Unknown Artist - "Itaula Bava Yami"

That is Amami. Amami is a grown child, she does not like to work. It is not that she does not like to work, but that she has so much fun all the time, she is always singing and hooting, it often seems that she is not working, even if she is working very hard. Some of the other women, and some of the men, are put off by her sunshine. She will hoot, a hoot like you have never heard, and laugh, as soon as she wakes up in the morning. She does not care who is sleeping next to her, or who else close by is still sleeping and needs to sleep, she will hoot like "Deeee! Dee Deeeee!" Some people think she is crazy. I am tempted too sometimes to think she is crazy. But when she picked me to dance with that night, when she spun me around in the sand that one night on the beach, I admit I fell in love with her a bit. Her bright orange smile and her strong rough hands, her large and unshakeable frame, her movement, her slide and her sway. I think about her often. But my brother told me, "she is married to herself, do not think about it." That is hard to do when every day I roll over in the morning and half-open my eyes and wait to hear that golden hoot. [Buy]

White Denim - "Mirrored and Reverse"

Only the reflection spoke, ".seY"

[Buy from Full Time Hobby in the UK]

Faux Hoax - "Your Friends Will Carry You Home". Pastiche means many things. Okay so Faux Hoax's "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" sounds like a pastiche of the music of BARR. And Faux Hoax are themselves literally a pastiche - pasting together members of Gang of Four (Dave Allen), Menomena (Danny Seim), Tracker (John Askew) and in this case vocalist Adam Gnade. But life is a pastiche, an aggregation of moments, most of them arbitrary, disconnected. "You will get drunk / and you will get sad / and they will sit with you on grey curbs under yellow streetlights / and they'll let you talk / your friends will carry you home / your friends will sleep with you once and you'll think of it often." Nothing inherent connects the getting-drunk and the thinking-of-him-often - it's only in the throughline of consciousness, will, reflection, story (or of songwriting). "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" offers life as pastiche, yes, but also collage, bricolage, a loose and ragged line of drums. [MySpace/buy]

Slaraffenland - "Away". Forget "Meet and Greet", the lead leaky MP3 from Slaraffenland's upcoming We're On Your Side; it's this track, released on a Hometapes sampler, that makes the best case for pre-orders, for love-letters, for sending Slaraffenland postcards reading WHO ARE YOU?. Burnished, melancholy, optimistic and forsaken; like a roll of film running back and forth behind a projector's lens. Handclaps, clarinet, horns, drums, piano, noise - without the National's self-sabotraging ennui, without Broken Social Scene's grassy haze. Slaraffenland make that perfect music for when summer disappears, vanishing under a string of black clouds. [website/buy other releases]

---

The winner of our Royal City contest was... Billy. Go to the entry to read the winning submissions and the very capable runners-up. Billy, we'll be in touch.

[credit: Bruce Davidson]

Dead Elephant Bicycle - "I Will Always Be"

The candles of my feet ache and singe the sore trunks of my legs. The path of my day glows like a translucent yellow band that I only need to follow. I can see it head first to the sink, I must need a glass of water. Then to the bathroom, must be a shower. Then back to the room, get dressed obviously, then out the door and down the front stairs. Mostly normal stuff the path leads to; post office, bank, pharmacy (right, I need paper towels). All day I follow perfectly the path, I can turn off my mind, I can think about other things, what a pleasure this path is, what a convenient turn of fortune. Until I find myself biking very far from my house, way to the north and very unfamiliar surroundings. My legs, now blackened with acid aches, bike on, following only the path. Maybe I need to meet someone way up here, or maybe I'm going to get my passport renewed, or maybe I'm supposed to take pictures in an industrial neighbourhood. And then the path twists under and up the other side of an underpass, and heads straight onto the highway. I pause. I don't have a car, and the path just stretches on as far as I can see, amongst the whizzing traffic of the highway. I follow the path. At the time I wondered why I was doing it. Now I know: I had no other objectives left. Nothing more important to do.

