Rachel Ries - "You Only". At first this folk-song seems clumsy - a too-wakeful song about sneaking into the house, a too-sprightly song about tuckin' in for the night. But then you realise, aha, why the guy is singing along - that oh lordy she's in on it. This isn't naive platonic playing: this is not a Saturday afternoon jam. No it's friskyfrisky: it's the laughing la-la-la of lovers who stuff their faces with peanut butter and then fall into bed; of those evenings when even if it's two AM there's still fingers running up and down that banjo; of those evenings when yes there's honeydew to be had. "For you only..."

I used to wonder what would happen if Sarah Harmer ran away from home wearing a red riding hood, en route to join the east-coast whaling trade when oh golly she fell head over heels in love, and with a South Dakotan boy at that. So she moves to the cornfields and though she sings to the sky and the cows she's also thinking of skyscrapers and smoke, and how they're not at all there... Anyway, I used to wonder, but then I got the beautiful package that is the Rachel Ries CD and now I don't wonder no more. Instead I sit on my bed feeling like a girl and listening to Rachel's voice.

[buy / more info]

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Downy - "Ichi". When you're out walking one day, maybe you'll crest a hill with tall green grass and you'll suddenly face a dragon and uh-oh his mouth will already be open and he will be breathing fire and you, sir, will be in the thick of it. You'll be in a world gone liquid and gas, amid swirls and shocks of feeling, hanging there for the split second before the melt-and-collapse. If there was an observer, if there could be an observer, they might see just death. But you don't just see death: you see eddies and currents, you see flickers and licks, you see flame and fire. You, the wo/man who is being burnt to death by dragonbreath, you see your childhood and adolescence and old age, you see your whimsy and longing and regret, you see how your dreams and achievements get muddled up when they're put in a box and taught to fight. You're delusional now, (you're dead, frankly,) but you understand life's hot rumble better than you ever did when you're alive: it has something to do with earthquakes. Something to do with earthquakes.

Downy are a band from Japan. David sent me this song. It is a heavy jazz-rock, an Acid Mothers rock, a lodestone rock, something to use instead of a mining drill or Need New Body. But if you listen twice, thrice, you hear that the sludge isn't sludge - it's different things, guitar and bass and clangs, saxophone and a man's keening Minus Story vocals. It's like how you can see starlight two different ways: either it fills the sky, bright as oblivion, too bright to think; or else they're pinpricks you can pick, constellations you can choose, friends that take shape in the thick gloom.

[buy (if anyone can find any cheaper sources, let me know)]

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Elsewhere:

I like the look of O Song -- Augie March, The Zombies, and the Paul McCartney song I may yet post here. I love that there's good songs and dollops of writing to accompany them. (Also, judging from the number of comments there, Said the Gramophone oughta just switch to livejournal.)

Daughters of Invention paint a cocaine-partytime kinda Toronto that's news to me, but cool I guess. More pertinently, the music's great: case-in-point the piano-rickety Robyn b-side about masturbation.

Tuwa's still lookin' for (at least) another person to review a doubtless-most-awesome mix CD for a Tofu-Hut-style project. Someone snap it up!

and finally, Abby's got a wonderful rant about posting pop songs you love.