Destroyer - "State of the Union". In Destroyer's song, it's raining. He asks: "What did you learn?" And answers: "Girls are great / grated on my plate / and boys are best / served / with a stake through the chest." It doesn't sound like he had a very good year, no, and like I said it's raining. On New Year's Eve it should snow. If anything, it should snow. Or the sky should be clear as a lens, and dark as a friend holding her hand over your eyes. And when the champagne pops, the thing to remember is that this is not your year's punctuation - the period at the end of 2007, your momentum's full stop. Instead it's the sound of something being dislodged, of spirits finding an opening, of the doors of your life coming unstuck. The sound of a dam bursting.
Patrick Wolf - "The Magic Position". The best so far of the things I missed, and a song I hope you're able to take with you into two oh oh eight. What matters: the joyfulness of the over-and-over, the splendour of the start-and-restart. It's a song of relentless repetition - in handclap and major scales and ever-thumping drums and the sky-seizing yip of fiddle. But as Patrick Wolf shouts: "HEY!" Because somersaulting into a new morning, a new month, a new year, dancing even the same steps to the same songs, there's newness waiting; there's happiness; there may even be bliss. Sooner or later you're going to dance on over onto the right person's toes, or into the right person's arms, or just in a circle of friends so dear that the sparks in their eyes are all the light you need; and you'll not be searching for lighthouses any more: you'll have found the shore.
---
Abby writes, no, sings?, beautifully about Okkervil River's "Unless It's Kicks".
Eric Marathonpacks talks about favourite albums of the year, but the thing that glints & gleams is the way his words on Spoon & LCD Soundsystem become a canvas for his heart's particular beat. I remember the day after everything went down, I somehow made the connection in my mind with the song, and although I knew it would be too painful to listen to, I couldn’t get it out of my head with a crowbar if I tried. I know everyone in the world has been through the exact same situation, maybe more than once, but this was the first for me, and man was it fucking awful. Art didn't redeem the hardships of 2007: but it was there with him, yes, as he pushed on through them.
[photo is of Sebastian Errazuriz's "The Tree", in Chile.]
"Can I Change My Mind," in which a rhythm section betrays a singer's subconscious:
Tyrone Davis is an incorrigible Lothario, a player and a cheat - not even he will deny it. Faced for the first time with pangs of regret, thoughts of what might have been with the latest in a long line of ousted lovers, he sings plaintively over an incongruous instrumental. The guitar: Uncontained joy manifested in too many notes in too little time, bars overflowing with slides and runs and syncopated strums. The drums, bass: Jackson 5 at their most elated. From where is this joy derived? Is it from a memory of past happiness or the anticipation of future reconciliation? Perhaps from a realization that Davis's romantic wandering was not in vain, that there's more to feel than flesh, that under certain circumstances this guitar line can be played with conviction.
[Buy]
Chris Garneau - "Love Zombies". I'm very nervous to recommend any song with "zombies" in the title, particularly if the meaning is semi-literal, but here I am, smitten. It's probably the first great song he's recorded since the sublime "Not Nice" (mp3 here), but "Love Zombies" shows once again why I put faith in Chris Garneau; why I hold onto the conviction that this guy may one day record a masterpiece LP. His voice is often a shadowplay, holding up silhouettes of Antony, Regina Spektor, Sufjan Stevens, yet there's something much more robust in it than that; turn the lights on and his unique shadow would be there, flickering blue like a gas-lamp. "Love Zombies" is serious without being humourless, funny without being gutless. Garneau sings pretty, sings angry, sings playful, and in each of these modes he's a virtuoso, stirring any listener willing to be stirred. There's a glissando at 0:42 as he sings the word "wholly" and that alone would be reason to share this track with you.
Aaron Sewards is the only guest-artist I've ever discovered in a friend's living-room. There's a lovely Montreal apartment where two cats live. Their names are Jasper and Franklin. Jasper & Franklin most of the time tolerate the presence of my friends Neale and Raffi. And above the couch in the living-room where Jasper & Franklin & Neale & Raffi play, there's a little framed drawing. It makes you long for either a magnifying glass or a larger pair of eyes. The better to see it with, my dears.
This tiny illustration was drawn by the English artist Aaron Sewards. I'm not sure if Aaron has a magnifying glass, or large eyes, or just very small fingers. But he draws eensy-weensy windows, microscopic portholes into the world we already dwell in. His pictures remake our ordinary lives as sites of tenderness, care, and pattern. In his works, the details add up to something. Mixed-up visions and empty rooms become the places where our emotions have the space to breathe.
