Archives : all posts by Jordan

Robert Fripp with David Byrne - "Under Heavy Manners"

?Under Heavy Manners? starts off dated: a reggae disco whose bass sound betrays its age. However, we are compelled to listen on by the familiar clipped vocals of David Byrne, singing the names of as many isms as he can think of in the nerdiest voice he can muster (not to be scoffed at, as Byrne?s nerdiest is analogous to Aristotle?s driest, Woody Allen?s most anxious or Dave Kingman?s highest (home run)). And we?re glad we stick with it, because the bass fades away from the focal point and is replaced by increasingly dense layers of Fripp?s signature guitar playing (unrecognizable as guitar, like panes of slightly different coloured glass being superimposed onto one another).

And then when the bells come in, Byrne is released from his word game:

?Bells, I can hear bells.?

No one plays guitar like Robert Fripp or sings like David Byrne, and so it is not surprising that as a team they were able to produce something unlike anything else.

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Six Organs of Admittance - "Khidr and the Fountain.mp3"

My friend Darren has been spending some time learning to play the solo acoustic guitar songs of John Fahey. In doing so, he told me the other night, he?s grown sick of listening to Fahey?s music. All the mystery has been taken out of it. He is too well acquainted with the songs to enjoy them, at least for now. So, he?s been looking for music to fill the void left by the absence of Fahey, and has as of yet been unable to find anything suitable.

Which of course brought to mind the classic question: if you are someone whose favourite artist is John Fahey and you are going to a desert island but can?t bring any of Fahey?s music, what music do you bring in order to satisfy your appetite for Fahey?

I guess you bring the early recordings of Six Organs of Admittance. SOoA, like Fahey, is a guitar virtuoso with a fondness for the solo performance without overdubs. Also like Fahey, he plays sad, dense multi-rhythmic songs deeply rooted in the tradition of early American blues and folk, as well as Indian classical music. Which is not to say that he is merely a follower of Fahey. It would not be possible to confuse the two guitarists. Whereas Fahey plays a dead slow aching swing, SOoA plays a faster, more straight ahead wall of notes; steadily alternating bass note patterns and simultaneous blazing treble solos.

?Khidr and the Fountain? tells the story in song of the Islamic prophet Khwaja Khadir who is supposed to be the only immortal man, a position he got himself into by drinking from the Fountain of Life.

Though there is something of Middle Eastern immortality in this song, there are also equal portions of cowboy face-off and Spanish folk tragedy.

Tommy James and the Shondells - "Crimson and Clover"

You've probably heard it before, but it's worth another listen.

Tommy James and the Shondells were mostly a schlocky bubblegum-pop band, but their one foray into the then popular world of psych proved most fruitful. Just as James and his Shondells had brought the mindlessness of pop to new levels with the meaningless "Mony Mony," in "Crimson and Clover" they leave no crevice or nook of song untouched by the wavy, multicoloured hand of psych. The incredible drama achieved by the major chord progression, click and jangle percussion, backup "ah's" and the proto-emo avowal vocals, makes this the perfect psych-pop track for the dance you're planning (save a spot on your dance card for me, please. I like the slow ones).

As the song unfolds, each instrument becomes increasingly drenched by tremolo, until it becomes almost unbearably shaky (just give us one whole signal). Then, just when we think it's too much, that it can't get any heavier, when all the tremolo solos have played out over their tremolo backgrounds, at 4:22 the tremolo cuts out, leaving us a crisp two-note guitar riff and then (oh, there it is) deeply tremolo affected vocals, repeating what is perhaps one of the most inane refrains in the history of song: "Crimson and clover, over and over." The song builds itself back up around James, the two notes repeat faster and faster, a wave of tom drums propel forward.

Even the notoriously picky Hubert Humphrey endorsed this song. And perhaps if he had chosen it as his 1968 presidential campaign running-mate instead of that dreadful bore, Edmund Muskie, Nixon would never have been President and we would be living in a very different world right now. A world with an America that used to have "Crimson and Clover" as its Vice President. A better world.

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Mirah - "Murphy Bed"

Alternating between deep warm tremolo ascending arpeggios and shimmering treble strums, Mirah monologues to her boyfriend or girlfriend (let's call him/her The Corporal) about the merits of an open-relationship. She hopes that The Corporal's getting some action while The Corporal's out on the road. She wonders whether or not she should tell The Corporal about what she's been up to. She explains that when The Corporal comes home, The Corporal can tie her to the bed ("let's do all the things you said").

Being a man of the cloth, all this means to me is sin. However, I fully embrace this song on the basis of its brief and dense wall-of-noise crackling coda.

Hayden - "Home By Saturday"

It turns out that Hayden?s latest is actually really good. This will be a vindicating admission for certain parties who have been met only with ridicule during their repeated attempts to convince me and my trusty editor of just that.

On this track Hayden intones in his usual half-distracted, lying on a flannel-covered couch at his cottage kind of way. He sings about giving up the music biz for a girl with whom he doesn?t want to screw things up. I ignore the lyrics.

What should not be ignored is the guitar triumvirate consisting of an acoustic (reminds me of wheat or corn or golden crop of some kind), pedal-steel (a friend with interests in sliding and bending) and their leader, the distorted electric (confidently clears a path, which the pedal-steel follows like the tide coming in, tentatively moving forward two steps, then back one).

