There are at least two ways to be a curmudgeon.

• Sole & the Skyrider Band - "A Sad Day For Investors (Astronautalis remix)". You can build a house out of cinders, chalk and dustbunnies. A perfect house, no one would ever know but you. Then you sit in your IKEA parlour with friends, all sipping Glenmorangie, and you're the only one who knows: this whole place is cinders, chalk and dustbunnies. You hold yr curmudgeonliness to your own chest and walk around town chewing on a piece of paper, a little slip that has the word SOURPUSS written in bitter ink. You glare at the news-agent. You shake your head when you see someone buy an extra-large ice-cream cone. If they only knew. You sit in your corner office and look onto the city and suspect, every day, that maybe this whole place is cinders, chalk and dustbunnies. [buy/MySpace]


• Rihanna ft. the Dream - "Hatin' on the Club". You can wake up early and while the sun is low, start making jars of sky. Cover your kitchen table with mason jars and pour sky blue sky into every one of them, boiling & sealing & setting them near the patio door. When your boyfriend arrives, that asshole in sunglasses, you don't go with him. You don't go out. You fold your arms and mouth the words "No way." Instead, as he watches you through the patio doors, you drink that sky. One by one you twist open the lids of the jars, your hold them up to him, and then with the sun nooning through to you you drink that sky up, drink it in front of him, in glinting gulps; stand all alone in your apartment drinking a hundred jars of sky. [official website]

---

Carey Mercer (Frog Eyes, Blackout Beach, Swan Lake) has a blog and it's wonderful. (Years ago, we asked him to do a guest-post for Said the Gramophone. He never answered. Carey, if you're out there... please!)

This time-lapse video of a particular intersection on London's Abbey Road is getting a lot of play, but to be honest after about a minute and a half I was tired of tourists' hijinks. But I kept watching. Why? Because I was smitted by the song, Blame Ringo's "Garble Arch". (The band is not actually a Beatles cover band or anything - their name is revenge from a previous [and rather spurious] legal threat by Richard Starkey.) [buy]