Aaron played for Raffi the music of Sleeping States months before the rest of the world (myself included) had heard of the man. He shared other secrets too. And so I was eager to ask Aaron to share a few more secrets with Said the Gramophone's readers & writers: to choose a few favourite songs and to make drawings, paintings and sketches that speak to his favour, that express his convictions in ink and line. These are the three songs he chose, and the images he created for each one.
If you can spare a moment, please do leave a comment to tell him what you think.
(Previous guest-blogs: artist Corinne Chaufour, "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Will Butler (Arcade Fire), Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone), artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Michael Nau (Page France), Devin Davis, Will Sheff (Okkervil River), Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear), Hello Saferide, Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), Brian Michael Roff, Howard Bilerman (producer: Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc.). There are many more to come.)
St. Thomas - "Take a Dance With Me"
There’s not much room up there, above the tremulous falsetto of St. Thomas. An uncertain violin occasionally rises above, as do a few high plucked notes on an acoustic guitar, but the saint’s own voice tends toward the heavens most consistently. And the heavens tend toward it: I think I speak for the strange man sleeping beatifically in the Greyhound seat next to mine when I say that, muffled by headphones or not, the song’s softness – strummed old guitar strings almost indistinguishable from brushes on snare, reverberating chains – is complemented by the bath of sunlight in which we now sit. My initial lede for this post was “Aquinas does it again!” but then I heard sympathy and gentleness in the music and couldn’t find the severity and scholastic rigour one might expect from a St. T.A. composition. This music is more toned-down Tiny Tim than St. Thomas, or if it must be a saint’s, then why not St. Francis, who talked to and serenaded the animals and probably tiptoed through the tulips, too. [Buy]
***
The Anomoanon - "Sixteen Ways"
Also on the bus: text messagers and cell phone talkers, magazine readers and perfume wearers, silent sleepers and very loud ones, heads on strangers’ shoulders and faces turned out toward the receding landscape. Most are going home, where, among family, love will mix with security and booze and their opposites. In his ode to the domestic, Will Oldham’s brother Ned sings of the complex emotional climate of the home, where things are at once “coming together at the seams” and coming apart, where a cry is both an indication of sadness and a proof of life. He does this in the wobbly drawl of his brother, while letting his lead guitars wander untethered over a backdrop of square-wave dynamics. Thus does he mirror the reassuring untidiness of home with this blessed mess of song. [Buy]
The Owls - "Welcome to Monday". This song is a greeting card, The Owls' cheery omniscient hello on your strained Monday morning.
Welcome to MondayAnd it's nice of them to do so, to send a pop song telegram in shades of blue and rosy pink, with mildly jangling guitars and a jetstream swirl of synths. If it's God singing (and She sings in the first person plural, so there's a hint of She-knows-something-we-don't-know), well despite Her insensitivity to how much Monday sucks, She's sweet to be taking this personal interest. Something in Her dry, pretty voice suggests Mia Doi Todd, or maybe just a world that's kind & good but not flashy in its offerings. A Monday that will provide for you only if you ask it to, demurely.
We hope you are working hard again.
Welcome to Monday
We sent you a card to let you know we're thinking of you.
The Owls - "Isaac Bashevis Singer". Isaac Bashevis Singer: author, humourist, Nobel Laureate, Jew. Were he still with us he would probably be doing the same thing as I'm doing on this Christmas Eve: noshing on mixed nuts, Ferrero Rochers, waiting at a loved-one's house for a matriarch to return with some cabbage rolls. It's a good life.
But one of the things I like to do with this song, this tender portrait, is to disconnect it from the "real" Isaac Bashevis Singer, the I.B.S. known and beloved, and instead to give the song to an anonymous Isaac: one who aged and died in NYC without ever becoming famous, who smiled and shook his head whenever he read an article about the famous writer who shares his name. Our Isaac, this gentle bachelor who works as a watchmaker or a newspaper seller or a watercolourist, this guy too has a wide circle of friends, has lady callers and superstitions and on Christmas Day he throws a feast for all his cherished ones, gentiles and Jews and a solitary Hindu, serving fruitcake and gefilte fish, kosher wine and Austrian bubbly, Ferrero Rochers and mixed nuts. And his turntable never stops spinning.
