Archives : all posts by Jordan

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "Ignition" (live)

Grace from Australia sent me this R. Kelly cover about eight months ago.

Is it right to write about "Ignition" from within my parents' home? No. It's too dirty. Nevertheless...

After reading a Nabokov short story about lepidoptery, do you grab a big net and a mason jar and go butterfly catching?

But, does staring at an Escher lithograph drive you to the study of higher geometry?

Still, isn't it the case that immediately after reading a Dick Francis novel, you ride a horse in a steeple chase/solve a crime through cunning detective work?

Each of the above artists is an expert in the field of his subject matter, and sometimes portrays it from an obscure, inaccessible perspective - one which I can often appreciate, but rarely relate to. This is true too of R. Kelly and his subject matter: doing it. But unlike zoology, math, and the world of equestrian crime, sex is not the domain of experts. It is for us all. When I listen to an R. Kelly recording, I'm not aroused or seduced, but shamed. I wish he wasn't kickin' it with my girlfriend. In his version of "Ignition," Mr. Oldham gives voice to the amateur love-maker. He's self-conscious and ironic, but not detached or untrue. It's the self-aware awkwardness and ridiculousness of his attempt to be sexy that makes it seem so authentic and, well, sexy. When at 3:19, things fall apart, he and his "partner" start laughing. Now they're having fun. This I can relate to. This is hot. I don't know about the lascivious science of R. Kelly, but I do know about being laughed at in bed.

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Boat - "Holding All The Globes"

The last slow dance ever. Played by a four-piece band, two of whom seem to have nothing to do but show enough good taste to do nothing. [Info]

London readers: I'm sorry and I hope you're all OK.

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Kind of Like Spitting - "Thirteen"

When Elliot Smith covered Big Star's "Thirteen" he turned the sentimental psych-pop ballad into a melancholy finger-picked nostalgia (i.e. an Elliot Smith song). Kind of Like Spitting carries the song further in the same direction. There is nothing about this version that doesn't mean high school to me. No note, or phrase, no emphasis or delivery that isn't authentically of the high school boy. I recognize that tape hiss: it's the pervasive 'hsss' of late night four track love songs.

KoLS (why this name, Kind of Like Spitting?) chooses mostly on the side of restraint, and always on the side of good. He changes a line: "If it's no, well, I can go" becomes "If it's no, then I can go." This is a better, starker, less snot-nosed line. Less a threat than a regrettable fact. He holds back from running his vocals on the second line ("meet you at the pool"), as the other two versions have it. This has the effect of making the later runs ("Paint it Blah-ah-hah-ah-lack," etc.) more striking; more true to his tentative, grand, clumsy love. When he doubles his voice, he finds his way to the most gentle and careful harmonies. While sung in the present tense, it is set in a past shared by us all (remember?). [Label]

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Thanks for asking, Dan. Here are two (very roughly mixed (why so much vocals?)) new recordings.

Removed due to band upheaval. I probably should have asked them before posting the songs in such rough shape. Sorry about that. Hope I didn't get your hopes up too high.

Architecture in Helsinki - "The Cemetary"

Not former champions of the Howard Scripps National Spelling Bee, Architecture in Helsinki includes somewhere in the range of six hundred different singers (among them: Robert Smith, "Boris" Picket, The Bangles, The Cincinnati Bengals, and Leibniz (Ha Ha)).

One hundred tiny songs threaded on a streamer. [Buy]

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Kate and Anna McGarrigle - "La Vache Qui Pleure"

These two voices are familiar playmates. They were, after all, born and raised together. Individually, they each mean something different (one is the earth, the other the sky), and together, when they harmonize, they are, well,

Keep this in mind:

You graze. You chew cud. You're prone to disease. You're feeble-minded. You follow the Socratic ideal, and as such, refuse to engage in escapist thinking - facts are facts, and you know that you are likely to encounter a wide range of unpleasantness in your short life (utter prodding and slaughter, to name just two examples).

Sometimes it's very sad being a cow. [Buy]

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Hello everyone. Whatcha knowin'?

Holopaw - "Igloo Glass"

The members of Holopaw must have thick skin if their paws are in fact hollow. Otherwise, how could they play guitar with Nick Drake quickness and lightness? How could they play trilled bluegrass mandolin runs? How could they play cymbal-swells that last forever, ambiguous and unresolved? Wouldn't their unreinforced fingers collapse under the pressure? I think so.

