Archives : all posts by Jordan

It's Valentine's Day today and so I hope you're all making love right now. If you're not, I warmly (and somewhat off-puttingly) suggest that you do.

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Nugrape Twins - "I Got Your Ice Cold Nugrape"

Here's a love song about a drink. When you write a love song about a drink (c.f. my "My Beautiful Diet Pepsi") you do so from the purest regions of what is probably an otherwise rather blackened heart. I say "purest" because you can't expect anything in return for your effort. You will not endear yourself to the drink, and the drink will not weep with gratitude and then write you a love song, quid pro quo. A drink just never would. I say "blackened heart" because if you're going to have a heart, you might as well have it as the Cajuns would. Or perhaps because I am an adherent of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. I can't remember now why I said it.

The love the Nugrape Twins have for nugrape is an ideal love, and their song makes me want to drink a tall glass of ice cold nugrape - whatever that is.

Musically speaking: nobody exploits cadence like the Nugrape Twins. The descending resolution of each phrase is so satisfying that I actually sigh after every fourth bar. [Buy]

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13Ghosts - "Three Little Birds (After Bob.Marley)", followed by 13Ghosts - "Nobody's Hero"

These songs were meant to be heard one after the other. I mean both that they were intended to be heard that way by the band and meant to be heard that way in the teleological sense. Please, for your sake, use your computer to make it happen. 13Ghosts achieves delicate and beautiful (difficult) and then rowdy and drunken (surprisingly difficult). Like that time I saw Bob Marley open for the Band. Or was that just a dream? It was? OK, then: like that time I saw fine china open for Errol Flynn on a bender. [Info]

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Also: A big welcome to all new readers coming to us from StG friend Kelly Nestruck's nice little piece in the National Post about Sean's nice big My Funny Valentine contest/post.

Lylas - "Darling Do You?"

'Muted' and 'naturalistic' are two adjectives that immediately jump out at me. Not so immediately, but just as vividly, 'off-kilter' and 'Smile-ish' make themselves felt. ‘Sweet and sour’ is probably more clearly embodied in certain soups or sauces, but is not entirely out of place here. Adjectives that don’t present themselves to me as I listen include (but are not limited to): ‘courteous,’ ‘tardy,’ and ‘sylvan.’

'Banjo,' 'pedal steel,' and 'snare drum' are nouns. 'Sing' is a verb. 'Whistle' is a noun and a verb. So is 'boogie'. [Info]

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Roscoe Holcomb - "Little Maggie"

Imagine, if you can, how breathtaking it would have been to hear this music in its natural habitat. To hear Roscoe Holcomb's wail and pick bouncing off the green appalachian hillside. [Buy]

Alabama Sacred Harp Singers - "Sherburne"

"Sherburne," recorded in the early 1940's by Alan Lomax for the library of congress, is a masterpiece of counterpoint and cadence. It begins unportentously, as several men tune their voices to one another, then emit incomprehensible utterances in quick succession. What follows though, is something rather more impressive than the sum of its parts: a fiercely sung round of religious faith, that also reminds one of the horrors of war and the power of community in the face of adversity. Like a stunningly beautiful vocal "the wave". [Buy]

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Old Crow Medicine Show - "Wagon Wheel"

There's not much interesting about the Old Crow Medicine Show, and this song could have easily been recorded by The Band, but luckily for OCMS, it wasn't.

Tender like the beef I'm chewing right now (filet mignon (avec sauce au poivre, et des asperges blanches)) and legal unlike the tender I used to buy it. [Buy]

John Coltrane Quartet - "Afro Blue"

Sean having set the stage by posting a six hour song on Friday, I now follow suit with this, the shortest cut off my favourite release of 2005, "Afro Blue" from John Coltrane's One Down, One Up: Live at the Half Note. Recorded in the Spring of '65, just after Coltrane's year of unsurpassed brilliance, this live set showcases the classic Coltrane Quartet in top form, pushed stylistically beyond what they had done on Crescent and A Love Supreme, right up to their limit, as it would turn out. These are longer, freer, more exhaustive investigations than the band or almost anyone else had done previously. Coltrane does not cease to surprise - just as you feel he has explored all a theme has to offer, he will approach it from a new, more oblique angle, showing you something about the song that was there the whole time, that you'd never heard but that you'd felt. Jimmy Garrison and Elvin Jones provide an erratic, tense heartbeat, while McCoy Tyner furiously bangs out storms on the piano. When the radio announcer's voice interrupts the end of the song, we are presented with a very strange juxtaposition indeed: the immanent, earth-bound voice of a radio dee-jay and the transcendent, inter-stellar sounds of the best band of all time.