[buy Daughters and Suns, absolutely the most diverse & pretty a group of pop-songs you'll hear before the end of the year]
Born Ruffians - "Barnacle Goose"
Have Born Ruffians become separated from their souls? Yes! Their souls now live outside their body, in guitar and drum form, and their mental state is now dually displayed by both the verbal cadence and bright shining shouts, combined with the clawing guitar, slashing. They oscillate between synchronous and opposite motives, as in many songs of any kind, but now with their inner struggle so clearly displayed, old standards become new again, something to rediscover, and this has become some kind of Broadway number meets campfire rounds meets Moxy Früvous-style vocal group, but has the clear vision, and calm panic to be way way better than any of those things. I did recently watch The Golden Compass, but I think this song's daemon is indeed a goose (note the lovely interrupting honk). Also, side note, the Born Ruffians album is great. Anticipate it. [Buy other stuff]
Half School House Rock, half David Bowie on a day sail. I think this song is playing some kind of "walking game" where you can never have more than one foot on the ground at one time. Kind of a hopping, jokish goose step. But I like it, it's snappy and geeky. And it ends with a delightful kerfuffle of puffling horns. [the album (and two others) is free, and quite nice]
Johnnie Taylor - "Rome (Wasn't Built In a Day)"
Miami was hot even in winter. So we dressed like it was summer underneath our coats and mittens and scarves, denuding once inside. What an appropriately named bar!
Inside - this was the last time I saw her before I first spoke to her - she was dressing to leave. A white tuque and a red pea coat. Her young cheeks were flushed from drink and she sang along to "Crazy," which played on the jukebox. From what I could hear, her approach was more Janis Joplin than Patsy Cline, and it didn't suit the song at all.
Later, when I first approached her, she ignored me. "Hi," but she walked right past me. So I went back to my g and t and tried to cool down. This happened three more times.
Her first words to me were slurred only ambiguously in my direction. "Guess my middle name!" This had something to do with a separate conversation, not involving me, and on which I'd been conspicuously eavesdropping.
"Elizabeth," I proffered and immediately regretted it. An old woman's name.
"Starts with an 'm'"
"Oh. Mandy!"
She didn't speak to me again for three weeks. We were outside; though I'm not sure how we got there. My roommate, Joel, was talking to some acquaintance of hers and then whispering and then we were out in the cold, standing in a circle composed of Joel, me, her and four of her friends (douches). They were passing around a joint. I'd never smoked before, though I wasn't about to let anyone know that. Once the smoke hit my lungs, it wasn't long before I was talking too much and calling her Mandy again, which didn't get the reaction I was hoping for.
It's true that we never exchanged another word - if you define 'word' in the traditional sense. It's also the case that, from that point on, she always eyeballed me in a way that most people reserve for weirdos who may pose a threat of some kind. And then, at some point, she was gone from the city, then I was gone from the city. But I wouldn't say, as you probably would, that I blew it. I prefer to think of it as having planted a slow-germinating seed of love.
Persistence, I understood even then, is paramount. "Where there's life, there's hope," I always say, and then study the faces of my audience to see how quixotic/creepy I am coming across. After all, it occurred to me one day, years after I first smoked pot just outside of Miami, that Rome wasn't built in a day. It took many days to build Rome. And ever since, I have been deeply heartened by this analogy, for if our love is Rome then yes, it will take time to build and no, neither of us can escape it. No matter where we stray or what our (her) instincts or preferences or circumstances might dictate, inevitably, all roads, etc.
This may be a letter from a melancholy thundercloud, it maybe be a beach party bonfire turned cold, it may be a nap. It may ask you for your hand stepping onto the curb, or into a bi-plane, it may wish you well as it goes off to a boring old war. This song may arrive too late, too tired, jacket ripped, to a date long wilted and blown over. It may leave a garbled message to come home to, late-night leftovers and a TV on mute. It may go on telling itself the same things, fooling itself, fine. It may do and be all these things, but it must be important, an end and not a means, because it is enough, I'm well-supped beside this sad beast, the two of us, backs against the bricks, knees to our chests with the last one of one too many. [Pre-order]
Yesterday, we shared some of our favourite songs of the year. Today the three of us talk in fewer words about our favourite albums.
I've heard almost all of them and they're all fuckin' rad. Go buy some music for Christmas, late Hannukah, New Year, end-of-world, or your wedding night.
