The Radio Four - "How Much I Owe". The newest issue of the book-length journal known as Yeti has great drawings by Julianna Bright and Nicole J Georges, a collection of amazing pre-1950 photos (of Sydney, Australia crime-scenes and criminals), a conversation with Octavia Butler (rip), a suprisingly medicated tour-diary by Okkervil River's Will Sheff, and a hysterical, fascinating interview of Destroyer's Dan Bejar, by an 8 year old kid. It also has a free compilation CD with unreleased tracks by Page France, Okkervil River, We/Or/Me, The Blow -- and weirder things too. There's at least a couple of songs I'll probably end up sharing with you.

This is one of 'em.

As the liner-notes attest, these days "Radio 4" is likely to evoke either the BBC or a NY garage-rock band of the same name. But if we roll back to 1955, this was Radio Four: a "family quartet" about whom "not a whole heck of a lot" is known. I will infer what Mike McGonigal restrains himself from doing: if it was a family quartet, called the Radio Four, then clearly their last name must have been Radio. That's as far as I'm willing to extrapolate, so I'll turn to plain fiction as I name them, the Radio Four. Pop will be ole' Aloysius Radio, and maybe his younger brother Ishamael ("Ishkabibble") Radio. Aloysius' sons are both members of the Four: Marcus Radio later quits music to become an architect, specialising in steeples; Little Shelley Radio wins a trip to France when working as a refrigerator salesman and while there tries a truffle mushroom for the first time. He and his wife both decide that truffles are the truest signs of God they've ever seen, and devote the rest of their lives to the fungus.

And while Marcus' steeples still stand; while Ishkabibble's burbling laugh is still remembered by citizens of Cranberry, MS; while Aloysius' grave-stone sits in strange proximity to the oldest weeping willow in the United States; and while Michelin-starred chefs across the American south will tell you of the Mr Radio who taught them everything they know about the truffle... it's "How Much I Owe" that had the greatest lasting impression on the happiness of humanity. Because every time the song is played, a soul is saved, an angel born, a lame man lifted to his feet and a bird kissed by the gold hot sun.

[buy Yeti / try to buy the Radio Four on CD]

The Frames - "Bad Bone". This is a song laced with the full & terrible, wine-red and cocoa-black temptation of the downward spiral. When I listen to it: I sink.

It starts so simply, so dully twilit, Glen Hansard singing his silly lines about a "bad bone inside of [him]". Please. And yeah then the violin comes in, the bass and drums - but still, no, there's nothing to trap you. A few lines catch your (my) ear, things that hook parts of your minds' eye - "You were naked on the balcony"... But no it's not until the closing minute and a half when you realise that all that came before was promise; the muddy moody indie rock just a path to a starry, sick sweet blur. "To die with you upon the vine," Hansard sings, and it is so fucking enticing. The guitars bloom like nightshade and the strings coax you all the way to where you break your own red beating heart.

The new album by Ireland's The Frames is out now in Ireland. (Anti will be releasing it abroad in 2007.)

[buy / The Frames' Glen Hansard is on a semi-solo tour in the USA in October]

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Elsewhere:

Tuwa's story about Shuggie Otis is absolutely one of my favourite posts of the year. Something that we struggle for on these very pages: a fiction about a song, saying more than the truth could. (If you like Said the Gramophone, I suspect you'll like this.)

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By the by, I'm not in Montreal but these would be my Pop Montreal picks (oh, what a lineup!):

Wednesday, Oct 4. - Orillia Opry and Vashti Bunyan (Bunyan is really unexpectedly awesome, live); or else I'd do some hopping between Two Gallants, The Winks, and Damien Jurado

Thursday, Oct 5 - Under Byen and Joanna Newsom (obv, but seriously bust over to see Basia Bulat's set when it's done)

Friday, Oct 6 - Mocky and the Handsome Furs, but then def Islands in a hometown show

Saturday, Oct 6 - man! Beirut and Akron/Family!

Sunday, Oct 7 - Think it's possible to do The Acorn, Sunset Rubdown and The Constantines? Do try.

Oh, and you kids might also be into seeing our own Mr Dan Beirne in conversation with Matt Fluxblog, Carl Zoilus, Andrew Pop and some other luminaries at this panel at McGill on Thursday. I guarantee it will be better than the biggie. (Sorry, Frank!)