Archives : all posts by Jordan

Ali Farka Toure - "Cinquante Six"

Divide the guitar part into three: the bass (be patient, it comes rarely); the middle (repetitive and swinging); and the treble (running frantically in all directions - sometimes responding to the middle, sometimes ignoring it).  Then put the parts back together, if you can. Hear it as a whole again.  Start from the beginning, if you have to. Listen to the beginning's tentative teasing refrain in which the three parts act as one.  Then hear the treble leave and wander and do coy things and violent things.  Do you hear that it is simultaneously circular and linear?

Drink water as you listen: this song is bone dry.  Trust me.  I'm no camel, but nor am I a particularly thirsty man. [Buy]

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Irma Thomas - "Ruler of My Heart"

A stand-up bass stutters, constantly relocating the groove with its careful placement and delicate staccato phrasing.  That it stutters is nice, but relatively inconsequential compared to the important fact of why it stutters: namely the awe-inspiring voice of Irma Thomas, an instrument which possesses that most rare quality of at once being both smooth and rough, sweet and sour. [Buy]

Twin Atlas - "Roll On"

Can someone please tell me what kind of guitar is used to play the simple lead here? Its tone is clean and chiming and contrasts perfectly with the wash that constitutes the song’s base. While you’re at it, can you tell me what kind of voice is used to sing the double-tracked, reverb soaked vocal? I know that it’s the same kind used in Red House Painters and My Bloody Valentine, but I don’t know the model, the name of which I must find out if I’m to buy it on Ebay and record my own album with it. [Info]

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Most Serene Republic - "Where Cedar Nouns and Adverbs Walk"

The word for Most Serene Republic is ‘precocious.’ In their youth and ambition and skill they remind me of another precocious talent: Jonathan Safran Foer. Foer seems to want to fit every idea he ever had into every word he writes, making for a dizzying read that is mostly as grating as it is impressive. Most Serene Republic has a similar problem/talent, and their debut promises that with some Ritalin and some patience they could record an album that would be enjoyable as well as impressive. As it stands, however, they are stressing me out (too many changes, too many ideas). Also, is their name supposed to be ironic? [Buy]

Sorry everyone. Technical difficulties.

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Bill Ricchini - "Like An X-Ray"

I just got my learner's permit. So I started driving a bit, and I'm really good. I don't use the turn signal yet, but I turn often and so well that other drivers honk in celebration.

Since I didn't have my driver's license in high school, I was very lucky to have liberal parents who lent their car to my friends to drive me around in. Once, the comedian Joel Taylor (sometime StG commenter) drove me to the bus station in my parents' two-tone brown Oldsmobile. On the way, he turned the wrong way down a one-way street (one of the busier streets in Ottawa) and the steady flow of oncoming traffic forked around us. I remember the sound of a thousand horns. We somehow emerged unscathed and pulled into a parking lot at the side of the road. I was in complete shock and Joel looked like, well, Abraham Lincoln, actually. I looked out the window and saw about ten squeegee punks laughing hysterically. Joel waved. They washed our windshield.

Anyway, when I first heard "Like an X-Ray," I immediately thought of being driven in that car, listening to AM radio (the only option), singing along to Oldies 1310. The song's jangling guitars and sunny melody are very AM. And the trumpet calls to mind the end of weekends and the final days of summer: times I spent and contemplated in that car. At 0:55 snare hits begin at two, two-and, and four, providing just the right emphases and swing for a nostalgia inducing AM classic. [Info]

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Iron and Wine and Calexico - "Dead Man's Will"

Iron and Wine is fine, but boring (I think). I thought that maybe Calexico would be just the medicine for Mr. Beam, but alas, it's not quite the case. There still remain faint remnants of undynamic dullness on their collaboration, the ep In the Reins. Still, Calexico does add something - namely, their unusual and unexpected instrumentation and arrangements. Here it's a marimba, a piano and backing vocals that reveal the ghostliness of the material, and bring out the title's second meaning: this is not just a will and last testament written by a living man to be read after his death, but a dead man's exercising of his ghost-mental faculty for choice and action, to speak his regrets and desires from beyond. [Buy]