DAN:
I know what you're thinking: "Dan, you have impeccable taste". Well, you're right, keep talking. "I notice you've started strong out of the gates with an album no one cared about, and no one can even get ahold of. How eccentric! And then a bunch of canadian bands you've been talking about for three years, mixed with a Brooklyn band you've been harping on for three years, and a new Brooklyn band. And mixed in there, taking up one of the seven slots for the year, the 4th no less, is an album of stand-up comedy. Seriously, you know what you're talking about." Okay, stop talking.
I'll explain the ones I think need explaining. Group Inerane's Guitars From Agadez is the most affecting group of songs I've heard all year. That album is a document of perfect expression, it's like listening to the invention of the electric guitar. After I heard it I went looking for something like it, and though there are many imitators, nothing comes close to this. Paul F. Tompkins is on there for two reasons; he's representing the comedy album, and he made the best one (simple, straightforward, yet formal, classic, like a three-piece suit).
JORDAN:
My past 365 days have been profoundly enriched by the following pieces of music (in no particular order):
Nat Baldwin's Most Valuable Player (Info)
Feist's The Reminder (Sean)
The Sleeping States' There the Open Spaces (me)
Sandro Perri's Tiny Mirrors (Sean)
Frog Eyes' Tears of the Valedictorian (Dan)
Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, Tusk (Sean, me, Sean, me)
The Band's The Band (me)
Robert Pete Williams' Graveyard Blues (me)
Revenant's American Primitive, Volumes 1 & 2
Van Morrison's "Tupelo Honey" (Buy)
Percy Sledge's "Come Softly To Me" (me)
Medicine Head's "His Guiding Hand" (me)
This year was also musically notable for me because: After three years of work, my band, The Cay, finally finished Don't Go Out Tonight. Here are two songs from that album.
SEAN:
In more ways than one, this was for me a year about coming back to life. I want to thank the artists who made living seem easy - Spoon, Basia, Vampire Weekend, Feist, Miracle Fortress. I want to thank those who found new ways to sing the ways it is hard - The Luyas, Of Montreal, Low, Shearwater, Sandro Perri. And I want to thank as well the two or three who I left behind with the ghosts; Burial and Phosphorescent, artists I've not been quite able to look in the incandescent eye.
[photo by Louis Vest]
We really only have one rule at Said the Gramophone: write about songs you love. In 2007, Dan, Jordan and I wrote about more than 500 tracks. Some of these we have loved for years, others we loved for a few moments, when they hit us just so with the palm of their eye.
Here are my fifty favourite songs of the year.
2007 was a marvelous year for music and I could have easily written about another hundred wonders. But fifty is enough. Lists are arbitrary and sudden. I tried to just be honest with myself. And I made a few rules, the most significant of which is that no artist is represented twice, even though several should have been. (See also my 2006 and 2005 lists.)
The best way to browse this list is to click the little arrow beside each song and then listen as you read. The things you like you can then download by right- or ctrl-clicking with your mouse. Please buy albums, singles and EPs by bands that you enjoy.
You can also download a complete zip of the fifty songs here, via SendSpace. If someone can figure out how to host a torrent, I'll link to that as well.
Tomorrow we will be sharing some words on our favourite albums of the year. I hope we'll see you then.
[haystack photo is from mirroroworld]
Pink Mountaintops - "Single Life"
A car with tambourine wheels pulls jagged out from under the rising blue garage door. In it rides a rich-looking chauffeur and God's Forgotten Son. The rich-looking chauffeur takes his orders from no human in the world, instead he reads The Bible like a road map, bike lanes be damned. Meanwhile God's Forgotten Son sits shotgun and bounces his knees nervously, arms crossed and eyes ringed darkly, feathers from his coat whisking his pale pale face. The rich-looking chauffeur stops for a 2L Coke and a bag of neon green Doritos, and they're off. Barreling through the city like some kind of grimacing laser beam, they rumble out into the country to find a way OUT, you know? The rich-looking chauffeur finally stops, in not-quite-the-middle of a muddy field, gets out, wipes his hands and opens the trunk. He takes out a shovel and an umbrella and tosses them on the ground. As God's Forgotten Son gets to digging, and the chauffeur rides off, it begins to spit rain and the farmer in the distance has stepped onto his back porch. [Out of Print]
Aidan John Moffat - "Good Morning"
From Aidan John Moffat's (ex-Arab Strap) album of erotic poetry I Can Hear Your Heart. Yes, an entire album of erotic poetry-songs. It's kind of nice. There's a strong theme of adultery, but it's more taken for granted, like the way your beer comes with a coaster. But many of them are very evocative, and here I can feel the warm morning sun, the soft fabrics, the many senses of this story. Premium-grade mix cd material, if you're still, like me, pretending to be that age. [Preview Site (Adults Only!)]