Dead Elephant Bicycle - "Drunken Child"

I followed the path for 8 days. After the first day on my bike, I realized I should be hitchhiking. It was amazing and poetic that even the people that were driving me would follow the path, every lane change, every pit stop, every drop off point, they followed it perfectly. Though I was afraid to actually mention it to them. I thought I would only say something if they deviated, but none of them did. One night I could see a strange pattern in the path in the distance, and as we approached it and slowed down, I realized that would be me having sex. I was more embarrassed that the path was 'watching' me have sex, I didn't enjoy it. The next day, she drove me into town, and it was sunny and hot and we got ice cream and walked on the dirt road. Then the path lead to a man selling glasses, and I tried on a pair of yellow tinted lenses. And everything looked yellow I couldn't tell the path from anything else. It disappeared. It felt terrible, horrible, and also totally liberating, like having your legs cut off and replaced with a pair of wings. I spent an hour or so debating the choice, I told the girl I was with all about it and she laughed and said the choice was obvious. I don't wear the glasses anymore, obviously, but sometimes I wonder if I'll run across the path again, and whether I'd be drawn to it.

[MySpace]

(thank you again, Moss Bailey)

Michael Jackson - "Billie Jean (demo)".

I

After Michael Jackson died
the first thing he learned
was quiet.
His spirit slipped lightly from his body
It was as light as he had dreamed of being for
years
like diamonds, grass pollen,
the dust that sits on mirrored surfaces.

His spirit slipped like steam from a kettle's spout.
Briefly he thought of his grandmother,
and he wondered if he would see her soon,
now that he was dead,
now that his spirit was being lifted
lightly;
and as he saw the doctor from Las Vegas leaning over his body, pushing at his old bones, at his chest, at the muscles he had earned this spring under silver machines, he saw himself as beautiful; strange but beautiful; in sunglasses.
It was so quiet.
Like the desert
Like honeymoon mornings
He was lifted up out of the bedroom and the house, and he could not hear the chattering televisions nor Frank's pleading shouts, nor the water lapping at the 50-foot swimming pool. He could not hear the sounds he had heard for the past forty years: cars starting, flashbulbs, photographers' patent leather voices; clink and praise from men in expensive suits, sipping from straws.

At the rehearsals
the music had been so loud,
so loud!
like monsters roaring
and the dancers strutting, leering,
Michael so old and so heavy
raising his feet and putting them down
on the floor.
Now Michael was lifted away from the house and the city and he learned quiet.
He re-learned quiet.
A lesson he had forgotten.
He thought of the leaf he had watched once in the window at Neverland
he had watched it do nothing
but be.

II

After Michael Jackson died
the second thing he learned
was remorse.

At the moment his spirit was lifted
lightly
through the veil of cloud and atom
that separates Los Angeles
from other realms,
God came to Michael.
He came like a season.
Michael saw signs, tremblings, promises in wind
and then God was there
raining through him
hailing
sun
and so inconceivably large.
God touched the bottom of Michael Jackson's heart
the place where it shivers
and God showed Michael Jackson
everything he found there.
Every shadow pellet and lie and dark marble of sin,
and every half-sin,
broken promises, professional betrayals, deliberate acts of neglect,
that time with the glass ashtray
& in 1989 with the little knife
someone had left out
because although nothing really happened
something small had happened
and God saw.
God showed these things to Michael Jackson.
God showed even the worst things, the things no one understood, not the tabloids nor the courts, the sugary tarry seconds with boys whose names reminded Michael Jackson
of baloney sandwiches.
God slipped these mistakes from Michael Jackson's shivering spirit heart
& he turned them in the dark
so Michael Jackson would see.

Michael Jackson's mistakes flickered and gleamed.

And for an instant that lasted ten thousand years he felt the exactly sufficient amount of remorse
because God is a capable mathematician
when it comes to remorse.

III

After Michael Jackson died
the third thing he learned
was everything he had never known.
He passed through the purgatory of justice & regret & forgiveness and passed into somewhere else
where he donned a fedora
and a glitter glove
and the world was presented to him in balletic montages
images painted on velvet
messages painted in green June leaves.
Every truth and mystery revealed.
He had lain in bed at night, alone or with others, with friends, with people he loved or strained to love,
and laying stilly his heart had bucked and leapt
had dreamed of answers:
Why did he feel so alone?
Why still did he feel so alone?
Why still still did he feel so alone?
Stilly he dreamed of answers.

