Archives : all posts by Jordan

Dear Readers,

What can I tell you? Well, I can tell you that there was no post today. I could tell you whose fault that was, too. But I don't want to point fingers. Especially because, being a man without joints, I find it particularly difficult to point fingers at myself. In any case, myriad factors went into this breakdown and I don't want to bore you with a tedious multivariate analysis of everything that went wrong; or, rather, I do, but feel that you don't want me to, and you know I only give you what you want, right babies? To make up for it, I will post two whole songs tomorrow. And, what's more: I'll write about them. Big time.

In the meantime, I urge you all to check out Carl Wilson's exceptional and rather otherworldly post from yesterday. I think it's quite unlike anything that has been published on this site, or, for that matter, unlike anything on Carl's own.

Ramblin' Jack Elliott - "Engineer 143"

Ramblin’ Jack Elliott’s new album is a masterwork. In his highly melodic guitar strumming - alternating bass note patterns playing counterpoint to the vocal lines - we hear not so much Woody Guthrie, as has been claimed, but what Woody Guthrie begot: early Bob Dylan. More than forty years after the fact, Elliott gives us an album that is more similar to Dylan’s brilliant self-titled debut than any I have heard. And yet this time it’s not all bravado and stance, nor borrowed drama and forced humour, as it was with Dylan, but a naturalistic statement of a life lived ramblin’.* With his first album, Dylan was fumbling toward his own style. Though there was always something unique in his voice, he had not yet fully developed the tools that would allow him to create Bob Dylan Music, and he compensated for this lack with a highly developed appreciation for the music that was his passion: old-timey folk. Elliott’s album also has an aspect of tribute, but it is the tribute one gives to a peer as opposed to an idol, and so it has a very different quality. This Americana folk music is not a stylistic springboard for Elliot, as it was for Dylan, it is his music, and he’s got playing it down to a science. [Buy]

*To avoid charges of Rockism, I should be clear that this isn’t an argument for the superiority of Elliott’s album over Dylan’s (no such argument could be sound), but merely a comparative description.

***

The Donkeys - "Come On Virginia"

This song is mixed like a bowl of well mixed greens (i.e. well). The vocals sit in the instrumental tracks like my cat Bruno the Berber (Purr-Purr) Kitty reads YA fiction (i.e. comfortably). The piano is like Mondrian blocks of primary colour and the slide guitar is like pastel Riopelle squiggles (i.e. the piano player is Piet Mondrian and he didn’t so much play piano as paint in his usual style, and the slide guitar just sounds kind of like Riopelle, you know?).

The lyric “You like long hair and I platitude the chin” is like Pythagoras’s views on beans, but unlike his views on triangles (i.e. false). I platitude the chin; no one else.

“Come on Virginia” is like an undeniable summer anthem in that it is one. [Buy]

***

What do you guys think about turncoats? Do you feel negatively toward, say, Judas Escariot? Benedict Arnold? The Hudson’s Bay Traiting Company? My former editor Max Maki?

You: But she was so loyal!
Me: No, that was a facade.

Max will be leaving the StG family and will be adopted by the richer and more prestigious CBC radio family in Quebec City. There, she will become someone else’s editor Max Maki. The Defector knows no one in and nothing about Quebec City, and though, of course, I wouldn’t want any of you to extend even the most miniscule of kindnesses to this back-stabbing apostate, I would appreciate it if any Quebec City readers might contact Max and, along with your lengthy chastisements, let her know where’s good to go and what’s good to do or see. Goodbye, Max. See you never.

Jesse Malin - "Hungry Heart"

This is the one-thousandth Bruce Springsteen cover I've posted on StG. The truth: this is a Bruce Springsteen cover blog. However, as Springsteen basically jacked everything he ever did from the work of Abraham Maslow, I think it's only fair to call a spade "a spade" and recognize that StG is, at its core, an Abraham Maslow appreciation page, or "fan-site". "Everybody needs a place to rest/everybody wants to have a home," sings Malin reciting Springsteen stealing from Maslow's seminal A Theory of Human Motivation. The only observation that Springsteen adds to Maslow's thoughts is that "everybody has a hungry heart" - a claim that is absurd on its face. Hearts aren't even the kind of thing that can be hungry.

Anyway, ethical transgressions aside, the song's a heartbreaker and the force-of-nature distorted guitar-drum machine combo is like the game of baccarat: outmoded and potentially ruinous. What?! Recommended! [Buy]

***

The Louvin Brothers - "In The Pines"

A contradiction:

Jilted, the Louvin Brothers leave their home in Tennessee and move in among the pines, where it is both pitch black and quite cold. This is, of course, a babyish response to broken-heartedness.

