National Park - "The Only Stars". I spent most of my time in New Zealand in national parks. I think. You would have to ask my dear sister. I saw mountains and rainforest and flightless birds. I saw rainbows and greenstone and fjords. I saw sandfly bites. I saw stars.

National Park are a Glasgow group that shares a plot of ground with The Clientele, the Velvet Underground, Galaxie 500, and, in a funny way, Broken Social Scene. They know how to sway, run, whisper, holler. They know how to skinnydip. They know how to throw themselves down a grassy hill. They know how to doze. The group makes this sound so easy - a tune that glitters and glows, that shakes into loud crackle. And yet meanwhile there are a thousand bands achieving only half of this sound; groups that make mood but can't summon force, ever pretty but never fierce. The National Park have done something accomplished and distractingly rad. "The Only Stars" is a patch of sky in purples & yellows, in dusk-blacks & night-whites. Strange the way that a flutter can be the most violent feeling - that a flute can introduce an electric guitar.

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The Handsome Family - "Eleanor Rigby". It wasn't until I saw the film Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus at All Tomorrows Parties that I understood the Handsome Family. Every now and then in the movie they'll cut to the inside of a barn, to a grey dead field, and the Handsome Family will be standing like an American gothic, autoharp or banjo in hands, moaning dryly into the evening. There was something so Southern about them. But also something so hot. Exhausted, drained, almost dead with heat. And for the first time I heard the moaning not as a foot-dragging blah - I heard it as the only sound that would carry through the summer steam.

This is a song by The Beatles. We have a man and a woman, a banjo and a steel guitar. An English melancholy that's been dragged through the greengrass swamp.

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I'd like to thank critic and blogger Carl Wilson for filling in for me (alongside my marvelous partners, Dan and Jordan) while I was gone. Carl, your work was perceptive and careful and mighty and personal and thank you thank you thank you. Everyone should have bookmarked Zoilus, be reading the Globe & Mail, and have pre-ordered his upcoming 33 1/3 book on Celine Dion.

Elsewhere:

Scots, join me at Mono's Get Off My Pavement! festival on Sunday, July 30. Who else will be there? ONLY HERMAN DUNE, ARAB STRAP, UNCLE JOHN & WHITELOCK AND MANY MORE THAT'S WHO.

Lovely Party is a wild new mp3blog that uses a big graph and stuff. The first song they posted was by The Diskettes.

There is a most-sweet preview videoclip for Bonnie Prince Billy's new record, in which Neil Hamburger gets harassed by a crooning Will Oldham while on holiday.

Bootlog has The Weakerthans singing a Sarah Harmer song, and Sarah Harmer singing The Weakerthans' "Left and Leaving". Yes.

And finally, Blogotheque's series of videos of musicians-playing-music-in-weird-places continues with a MARVELLOUS pair of clips of Grizzly Bear. Click the one on the right and revel in the band as it walks down the Parisian streets, doowop-ing "The Knife": I promise that your smile will glint like shopwindows. (thanks, alex)