Archives : all posts by Jordan

My Brightest Diamond - "We Were Sparkling"

Goth - but not like PVC and black lipstick, nor like the barbarian sackers of Rome. Goth like Aristotle's and Goldielocks's favourites: the temporal middle-dwellers - E. A. Poe, Goya, and the bad dudes who built the gargoyles and stained glass of Notre Dame.

Soft - but not like an old teddy bear, nor like an enormous cotton ball. Soft like an overripe apple, or brown, slushy snow underfoot.

Slow-unfolding like a The For Carnation song.

Again, like a The For Carnation song: An already eerie atmosphere, defined by the round tone of a plucked guitar, becomes frightening through the subtle use of well-placed chimes and metallophones.

Like, pretty sweet. [Buy]

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Timber - "Criminals"

What "Criminals" lacks in melodic movement, it makes up for in slight and fine increases in harmonic density. Timber knows how to build pretty sounds one on top of the other to make something just a little bit more than pretty. Neither hot nor cold, "Criminals" is the temperature of bodies - a middle ground pleasing to the Greek philosopher and fairy tale character alike. [Info]

Yellow Jacket Avenger - "Little Thief"

1. Among the bands that list Yellow Jacket Avenger as an influence on their MySpace pages are Kepler, the Wooden Stars, and Clark the Band.

2. Yellow Jacket Avenger lists Joan Armatrading as an influence on his MySpace page, and in the chorus of "Little Thief," this influence is unmistakable.

3. Sometimes YJA's music is fierce, mathy post-punk; sometimes it's easy instrumental. Sometimes his music is entirely organic; sometimes it's exclusively electronic. At its core, however, there is always a pure, delicate, pop sensibility.

4. Several years ago I was driving to Halifax, where The Cay was to play with Yellow Jacket Avenger later that night. The car was entirely enveloped in fog and we couldn't see anything beyond our windshield, save for an occasional high beam. What came over me, as we listened to John Coltrane, and moved at high speeds with zero visibility, was a combination of fear and awe at the otherworldly beauty of the grey nothing beyond.

It wasn't until Yellow Jacket Avenger played his first notes that I was jarred out of my zombie trance. The precision of the music, along with the vulnerability buried shallow underneath, were familiar reminders of the Ottawa sound - co-invented by YJA - that was so definitive in my aesthetic education. [Info]

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Roy Harper - "North Country"

Hear hear: Roy Harper's wonderfully off-kilter take on the traditional English folk song that also served as the basis for "Scarborough Fair." I imagine that Harper's version has the exact opposite effect on children as does the S and G version. The way over-the-top string section has the occasional elemental force of Van Dyke's arrangements for Ys, and the inexplicable final minute can be explained as simply the perfect ending to another Roy Harper masterpiece. [Buy]

The fact that two nights ago was New Year’s Eve means the impossible: that this is now 1913. Alexander Himelfarb lives in Poland. An erstwhile professor of mathematics in Warsaw, he was discredited when he denied the validity of Georg Cantor’s diagonal argument for the different sizes of infinite sets, based on his assertion that “though Cantor might sound good, questions of the infinite should be left to the Rabbi.” Whether he meant that infinity as a concept should be left to religious thinkers, or to him alone (for he often referred to himself as the Rabbi), has no bearing on the inappropriateness of the comment, given that it came from an atheist mathematician. Himelfarb is richer than the chocolate mousse he’s eating right now. His wealth was acquired not through math – in that field he was a middling professional - but through the shmatte trade, in which he excels. It’s the garment industry that has allowed him to pursue his two greatest amateur passions: sweet toothism and zoology. He’s traveled the whole East of Europe hocking his wares, sampling desserts, and collecting local specimens for his menagerie. He has a white husky, an orange tabby, six fine examples of koi fish, a parakeet, and a monkey named Kurt Gödel (of whose namesake Himelfarb has not yet heard).

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Otis Clay - "Trying to Live My Life Without You"

Exactly one year has passed since January 2nd 1913, but seemingly a lifetime’s worth of tragedy transpired during that time. For instance, Alexander Himelfarb’s Traveling Menagerie has dwindled down to exactly one animal. The reason for this atrophy is simple enough: the monkey Kurt Gödel is a murderer. He poisoned the husky, garroted the tabby, filleted three of the koi, smoked two others (one like a brick of gouda, the other like a cigarette), and tricked the last into a deadly hunger strike. It’s been almost six months since Kurt Gödel killed the last remaining animal other than himself – he shot the parakeet in the head – and yet Himelfarb is only now beginning to suspect the true nature of the crimes. He wouldn’t believe that Kurt Gödel could harm a living thing, so tender had Gödel been in all his dealings with him; yet lately something sinister had crept into his aspect.

Kurt Gödel had always been jealous, but in the last several months his envy had taken on a higher level of intensity; he’d been weeping loudly and flinging his own waste willy-nilly every time Himelfarb brought a woman home. Himelfarb wondered if his affections for the other animals had indirectly brought about their demise. He has decided to confront Kurt Gödel about this.

