Disavow your Vow Smash Your Sacred Cow---Art Bergmann-What Fresh Hell is This---It's Boxing Day in Canada!

I wanted to do a Canadian Post for Boxing Day, originally I was going to do a long overdue post on the Dishrags. But you know what? I realized that I've amassed 6 Art Bergmann albums without having a post on him yet. Well, I haven't listened to them all either.

So I've changed my mind. Sorry Dishrags--but your time will come. Jade Blade has got to be one of the best punk names ever.......

So I'm listening to a pretty great but extremely dark album from Art Bergmann, one of the most original and talented Canadian musicians you could listen to. The album is What Fresh Hell is This?, and it won the 1996 Juno Award for Best Canadian Alternative Album. But how many people have heard this one South of their border?

Create a Monster and Eat it Too......

Bergmann is probably best known for leading the K-Tels and Young Canadians from the early Punk days of Vancouver. You can see him in the documentary Bloodied Not Unbowed, one of the best made scene documentaries around. The Young Canadians/K-Tels compilation on Sudden Death Records is mandatory punk listening. Back in those early days he was probably the musician that people thought would break out. Well, sadly that did not come to pass. But let's get back to Hell.

But its pretty amazing that an album with such self-confessional desperate jaded gritty vitriolic poetry could get such mainstream acclaim. I couldn't really imagine an album like this winning a Grammy. Musically the album is a fairly melodic rock album (he's a pretty great guitarist), but the listening to the subject matter sort of like pulling off  a scab to reveal a whole other world that I'm fortunate not to have lived. Harrowing songs, right on the edge of things, kind of like Lou Reed. But its Art Bergmann and he is in his own Hell, not anyone else's. This music is just too personal, edgy, like Curt Cobain's---this is not about simply being an entertainer, it's breaking down the boundaries between generalities and the personal. I feel like I know too much now, like a voyeur.

Just from the outset, with the song Beatles in Hollywood, he sings about the contrast between idealism, innocence and the music business and its corruptibility, but it seems to be equally about fighting demons. But whatever it means, it is a seriously miserable place to be in.

The songs on Fresh Hell have titles like Demolished, Buried Alive, Some Fresh Hell, Dive. It gives you some idea of the subject matter. The song Contract is probably one of the more vicious songs about the music industry you could hear. "I dig my own grave for you, be a slave for you", he sings.



Guns and Heroin is an epic sounding ballad on the album, replete with cello by Anne Bourne.
What a powerful song this is!



Art Bergmann is an artist well worth getting acquainted with, and What Fresh Hell is This? is probably a good place to start. But most of his albums are available at reasonable prices, with the exception of Vultura Freeway. The Lost Art Bergmann  came out in 2009, but that seems pretty impossible to get today.

He's been playing shows again recently, the reviews so far seem to be mixed, but hopefully better times are coming for him. One listen to What Fresh Hell is This? and you'll wonder why you didn't hear about this album 10 years ago!