahmed record.

I could have plucked any of Ahmed's songs because they all sit on the same level of sub-par, but I got his permission to re-upload one of his music videos! Yay! The video is just as fucked up as the music, so I guess it works. The video stars Mickey Mouse. The video was also produced by Mickey Mouse.

Enjoy wasting the next 3 1/2 minutes of your life:



Well that was fun and easy! Be sure to watch for some more kick ass new releases coming your way soon from Classical Gas Emissions! Also, I'm currently working on plans for another appearance on Amateur Hour, so stay tuned for that!

Jerry's Sleger's One Man Band

I cannot believe I found THREE albums by this guy in the course of one month. It's like he exploded out of nowhere and took the thrift stores by storm! I'm not entirely sure if that's a good thing for one's music career, but they certainly caught my attention.

The music is the typical run-of-the-mill old-guy cover songs that I've seen on countless other self-made albums. And the music? Well... The tunes are certainly identifiable, but it all just sounds so bloody disjointed. Anyway, let's get to the albums...


Polka & Waltz Across The USA



Judging from the album cover, it appears that Jerry is not only talented at playing a ton of instruments at once, but his head is amazingly able to detach from his body and float into orbit! With his super magnification glasses, he is able to peer into sexy women's bedroom windows. Google Earth has NOTHING on Jerry!

For this album, Jerry travels the US and plays anthems belonging to many of the states. Well not literally, he probably avoided traveling and recorded them in some guy's basement. Since my background is Ukrainian, I'm cocainely addicted to a good polka or waltz. The sad thing is Ukraine does not belong to the USA, so there's pretty much nothing here that I recognize. I chose to feature the Pennsylvania Polka. It may be the cocaine talking, but I swear I hear SOMETHING in the background of this recording. I don't know if it's a baby in a blender or the usual demons found in polka recordings, but I'm pretty sure something odd made its way into the background.

Listen to Pennsylvania Polka


Variety Pack No. 1



The album cover shows us that Jerry owns way too many fucking keyboards. It's that, or he's got five hands to play them all. Given the fact that his head detaches and floats, the probablility of him having five or more hands doesn't seem to surprise me all that much.

Jerry covers the classics here, from "Green Green Grass of Home" to "Please Release Me". I was personally looking forward to his version of Welcome To The Jungle, but I guess there's only so much good stuff you can pack into the first volume.

Because I love Disney so damn much (LIE) I figured I'd include the amazing happy version of It's a Small World. If Disney could do one thing right in their lifetime, they could start using Jerry's version of the song on their amusement park ride.

Listen to It's a Small World


Plays 28 Songs



YES! 28 FUCKING SONGS! You don't even get that on a Green Day album anymore! Here, Jerry seems to void the name of his band and feature his wife on the cover. Well, maybe not. I mean, she's not a man so it's still a "one man band", but there's one woman too.

There's lots of polkas and waltzes on this one, but Jerry throws in some classics like "Been Working On The Railroad" and "When The Saints Come Marching In". I decided to go with a favorite Elvis song of mine for this one. The drum fills don't really work, and it's disjointed as hell, but it's an Elvis song... Well, I doubt Elvis actually wrote it, but he recorded a nice version.

Listen to Blue Moon to Gold

I ended up doing a Google search to see if Jerry has any more albums floating around out there (he does), and I found him on Youtube. There's a bit of an interview here and you get to see him play his pile of junk live! The fact that he hacked the shit out of an old accordian and made it do weird stuff totally earns my respect. Check it out:



There will probably be more Jerry albums featured here in the future, given the fact that it didn't take me long to find three of them. I can totally see him joining the ranks of Arnie, Teo Mance, and Kevin Harcourt, all who love to have their wonderful music featured on Classical Gas Emissions! Well, maybe except for Arnie. Arnie kicked the bucket a while back.

Slides 1968-1974

A while back, I came across a pile of cool junk that someone discarded. In the pile of junk was a couple of trays containing slides. I've gone through them and scanned the most interesting ones for your enjoyment!

The period of the slides ranges from 1968-1974. The styles of this period are always interesting to look at.



