As I try to catch up on Winnipeg’s never-ending production of music, and I may miss an album here and there for I am merely just a man who listens to music and writes about that music and goes to concerts and shows every so often and cannot be expected to keep exact track of every release, and there are many releases, despite logging upcoming releases in an extensive Excel spreadsheet so that I can forget to remember each – some do get missed, especially the releases that have no songs available to listen to but say that the album will come out in eight or nine months, in which case an Excel spreadsheet is of little help, because even then the band and album get buried in a slew of rows and columns and pivot tables; but I do try to go back to those I’ve missed and fill in the blanks, and often I’m glad I do.
Case in point: Thaddeus and the Sherbrook Sluts, the fictional band as described in Colour By Numbers’ Thaddeus Vol. 1, the first of three such volumes.
Thaddeus, the protagonist, and who is named after Jude Thaddeus, the brother of Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour, is seemingly dropped into the ratty center of Winnipeg as if he were a falling star. He is easily irritable. Peevish even. And he wanders around Higgins and Disraeli looking for a bar. (I know of no bars in that area, and so this lends to my theory that Thaddeus is a recent Winnipeg immigrant. Perhaps he comes from Ontario.) There are many reasons for Thaddeus’s prickliness:
1) His band sucks (his words, not mine; they don’t, in fact, suck, but Thaddeus criticizes them for always getting high at band practice, which is itself curious because he does so while smoking a joint himself) – a quote from Thaddeus’s brother comes to mind: Why do you focus on the sliver in the eye of others and not the plank in your own;
2) He caught his girlfriend, Ashley, perhaps one of the “Sherbrook sluts”, making out, and maybe even more than that, with some smooth-talking, muscle-heavy big-dicked jock while on vacation in the Dominican Republic, and understandably this would put some strain on their relationship, which sounds like it was already quite strained in the first place;
) He doesn’t have a job, or, at least, there is no mention of a job asides from the slim share of door money from the Sherbrook Sluts gigs;
4) He’s met someone, Shyanne.
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To read the rest of this review — and more by Steve Schmolaris — visit his website Bad Gardening Advice.
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Steve Schmolaris is the founder of the Schmolaris Prize, “the most prestigious prize in all of Manitoba,” which he first awarded in 1977. Each year, he awards the prize to the best album of the year. He does not have a profession but, having come from money (his father, “the Millionaire of East Schmelkirk,” left him his fortune when he died in 1977), Steve is a patron of the arts. Inspired by the exquisite detail of a holotype, the collective intelligence of slime mold, the natural world and the suffering inherent within it — and also music (fuck, he loves music!) — Steve has long been writing reviews of Winnipeg artists’ songs and albums at his website Bad Gardening Advice, leading to the publication of a book of the same name.