At the end, when the back-up singer switches to "this little light of mine," I think of McCoy Tyner surprising John Coltrane with an unexpected and perfectly placed chord. [Buy]

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Christine Maki - "Portuguese Soundscape"

For those of you wondering about Montreal's Portuguese community (I assume that's all of you):

My editor, Max Maki, makes radio documentaries. Some are serious and newsy and some, like this one, are hysterical and whimsical. She is a gifted observer of life's small incongruities and absurdities, and as such, makes radio that is very funny and just a little bit (and only obliquely) existentially significant. [Email]

Kath Bloom and Loren MazzaCane Connors - "How It Rains"

Loren MazzaCane Connors plays music like this: he plucks a guitar string and bends it as far as he can while groaning in harmony. Simple as that. He's been doing it for years. It sounds like dying.

Kath Bloom sings like this: as if from within a hundred-year-old wax cylinder.

Goes together like a horse and carriage. [Buy]

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Richard Youngs - "The World Is Silence In Your Head"

If Steve Reich and Coldplay... [Buy]

Chad VanGaalen - "Somewhere I Know There Is Nothing"

For those of you who love Early Music as much as you do indie rock, "Somewhere I Know There Is Nothing" will be for you what a baseball stadium full of ice cream is for me: a bringing-together of two great elements in the creation of an optimal aesthetic (or, in the latter case, architecturo-gastronomical) molecule.

Imagine a Sufjan Stevens/Josquin Desprez/Samuel Morse/birds collaboration. What?! You can't? Go back to school! [Info]

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Tom Tom Club - "Genius of Love"

Is this the original version? I have this on record, but no working record player, so I haven't listened to it in ages. Anyway, I don't remember it sounding this way.

A Literal Interpretaion:

1. Girl gets out of jail.
2. Sex.
3. Girl discourses on the time-bending funkiness of Bootsy Collins's bass playing and the superior vocals of one "Smokey Raw-bin-sin."
4. Tribal chanting.
5. Boyfriend goes missing.
6. Girl relates anecdote about what it was like when she and Boyfriend did cocaine (they "went insane").
7. Japanese is spoken.
8. Girl spouts nonsense.
9. "Bohannon/Bohannon/Bohannon/James Brown/James Brown/James Brown/James Brown"

See you guys at the disco. [Buy]

Terry Jacks - "Concrete Sea"

Some of you will have read of my editor, Max Maki. That's because she likes to insert her name into as many posts as she can get her greedy (not to mention greasy) little bearpaws on. Yesterday, she was listening to the CBC (Max likes the radio) and heard an interview with Terry Jacks. Now, I'm not going to lie to you: I'd never heard of Terry Jacks. Max told me that he was the artist responsible for that insipid enemy of a song, "Seasons In The Sun," (best selling Canadian single of all time (boo!)) but that - as evidenced by his extraordinary song "Concrete Sea" - he was not a man of pure evil but a man divided between that extreme and its opposite. Needless to say, having never heard the latter song, I was sceptical (of her dubious claim (would you trust a new invention of Dr. Frankenstein's?) and of her existence (I'm an Ontological Skeptic)).

But, Good Lord! Was I ever wrong? Not before yesterday, I wasn't.

Add some vibrato to the voice, change the 4/4 shuffle to a slow waltz and convince Neil Young that he wrote "Concrete Sea" and he'd be real proud.

Turn it into a book, take out the ham-fisted rhymes and convince H.D. Thoreau that he wrote "Concrete Sea" and he'd be real proud.

It's short and it's simple - a formal reaction against the "concrete sea." Yesterday, Jacks described it as "simple and all acoustic." That, of course, is a lie. Electric guitars are not among the instruments we label as acoustic. But would you expect honesty from the man who brought us "Seasons In The Sun?" [Buy]

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A cover of a Frog Eyes song from a Believer magazine music comp:

Wolf Parade - "Claxxon's Lament"

Wolf Parade plays a kind of caustic church music. A church music without the appropriate deference to greater powers. Fittingly, here their voice sounds like the voice of god, tentatively forming prayers in the imperative.

It sounds a bit like Bowie and a bit like Destroyer (the horns at the end are vividly evocative of City of Daughters), and it sounds a bit like a new kind of plainsong: unadorned, yet spilling over with feeling. They sound confident, doing much with little: a reverb-soaked harmony at 0:45, a moment's vocal vulnerability at 1:05, an aimless organ, a simple guitar counterpoint, the repetitive and dissonant interplay of the muted guitar and off-kilter saxophone squawks that bring the song to an end. [Buy/Info]