Archives : all posts by Dan

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Horse Feathers - "Helen" (song removed by request)
Horse Feathers - "Curs In The Weeds" (approved from Kill Rock Stars site)

An orgiastic past. A turgid and turbulent past. Like a flipbook where every image is different, it's confusing to think back on it. It's sometimes painful or shocking to think back on it, especially compared with the current surroundings; so calm and warm and sun-dimmed. With a dry clicking swallow, it's the easiest thing in the world to just never think about it again. And yet, it's kind of like starting at zero, you feel jealous of strangers, like they must have a head start. Until, walking in the park, you happen to see an old tree, a big old tree, and a little sapling next to it. And you realise the world takes so damn long to change, which makes things better. It'll be another ten years (or until a flood hits your town) when you realise it takes just as long to change back.

Horse Feathers will set free their new and shining album House With No Home for purchase next Tuesday. [pre-order here from Kill Rock Stars]

Annie - "What Do You Want (The Breakfast Song)"

I took the city bus to and from high school for four years. Every day there was an autistic woman who would sit in the same seat, and every time we hit a certain corner in the route, she would begin repeating the question: "What are we having for dinner?" Over and over, practicing for when she walked in the door I imagine, over and over. It didn't take long for this ritual to become very comforting, and the rare days when she was absent, I didn't notice until we hit that corner and the phrase started repeating in my head on its own. Now I suppose the same kind of memory trigger will be true for this song. I have to assume the most appropriate set of circumstances to trigger this would be a roller-skate rink with multi-coloured disco lights and people in animal costumes. Or somehow getting around town by slide. Like a slide that works like public transit. [site shop]

Orouni - "A Greased and Golden Palm"

This chorus is like looking out a basement window, squinting in the light of a day that was never supposed to come. Like, there was no day scheduled today, but it showed up anyway, proof that it really does love you, that it missed you during the night.

[album released tomorrow on MonsterK7]

Of Montreal - "Nonpareil of Favor"

Skeletal Lamping is described by Kevin Barnes as his most confessional album. For an album dedicated to hunting out, killing and mounting, or cooking and sharing around, the skeletons in one's closet, I love that the introduction is a thank-you note. It's the kind of thank-you you say just before your lips dip under water. You know that kind of half-swallowing last word to the sky as you slide right under the water. Into the blaring pressure of those guitars, those transfixing and transformative guitars, all you hear is loud, and you know that you will hear always these sounds foreverever in your new shape, they will have to compliment everything else now, you hear and see and look a totally different way now. A last thank-you before starting the process of opening your skull at the seam and turning right inside-out. Kevin Barnes understands me.

[via Rolling Stone]
[pre-order starts next week for this incredible album]

Chad VanGaalen - "Rabid Bits of Time"

I moved into a house once where someone had left meat in the walls. I think the landlord had made them mad, so they put meat in the walls, and re-drywalled right over it. I moved in in the winter, slippery and messy as hell, so I didn't notice it until the first real heat wave in late May of that year. Something as hideous, as obvious, as death slept through the winter, ignored its duties until spring, until it exploded into a rush of decay. And that's exactly what this song makes me want to do. To just forget all the stuff I should be doing, all the little tiny bits of tasks and touch-ups that line the pathways of my day like knots in a winding bannister of dental floss, and just wait until it all falls out at once, until I do something different, easier, better, bigger. Chad VanGaalen understands me.

[pre-order from Sub Pop]

[source]

David Byrne & Brian Eno - "Life is Long"

Sincerity is a chore that we perform every day. Honesty is a conscious constant effort, like hiking up your pants when you don't have a belt. Love is the nearest street corner to your house, you see it every day and you pass it by, always reminded, always there for the taking. Truth is brushing your teeth, you can force it, fake it, or mean it, but if you get it done eventually you'll come to like it. I can't understand this song, like I can't understand "Perfect Day" by Lou Reed, but I can react, and I react by lying down in the back seat of a car, putting the middle seat belt over my chest, and watching the telephone wires making that eternal rising dipping line in the sky.