Frances - "It"

Ironically referencing the "Star-Spangled Banner" in its opening bars, this is a song of frustration and helplessness. The low wheezing of the accordion, forced out in long drones lagging just behind the melody, is a nice reflection of the artist's frustrated attempts at communication. [Info]

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B Castanon has done it again. Frankly, I don't know who this guy is, or if that B stands for Brian, Bradley, or Bronson Pynchot, but until I hear differently, I'm assuming it stands for Brains! If you ever get an email from him (and you will) in which he recommends some music, listen up; he is keenly perceptive when it comes to identifying the Good. For example, please check out this cover of the calypso standard and Andrews Sisters hit, "Rum and Coca Cola," by Les Shelleys. This exquisitely sung version is by far the best song about Trinidadian prostitutes I've heard all night. Hand-claps! Clap your hands.

Dan, do you remember when I sang this to you in your bedroom? You were sitting on your bed, I was posting the blog. Will you deny that you were moved?

Frank Black - "I Burn Today"

“Yesterday I will burn/for the times I did not learn,” sings Frank Black in his warm and wide voice. Probably because he never learned about tenses in school, or maybe because his friend the “tarot maid” taught him that tenses are an artificial human construction (will be a human construction, were a human construction, are being one, etc.). Or maybe he was just distracted by the beautiful playing of his pianist, who finds hidden aspects of the melody and brings them out with a single note or a few sparsely timed chords. [From September's Paste Magazine sampler]

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Listing Ship - "Baise Ca"

“Baise Ca” can be understood as a suicide note of sorts, but its macabre elements extend beyond that interpretation. I’m reminded of the stark black and white images of the bayou in “Down By Law:” the anxiety inducing stillness of the water, a boat cutting through the green surface cautiously, mist and mazes. I’m also reminded of galleys and fires and war in muddy trenches. When I wrote about Think About Life about a month ago I flippantly referred to Heart of Darkness, and now I wish I hadn’t. Because above all, when I hear the tribal click and thud of the percussion and the funereal fiddle, when I hear the singer’s voice emerge, breathless and resigned; I think of Marlow sailing down the banks of the foggy Congo, losing his grasp on reality, seeing a harlequin waving eagerly in the distance. [Buy/Info]

The only kind of band I like is the kind that's American and sings in French. That's the way I was raised. Anyway, I never liked a band until the other night when I first heard Listing Ship on the advice of the enigmatic B Castanon. Today I will share their music with you, the readers of StG. Before I do that, however, I will continue to run late until I catch up (or will I? (c.f. Zeno's Paradox)), at which point the sun will set everywhere in the world simultaneously and my post will appear.

Kaki King - "Can The Gwot Save Us?"

My interest in Kaki King was piqued by a young physicist named Darren. He recommended her song "Night After Sidewalk," and described her as a "more proficient David Pajo." Being a gumshoe by nature, I investigated.

One reviewer described Kaki King's music as "somewhere between funk and flamenco." Now, if you're disgusted by the very thought of such a music, fret not; I'm doubly disgusted. When Kaki King treads "somewhere between funk and flamenco" (and sometimes she does), she treads on dangerous and barren ground, and we needn't accompany her. But here, as on "Night After Sidewalk," she takes advantage of the considerable potential power of solo acoustic guitar music. We hear her fingers depress and pluck, their calloused tips against coarse metal strings. We hear her slow down and speed up, draw out and cut short, her timing unregulated by a band and her emotion unmitigated by the strictures of the pop song. [Buy]

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Robert Charlebois - "Dolores"

Here's what I see when I hear "Dolores":

Porcelain beer steins, of course, and old dark wood. I see big billowing women in denim dresses with white skin and pink cheeks, dancing and smiling. I see skinny old men with combovers fiddling until their fiddles combust. Overalls catching fire, bottles of alcohol exploding on shelves. I see a consuming conflagration. The roof burns away, revealing a blue sky and the sun. The fire dies down. At 3:40 I see what Robert Charlebois sees: a little bird. Men in burnt tatters picking up their smoking violins, the party beginning anew. [Buy]