Now, behatted, beglitter gloved, all these answers came streaming in hungry undeniable technicolour veracity. Michael Jackson relinquished himself to them. He understood why he had felt so alone, still & still still felt so alone. He understood why his father had hated him. He understood Tito's gift, and Janet's loss, and his own greatest mistake. He understood his willowy love, why Lisa Marie had said the things she said in precisely the way she said them. He understood why he had seen his father's face in the mirror. Michael Jackson understood what had made him so special, for a handful of years in the history of human beings; understood the magic of the moonwalk, of a wild, free "Woo!"; of grabbing your crotch and dancing like a switchblade, a salmon, a moonbeam. He understood that "Billie Jean" was not a song about paternity but instead about bassline, thrust, a certain neon yearning. He understood the liberated
sing
of his childhood songs, the worlds concealed in his boyhood choruses, wants he found words for, even then, before he knew what such wants could be, before he knew the meaning of "darling!", back in the days where he still thought he would find this, find "darling!", before he had given up, turned instead to monkeys and children, to dandelion joys; he understood that lust lasts, that it does not go away just by drinking cold water and eating apricots and chewing tiny white pills; nor by sleeping; and he understood who killed JFK, what killed Elvis, understood finally the stuff those engineers had told him about the "Smooth Criminal" shoe patent, exactly the way the mechanism worked, not just how to use it but how it worked! so simple and so genius!; and Michael Jackson learned how if he had not been a singer and dancer he could have been an award-winning zoologist, would have in this other life worked at Northwestern University, and been happy, but still lost, a little lost, and he would have died in a car accident at age 46, four years ago, in this other life, and never have been married; but Michael Jackson learned as well that it was no use to think What If.

He learned that Uri Geller was a scam artist, and Dr Tohme Tohme was a scam artist, and that Leonard Muhammad and Shmuley Boteach knew scarcely of God;
He learned that he had a true gift;
He learned that the best song he had ever recorded was "I Want You Back", and that his new album, the one with T-Pain and Will.I.Am, was not very good.
Michael Jackson learned everything, he learned the whole universe, became wise as a sage, as the wisest sage
looking upon a garden
knowing the name of every flower

and then he ascended to Paradise.

IV

After Michael Jackson died
the fourth thing
he learned
was

peace.

He arrived at the place
where the dead go
when they are ready.

By the time Michael Jackson
arrived
he knew everything
and so he did not hesitate;
he came in
where it is safe &
good
and he felt the things you feel
in paradise.

He looked down upon the Earth and saw his sons, his daughter, his friends;
all of his friends. He
did not want them to be
crying.
(Okay
maybe a little bit; but
just a little bit.)
But when they were done their mourning
he wanted his beloveds to
be so
happy, so
cherished
& he knew now that they would be
probably
and that the probably is all right.
He saw his mother weeping and
he dispatched angels to
let her stop.
He did not think of his father.
Not in paradise.

Michael Jackson saw a million people playing "Bad" and "ABC" and "The Way You Make Me Feel", all over the world, in river towns and desert towns, skyscrapers and huts
and he saw them moonwalking and
doing the robot
under the stars.
John Lennon came out to see Michael Jackson.
"Hello," he said;
Michael Jackson had always liked English accents.
John Lennon was not angry about all that publishing rights stuff because he was dead and Michael Jackson was dead and both of them understood everything now.
They watched the people of the world doing the robot.
"Nice one," said John Lennon.
James Brown came out too. And Sammy Davis Jr. And even Louis Armstrong
for some reason
and they hung out for a while
watching humankind
sing lyrics like, "the doggone girl is mine",
or "darling!"
all of these late entertainers understanding how much these elegies matter
and how little.
In time he broke away from the famous men
and went in among the others
in paradise
to dwell. And at this point Michael Jackson was
no longer
who he was
(nor was he a child:
he was something freely
in-between;
released from certain shapes & sizes
to live
forever
as he is)

also he could fly
and turn into a switchblade
or a salmon
or a moonbeam;
or into a whole season
a whole summer of sidewalk glitz and starlit yes
for the world to inhabit
all of us loving and singing and dancing
and not knowing that this is Michael Jackson
in whom we are thriving
and making out
and inhaling the smell of mock orange blossoms.

(Michael Jackson is here
and he can still move
like he has figured out
the secret
of it.)