AH: Kurt, could one accurately describe your animal jealousy as insane? And, moreover, did you kill every other animal in my menagerie?

Not satisfied with Gödel’s responses – the monkey Kurt Gödel does not speak or understand any language – Himelfarb decides that despite the good times they have shared and the profound love that he still feels for “KG”, their only chance to lead normal lives is to go their separate ways. Kurt Gödel reluctantly agrees to a trial separation.

In February of 1913, Alexander Himelfarb became a perfect sphere, and though he could appreciate the wondrousness of this physical manifestation of a mathematical ideal, he also saw it as a sign that he should lose weight, and accordingly he sacrificed one of his greatest pleasures: the consumption of sweets. Now he is watching Kurt Gödel walk out the front door of his marble-tiled mansion and he is thinking that losing desserts is nothing compared to losing your best friend. He is singing.

Listen, you can hear him.

“Trying to live my life without you, baby, is the hardest thing I’ll ever do.”

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Jay Wiggins - "Sad Girl"

It’s a year later, Europe is at war and Himelfarb is dying of an unrelated disease. Bombs have rendered his mansion dilapidated and moribund. He sits amidst the rubble that once comprised something so grand and decides that he prefers his house and his life now that they are both liberated from the strictures of formality. He thinks of the monkey Kurt Gödel with love. Though there had been a fine beginning, what a sublime ending.

[Buy 1914, 1915]

Percy Sledge - "Come Softly To Me"

There's nothing quite like being thrust from sleep into an unexpected situation. Each time we wake up we are acclimatized to this world anew. Mostly this is an indiscernible process - a quick, confused moment, passed before we're fully conscious. But sometimes, when we wake to a surprise, our bodies and minds fight each other to get their bearings: our hearts race and our brains drag. For instance, imagine my surprise this morning when I looked out of my office window to find below me a fruit grove replete with lemon, persimmon, and pomegranate trees. The old grove exuded a dignity surpassed only by the the gnarled pines standing straight and high above it with neatly coiffed heads of green hair. Between these, on this perfectly clear day, I could see St. Peter's Basilica. Ah, Roma, I thought, quale buona sorpresa.

I'd be equally surprised to find out that "Come Softly To Me" was not recorded in a similarly surprised morning state. Perhaps Percy awoke to find recording engineers setting up a studio in his bedroom - a situation that would shock the most easygoing among us. Perhaps he searched the room for something familiar to ground him, though nothing - not even his white linen bedsheets, his white silk pajamas, nor his white on white paintings - could do the trick. Until, that is, his eyes came to rest on his lover sleeping next to him in bed. By this time, the band had already been playing for almost eight bars, but only now did Percy begin to understand what was going on. A white mic descended in front of his face and he began to whisper a love song, not to his lover - no, he whispered so he would not wake her - but about her, to everyone else; so that we all might know his hope that his lover would always be there when he awoke from now on - a fixed point of reference in a frightening, constantly shifting life. And when his soliloquy came to an end, the horn and string sections began to play right beside Percy's lover's ear, yet so softly that she did not awaken; not then, nor ever. She was dead. No, I kid (?). [Buy]

Rufus Thomas - "Little Sally Walker"

Little Sally Walker was the subject of a song sung at camps and as accompaniment to epic jump rope sessions. Sally was an innocent - a little girl who sat in a saucer, turning from side to side, wiping her crying eyes. That is, until Rufus Thomas got to her and thoroughly sullied her good name.

Rufus's Southern dance-soul take on the theme is altogether more adult than the rhymes that preceded his song. His intentions for Little Sally are entirely unwholesome, and he makes no bones about this, making them plain with an ensnaring snare, base bass, horny horns, and a most lascivious larynx. [Buy]

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Pigmeat Terry - "Moaning the Blues"

My parents were going to name me Pigmeat until they learned of the towering blues great of the same name. They thought, How is this boneless pudge-sphere of a baby boy going to fill the shoes of the bluesman who could moan like a clarinet and sing like a plunger-muted trumpet? Deciding that I appeared to lack any blues talent whatsoever, but that I excelled in the dramatic arts, they instead named me after Jordana Brewster, then only one year old. [Buy]

Arthur Alexander - "Anna (Go to Him)"

It has been said that I have a tendency to exaggerate about the weirdness of some music. This past summer, I made a post about Gorky's Zygotic Mynci in which I complained about how scared I was by one of their songs and how completely deranged the band seemed. Everyone who spoke to me regarding the post claimed that the song had sounded entirely natural to them and that it was I who came across as frightening and worrisome. Not entirely impervious to self-doubt, I listened to the song several times subsequently and still heard something sinister hidden in the Welsh cowboy music - the organ whispered conspiracies, there were daggers in the tumbleweed. I was forced to conclude that Gorky's had indeed gone insane, and that, in fact, all of my friends and acquaintances had come similarly undone. Thus began my Great Hermitage, still currently underway.