The band would take on a new form before the end of '65. Where Coltrane was going next he would need a drummer who would abandon traditional rhythms altogether, and horn players whose fluid and continuous shredding and skronking would provide a bed and a foil for his experiments. For me though, this moment, this night at the Half Note, is the high point of an arc, the lowest points of which themselves exist on a higher plane. [Buy]

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Arthel "Doc" Watson - "Hicks' Farewell"

Arthel "Doc" Watson is known primarily as a master of flat-picked, rather milquetoast country music. But here, accompanied by a lone scratching fiddle, he unflinchingly examines his own mortality. Soon he will die, and though he will miss his wife, children, and friends for the short time he is separated from them, those he loves will come to join him soon enough, and for all eternity. He is absolutely sure of this. His voice is rich with bitter herbs, wet grass, moss, dirt, ash. [Buy]

New Buffalo - "Recovery"

New Buffalo starts her song with rolling hand claps and monotonous metal clangs. In so doing, she promises sugar-coated tweeness. Promises mean nothing to New Buffalo, who delivers something altogether different, beginning with a driving and strangely legato bass line. This other thing - the thing that she gives us in lieu of the pretty little song that she promised - is something much bigger, more complex. It’s a tight cyclical sequence of crescendos that moves, not over great distances, but over significant ones. And it’s just a little bit sinister. Don’t get me wrong, the song sheds a pure light - it’s not at all melancholy or sad - but it’s a bit scary. It’s like the fantasy scenes in Heavenly Creatures in which the girls run around exuberantly, elated by Caruso’s voice, or giddily frightened by Orson Welles lurking around the bend; the sun shines and we laugh with them, despite the thick inevitability of crime and tragedy. Or like a surprising sequel to Dancer in the Dark - Dancer in the Light - in which, guess what?, the hanging didn’t work and Bjork survives and she and her son and Peter Stormare board that train and ride it all the way to Paddington Station, whereupon they are lavished with gifts by sympathetic viewers of the first film, which they sell on eBay, procuring enough money to buy sight-restoring surgeries for all, including Stormare. Though he doesn’t need it, he gets it anyway. Still though, none will soon forget about the framing, or the wrongful conviction, or that Bjork was hanged - these facts still weigh heavy. [Buy]

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Reverend Gary Davis - "Candy Man"

Reverend Gary Davis has some trouble hitting several of the notes in his song. Some might say his elocution leaves something to be desired. I can’t understand most of the words in the song - I get “candy man,” and “fattin’ hog,” “big-leg otter(?)” and “salty dog.” But he communicates surpassingly well, I think, that he’d give anything at all just to have his candy man home. [Buy]

Richard Buckner - "Loaded at the Wrong Door"

Listening to the first verse of this song lumber forward with all instruments perfectly in line, you can’t possibly be prepared for the chorus that awaits you in which everything spreads out on a bed of synth, the bass steps out of line, plays counterpoint to the vibraphone (so much power in the mere addition of one quarter note).

Every instrument is used sparingly, except Buckner’s weary voice. His vocals are warm, but removed - a fire seen through a delicate fabric. He sings with cobwebs in his throat. He is not in the least bashful about vocal flourishes, rarely limiting himself to one note per syllable. He’s the Mariah Carey of alt-country. [Buy]

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John McGlinchey - "Spider"

“Spider” is a playful song, in the way that the Unicorns were a playful band. That is, the song is playful, but not silly. Playful, but still serious, dark, spooky. It takes bizarre turns, follows unexpected, treacherous paths into dark woods and pitch-black back alleys. The off-kilter chord changes, guitar digressions, and multi-tracked vocal experimentation are reminiscent of Syd Barrett.

OK, but who is John McGlinchey?

John McGlinchey plays all of the instruments on “Spider.”

John McGlinchey emailed me this song a few days ago. His email was four lines long. It was at least curt, and at most hostile. He did not mention whether or not “Spider” is from an album, nor did he provide a website. He is pretty much unGoogle-able. He is a mysterious psychedelic troubadour who inspires fear in my tender heart. Say his name three times, I dare you.

Otis Rush - "I Can't Quit You Baby"

The blues scale is blue in a number of senses. It might be literally blue for the synesthete, for instance. It’s dark and depressing, of course, but also filthy and unspeakable. It’s as sloppy as the band who plays this song. Here the scale is employed by several instrumentalists simultaneously, who sound like they’re playing together (or, more accurately, against each other) for the first time, and after a long night of debauchery. Each instrument is insistently pointing to Rush’s pain, squawking and honking and harping on the blue notes. When Rush sings “You know it hurt me way down inside” at 2:54, the band brings us closer to the nerve centre, the very source of the blues, with dense unrestrained runs of the scale: a seriously blue moment that causes even the pentatonic scale to blush. [Buy]

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Paul Newman - "Plastic Jesus"

This song is part of the film Cool Hand Luke, which I haven’t seen in years and so can’t remember the context in which Newman performs it. But even without context, there is something oddly captivating about "Plastic Jesus."

Newman begins his song with the line “I don’t care if it rains or freezes,” and he sings it perfectly. He’s cautious and languid and sweet. It’s about all he does perfectly in his minute and a half of recorded musical output, but there’s something fitting about his stops and starts, his fumbling vocals, and his out of tune banjo. It’s his best shot - a modest and honest rendition. [Buy the DVD]

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See you all next year, I hope!