(photo source)

Chet - "The Night The Night"

CRACK and a thousand documentary filmmakers set off to find the real Michael Jackson. CRACK and a slough (slew?) of tasteless jokes arc in the air like sad toilet paper rolls. CRACK and everyone in the room looks down at their stomachs, to their 8-year-old stomachs and there in their hands is a vinyl of 'Bad' and not a shred of the last twenty years. You change the subject, force yourself to think about something else, people die all the time. And they do. And movies and art and music and money will be made out of all this. I love Chet tonight, it's a beautiful crackling excuse not to have an opinion on anything. [Pre-order]

--

So Michael Jackson has died. I can't write about Michael Jackson, though, I'm not nearly schooled enough, I would much rather write about Chet. But I did mention him back in May (amazing song still up, for those looking to hear memories) and Sean mentioned him, it seems unknowingly, yesterday.

Discovery - "It's Not My Fault (It's My Fault)". Discovery's debut album, LP, initially appears to be a masterpiece. Its surges, snaps and blips press all my juicy summer buttons, recalling Len, Miracle Fortress and (inevitably) Daft Punk's Discovery. But this enchanted team-up between Vampire Weekend's secret genius Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles is utterly undone by Miles's vocals. Many songs wither under repeated listens, or in some cases even under first listens - because while Miles at different times recalls everyone from Harry Nilsson to Antony to to Kevin Barnes (Of Montreal) to Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie), he always sounds like a twerp. A song like "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" is an R&B pop marvel - that loses every bit of sizzle in its anemic verses. I'm certain this is an issue of choice, not of talent, but it's a fatal misstep. Irony does not trump sincerity, here. (See: R. Kelly.) Discovery's delicious, AutoTune-strewn cover of the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back" becomes nearly unlistenable as MJ's liberated sing is replaced with Miles's nerd croon. I become physically sad when I imagine what these jubilant chemical productions could be, with someone else's voice on top - imagine Jay-Z, Bjork, Sam Cooke, Jay Reatard surfing these songs' lead edges, all strut and bling. (And as much as I like Ezra Koenig within the context of Vampire Weekend, he is not the answer.)

Nevertheless, rejoice!, rejoice!, on "It's Not My Fault", the song works, the whole song works - dancefloor-smooved, with kevlar snaps and testtube bells. Miles (allegedly sharing vocals with Batmanglij) sand your edges, clear your heart for debris, leave you soapstone-smooth and ready for the June-time glitter. The song's wry, faux-frustration reminds me of a series of cold drinks on a hot terrasse, julep after julep, and every time my girlfriend brings me another I just spill it out on the sidewalk, watch the caterpillars crawl across the icecubes.

[website/MySpace - write and hire them for your mega-major-label hip-hop/pop/r&b project, to make me happy]
---

The Lifted Brow's Ronnie Scott has interviewed Carey Mercer (Frog Eyes) for MBV. It's a great, funny conversation, fuel for Mercer-crushes, yes. "My wife loves Devin the Dude. My father made her a mixed CD of his greatest hits for her birthday. Whatever bauble I had purchased her paled in comparison to this sonic gift."

You have until Sunday to enter our Royal City contest!

(A note on the optical illusion above: what look like blue and green spirals are in fact spirals of the same colour! Yes! Believe it! I checked!)

Asthmatic Kitty's recent decision to issue a b-sides compilation for Royal City was one of my favourite pieces of news this year. This Guelph, Ontario band (I don't get to say that very often) are one of Canada's all-time great indie groups, but due to the modesty, restraint and burnished gold of their folk-rock sound, they never received their due. (Let's put it this way - celebrating Arcade Fire just pre-Funeral, it's Royal City I compared them to.) I'm so glad to have a label like Asthmatic Kitty - American! critically acclaimed! Sufjan! - singing their praises, trying to teach a few more people about what we all took for granted.

Royal City folded after 2004's Little Heart's Ease, and their original label, Three Gut, packed it in the following year. That was the last time I wrote substantively about Royal City (I've just put those songs back online), and we had Guelph's own Tim Kingsbury, now of Arcade Fire, write an epitaph too. (By the way, I've changed my mind about Royal City's Alone at the Microphone, which I sneered at here. It's a great record.)

Okay okay, but even more hoorayingly, Asthmatic Kitty's Royal City comp is gorgeous. The most beautiful CD object I've seen in ages, weird & different, made with thick board and metallic ink, and utterly worth purchasing whether you're an old fan or new. Obviously, the music is great - you can stream the whole thing at MBV. But we're also celebrating the album's release in even greater style, with a Said the Gramophone give-away. (MBV and Chromewaves are doing them too.)

