Katie Dill - "The Body's Only Rental". It's the way of girls with ukeleles, I think; there's something inherent in them. Katie's voice is lake-pretty and her uke sends up long struts of shine. The reverb's like a sunlight that won't leave yr room, even after dark. I wake up with the song stuck in my head. Yesterday I sang it out loud in a chapel 100 metres underground. But the thing that catches me, more and more, is the words. By now I'm used to the song's general loveliness (I'd even be tempted to call it "mere" loveliness, absurdly, like true loveliness can ever be mere. [If you believe loveliness is mere, clearly you have never sat and watched Krakow's market square on that first, early, day of summer.]) -- but Dill's rhymes and repetition, the way they're at once easy (i.e. almost trite) and strange (i.e. unexpected), well "The Body's Only Rental" keeps bringing me to motionless silence during late nights or when the sun is high, or any time, really, even running along the Wisla River. "My life is full of gentle," she sings, and if she was singing "My life is full of gentleness" I'd pay no heed at all, but "gentle", yes, "gentle"; "gentle" as a noun; this is bent in a way that to me is pure poetry. And the way she later rhymes "water", "harder" and "water" again: I mean it, I really do, that this is to me a choice all full of rightness and beauty. And the song's greater message, this holistic, almost karmic stuff; well it's like the Salinger stories I was reading, weeks ago: Seymour's reassuring buddhist certainties. His gentle. Or the way Salinger can write "I think love is a touch and yet not a touch", and me I don't imagine the inside of a greeting card -- I feel my whole world give a little tremble.

Anyway, look, "The Body's Only Rental" is one of my favourite songs of the year so far, and maybe I say that a lot, but it's true, even if you can't really dance to it, and if I had a hand-tailored suit I'd keep it for a while in my inside pocket, where it would stay warm.

[Katie at MySpace]

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Elsewhere... (all three of these are a little late-to-press, but I've not had the chance before now):

Tuwa's post on Cypress Hill is personal and wide-ranging and another one of these examples of how musicblogging, as a medium, can be something pretty special. Do read it.

A recent post at Shake Your Fist thankfully abandons the subject of a band called Seamonster and spends its last paragraphs on Neutral Milk Hotel. This wouldn't bear remarking except that Amy's writing on Jeff Magnum is beautifully right-on ("that wobbly steel-bowled voice") and her look at NMH-and-sex, while succinct, is as insightful as anything I've read on Aeroplane Over the Sea.

My Paste feature on Arcade Fire is now up on their website. It's an interview/studio visit thing, and I'm not altogether happy with it, but there's some good & true moments, too. Much, much better (and the best profile I've ever seen of the band), is Darcy Frey's piece for the NY Times magazine.

Rachell Sumpter's new show has opened at the Richard Heller Gallery, and the paintings are once again revelatory. There's something in her work that stirs me in all my dryest, worn out places: hope and wonder and mystery, searching and finding, magic and steamed breath and smoky hot human touch. If I had $2,000 to spend on a painting, there is no doubt in my mind how I would spend it. (See also Rachell's StG guestpost, ages back.)