Masta Ace - "Hold U (ft. Jean Grae)". Masta Ace and Jean Grae make the sentimental simple, simple, simple. Nothing cute or precocious: a story; an explanation; unostentatious honesty over a warm, looped sample. I am always struck by the way hip-hop cuts meat from bone. It's got a poetry that's often much more precise than folk, rock, pop, or even the blues. Like the way Fitzgerald or Salinger can explicate something, secular words painting a picture of grace. Here's a love song that strolls effortlessly through the body of a love affair, blossoms all around, never stopping to be cute. Because this song demonstrates that it's not cuteness that sits at the centre of love, nor even the absence of doubt. It's the agreement, whole and plain, that: you, me, we're in love. Ha, so simple! Good thing I've got it all figured out. (He rolls his eyes.)

[buy]

Wyrd Visions - "Bog Lord". Both Grizzly Bear and Final Fantasy have been speaking with wonder about their tourmate, Wyrd Visions. It was the first time I had heard the name, and to be honest I wasn't attracted. The phrase "Wyrd Visions" makes me think of the little occult/elf figurine shops in small-town New Jersey, places with big crystal balls in the window. Places that smell of incense and flash with mirrors. But I'm a fool, I'm a fool. I should know better; I should know to trust Ed Droste and Owen Pallett. While Wyrd Visions is certainly part of the, uh wyrd folk movement, there's a play in the music that keeps it skittering over the cloud-tops, never stuck in its mud. This song is ten minutes, eerie and also smiling, like the man in the corner at the all-night diner. It sucks you into its long landscapes and slowly-moving figures; organ, harmonium and crisscrossing guitar. It slows to match your breath. "Wyrd Visions only listens to hip-hop," says Owen. This is not hip-hop -- it reminds me more of Alexander Tucker than anything else, -- but oh it resists getting trapped in the old folk groove. It wanders, it skirts, it flows, it swings. It moves across the floor and whispers to your girl. It's a will'o the wisp in our Sunday night, murmuring through the grates.

[more info, album to be released on Blue Fog]

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Some recent pieces of mine in The Skinny (and I have my own Final Fantasy intvw that's not been published yet): Akron/Family interview, Scatter, McClusky, The Knife, Belle and Sebastian, The Hussy's, The Streets, Kepler, Spinto Band, Alexander Tucker, Craig Thompson's marvelous graphic novel Blankets. Oof.