St. Thomas - "Take a Dance With Me"

There’s not much room up there, above the tremulous falsetto of St. Thomas. An uncertain violin occasionally rises above, as do a few high plucked notes on an acoustic guitar, but the saint’s own voice tends toward the heavens most consistently. And the heavens tend toward it: I think I speak for the strange man sleeping beatifically in the Greyhound seat next to mine when I say that, muffled by headphones or not, the song’s softness – strummed old guitar strings almost indistinguishable from brushes on snare, reverberating chains – is complemented by the bath of sunlight in which we now sit. My initial lede for this post was “Aquinas does it again!” but then I heard sympathy and gentleness in the music and couldn’t find the severity and scholastic rigour one might expect from a St. T.A. composition. This music is more toned-down Tiny Tim than St. Thomas, or if it must be a saint’s, then why not St. Francis, who talked to and serenaded the animals and probably tiptoed through the tulips, too. [Buy]

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The Anomoanon - "Sixteen Ways"

Also on the bus: text messagers and cell phone talkers, magazine readers and perfume wearers, silent sleepers and very loud ones, heads on strangers’ shoulders and faces turned out toward the receding landscape. Most are going home, where, among family, love will mix with security and booze and their opposites. In his ode to the domestic, Will Oldham’s brother Ned sings of the complex emotional climate of the home, where things are at once “coming together at the seams” and coming apart, where a cry is both an indication of sadness and a proof of life. He does this in the wobbly drawl of his brother, while letting his lead guitars wander untethered over a backdrop of square-wave dynamics. Thus does he mirror the reassuring untidiness of home with this blessed mess of song. [Buy]