Louvin Brothers: (stomping feet) Fine! you don't love us anymore?! Then we're going to live in the pines!

"Little Girl": C'mon guys, that's stupid. We can still be friends.

Louvin Brothers: (lying on their stomachs, flailing) No no no no no!

Yet, the occasional mandolin flourishes, and the astounding eight-bar electric guitar solo display such emotional maturity and subtlety that it forces one to question the very foundations of classical mathematics: on what grounds do we believe the law of the excluded middle and the law of noncontradiction? Recommended! [Buy]

Gorky's Zygotic Mynci - "Can Megan"

A psychological puzzle: I always moderate my language for the sake of politeness; I walk in an affected, bizarrely prim manner; I only ever eat sloppy joes and mincemeat pie. Why?

A clue: I listen to Gorky's Zygotic Mynci every single day. Why?

An Answer: My editor Max Maki's roommate's favourite band is Gorky's Zygotic Mynci, and as I spend 12-15 hours per day being edited (I'm an illiterate perfectionist), and as Max hasn't left her house since she was 7, when on her first and only ever outing she was burnt by the sun so severely that she ceased to be physically manifest whatsoever, I end up spending a lot of time with Max's "spirit", her roommate, and ergo Gorky's Zygotic Mynci. Which is fine, because I like Gorky's, but also not fine, because whenever I hear their music, I become extremely paranoid. Everything takes on a sinister aspect when Euros Childs begins crooning in his "sweet" falsetto. The walls start to close in on me, my friend's eyes cloud over with... are those murderous connivances? The ethereal Max Maki continues to hoist beer mugs and ice-cream cones, a kind of unmoved mover.

There's a sub-genre of pretty folk or folk-pop music that includes artists like Skip Spence and Simon Finn, as well as Gorky's, and is characterized by an underlying complete fucking insanity. You are lured in by the quiet, understated beauty of their work, and don't realize, until it's too late, that this music is primarily an off-kilter expression of the artist's extreme emotional vulnerability and/or deteriorating mental health.

But listen closely to "Can Megan" - there are clues. The Rhodes organ, for instance, is an insane instrument. It sounds like a precarious manic episode spent on the verge of tears. The rocksteady guitarist is drunk and the Philadelphia soul horn section is slow and lazy from too many downers. Consider please the low-mixed electric harpsichord. Is that not insane? And, of course, the song ends with this refrain: "You make me crazy," sung over and over again.

I assume that "you" refers, in this case, to the fact that the Welsh pronounce 'll' like Semites pronounce 'ch'. A fact that can leave no Welshperson untouched by insanity. [Buy]

***

Charley Patton - "Prayer of Death: Part 1"

Rarely have a voice and guitar been so perfectly symbiotic; they mirror each other, respond to one another, each consoles the other, they reconcile themselves to their mortal fate, keep on rolling together.

Patton was the subject of John Fahey's Masters thesis and here you can hear the roots of Fahey's slow, dense patterns, singing treble lines, and existential concerns. [Buy]

Frankie Sparo - "Back on Speed"

1. If you must know, then yes, I played in a Scrabble tournament this past weekend. So what? Why must you judge me so? In any case, the point is this: it turns out that 'reimbue' isn't a word. Nor is 'heaviosity'. Yet this song exemplifies the quality of heaviosity and could reimbue any lost soul's life with meaning.

2. "Back on Speed" begins with a painfully sparse distorted guitar riff and a shaker on the downbeat. It's a horse's trot in 3/4, a trot into some deeply dangerous territory. Most of Frankie Sparo's second album Welcome Crummy Mystics sounds like slowly dying from a stab wound, so it wouldn't be ridiculous of you to think, for instance, that this intro is the sound of, say, the trotting of the four horses on whom ride the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Not ridiculous, but incorrect.

3. Remember Story Starters? Based on the erroneous idea that children can't come up with their own story ideas, sometimes teachers will, when assigning writing tasks to grade-schoolers, give them Story Starters like "What if Earth were a polygon instead of a sphere?" or "What if 'sphere' were the only word in our language and a perfect polygon the only object in our world, then how could we talk about anything, never mind the only two things that matter: newborns and peppercorns?" etc.