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International Airport - "Cyclonic Lanes"

There are two singers on "Cyclonic Lanes", neither of whom is particularly competent. The fumbling of the male singer who starts the song off is not quite as cute as it is cringe-worthy. However, at 1:07 the female singer takes over. She has a lisp which she exploits to its full potential; making the word ?sun? softer than it already is over and over again. This in combination with the distorted found sounds, drum machines, Rhodes organ and out of tune flute, causes ?Cyclonic Lanes? to be not just your standard clumsy indie-pop song, but something kind of elegant and intensely sleepy. The latter quality being an important one at this late hour.

Castanets - "Cathedral 4 (The Unbreaking Branch Song)"

Starting out as an amorphous and toneless sermon on spirituality, the soul and God (set to down-strummed acoustic guitar), "Cathedral 4" turns at 1:12 into an amorphous and toneless dance sermon on being and the good life (set to down-strummed electric guitar, jaunty and oddly detached organ, occasional glassy guitar and a borderline silly drum beat). Good. Because that's what I require of a song.

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Great Lake Swimmers - "I Will Never See The Sun"

Some name/thing confusion that is likely to arise when listening to "I Will Never See The Sun":

1. This song is similar to The Saddest Music In The World, but not to the saddest music in the world.

2. The Great Lake Swimmers are the Great Lake Swimmers, but are not (to my knowledge) Great Lake swimmers.

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Some identity confusion that is likely to arise when listening to "I Will Never See The Sun":

1. This song is the Bluenose sailing in 3/4 time, and, of course, is not that.

2. That triumphant bass part is four round raindrops (the volume of a full big bathtub each) falling to the ground and coming satisfyingly undone on impact. Also, that is not what it is.

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An ambiguously constructed sentence pertaining to the aptness of the band's name:

Rarely has the name of a band been so powerfully evocative of its aesthetic.

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This is a very beautiful song.

Macha Loved Bedhead - "Believe"

There is real artistic vision at work when a musician hears Cher's "Believe" and thinks to himself rightly "I could do a great cover of that." Macha and Bedhead had the thought and executed the cover almost perfectly (maybe it could have been half the length).

The original is something like what would result if an automated phone service and a soulless record producer met at a seedy downtown bar, drank four old fashioned's each, made out and procreated.

The cover keeps the phone/electronics focus of the original but slows it way down, moves it from the gross oversaturated green night club scene, to a creaky sunbright bedroom. The vocoder is kept, but instead of sounding like a computer it sounds like an ancient quarter-inch tape recording left out in the rain and then played on a reel-to-reel with a precarious power supply.

Go here to make your own cover. I can't stop.

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Smog - "Hit The Ground Running"

So, this is a weird one. Here's how it starts:

Pizzicato strings and a child staring straight at you singing exactly what's being plucked, "bum, bum, bum." There's something vaguely psychopathic about it. Then another kid steps out from behind the first. And a third kid from behind him. Hey, it's a grade three class unfolding from a single-file line, all singing the "bum, bums." Where's it going? You don't know. You don't even know how you got here in the first place. Then Bill Calahan (aka Smog) starts in. What does the bizarre man behind this circus have to say? "I had to leave the country, though there was some a nice folk there."

Mostly it's a straightforward 4/4 rock song, but sometimes it has a string section and sometimes a choir of children.

Don't be upset when he sings "I was born in a pit of snakes/Blink your eyes/I was raised on cake." There's no reason to be upset by what is good.

If you sense something different about today's post, perhaps a residue of some kind, then you are a particularly astute reader and have picked up on the fact that my editor, Max Maki, has laid her greasy palms all over this stuff (these posts were, she will claim (she's hungry for credit (albeit, where it's due)) co-written).

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The Silt - "A Song About A Red Whistle"

I once had a red fox forty. So I know something about whistles. Excited to sit down and put my knowledge to use, I was disappointed to discover that "A Song About A Red Whistle" is actually a song about a song about a red whistle. Knowing nothing about songs, I wept.

"A Song About a Red Whislte" is a shanty stomp from the mines to the mess hall. Hat brim-skewed, fingers blackened, stomach shrunken, body so tired your mind can?t remember what you had for breakfast (beans? was it beans again?), let alone a song you wrote a full year ago. This latter lacuna of memory is the central crisis of this song which would otherwise be called A Red Whistle. A much catchier title.

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Jim Guthrie - "Sexy Drummer"

Every time I?ve seen Jim Guthrie play I?ve been impressed by his guitar playing. Unfortunately, his arrangements tend to be distractingly misguided (electric cellos? Sony playstation composition games!.?) and his songwriting questionable. This song avoids the Guthrie pitfalls through its simplicity. The warm drive of the drum beat (unassuming, but mesmerizing, soothing but, yes, sexy) carries the guitar and cheap organ over the bass? melodic framework. Plain and nice.

Guthrie?s use of the word ?score? hints at the two most salient features of the drummer?s existence: counting bars and notches on bedposts.

Still swamped with papers, so only one song today.

This post marks the first featuring a song submitted by a stranger to make the site. Moral: send your songs.

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Tom Thumb - "Wine and Cigarettes"

"Wine and Cigarettes" moves quickly from an aimless whiny (and cigaretty?) twee jangle to a confident amble (electrics and acoustics dialoguing seamlessly). The drumming is a horse's trot on wet soft dirt, made more forceful and driving by a plethora of supporting percussion (hand-claps, bongos, shakers, maybe a cowbell).

Tom Thumb sings like he's dancing. Shaking his head more vigorously as the shakers come in, the electric guitar breaks its stride, takes more liberties. At 1:47 he looks into a mirror and is spurned on by his own enthusiasm, his voice bouncing off itself, his guitars running circles around each other.

It took me a few listens to get it, but this is an unexpected treat. [Buy]