--
Elsewhere: Zac Pennington of Parenthetical Girls has compiled an hour-long mix of holiday music from his, clearly immense, Christmas music collection. It's called A Rough Guide to Xmas and it's a joy, really. I hadn't heard a single thing from it before (and I thought I was into Christmas music!) and it took me on a ride from laughs to goosebumps to lovely lovely cloud-ish drifts. Christmas or no, it's a great listen.
Half-Handed Cloud - "Cut-down". The making-of this song could have been one of two ways:
[Winding Currents is part of the Seven Inch Project, which offers 7" vinyl + 320 kbps mp3s + lovely, limited edition jackets. BUY]
Brainstorm - "You Know Who You Are". A song which in its kindness recalls Badly Drawn Boy, which in its playfulness evokes The Eels or even Kanye West. The coup's not in the flimsy lead vocals - it's in the opening guitar riff, twisting, and the constant bassline, marching, and the chipmunk voices that sneak, squeak, and speak to all the promise hidden in a three-minute running time. It's a song that could go further; a silver medal, something I'd still be proud to wear on my chest.
[thanks conor - let me know if there's a link i should point to.]
---
Elsewhere:
Shake Your Fist's 50 favourite songs of 2007.
Stella Chiweshe, the Queen of the Mbira, sings in Shona, a language I don’t understand, so I can’t say for sure that her lyrics ask the question that her music begs, i.e. Who plays video games in the middle of a construction site? but I can say for sure that her song is as sad as a manatee is mammalian, a ‘mom’ palindromic. Ancient sounds are thrown against an electric fence, while, in fugue, the vocalist debates herself, takes losses in direct proportion to victories. [Buy]
***
El Perro Del Mar - "I Can't Talk About It"
Usually, the purpose of speech is to communicate a message, so it is therefore generally undesirable to say the opposite of what you mean (irony excluded). It’s somewhat perverse then that in “I Can’t Talk About It,” that salty sea dog El Perro Del Mar sounds like she’s singing, “I can really talk about it,” as if she were a western European medievalist preparing to answer a question on the Bayeux Tapestry. Though the intention is somewhat more depressive and dispossessed, the woman sounds like a braggart, a braggadocio, full of bravura, if not like a bravo, some bracken, a broadside. For fans of modern-day Motown, latter-day Christmas, Xanax, Zoloft, etc. [Buy]
Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes.
It's been in the works for many months, but it's finally here: The Wonderful Video Contest. We at StG know that you, the readers, are not just passive music dabblers. You may not have a giant music collection, or even listen to music very often, but if you're a reader here, music has an effect on you. You have memories, moments, tingles and sparks associated with music, it's a part of your life like any other. And we have decided to throw a contest to celebrate that.
We want you, the Said the Gramophone reader, to make a music video. Make it for any song you've ever loved, the one song that changed everything, or even just a song that inspires you cinematically. Make it a story, make it a poem, make it an experiment, just make make make it. It doesn't have to be slick, it doesn't have to have money in it, it just has to be beautiful, honest, great. The first and golden rule: make a video you love for a song that you love.
This contest is open equally to professional and amateur filmmakers. I know some of you readers are utterly wonderful film artists, and we're asking you (through the paper-towel tube of prizes prizes prizes!) to make us a labour of love. I know you're familiar with those, and I know that at the end of the day, those are why you're here anyway. Think of it as a reason to start a project that will feel fresh in your lungs.
On the other hand, you may have never made a movie before, and that may be intimidating. But if you've ever wanted to, now is the time. Music videos are short, they're as much or as little work as you want, and the whole process of making a movie, especially when it doesn't matter, is great fun. We were inspired to hold this contest because of a couple of unsolicited submissions, which were so beautiful, and fun, and the kind of great that we're talking about, that we had to know what else you readers would have in store for us. The second golden rule: everyone will be judged equally to a standard that has nothing to do with experience at making music videos.