4. Quiet down class. Here's a homework assignment worth 100% of your final grade: take however much of the first thirty seconds of this song and use it as a Song Starter for your own song. Record it and send it to me. I'll judge it, and if I like it, I'll send it around to record labels as my own. Thus is my insouciance in the face of copyright law and the ethical realm. But seriously, I want you to do it, OK?

5. Because none of you, having only heard the first thirty seconds of the song, could expect anything like what follows. The vocals - unlike any elsewhere on the album - have so much fight and life in them. Harmonically, the song moves little: here, as in life, there are small steps up, small steps down, full of effort and tension, but no cadence or resolution. That is, until 2:16, when the choir kicks in and the sparse riff from the beginning reemerges, and now we get our cadence and our resolution, and yes, this is death, but not from a stab wound. This isn't the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the already dead and decayed, this is Ethan Frome and Mattie Silver, or even Thelma and Louise, only now, as they embrace the end, experiencing life fully. [Info]

Brown Bird - "Monkey or an Engineer"

Don't look down upon Brown Bird just because he can't decide whether he is a monkey or an engineer. It isn't always easy to distinguish. One point of confusion, for instance, is that monkeys engineer and engineers monkey. Another is that engineers and monkeys both have tails, are good at mathematics, drink white wine to the exclusion of all else, etc. Capuchin? That's a monkey. But, Spider Monkey? da Vinci? Rhesus? Alexander Graham Bell? Who can tell?

Brown Bird is not a sound engineer, that's for sure: tape hiss is featured prominently throughout his song. Then again, the song he engineered is artistically sound, and therefore, yes, in at least two senses he is a sound engineer. We mustn't forget, though, that monkeys are also sound engineers of, for example, monkey nests. So what do we know? Certainly not whether Brown Bird is a monkey or an engineer. We do know, however, that "Monkey or an Engineer" is neither a monkey nor an engineer, but a wise old ballad. [Info]

Orillia Opry - "Lucky Wind"

1. From what little of them I’ve heard, Orillia Opry is a pretty-voiced indie-folk quartet whose long songs are guided by simply strummed acoustic guitar, and complemented by the occasional well placed vocal harmony and solid bass and drums rhythm section. Which is all very well and good, and even your mom would like it, but: you know when you’re sitting at home in a terry cloth robe, watching CSI Miami and eating a fresh angel hair pasta with home-made pesto and you’re like “oh, this is good, man, I’m really enjoying this pasta and this sauce I made and I don’t even think this meal could have been better if it had been prepared by Emeril Lagasse himself,” and then some guy who you’ve never met comes along, and yeah, he’s impeccably dressed, and yeah, he looks a lot like Peter Lorre, and yeah, here he is, uninvited, in your living room with a brick of parmesan and a grater, and he just goes wild on your pasta? I mean, he shows no restraint? And then you just start screaming at him, like “Get out of here! Who are you?!” You know? But then he gets really, really scared because of how loud and aggressive you’re being and he runs away? And now you’re super hungry because of all the adrenaline that’s running through you because of Peter Lorre and probably too because it’s that episode of CSI Miami where Eric Roberts plays the psychopathic nemesis of David Caruso and then kills himself with a pb and j sandwich just so Caruso won’t get to him first, which is really intense, so you take a big bite of your pasta and it is just, wow, it is really a lot better than it was before? In fact, it’s fucking amazing? Do you know what I mean when I say that what was a quotidian snack has now become pure ambrosia?

2. The electric guitar, with its warm, rich tone, affected with tremolo and reverb, is approached in the Motown style of switching easily between a deep groove in the rhythm playing and soulful melodic blues in the lead.

3. Later, when you’re writing your SATs, you encounter the following question:

Your angel hair and pesto was to the parmesan as Orillia Opry is to

a) Prime numbers
b) The historical Jesus
c) That glorious electric guitar

And you think ‘Thank you, Peter Lorre - for the parmesan and the help on my SATs. You sir, blew through my life like a lucky wind.’ [Info]

***

The Soft Disaster - "Nothing Returns"

What is it about Ottawa that breeds music like this? Probably the same thing that breeds perfect little mp3 bloggers (i.e. bureaucrats). The Ottawa indie-rock scene has quietly been developing its own sound for over a decade now, taking as its starting point the tight structures and crisply distorted intertwining guitars of the Wooden Stars. Here the Soft Disaster uses the Ottawa building blocks to make something delicately fuzzed out, with a cleverly drawn-out rising action, a moment’s climax (just enough for a few “ooh”s), and a brief, tender denouement. [Info]