I had a slow week musically. I bought a new big-screen smart television and found myself wasting more time than I should have in front of the idiot box. I also had a few household tasks that ticked off a few hours. Anyhew, no excuses, I have a short list this week. Short in quantity but still bursting with quality.

https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2021/winter/tv-brain-study/

Todd Rundgren Initiation

Todd Rundgren The Hermit of Mink Hollow

Todd Rundgren Back To The Bars

Harry Rusk Canadian Country Hits

UB40 Labour of Love

Let’s start with Todd Rundgren, shall we? I have four of his albums, two of which are double albums, so I had a total of six albums to listen to. That came out as 4.38 hours of Todd. I had listened to Something Anything last week, so that shaved off 44 minutes, but it was still over four hours of Todd Rundgren in one sitting.

I have only had one occasion where I overdosed on a band, that was The Talking Heads, and that was years ago. Since then, I have plowed through many multi-album artists with no hangover. Until I hit Todd Rundgren, I really liked his music. Something Anything is a fantastic album, and the rest come just behind it. The Hermit of Mink Hollow has lots of ear candy, and it spawned several single hits, including “Can We Still Be Friends,” which should be making Todd barrels full of money because it has been covered by numerous people and created hits for a few of them.

Back to the Bars is a two-slab live album which reprised a significant number of songs from his early albums, so I had already listened to many of the tracks. I’m glad that I made it out without hating the music of Todd Rundgren, I just have to limit myself to one album at a time.

The Quality of Mercury is a new band to me, courtesy of Shameless Promotion PR; thank you, Shauna. I like them. The first listen to their new single, ‘Ganymede,’ was very good, so I listened to the album again with the lyrics in front of me and liked it just as much. They do not conform to the top ten recipes of three-minute songs about finding love, being in love, or losing a lover. They do sing about love, but it is so obtuse that you may not even notice that it was about love.

From the press release:

“Ganymede builds patiently and purposefully, taking us on a cinematic journey that reflects the album’s overarching themes of distance, discovery, and transformation. It’s a song about finding love and losing it, fulfilling Rouse’s core mission of exploring emotion and texture across vast sonic terrain.

“Ganymede is a love story told through the lens of science fiction. It follows two people who meet and fall for each other on a space station that’s orbiting in the golden atmosphere of Jupiter, a place full of warmth, wonder, and the thrill of possibility. He’s cautious. She’s fearless. And he follows her, chasing the gravity of her spirit,” says Jeremiah Rouse. 

“But when she persuades him to explore Ganymede, a cold, sterile moon, the warmth between them starts to fade. The relationship fractures in the isolation and cold environment, and eventually, she walks away, leaving him alone at the edge of an airlock. This song is about how love can start bright and beautiful, but lose itself in unfamiliar terrain. I want listeners to feel like they’re watching a film unfold in slow motion and to feel the quiet heartbreak of trying to hold on to someone who’s already gone.”

Handling not only writing and performing, but also engineering, this music is a reflection of Rouse’s sonic DNA. Influenced by iconic bands such as Hum, Failure, Starflyer 59, and Sunny Day Real Estate, The Quality of Mercury crafts music that is anthemic yet accessible, cinematic yet catchy—the perfect blend of muscle and melody.

Rouse’s recorded works serve as a bridge to his audience —a suitably distant medium, given his songs about receiving transmissions emanating from the other side of the universe and epic, intergalactic voyages. For all its otherworldly sound and association with the vastness of outer space, the intensity and intellect, depth and profound insight of this music is also a journey into the artist’s own inner space.

For Rouse, music isn’t just sound. It’s a vast, immersive world. Each track is built as a sonic landscape, grand in scope yet meticulously detailed. The goal is simple but ambitious: to create music that reveals something new with every listen. Tiny flourishes, subtle swells, and sound elements crossing the stereo field are placed with obsessive precision, often blooming unexpectedly or popping out at just the right moment. Every detail matters, perhaps to a fault, but that’s part of the craft.

With a background in film production and a lifelong love of sci-fi cinema,  Jeremiah approaches songwriting with a distinctly visual mindset. Every song is imagined like a scene from a movie — framed, lit, and paced as though it were a short film. That cinematic sensibility, combined with a meticulous approach to sound design, results in music that’s as emotionally resonant as it is sonically rich.”

Back to Norman: Combining sc-fi and hi-fi lights up the space around me with great music. I’m eagerly anticipating the release of the entire album on October 24. I quite imagine it sounding even better on a full-on hi-fi, please tell me it comes out on vinyl, or CD, or even cassette.

‘Heaven’s Gate’  https://thequalityofmercury.bandcamp.com/track/heavens-gate

Spotify  https://open.spotify.com/artist/727hN46NfBt32nJJMeDo2N

YouTube  https://youtu.be/pusaFvxHyes

‘The Voyager’ album https://thequalityofmercury.bandcamp.com/album/the-voyager

‘Ganymede’  https://thequalityofmercury.bandcamp.com/track/ganymede

Spotify  https://open.spotify.com/track/7wNn8ZS3FihGCPH8sNW18n

Apple Music  https://music.apple.com/us/album/ganymede-single/1833980836

YouTube   https://youtu.be/POUek4JKClQ

‘Transmission’ LP (2017)  https://thequalityofmercury.bandcamp.com/album/transmission

Harry Rusk Canadian Country Hits

Harry Rusk gives us our weekly dose of Canadian content with his album of Canadian Country Hits. This is an enjoyable album; it won’t top my list of favourite albums, but it is still fun to listen to. While most of these songs are relatively obscure, they are hits for Harry Rusk fans; it is still good-quality music. If you like old-time country music, you will likely enjoy this album.

The Joe UT OH

Speaking of obscure, we have The Joe. Good luck finding a hard copy of the album. UT OH is not going to knock fellow Canadian rapper Justin Bieber off the charts, but UT OH has its own charm. It wanders all over hell’s half-acre, which gave me a challenge to try to coalesce any meaning or overarching theme to this recording. So, I am listening to UT OH again, and I still don’t know for sure, but I think it is the rant of a confused young man who doesn’t know what to believe. His faith is a jumble, his life is chaotic, and he can’t find a place that is safe to call home. Home, both literal, metaphorical and figurative. In fact, one of the tracks is “It’s A Jungle Out There.” I don’t know, I just like it. The Joe is something new to me and has introduced me to some rap that I don’t hate, unlike mainstream rap, which is often marred by hate, lust, and lies.

UB40 Labour of Love

I listened to UB40 back in the 1980s, but then the 1990s came along, and they disappeared from my radar – my bad, not theirs. Now, we are in the 2020s, and I am enjoying UB40 again. Labour of Love is reggae/pop, not hardcore reggae. If you are looking for authentic Jamaican reggae, stop reading right here.

If you are OK with reggae/pop and playing loose with the downbeats, you will likely enjoy Labour of Love. It is not a bad album; in fact, I enjoyed it as a reggae/pop album. Labour of Love is an album of cover versions. Released in the UK on September 12, 1983, the album is best known for containing the song “Red Red Wine”, a worldwide number-one single, but it also includes three further UK top 20 hits, “Please Don’t Make Me Cry”, “Many Rivers to Cross” and “Cherry Oh Baby”. The album reached number one in the UK, New Zealand and the Netherlands and the top five in Canada.

Done. That is another week of music. Although it may not have been a particularly big week in terms of the number of albums listened to, it was still a good music week. I am at the end of the letter “S” and look forward to starting the letter “T” soon. Have fun listening to whatever music makes you happy, I do.