And the winners are in store for some seriously astounding prizes. The Wonderful Video Contest is sponsored by, is in cahoots with: 4AD, Absolutely Kosher, Arts & Crafts, Dead Oceans, Dreamboat, Jagjaguwar, Matador, Merge, Misra, Oddica, Polyvinyl, Rough Trade, Secret City, Secretly Canadian, Sennheiser, Sub Pop, Vice, and Young God Records. There are cds, vinyl, signed stuff, extremely rare, limited-run singles and 7-inches, limited edition posters, a one-of-a-kind art calendar, premium headphones, even a special birthday phonecall! We're not kidding around here, these are BIG prizes. Everything is outlined in detail (including rules and fine print), on the main contest page.
How To Enter:
1. make a music video
2. upload it to a web-based video outlet (like Vimeo, Dailymotion or YouTube)
3. send an email to videos@saidthegramophone.com that points us to it so we can watch it.
These are videos from gramophone friends that inspired us to hold this contest. These are not entries, but they're a further example of what we're talking about.
Ola Podrida "Lost and Found" (by Todd Rohal)
Jerome Minière - "Trains" (by Dan Popa)
Herman Düne - "Suburbs With You" (by Cassandra Long)
Sunset Rubdown - "Us Ones in Between" (by Dan Beirne (if we can do it, you can do it))
Feist - "My Moon My Man (Boys Noize remix)" (by Sofia Szamosi)
Wolf Parade - "Shine a Light" (by Matt Moroz)
and lastly, note that The Wonderful Video Contest closes February 5th, 2008. So spend your holidays listening and dreaming, and then get down to work, because we're already excited to see your results.
We'll start our week with a bird killer and a hangman.
Fire On Fire - "Hangman". It's mandolin and stamp and big-mouth yell, jaws open wide as muppets'. WAAAA-OOO, they sing. It's a sound that reverberates in my skull as I sit in my office at work, with the Monday raw behind my eyes. It's the opposite of everything before me, or the tie round my neck. WAAA-OOO! What the hell am I doing - what the hell are we all doing, we toilers, we paper-pushers? Why aren't we with our friends, building our own cities, fixing our own feasts, finding our own kings & queens? On Mondays with our stacks of forms and flatscreen glow, it's easy to forget you have friends. That somewhere beyond these chipboard walls, beyond the place where you dwell for a time to bring that bi-weekly cheque, there are people who will clasp and hold you and raise you, when the time is right, onto their shoulders. But even the hangman has friends, my friends, even the hangman has friends.
[Fire On Fire's limited edition, silkscreened debut EP is now available from Young God. / Looking at the "Influences" on the Fire On Fire myspace is like a who's-who of interesting and favourite folk acts: "B. Dylan ... Sun City Girls, Sun Ra, Jolie Holland, Herman Dune ... Alex Lukashevsky ... Doc Boggs, ... Neil Young, Van Morrison, Skip James, John Hurt,... Arthur Russell, ... Gillian Welch, Tarif de Haidouks..."]
Beasts and Superbeasts - "Bird Killer". In a quiet voice - something of Smog, or the fellow British Columbians in P:ano, - Michael Baker tells us that he's a ladykiller. He's a bird-killer, a shark, a dog, a coyote. He licks his lips as his band plays their heavy folk-pop. He sits looking darkly at you from across the room, red kerchief in his upper pocket. He sings of sickle moons and slow-slain suns. He sings that he's a bird-killer, and that ultimately we are all like him, opening wide, teeth flashing like stars. "Sex is a sword / a smile is a wooden horse / we all fear exposing skin / we all sometimes take aim."
[Buy via Randy Bachman's homepage (?!) / MySpace]
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Said the Gramophone will tomorrow be announcing the biggest contest we've ever held. Stop by.
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Elsewhere:
Catbird Records is having a holiday sale.
In my Vampire Weekend post last week I forgot to mention this terrific, hilarious writeup at The Fader - Vampire Weekend's song "Ladies of Cambridge" explicated in a wry, printed-and-scanned bulleted list.
Everyone does end-of-year lists but my favourite are the ones that illuminate music I hadn't heard, or else comment on something in a new, right-on way. 2007's first two essential year-end best-of lists are at Skatterbrain and Motel de Moka. At Skatterbrain Matt rounds up a year's worth of under-the-radar indie-pop releases, whereas Moka's idiosyncratic list has a folktronica bent.
