Shelly Blake - "Home Movies". Open your mouth too wide and cherries fall out. No? Is it just me? Me and Shelly Blake. More cherries fall out of his mouth than mine - and more cherry-pits. He sings sloppy and achey, Daniel Johnston in a wagon with the dude from OMC's "How Bizarre". Eventually he introduces the electric guitar and this is a moment that you know, this is a moment that is familiar. It's when you're at the Scrabble tournament and you've just spelled the word "singersongwriter" and there's a squawking sound, a brief electric buzz. You look up and there's a stork in the corner, long-legged, bearing an electric guitar. He stops playing, he looks at you, he blinks his eyes. "Yeah, what?" he seems to be saying, in stork. And when you look back down the word "singersongwriter" has been changed, either by cheating or by some obscure rule. And your tiles now say: "Elope, elope, elope, elope!"

Am I trying too hard?

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David-Ivar Herman Dune (w. Lisa Li-Lund) - "Burn Burn". My bus was a few hours late to All Tomorrows Parties, a couple weeks ago, so me and all my new friends missed Herman Dune. I did get to see them loitering at the Broken Social Scene show, though. And then I think at Destroyer. I hope so. And then I went down to the merch table and I was easily persuaded to buy "Demented Abduction" - Nova Scotia Runs For Gold, the David-Ivar Herman Dune solo album plus Lisa Li-Lund. This song is from there. It was recorded on tour in Nova Scotia, mixed to mono on a Panasonic tape recorder.

In this song, the narrator does these things: pets a dog, makes coffee, puts a record on, sings, makes a call to NYC, pours drinks, is sick, misses her, gets a gun, practises shooting, goes for a drive, shows her what he can do, drives into the sidewalk, drives into the bridge, drives into the wall, drives into the river, dies, finds god, gets a criminal record, pisses off the police, meets the enemy, gets immolated.

In this song, David-Ivar Herman Dune and Lisa Li-Lund do these things: sing like a hairy morning, sing like chorus girls, play ukelele, make a chorus of sloppy folk-pop a thing of effortless pissed-off grace.

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