Up for grabs is one set of Royal City art-prints, part of a hand-numbered series of 30. These giclee prints are 6 1/2" x 6 1/2", archival ink on 310gsm German Etching stock. They are beautiful. Ryan Catbird made them with the help of Three Gut founders Lisa Moran and Tyler Clarke Burke, and used Tyler's original artwork from all three formal Royal City releases, 2000’s At Rush Hour The Cars, 2001’s Alone At The Microphone, and 2004’s Little Heart's Ease. Most of these sets went to the band and label, but one will go to our readers.

To win our set of prints, listen to the songs below and tell us (in the comments) what we should have put beside [at least] one of them, instead of that boring release info. The contest closes 11:59 pm on Sunday, June 28. Thanks to Ryan for organising all this.

Royal City - "I Called But You Were Sleeping" (b-side, reissued on 1999-2004)
Royal City - "Cabbage Rolls" (from Little Heart's Ease)

[Buy Royal City, 1999-2004.]

(ps: happy st-jean baptiste!)

Smith Westerns - "Tonight"

Tonight I held your parents in grey wrinkly arms in the hand-drawn graveyard, and held my breath. Tonight, I kissed a bit of beer into your mouth. Tonight, I raked money into piles, warmed my tired feet while it burned. Tonight, gift-logic reigned supreme, saved the planet from a near-disaster. Tonight there lay candles on the runway, candles in the clothes, candles in the cameras, candles in the food. Tonight was Beast, pure Beast. Tonight forgot who it was, left the wrong mad message in the wrong damn place. I'm going out tonight, and I'm going out with tonight. A small supper and a pre-drink is my hot hot boyfriend.

Smith Westerns - "Diamond Boys"

M'lady likes a cold bath in the fresh air of dawn. Dried with cotton and fed strawberries, I was once caught peeking at her porcelain flesh. I was beaten severely, but no amount of heavy blows could rid the image from my mind. I spent the next week cleaning grime traps in the corners of the kitchen, all the while smiling, thinking of the way she gasped when she spied my wandering glance. I know the beating was a formality, something she felt she had to do for the sake of appearances. We'll be together one day. I could find myself on an errand in the far wing of the library when she's studying her scripture. I could bring her extra lemon water for her lunch of bread and flowers. I could break open her bedroom window in the sludge of the night and steal her away. It's only a matter of time, we'll be together. And my young lips will grace her vile beauty with their passing.
Then I will be king.

[Buy Buy Buy now now now]

Unknown artist - "Unknown song" [I call it "Say Yes (Fashionable Matador)"], from David Barclay's CD of found Taiwanese tunes.

The fashionable matador is the talk of Taiwan. He arrived on a sky-blue yacht, standing on the prow. He is tall, but not too tall; broad, but not too broad. He has dusky eyes and thick eyebrows. The fashionable matador walks as if parts of him are oaken - steadying, strong. Other parts instead seem made of rope, or soapstone, or man. His matador outfit is at once classic and modern, with velvet epaulets, sequins, sunglasses. He has a five o'clock shadow and it is only eleven in the morning. He sits eating scrambled eggs in a Taipei square and the girls gather around him, silent, hands clutched to chests, wondering how quickly he can kill a bull.

(photo origins unknown)

I haven't seen her in ages. We used to go out in high school, but a lot has changed since then. I'm married now, I've got Jared, who she's never met, and I weigh a bunch more (ha ha). I've found myself guessing what she's like now, I picture her face on a slightly taller body with a bit more wrinkles. She was funny, like a bit crazy, she would make weird sounds and motions with her hands. But I liked her a lot, and I'm thinking about her. Why do I keep thinking about her? I feel like I shouldn't, but it doesn't matter, I'll just go watch her band and say hello and we'll chat about our lives and that'll be it. But I keep thinking about what seeing her will be like. What will her band sound like? Maybe like soft folk or alt country. No, probably not. Maybe. I don't know! She's still kind of a mystery to me, a bit. I guess that's why I'm thinking about her so much. She used to wear a leather jacket that had a big picture of Bill Cosby on the back. And she wore a leopard-print skirt that the teachers used to look at and scowl but never said anything about. I was kinda proud that someone so weird liked me. I wonder what her band will sound like.

Finally Punk - "Piranha"

[Buy something, anything]

--

Piranha-related content: Tom Scharpling held a 6-hour Best Show a few weeks ago, and Paul Scheer made an incredible call about being on the set of Piranha 3-D. It's 23:14, so you know.