Buildings are made of money, people are made of money just the same way. Animals, appliances, a forest, cars. You can sell them as one piece, you can get money that way, or you can break them into little pieces and sell them that way. It's difficult to tell what way will make you more money. Money is also made of money, you can keep it in a locked room and it will manage to attract other people's moneys to it. Food is made of money, decisions are made of money. A crack is made of money (as in a brick), and to fix it is made of money (as in a window, or a widow). Sybris might be the only thing that is not made of money. They are made of teeth, slippery and separated. And with a sneer, there is no tooth fairy. I want some change. [Buy old Sybris]
--
Elsewhere: Super Deluxe is apparently a nice place for interesting artists.
The Speakers - "You'll Remember". The first two and a half minutes are about trying not to remember, and the last minute and a half are about nothing but remembering. There's an eternity between each resound of piano. Enough time to have a thought and then shove it away; enough time to be happy for a moment before there's that flicker of recall; enough time to imagine for a second that you could forget, that you could move on, that you could leave your sorrow with the water that spirals down the drain of the sink.
The Speakers haven't released anything official since the bloody marvelous Yeats is Greats (2005). (Though there's the Lightning Bug Situation side-project.) They have nevertheless got three whole unreleased albums, not to mention live cuts, odds 'n ends, and so on. So even if The Speakers have nothing new, they have something new: an extremely limited CD-R of their "best" unreleased material, including the above track. It's a very pretty record, perfectly suited to snowfall, with shades of Elliott Smith, Grizzly Bear, even Stars of the Lid. It won't be available in shops.
Said the Gramophone has three of these to give away. If you'd like the chance to win one, email me with the subject line "THE SPEAKERS", and include in your email the best thing anyone has ever whispered to you. Thanks to The Speakers for the invitation to do this.Speakers contest is over. Thanks for your remarkable entries. I'll email the winners. (There's still time to win tickets to Vampire Weekend's concert in Montreal, too.)
[buy other Speakers/Lightning Bug Situation things, or go to the LBS release party in San Fran on Saturday]
Freeway -"Take it to the Top (ft. 50 Cent)". A song borne entirely on the back of Mr Cent: forget Freeway's whingeing, even the cinema-carpet synth riff, we're here to hear Curtis sing the hook. His delivery is gentle, almost kind. "You gotta believe me," he sings, and when he says where he'll take you (to the top), the squeak in his voice is imbued with affection and play. "Shorty," he calls you, and for a moment you can imagine what it'd be like to actually be loved by this guy. [buy]
Broadcast 2000 - "Get Up And Go". A folk-pop song in the broken beat style, as if The Books gave Kings of Convenience the hiccups. Broadcast 2000 is Artisan's Joe Steer gone solo, but "Get Up And Go" is one of these songs that feels very much like it was made among friends. There's no loneliness in this - instead hope, pleasure, community. Light reflected off guitar-strings and onto faces.
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(image from Tradescant's Musaeum Tradescantianum, via the great BibliOdyssey)
Somewhere there’s a woman who carries a hand-held cassette recorder wherever she goes. She records ideas for songs as they come to her, fragments of melody with her voice. When I first met her, I thought this was an affectation and I didn’t like it; I wished that she’d stop. Later, I realized that she was more unselfconscious than I’d given her credit for, just her unembarrassed embarrassing self. And then I was glad for the tapes, for they document the seeds of a brilliant body of work - a million songs wide and as many good ideas deep. She called herself The Fresh Young Breath, maybe still does. Though, given that she never performed, and barely ever shared her work, a name was unnecessary.
There’s something of the disconcerting otherwoldliness of The Fresh Young Breath in the work of Metallic Falcons, something of the trudge and swamp and loneliness. “Airships” is isolation made musically manifest. “Come with me,” the singer beckons, “where rainbows die.” And she invites us to other liminal places, too, and paints them with the distorted, falling-apart notes of an electric guitar. How have we come to hear this, I wonder? This impossible summons. It calls to mind a girl singing tantalizing thoughts into a recording machine, the fruit of which will never reach our ears.
