Archives : all posts by Dan

AIDS Wolf - "Spit Takes Like Metal"

Like any genre, noise requires a certain mood to be enjoyed. I saw Half Nelson yesterday, and I'm pretty inclined to start smoking crack and hating myself, but since I don't have the energy or the fearlessness to do that, I'll listen to AIDS Wolf. I can't write about what I enjoy in this music, because what I love about it has nothing to do with any communicable pleasure. It's the kind of pleasure you get from hurting yourself; not only is it kind of embarrassing and difficult to try and explain, you end up sounding pretty juvenile. Example: imagine all the unspoken misunderstandings, the half-jokes stopped after they've hurt feelings, the obscure glances, the incessant tiny disappointments and misplaced intentions, the small rejections, put-downs, and smirks, the turns of smugness, and any use of your power against someone else. Imagine those all added up and melted down, until they pour out of the bottom of a cooler in a steady stream and into the grass. That is this song, cathartic and red.
see what I mean?

[site]

Blue Pine - "The Milkmaid Queen"

I leave messages on people's answering machines for a living. But this. This. I feel unfit to do my job. The brevity and power of a "call me, we're fucked", but the delivery and teeth of a "you're not good enough for me". I hope your voicemail sounds always and never like this. [Buy]

Blind Roosevelt Graves and Brother - "I'll Be Rested (When the Roll is Called)"

I'm getting ready for the Rapture. I'm boarding up my neighbours windows, I'm keying stretch Hummers and Vespas. I'm digging a trough in the middle of my lawn, and piling the dirt at the front like a great pompadour. I'm making sandwich after sandwich, and freezing them alongside my collection of stolen cellphones and prescription sunglasses. I'm screaming and slapping the girls who leave school first, I'm struttin' my new longboard and wielding it like a saber against mailcarriers carrying packages from Amazon and anything heavier than it should be. I'm right, I absolutely know that I am. [Buy]

Blackball False, Truth! - "Girl Penguin, Come Back, Goddamnit!"

If a roadtrip were a hypodermic needle, the car the plunger, then getting out of at the end would be near impossible. This slow building of pressure, over hours, though at top speeds, is what this song feels like. The same is true for much of this great album. How else can I analogize this feeling? Like, imagine all the lightbulbs in your house were actually balloons, and the more you left them on, the more they inflated. At first it's cute and fun, then it starts to impede your work a little bit, and soon you're overwhelmed, you can't even move, they're hot, they kinda burn.

Blackball False, Truth! - "Motion Sickness Conquers Heartache"

the colour comments: formerly Malmo, BF,T! seems to be one guy, so i guess touring is out until a band can be assembled. This is a very interesting veil under which to experience this music. It feels anything but solitary, and totally full-formed, not layered at all. An unexpectedly commendable achievement. Now get a band.

[site]

The Morning Benders - "I Was Wrong"

This song is like peanut butter and banana sandwiches are for me, like microwaved instant coffee is for my roommate, like saying "I'll be gosh'd" is/was for your dad, probably. It's something you resort to, but don't mind at all. It fills the absence of the new with something that, for us, will pretty much always work. I can't write this in a way that it sounds like a compliment, but it is. [Buy]

Thrush Hermit - "Oh My Soul"

This is where this paradise was founded. Dusty (whose band, Relief Maps, is at Divan Orange on Friday) gave me this song when i was 18, and I felt like I'd been living a life devoid of a whole lot up to that point. These kids were 18, making this, a whole bunch of years before I even heard it. It would be like discovering the Unicorns right now. It made a nice mattress, a cushy floor, onto which everything i like will eventually fall, and get added to the mush. [Buy]

After Zac's post last week, I've been listening to that Girl Group Sounds collection he mentioned. Hoo, boy, it's fantastic:

Julie Driscoll - "I Know You Love Me Not"

Swirling with the sweep of a James Bond movie song, and founded on Bonnie Tyler-level commitment and verve, Julie Driscoll, I don't know who you are but I will never forget. The worst kind of scorn is the same mistake made twice. Betrayed forgiveness tops the list for reasons to sing an "i'm gettin' ova you" song. This should be covered, immediately, in the following way: vocals by Chrissy A, backed by Tapes n' Tapes, and they should linger in that all-too-short last part, because there's more in there, I know it.

The Fabulettes - "Try the Worryin' Way"

The most sensational song in the set, The Fabulettes seem to have been the Right Said Fred of their generation. And I don't have to explain that further. I don't have to explain squat to you when you walk in at this hour.

also, what is this trend of fading out at the best part? So disappointingly efficient.

