Mt. Eerie - "The Dead of Night".

On Your Blues, Destroyer built his songs on a platform of straw and straws, strips of satin - casio synths, drum machine, fake strings and electric piano. This fakeness? he seemed to be saying, It was always this fake - you just didn't hear it before. As he told his skewed stories, sang happily and sadly and obliquely, as he swam in those sleek waters, this is what I heard: Art's always been fake. It's made by people. Beauty's fake too. But that's okay (I think) -- art's still art. Beauty's still beauty. And booty's still booty.

With Eleven Old Songs, which is available now at Mt Eerie shows, Phil Elvrum revisits eleven of his old songs, and he does so with casio synths, drum machine, straw and straws. And in Elvrum's hands, these materials say something different than they did with Dan Bejar: Beauty's not fake -- "fake" is beautiful.

Bejar might say that he means that too, only sideways. But I think Phil would say that's too complicated.

I'm not sure who's right.

As a sample from the record, "The Dead of Night" is a bit of a cheat - for two reasons. First, the track was only previously released on the limited Live in Copenhagen triple-LP. Second, there isn't much of that casio.

I love this song, though, because I love the trick of it. Phil sings with his usual wistful seriousness, words like pebbles skipped onto a lake, and it's anchored by this repeated sample of a singing crowd. The sample goes round and round, the rhythm not quite right, like a wheel with bad balance. It begins to come apart - and you begin to get sick of it. And then something changes - at two and a half minutes, Elverum dies. (Spoiler: he doesn't.) And the sample changes, it twists and stretches and fades in and out, human voices that cease and restart, and if you hear it right it stops you in your tracks, the wheel is suddenly perfectly weighted, but it's not taking you anywhere. You hang... -- and yes there is that casio, sounding like the most vivacious and ebbulient thing, living itself, the skipping realworld plantlife heartbeat.

On his recordings, Elvrum's greatest strength is his ear for song-texture. It's why the unflashy No Flashlight (2005) kinda sucks. But it's why a song like this can leave you gaping, at least a little bit.

The Harvey Girls - "Mountain".

The terrific mp3blog Spoilt Victorian Child has launched a record label. Mike Seed's Songs For The Wintering Show Troupe is quivering and wintry - like the end of winter, though: the onset of spring, the moments after you turn off that M. Ward CD, when there's heat in your fingers. There are samples here (I highly recommend "William In A Trance").

The Harvey Girls are another beast entirely. They're a duo who play avant pop, indie folk, eclectic and soft-hearted weirdness.

And clearly they can also play a kind of bluegrass.

"Mountain" is a song where the engineer's done half the work for you. Listen to that mandolin. Listen! My gosh - listen to it! It's the sound of everything I love in my life. Listen! It's the cat with the fiddle, the silver spoon, the man in the moon. Hiram Lucke is singing something, but I need to listen so hard to hear it - the mandolins are dazzling, brilliant, the only things I want to concentrate on. Listen to them!

All right, all right. I'll pay attention to the lyrics... "Fold your hands to listen now." Okay! Will do! Mandolins!

(Final note: Lucke's lyrics are of course very good, but "Mountain" sure don't need rely on 'em.)

[All SVC Releases come as high-quality mp3s with full artwork. And they are extraordinarily good value -- The Harvey Girls' Wild Farewell costs £4 (or $10-$15 on CD), while Mike Seed's album is a mere £3.50. Twittering electronica is also available from The Palace Lido, for £3.50. -- so do BUY.]