[Buy]
The ease with which this song is produced is completely infectious. If lyrics are this easy, if singing a languid tenor is this easy, if steppity-step drums and whistling organ lines are this easy, then maybe everything is just as easy. Maybe I can snap my fingers in time to the pace of my feet and everything will turn into this gray night cityscape fog. Everything will have the easy grace and breezy moves of an unexpected dancer, a stranger, hiply dressed with a gaunt face, who's suddenly got it goin' on. [Buy]
No Little Kindness - "I'll Try"
No Little Kindness have endeavored to produce a new song every week. Not like "until we have an album's worth" or "for 10 weeks straight" or even "until we're famous", they're just going, no end in sight. And this week's is so far the best. It's taken eight weeks to get here, but it was well worth it. "I'll Try" is a fervent and glowing cloudburst of a song, it's a smooth, blue, revolving, gem. It's, like most NLK songs, a series of thin layers, that first start by getting laid on top of each other, and then end by getting cut through, like chopped in half, to see everything at once, to suddenly see everything at once. And here it's as if this idea suddenly occurs to the singers at the end of song, when they hit "I'll drive in an ocean," (or is it "I'll drive in a notion"?) they almost seem to look at each other, to make sure they're right, that they can destroy everything with guitars and cymbals and that that will sound great. [Previously] [Site]
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Elsewhere: unreleased Sunset Rubdown song in their new Daytrotter Session. "Idiot Heart" is quite nice, but their "tour version" of "Three Colours" is really fantastic.
Vampire Weekend - "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"
Vampire Weekend - "Bryn"
Vampire Weekend - "A-Punk"
Never have I been so happy to have egg on my face. After months of ignoring the buzz around Vampire Weekend, contenting myself with the pretty-darn-good song called "Oxford Comma" and assuming all the rest to be blog hyperbole (hyperbloge?), I finally downloaded their "blue cd-r" a few of weeks ago. Other than singles it's their only release, at least until XL issues their debut next year. And you can't buy it anywhere any more - hence my willingness to share one, two, three songs with you today. My willingness, yes, and also my glee.
Because Vampire Weekend are terrific and these songs doubly so; a mess of glint, snap and bump that sends me happily huddled into my weekdays. It's indie pop informed by Spoon, Paul Simon's Graceland, Wes Anderson, and Baroque string quartets, and if this sounds good to you then THIS WILL PROBABLY SOUND GOOD TO YOU.
"Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"'s named after a Congolese dancebeat but the song's not in fact a kwassa kwassa, nor is it a slow jam, although it's basically about making out, pale and collegiate, and wondering what the heck you're doing. The chorus ends, at least to my ears, like this: "Does it feel so unnatural / to Peter Gabriel too?" And while critics fall over this as a statement about "world music", appropriation, &c, to me it's just a kid's clumsy, loopy wonderin' about the having of sex. Fresh out of puberty, fresh into university, jostling shoulders and hopefully bumping boots with the rich-girl in the Benetton t-shirt and with the Louis Vuitton bag, reggaeton on the stereo like the spiced sound of i-can-do-what-i-want! And our hero, our nervy art student of a hero, thinking as he takes off his undershirt about the man who was all through his youth the paragon of funk, of musically getting down, the bootiest music that 9 year-old Ezra ever knew. Does Peter Gabriel, too, find sex so... unnatural? So happily weird? So happily, happily, happily weird?
"Do you want to fuck?" Koenig exclaims the first time round, the crowing of a lad who can't believe his luck. But he's still too shy to be so explicit more than once: "Do you want ta'?!" he sings every time after that, a lustful lamp in his eyes, "'cause you know I do." Ooo-oo ooh-ooo. And in the song's final moments, before harpsichord snaps into position to show that this era has a cadence, that this soft jersey time will end, we have the sweetest love-scene of any song this year: a scene of white sheets and pink lips and fingers slipping round the curve of an ear, a few bars where we hear just Hammond hum and hands on skin and the bluebird coos of a boy slipping out of one skin & into another. Out of the young and into the old. (Out of the heat and into the cold.)
"Bryn" is a handmade rocket, a skyward climb, the sweetest California sunrise of a sound. It's two minutes of sunkiss and the tumble of drums, it's longing and wishing and the knowledge of it-won't-be. And it's strings, wild and wheeling, the sound of the seagulls - free, certainly, but never ever home.
And "A-Punk", well, it makes Clap Your Hands Say Yeah feel defunct.
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(Vampire Weekend do inspire a whole lot of chewy ideas around race, class, appropriation and so on. The best analysis of these is probably Eric's from last week - it certainly feels like the most honest one.)
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Contest:
Vampire Weekend are touring and they come to Montreal on December 14th. The show's at Club Lambi. Said the Gramophone has two pairs of passes to give away. To enter our sweepstakes email me with "VAMPIRE WEEKEND CONTEST" as the subject-line. And in the body of your email please suggest an alternate name for the band, cos seriously, "Vampire Weekend" is awful.
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(more about the site of the above photo, credit unknown)
There is a lot of snow here. Today's post is going to be a little late.