[Buy]

[Zac Pennington is the genius behind (or amongst) the geniuses of Parenthetical Girls. They made an album so beautiful in detail and breadth that it's the reason I want to make a top ten list this year. They're currently rumbling across eastern North America, and they're here in Montreal on Friday. Friendship Cove, 7pm, 6$. You don't have plans, so I'll see you there. - Dan]

I wish it were a more chaste emotional relationship that I share with pop music—a mutual, unweighted dedication unsullied by commerce, criticism, or the chasmic disparity that rests between my life-long veneration and its pure, colossal indifference. And although there is certainly an amount of pleasure and happiness in it, the fact of the matter is that there is an inherent impurity at the dense, unkempt roots of the whole affair that’s enough to blight it altogether: that of a seemingly inexhaustible jealousy married to nearly every inkling of satisfaction that pop music’s light casts upon me.

Or more simply: with virtually every new exhilaration brought upon me by pop music comes a little tinge of resentment at the vast cavities in my personal musical capacity—whether it be that I feel mentally/dexterously incapable of achieving the heights suggested by those I admire, or merely that I didn’t get there first.

I never played in a band in High School. The band with whom I am currently crossing the country (I-94, approaching Eau Claire, Wisconsin) is for all intents and purposes my first proper band, now in its umpteeth awkward incarnation. Before this band, music was tangible to me only by the obsessive collection and cataloging of arbitrary facts and artifacts—its construction an exhausting mystery. The tools necessary for music making—even punk rock—seemed to me to be mostly the product of a laborious exercise in rote that I never had the patience for. [Though it’s certainly not a point of pride, I’ve still somehow secretly managed never to learn to play a proper power chord]. The source of as much teenage frustration as pleasure, pop music was ever-elusive–and oh, how desperately I envied those somehow able to harness the ephemeral majesty of “Doll Parts” or “Bullet With Butterfly Wings” during lunch breaks.

And though I convinced myself that a more reciprocal relationship with music was all that would be necessary to quell the hopeless jealousy that I had come to expect from most every listening experience, the truth is, making music myself has only made matters worse.

Sparks - “Popularity”

Though probably not even in the top twenty-five of the Maels’ countless perfect pop moments, this “Popularity”’s very plainness illustrates more than any other the casual genius of Sparks—the band that has most been at the business end of my increasingly green complexion for the better part of the last few months. The brilliantly inconsequential lyrics aside, the song’s bouncing verse may just be the most perfect melody ever written—had Sparks themselves not written roughly three dozen melodies that better it. It’s so good in fact, that they don’t even fuck around with a chorus—they just tease you with the first five notes until the verse comes around again.

The Moles – “Minor Royal March”

I covet virtually everything Richard Davies touches, but among all of his quiet triumphs, nothing comes close to the whole of Instinct, his largely solo follow up to the appropriately celebrated Untune the Sky. The past few years have seen the expanded reissue of the releases that bookend what for my money is his hands-down masterpiece, but somehow Instinct remains neglected. “Minor Royal March,” the album’s opener, is here chosen somewhat arbitrarily for its undeniable horn refrain, but it should be noted that Instinct—a hiccup of a record at ______—is best viewed on the whole. There is presently no record that I would rather have written myself, and as such, Instinct is something of a cruel joke to experience.

Dawn — “I’m Afraid They’re All Talking About Me”

Though the analogy only goes so far, I occasionally consider my now-ancient affection for Girl Group pop the closest thing I ever came to a substitute for Hardcore—a faceless teenage obsession whose minor variations are mostly only discernible to the fanatical, and whose reach colors, however faintly, the way I hear the vast majority of the music I listen to. Also like most ex-hardcore kids, it takes a real gem to arouse any kind of excitement out of me when faced with a previously unheard single from the era. The expertly compiled One Kiss Can Lead To Another box set unearthed a handful of them, but none quite so gutting as Dawn’s “I’m Afraid They’re All Talking About Me.” Where once I would’ve been hot on the trail of every other Dawn single (and probably the producer’s as well), I’m now comfortable just leaving the particulars a mystery—as shrill, demanding, and haunting as that mystery might be. “Afraid…” milks the classic Girl Group fake-out—the pregnant restraint of the verses, the brief gasp, and the absurd chorus explosion. But the point here, clearly, is the refrain—the best song title Morrissey never wrote, “I’m Afraid They’re All Talking About Me” is all I’ve ever wanted in a chorus. And I can’t believe they beat me to it two decades before I was born.

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[Buy Sparks] [Buy The Moles] [Buy Dawn]

Carillon Ringing - "Fisher"

An hourglass, while functioning, is the simultaneous dismantling and building of, to some, a little mountain. A mountain, turned upside down, drips into a new one. This is what's happening here, on today's show. The top song drips into the bottom song, the first always dying, the second always growing, both lovely and beige and made of the same stuff. To put it another way, the first song is a dawn, crisp and unexpected, and the second is its identical reverse, a dusk slow and cloudy and careful.

Both are little marvels; listen to them in order.

The Strokes - "Under Control"

[Carillon Ringing's site, Buy Room on Fire]