Archives : all posts by Jordan

Super Eagles - "Love's A Real Thing"

The Ontology

Love is a real thing. Expressible by

The Aesthetic

Actual psych shipped overseas, melted and sweated into something new. An organ played by a child; a guitar played by a skilled, overenthusiastic child, who, like the baby he is, insists on bending every note he plays. A skittering guitar solo in eight bars. Raw-throated Hendrix vocals. The force and manic energy of the American classic rock for which the Super Eagles' love is real. Doubt me?

The Epistemology

"Hold me tenderly and you will see/I'll prove it to you, my loving is sweet."

The Teleology

For us: to which to dance, love, and make merry. [Buy]

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Matt Baldwin - "She Was a Girl, She Was in Love"

An open-tuned acoustic guitar and an aching melody, accompanied by the smallest intakes and slightest outputs of a guitarist's breath. Little is as lovely as listening to the breathing of a musician in song. A player's breath, breathed to an internal rhythm, can be a clue about the creativity of an artist - their own perception of rhythm and time, even pitch and space, embodied more profoundly than in any intentional music. [From American Primitive Guitar, available only on emusic]

The Emanons - "One Heart"

I apologize for my unromantic colleagues here at StG, but fret not mes amours, I have not forgotten about Valentine's week. "One Heart" is my Valentine to you, because I feel that it is a precise musical representation of the tender little relationship we've carved out for ourselves, you and I, here in this pistachio place of ours. Listen to me, I am the bass - endearingly nervous and puffed-up with peacock pride, yet irrepressibly, profoundly gentle, loving, even gooey. And listen to you, you are the vibraphone - poised, self-assured, certainly aware of your own charms, even coquettish. I'm a Pepé le Pew to your Penelope Pussycat, a Pat Garrett to your Billy the Kid, a Stanley to your Livingstone. I'm committed entirely to each and every one of you and to polygamy; let's get married! [Buy]

Great Lake Swimmers - "Put There by the Land" (removed by label request)

The Great Lake Swimmers are slower than cars, slower than bicycles, than grass; they're about the speed of mountains, and maybe not that fast. They can be so simple, the Great Lake Swimmers - more simple than a proof of the Four Colour Theorem, or an ontological argument for the existence of god; they're about as simple as 2 + 3, and maybe simpler still. Here they're as monophonic as Josquin Desprez, exactly as linear as this ________________, and not even the sort of thing that can be as tautological as the argument I could give for the simple beauty of this song based on the true premise that it is possessed of a simple beauty.

[Info]

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Shirley Collins - "A Blacksmith Courted Me"

Time spoils almost all things.

[Buy]

Adderley claims that "Inside Straight" is where he's at philosophically. He asks "Know what I mean?" But who could? Perhaps a more suitable title would have been "When the Fear Stops... You're Dead!" (a work of genius later composed as the tag line for the William Forsythe film, Relentless 3).

Cannonball Adderley - "Inside Straight"

Know what I mean?

Though it at first appears to be a relatively standard (if particularly funky) Booker T and the MGs inspired soul-jazz, "Inside Straight", by its end, proves to be a surreal, frightening, and thoroughly fucked work. After the band runs through the theme once, Cannonball takes a solo that is a lesson in uniquely Southern dirtiness: his staccato is hot sticky fingers and his legato is lllllllllllubricated like... Oh my! And as Cannonball's playing becomes freer, the drummer rids the song of closed high-hat and rides the ride cymbal like a jockey rides a horse, or a mom rides her insolent adolescent son, or a mom rides an aspiring jockey (her son) for not riding his horse enough. The drummer rides the ride to the same extent that Magic Mountain is a ride. Then the drummer drops the ride, moves away from its indistinct clang, and returns to his eminently samplable funk. To take this as a return to home and to normalcy would be to ignore the monster that is simultaneously unleashed on all those in the live studio audience or listening at home - this monster, who now takes the lead, is some sort of half man-half half-brass horn; a bull in a china shop, huffing and chewing and slobbering and finally squealing like a pig. Frightening, I know. But what's more frightening is that this live audience of voyeuristic sociopaths only amplify their hollers and applause, loving every goddamn minute of the whole divine spectacle.