Tell me there's nothing abnormal about this song and I'll tell you there's nothing abnormal about you. But I'll be lying. For your position will not only be false, but incoherent, and I will not dignify it with a counter-argument.

Though, I could. And if I did, it would go a little something like this: Yeah, "Anna" sounds like a mid-tempo Sam Cooke soul-pop ballad with a more confined vocal line. Natural enough, I suppose. But allow me to direct your attention to Arthur Alexander ("Double A") himself, whose Sam Cooke is augmented by just a touch of Vincent Price. Or to Alexander's drums ("Double A's Batterie"), of which the high-hat sounds like a whisk slapping against a sheet of foil. Most of all, one should consider that the piano line sounds as if it's emanating from an ancient player piano with a dying motor - a sound more appropriate for a horror movie than a love song. Say what you will; I'll stick to the truth: this song is fu-ucked.

[Buy]

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Inlets - "Pictures of Trees"

Some guesses as to what might be causing this sound called "Pictures of Trees:"

1. The Wooden Stars and Cerberus Shoal share an Elizabethan priest hole for a practice space.
2. Post-castration Abelard has access to a tape deck and an arsenal of strings and woodwinds and Heloise's musical preferences include but are not limited to indie folk, Steve Reich, and choral music.
3. Sufjan Stevens is becoming uncertain, more questioning, begins to explore something more deeply fragile in his music.
4. Inlets the geographical entities or Inlets the band or both.

[Info]

My dear misguided readers, never before have we been in more desperate need of a serious chat. I've started a fire here, opened a bottle of Shiraz. Come sit by me. Do you like dark chocolate? I hope seventy percent cocoa isn't too bitter for you. Because if it is, you're not going to like my one-hundred percent bitter attitude. Where did we go wrong? From what great heights and to what terrible depths have we fallen? I still think you're sexy. Very sexy. Almost too much so to bear, really. And I know there was a time - don't you dare deny it - when you felt the same way about me. I'd suspected for the last little while that you might be losing interest (I even briefly entertained the absurd notion that you had started reading Sean's or Dan's posts). But nothing could have prepared me for the blow you dealt me in the comments section of Sean's November 24th post.

Sean wrote something about fishing or love or something false about Joanna Newsom or whatever - I didn't read it (at least I'm still faithful to myself) - but the first comment had nothing to do with the post's content, instead focusing on its effect. The commenter, one L, wrote something so obscene that I hesitate to quote it here: "Note to boys reading STG: Memorize this stuff - surefire way to get into a girl's pants. mmmmm I'm all tingly." This pornographic imperative disturbed me, and I can tell you from having subsequently "memorize[d] this stuff," that it's not true. Mere moments later, Danica, another commenter, added that she had had a "makeout dream" about our very own Dan Beirne. Well, I thought, now it is my turn. I waited, refreshing my screen every thirty seconds, sure that the comments box would fill up with lurid anecdotes about Himelfarb-related sexual fantasies, as well as phone numbers and salacious propositions. (I know I still become aroused every time I reread one of my posts.) But it never happened. You hurt me deeply and I sobbed until morning. I decided that maybe Danica had actually dreamt about me and simply misidentified me as Dan, but this made me feel only slightly better.

So now I have to win you back, my babies. Let's consider this post the beginning of a slow seduction. And what better way to begin than with a man whose sex appeal not even the most frigid among you will deny: the late, great Wilson Pickett.

Wilson Pickett - "Hello Sunshine"

Since I can't bring each and every one of you breakfast in bed like I'd like to do, I'm doing the next best thing to help you start your day off right. Are the short days and the increasingly cold weather starting to get you down? How about the fact that you're fundamentally alone? Well, "Hello Sunshine" is like a dangerously large dose of Xanax. I heard it for the first time last week and I've been in a psychotically good mood ever since. How Pickett's honey-thick vocal, the boisterous Southern horn stabs, and that fucking sinister piano lock into such an awfully deep groove, I will never know, but I do know that I just laughed my way through Babel, which I guess is supposed to be a bleak movie - such is the mood-altering capacity of "Hello Sunshine."

[Buy]

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Hey guys. You're looking really good. Such sensual features. And so smart too. You're like the young Hannah Arendt of readerships.

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Forest City Lovers - "Song For Morrie"

I worry sometimes that you think I'm too goofy to be sexy. But it's not like that. In fact, of the three bad StG dudes, I probably like the least goofy music (I'm also the tallest, have the best defined abs, etc., etc.). Case in point: this small, tender song about the death of a loved one. I'm not afraid to talk to you about how much it all makes me feel: the wonderfully restrained lead guitar part, the miniature keyboard solo, the gravity of the bass drum and the lightness of the vocal playing tug of war with...

You see?

[Info]