I believe this slide was a sample that came free when you bought a slide projector. The color of the picture was very red, since red is the last colour that disappears from deteriorating plastic film. Thanks to digital photo editing, I was able to restore the colour in this picture. I'm guessing it's from the mid-60s.

Now I'm going to shut up and let you look at some pictures. Some of them may be backwards.

Records To Play on Canada Day!

Since Canada Day is July 1st, I decided to pick through my blog queue and find some records to represent our Country! Yes, it was a doomed venture from the beginning because it seems that every song representing Canada seems to be sub-par (and that includes our national anthem). We just can't seem to write cool songs about our homeland which is quite evident in two of the four records I'm featuring here.

So won't you join me as we step into the home and native land of shitty patriotic songs, boring Canadian history, and airport music.


The Mennonite Children's Choir - They All Call It Canada



I'm glad this is not our national anthem. It's too long and I can't understand half the words, mainly because the children singing on here were taught to over-exaggerate their Canadian accents. Hooray for CannyDaah!

It's still a shitty song, so I'll forgive you for skipping over it.

Listen to They All Call It Canada


Sounds of Canada



Canadian history is boring as fuck, and this record helps drive that point home. Fortunately for us, this isn't just a record documenting Canadian history. It's a record of Canadian sound effects and audio clips.

Although I haven't been to our city's library in decades, the tapes, records and videos I've come across that previously belonged to the library are lame, stupid, or just flat out dumpster food. I'm not sure what the purpose of this record was. Perhaps you were supposed to buy it, mail it to someone in a different country, and they would excitedly opened the envelope to discover a totally destroyed 7" record because the postal system likes to smash the piss out of the mail before it arrives to its destination.

I've joined side one and two into a single 17 minute MP3 file. It's kinda stale, but if you want to know what Canadian atmosphere sounds like, this may help deter you from visiting us.

Listen to Sounds of Canada


T.B.A. - Summer In Canada



If you can't figure out what to name your band, just stamp it with "T.B.A." Seriously, how can Doug Riley write and compose a completely useless song, and then avoid coming up with a band name? The poor singers will never get the recognition they deserve. What a way to ruin a legacy. I'm also pretty sure I have a cassette of Doug Riley somewhere in my massive, overflowing box of bloggable cassettes, but I cannot seem to find it at this very moment.

I don't think this song was meant to be an enjoyable patriotic song. It sounds more like a radio station bumper to fill dead space while the disc jockey (who's a total slacker at his job) queued up the next record. So for all you slackers in the Canadian broadcasting field, feel free to use this song to stab summery joy into the ears of your listeners!

Listen to Summer In Canada



Flight Time - An Air Canada Introduction to Boarding Music



In the few times I've flown, I've NEVER paid attention to the fact that there's music playing while I'm getting on the plane. Nevertheless, this is a fun sampler of music that was playing in Canadian airports in 1979. You're not going to find any Led Zeppelin, Black Sabbath, or Deep Purple here. Satanic bands like those are NOT allowed on the airport speakers. Instead, we have a selection of (mostly) soft 70s pop music that will ensure you remain calm while airport security rapes and cavity searches you for guns, knives, cocaine, and cigarette lighters.

This is basically elevator music performed by a bunch of unknowns. Here are some of the songs I was able to pick out while listening to this record (with a few being heavily disco-fied)...

Day Tripper
Ben
Theme from a Summer Place
Music Box Dancer (the actual Frank Mills version)
Tie A Yellow Ribbon Round The Old Oak Tree
Raindrops Keep Falling On My Head
Seasons In The Sun
The Entertainer
Nadia's Theme
I Just Can't Help Believing
Georgy Girl
Nobody Does It Better
Suicide Is Painless

Personally, I would probably be more nervous during my flight after hearing the Theme from MASH while boarding the plane. The fear-induced scars of wondering "IS THIS PLANE GOING TO GET SHOT DOWN" would pave the way for a lifetime of intense therapy.

Both sides have different music, and side two has the commentary in French.

Listen to Side 1
Listen to Side 2

And that's it! I hope you have a spectacular Canada Day, regardless of what country you live in.