[Buy]
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Cupid: Miss Misery, meet Mr. Disgrace.

fin

[Buy Luke Temple's Hold a Match for a Gasoline World]

Louis Killen - "The Trimdon Grange Explosion"

Just what the doctor ordered. Or, what the doctor would have ordered had the patient been the small English town of Trimdon Grange (suffering from the the loss of most of its boys and men in the coal mine explosion of 1882), and the doctor been Hippocrates himself. After all, what better than a damp, mossy voice and the gentle call of a concertina to part sheets of rain, pull back black veils, and remind us that " Death will pay us all a visit/They have only gone before/We may meet the Trimdon victims/Where explosions are no more." [Buy]

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David Byrne - "Speechless"

Yet another installment in David Byrne's infinite series of songs to prove the inadequacy of words and the capacity of the human voice to say what needs to be said. Here he is spouting nonsense again, as he did in the Talking Heads' "I Zimbra" or Robert Fripp's "Under Heavy Manners," and as in both of those songs, his meaning here couldn't be clearer. For instance, his doo-wop vocal riff in the song's last third is wordless but communicative (part of a dialogue with the drums and bass) of a loneliness speakable only in tongues. [Buy Byrne's soundtrack for the film Young Adam]

Noah Saterstrom - "Buttermilk Hill"

Here's Noah Saterstrom atop Buttermilk Hill, crying at its summit like so many have before him. But Saterstrom brings a special understanding to his otherwise standard predicament, i.e. that his buttermilk tears falling down his buttermilk face turn a buttermilk mill that adds to the base of Buttermilk Hill. Naturally, this process (fueled by sadness) propels him ever further skyward, isolates him more profoundly on the world's y axis. What else does Saterstrom bring? It. Also, he brings the nontraditional to the traditional (a gift), and the labyrinth to its centre (a favour); he brings the absurd a kind of coherence (a thank you). He brings the shoo to the shoo and the shoo-la-roo; he brings the shoo-la-rack-shack to the shoo-la-babba-goo. He brings us an old troubadour's chiming guitar and a just-awoken voice, the daily murmuring of a lament for his missing love and a prayer for the soldier's return. [Buy]

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Howard Tate - "Chain Gang"

Bravery can be defined as the willingness to faithfully cover a song originally recorded by Sam Cooke. Under that definition (the most standard), I, unlike Howard Tate, am a coward. Tate is rewarded for his bravery, not only because he is a brilliant singer, but also because he has surrounded himself with a band consisting of several very bad dudes. The guitarist, for instance, has tone as warm as a perfect bath and as delicate as the bath bubbles that only a philistine would do without. The drummer, who plays a funk beat with brushes, is so gentle and tender that I imagine him playing with one hand and warming milk on the stove for his babies with the other. Or maybe he's a quadruped who drums with one paw, warms milk with another, writes cheques to the United Way with a third, and cuddles the elderly with his fourth. Listening to him now, he may even be an insect, or perhaps, an arachnid. In any case, after we hear from the chain gang for the second time, as the plodding rhythm is about to give way to the more fluid verse, Howard Tate starts to really blow. At the same time, our dreams are realized as the porcelain walls of the guitar-tub break, and the bubble bath becomes a babbling brook, a solo with which we are totally and finally swept away. [Buy]

The Jewels - "Opportunity"

Nothing since Einstein invented electricity has been better for the world than Rick Danko's verse in "The Weight." It's not that Danko sings the song better than Levon Helm, but that he feels the music so deeply and so viscerally that he is compelled to cut Levon off in order to rudely interject his anecdote about "crazy Chester." Similarly, The Jewels trade lead vocals at intervals determined, it seems, by each, in turn, being overcome by an urge to siiiiiing. The soul is catching; more catching, even, than influenza or Thurman Munson.

In "Opportunity," The Jewels extol the virtues of Robin Williams's personal philosophy: carpe diem. They urge us to be prepared to act the moment that opportunity strikes, since it's not likely to strike twice. The Jewels - i.e. a diamond, an emerald, Jewel, and a big fat sapphire - lead by example: when given the opportunity to work with material as good as "Opportunity," they do not squander their good luck. Instead they apply the profound minimalism of a Smokey Robinson arrangement to a melody that needs no instrumental help.

Better and more hand-clappy than all of Jewel's subsequent solo work. [Buy]