Said the Gramophone

OH CODY CHESNUTT, YOU APHRODISIAC YOU

Cody ChesnuTT - "Boils". It's Frosh Week in Montreal - that's like Freshers Week, but Canadian, - and all around the city are dewy-eyed kids who have stumbled into love-affairs. They're groping at each other with all kinds of astonished gusto. You see them making out at the bar and each half's internal narrative seems to be: wow; wow; wow; oh man, wow.

Cody presents a sermon - he sings the holy word of the Lord, - and yet his testifying reminds me not of church, but of these smoky shadowtouch brightlight scenes. Everything's a little lurching, a litle stop-start, with moments of spontaneous, unvarnished, trumpeted oh! It is the sexiest-ever song about BOILS.

[buy Plague Songs, with songs by King Creosote, Rufus Wainwright, Klashnekoff, Laurie Anderson & al]

Habitat - "Mess It Up". Habitat - and the couple who led it, featured here singing the words "Here's hoping we don't mess it up!" - have broken up. I guess this means that on some level... they messed it up. But forget that. Listen to the awesome way Habitat do this song, the glossola-la-lalia they layer over each verse. You need to like someone very much to let them loll that loud, all over you. It's easy to forget how much a relationship is an agreement - two parties in league with one-another. But here the consensus is writ large, and looping; a handshake sweet as a bowl full of cherries. [MySpace]

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Things that are great:

Eleanor Friedberger doing the Fiery Furnaces' "Quay Cur" solo, introducing it in a robot voice that's so cute she might as well have slung me over her shoulder and carried me off to Denmark.

Old Time Relijun's funky-cracklin' Beefheart lunacy: "Daemon Meeting"