[order directly from David Byrne]

Parenthetical Girls - "Four Words"

This is the opening track on the Parenthetical Girls' new foray into a cloud of earnest brilliance, their hollywood-broadway-avant-garde musical Entanglements. I never thought of it before, but it's a perfect fit for Zac Pennington's already well-instantiated style; lead role in a musical. From the moment he starts his cooing warble, and his imagery that pushes on that part between your thumb and finger (the part that schoolyard rumour had it was connected straight to your brain) the album gallops away and never looks back (but of course always looking kind of back). The album is really wondrous, just to listen to it, you can't really do anything else, it's like being covered in three feet of velvet and jewels and creams. But specifically, "Four Words", like much of Entanglements, is made of very heavy orchestration, at times almost too heavy for Zac to hold cupped in his hand, but it's perfect for his character who is being overcome by music, by words, near possessed. What I love most about Parenthetical Girls, and it's true here, and all through Entanglements, is how unbearably sexy they are. Like, sexy to the point where I can't bear it, it becomes dangerous, dark, harrowing. "Four Words" is the extremely tempting beginning to a story full of moments lush, carnal*, and true. [Pre-order for the Sept 9th release]

*yes, sexual, but also just "relating to the body", Pennington is a genius of evoking horror and pure ecstasy about the human body.

[Zac also wrote for us some time ago]

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Quintron - "Model Ex-Citizen"

Here comes Quintron, carrying a roller-coaster organ and a drum machine. He's here for you. He knows it's Friday. [site]

Envelopes - "Boat"

The Envelopes have made a very nice album, Here Comes the Wind. The album, I would describe it as nice, it doesn't offend, it's confident in itself, and it doesn't presume that you will enjoy it, it earnestly tries to convince you that it's pretty cute. But "Boat" is the album's dark center, it's bloody filling. It feels like a child's confession, in the kind of way children can talk when they don't really understand how much their words can cut deep. It bandies its own horrible despair around like it were the shoes in the front hall. Everything is right about it: the strummy guitar standing on its tippy-toes and the little sliding notes as steady as summer rain. And her voice like cupped hands, not interested in yelling or getting carried away, just here to tell it like it is.

Oh, and it's got 45 seconds of some kind of naval computer war sounds at the end. The first part feels tied to the song, like as if the child character goes back to playing video games after singing, silent and staring with blue light flickering on her. But the second part feels like part of the album (it gets a bit bloopy after this point)

[Buy]

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Elsewhere: Ed David e-mailed us yesterday with a link to a lovely little documentary that he photographed on Paul Mawhinney, the man with the largest record collection in the world.

Devo - "The Day My Baby Gave Me A Surprize"

I knew a guy who could only make love while listening to Devo. He honestly could not become aroused if Devo was not playing. Since I have never made love with this man, I can only tell you everything else I know about him, or I should say knew about him (he could have changed by now) during the period of 2002-2003. His desk at work was extremely neat, the only things left on the top would be a bottle of hand sanitizer and compressed air. The walls of his cubicle, however, were more cluttered than the family fridge. Pictures of the ugly little children of his friends and family, bad comics torn out and tacked up on a whim countless months ago, a small Matrix Revolutions teaser poster. I couldn't say with certainly, but I strongly believe that he wore the same undershirt every day. He was not bad looking, but did not know how to accentuate his strong features. He had occasional blemishes, and often red and enflamed cuticles. He was always an hour early for work because he claimed that was the only bus he could catch, and yet he still complained about it almost every day. He once begged me, literally begged me, to help him finish a tube of pringles. But I was eating yogurt, you know? [Buy]

Central Broadcasting Traditional Instruments Orchestra - "Dancing in the Moonlight"

Who understands the world better than me? Who believes in me more than the whole world? If I let go of a hang glider, another one will be waiting a few feet below. If I walk into the ocean, the great underwater waves will push stones into a ridge so I may walk straight out. If I make a fire and it blows out, it will blow into my chest and set me running for another whole cycle of the moon. I am made only of rain, and grass, and blood, and wood. I am complete and only my smile is gangrenous. [Buy]