Photo © André Bergeron

On Sunday I wrote about French & Saunders, a great comedy team that’s phenomenally popular in the UK but relatively unknown in the US. Today I want to talk about a guy and his band that are equally popular in Canada and equally unknown down here. Sam Roberts has scored multiple number-one songs and albums in Canada, had his very first single nominated for a Juno,1 and has won six since then. He’s released four albums since 2003, but you won’t find anyone in America who knows him outside of the well-quinoaed cult of Adult Album Alternative radio listeners.

Even Pitchforkians are largely unfamiliar with Sam, possibly because his music tracks a few rarely traveled paths. For one, It’s very high quality, but without any distinctive innovation; listening to it is like eating a perfectly made pizza. For another, it’s rock and roll of a type that’s particularly out of fashion, because it’s really just plain ol’ really good rock and roll. So much so that it’s hard to put a name on it. It’s not indie rock, or roots rock, or folk rock, or horrible modern rock, and certainly not punk rock. It’s just melodic, guitar-forward, five-piece rock and roll, played without conceit, gimmick, or nostalgia.

The latter is part of the reason I like Sam and his band so much. They root their music in a classic sound, but they don’t obviously imitate anyone who came before them. That’s admirable in time when even our best rock groups too often veer into sounding like AC lightning bolt DC, Bad Company, or the E Street Band. Sam Roberts’ music sounds familiar but without the feel of an arrow shot clean through a bullseye. And he’s certainly not putting together a sentimental pastiche, either intentionally2 or unintentionally.3

Sam and his band, when going at it full steam, put together a beautiful harmonic crash that makes you instinctively get out of your chair and air-something. For just some vital, charging rock and roll, listen to Chemical City’s opener “The Gate” or the three-minute bashing coda of “Mind Flood.” I’m a sucker for — more than almost anything else in the world — great guitar rock, and those songs flow straight to my nucleus accumbens. To me they seem impossible to dislike for anyone who’s ever “danced to rock and roll,” a dying breed that Sam writes a eulogy for in “Them Kids.”

But the first adjective I used to describe Roberts’ music was “melodic,” and that’s the real reason I love it. Sam’s as good a melodist as anyone working in rock music, and he bases his songs in melody, not hooks. He also consistently finds ways to develop and twist his melodies throughout the course of a song so that they never become predictable. He reaches levels of complexity not usually heard in this kind of music. “Lions of the Kalahari” from Love at the End of the World rolls forth like the sun coming out from behind a cloud.

So I’ve put together a Spotify playlist of 10 of Sam Roberts’ best songs, which you can listen to all free and legally. Here’s the lineup, with a few annotations:

1. “The Gate” – Chemical City4
2. “Without a Map” – Collider5
3. “Lions of the Kalahari” – Love at the End of the World
4. “Hard Road” – We Were Born in a Flame
5. “Them Kids”- Love at the End of the World
6. “Brother Down” - We Were Born in a Flame
7. “The Band vs. The World” - Collider
8. “Bridge to Nowhere” - Chemical City
9. “Detroit ’67″ - Love at the End of the World6
10. “Mind Flood” - Chemical City

Get It
All of Sam Roberts’ albums are available for free on Spotify, for sale on iTunes, and in petroleum versions on Amazon. My favorite is Love at the End of the World, for my money the most consistently successful of the four. Sam and the band recorded an excellent Daytrotter session in 2009 that includes three of the best tracks from Love, at least one of which is better than the album version. You can listen to it and (I think) download it for free, and it comes with a nice cover of “Hurry on Sundown” by the ’70s space-rock band Hawkwind.

1. The Canadian equivalent of a Grammy. [↩]
2. Like The Darkness. [↩]
3. Like Interpol. [↩]
4. This for me is the band’s best song. I also find its video strangely exhilarating. [↩]
5. From the band’s most recent album, the first released under the name “Sam Roberts Band.” [↩]
6. If it were available on Spotify, I’d replace the album version of this song with a superior live-in-studio performance recorded for Daytrotter. [↩]