Woke Myself Up by Julie Doiron

I first heard about Julie Doiron as a featured musican on an album by one of my favorite bands, The Tragically Hip. I liked her and thought I would like to hear more from her, so just to give her a try, I picked up her latest album, "Woke Myself Up". And though I can't say this is my favorite album, I can tell you that it is infact, a good listen and something that in time does grow on you. I'm not sure if its Julie's bubblegum like delivery over well played "chick with guitar" style backings, or that she seems to be having fun wile doing her songs, or that she seems to write songs that seem realistic and down to earth and fuse them with a great many styles. I will say though, before I get into this, my only real complaint is that the album seems to have many short songs and the album itself suffers of short disc syndrome because of this. (Short disc syndrome is a term I coined for an album thats under 40 or so minutes total and is said to be a "full album")

Julie does blend styles well, each of her songs is done in a different genre all driven by a masterfully played guitar base. She crosses genres from bubblegum pop to blues, to rock, to a 1800s style traveling gypsy fire side dance anthem, to an accoustic adult contemperary song, to just about everywhere else one can go with a guitar. She really does a good job mixing all of these as she does and not sticking to any one genre for more then a song or sometimes two. "I left town" also has her cats meowing in the background at some points like an odd yet lovely idea for a chorus. Truely well done.

"No More" is actually about as close to "radio friendly pop" this album gets though, I will admit this, but then again, we're not really about radio friendly or mainstream around here, so that makes it ok. The track itself is great though, its got a beat that will keep the people that just have it on for background sound from getting bored with it, and the harmonics and lyrics will keep everyone else going as well. "Don't Wanna Be Liked By You" is second for radio friendliness, which I think is kind of why I think they were placed back to back, the beat sounds like a mix of "secret agent man" and "walking on the sun", very infectious and very easy to drive over the speed limit too.

The other tracks on the disc are just this great audio journey though the world of guitar based canadian infused music. As I said earlyer though, the only downside really is that its short, the songs average about 3 minutes or so, and there aren't very many of them, only about 10 or so, but still, by no means does this make the album suffer as a whole. I enjoyed it and intend to attain the rest of her collection whenever I can see possable to do so. I highly recommend this disc.


Artist: Julie Doiron
Album: Woke Myself Up
Genre: Slowcore, Indie Rock, Indie Pop, Singer/Songwriter, Female Vocalist

Woke Myself Up by Julie Doiron

By: BC