Kepler are a band from Ottawa. I'm from Ottawa. Am I Kepler? No. I am not the band Kepler. But I am indeed Johannes Kepler, who discovered how planets work. My friends call me Kep.

Kepler - "The Changing Light at Sandover". A modest pattern of guitar and drums, a pigeon-toeing toward something. The something: loudness. Chekhov (the playwright, not the ensign) used to talk about introducing a gun into a play. That if there was a gun on stage, the gun must be shot during the course of the show. If you show me the gun, you must use it. If Kepler pigeon-toes toward loudness, they must eventually be loud. And they are - they luxuriate in the cymbal smash, the guitar growl. Then it's quiet again, and Samir sings some words. And then they show us the gun again, black and shiny in their hands, and although they take their time, melancholy stretching out over the horizon, Kepler do bring the loudness for us. They put it in the clouds so that when the time is right it can rain down. As Jeremy Gara hits the drums he is thinking only of bringing what has been promised; he does not think of the Arcade Fire as in these days he has not even heard of them; no instead he just plays with his band, Samir's band, and they sing a song of noise. (This song is better than the new Mogwai album.)

Kepler - "Broken Bottles, Blackened Hearts". Lots of people quit Kepler and the band almost broke up. When Samir put things back together again - with Snailhouse's Mike Feuerstack, among others, - the band was different. When I first heard Attic Salt (which was released in the US/Canada last year but which has only now reached the UK), I thought it was a quiet record. And it is. But what I've realised is that it's a quiet record that needs to be played loud. It's when you play it loud that you understand a song like this - the way each tremble of Samir's voice ought to hang in the air, just like those piano chords, just like the jagged guitar drone. Here they don't promise loudness. No. They promise something full and fullfilling. Something full filling. Something that will catch you up in its hands. Is this rock and roll? Naw. It's just the roll.

[buy 2000's Fuck Fight Fall and 2005's Attic Salt here.

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90 old, mostly b&w movies (scifi, bruce lee, dr jekyll and mr hyde!) that you can download for free!

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Because of a Toronto wedding, there is now a free berth in one of the two Said the Gramophone chalets at All Tomorrows' Parties (UK). Are you interested in joining other Gramophoners for a weekend by the sea with Destroyer, Joanna Newsom, Herman Dune, The New Pornographers, Spoon, Sleater Kinney, Dinosaur Jr, The Shins, Broken Social Scene, Mt Eerie, Clinic, Edith Frost, Dungen, The Decemberists, etc? If so, read this and then get in touch. Update: A few people have written in, expressing interest. If they all fall through, I'll let people know.