Archives : all posts by Jordan

Term papers are enemies. This is indisputable. Please write them for me. Something on Kant or Rousseau or whatever. Just mimic my style and refer to some of my favourite bands and I think we'll get away with it, OK? Good. In return, you get free mp3s. Now it is time for you to pay.

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Gordon Lightfoot - "(That's What You Get) For Lovin' Me"

It was using the guitar/bass introduction/theme to this song that my editor, Max Maki, taught me that Gordon Lightfoot is good. Will you prove to be as good a student as I was? [Buy]

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Melon Galia (feat. Conor Oberst) - "n'en parlons plus"

My editor, Max Maki, has as of yet been unable to teach me that Bright Eyes is good. I don't really like him. But, I can attest to the powerful soporific effects of this tiny baby of a song. It sounds like a record player in a light rainstorm on a warm night or it feels like pulling a heavy quilt up to your neck on one of those late fall/early winter nights when it's cold outside but before the heat in your building is turned on.

It is, however, entirely amoral. With no regard for consequences or my well-being, "n'en parlons plus" wants me to go to bed right now instead of soldiering on and studying a bit more, like I should do. [Buy]

Calexico - "Alone Again Or"

Thanks to Claire for pointing me in the direction of this cover of Love?s ?Alone Again Or? (I posted the original the day before yesterday).

Calexico moves ?Alone Again Or? from urban California to rural Arizona, from Spanish classical to drunken mariachi. Love?s sunny folk-pop is subtly reconceived as a down and out Ennio Morricone epic. The loneliness dealt with in this version is deeper and more desolate, deriving not from social alienation but from physical isolation. The song is a brief respite from a long desert travel.

Clap your hands for hand claps (i.e. every time you hear a hand clap, clap your hands. That way we?ll keep it going forever.)

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Microphones - "Solar System"

From soft static emerges the Microphones? signature panning guitars and very careful closed mouth singing. Elvrum sings like a curious kid, his eyes fixed and incredulous, his mouth twisted down. ?Solar System? is an investigation, a reflection on the infinite possibilities of the infinite universe, of our relative insignificance, of divinity and mortality.

Celebrate the drum at 1:03.

Embrace the phasing that plays the role of the ?solar wind.?

And the snare chains that represent water.

The Phonemes - "Steeples and Peoples"

It's kind of like running on the spot. But also more than that. It's like running on the spot while your friends perform a carefully choreographed and highly precarious dance/ritual in a circle around you. Some of your friends are spinning plates and others are "riding" stick horses, a few of them are somersaulting or pretending to be monkeys. This is not chaos or without purpose, this is culture battling entropy (culture wins (what?)).

The singer already sounds tired when she counts the whole rigmarole in. And at 1:41, when the dense guitar/vibes/high-hat/bass drum/organ/bass/hand claps/piano/found-whatever action is dispersed by the cymbal swell and the clear voice explains "we have to take care of each other," we understand that she was already tired because the whole thing goes on and on with breaks to take breathers and to express gratitude to those around the on-the-spot runner for pulling their weight in order to preserve the delicate balance that relies on the tenuous interconnection of all the players, before restarting the dance/ritual like it's an OK thing to do (it is not). You know?

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Lambchop - "Is A Woman"

There's something of the lounge singer in Kurt Wagner (Lambchop's front man). If you took early Tom Waits out of a dingy New York bar and put him in an upscale Nashville wine bar (with a twisted clientele, mind you) you would have something like Wagner.

The production on "Is A Woman" is so clear, so intimate that if you listen to it in your bedroom with the lights off, you might think he is speaking the song just to you. That maybe if you shined a spotlight into the corner you would find him there at his piano, sweating (the light is hot and he's working hard), with his bow tie slightly undone. At 1:26 after he asks "can you be sure," he leaves you four seconds of heavy silence to answer. He stares at you (now you're not so sure you want him in your bedroom) and though you don't understand his question exactly, panicked, you think of how you should respond. Then he continues with the song (relief). And then, at 2:32 when the song turns Caribbean, the spotlight broadens its focus, encompasses the whole band. Now you can see that there are a lot of people in your bedroom. Backup singers even. I don't think you'll be getting to sleep tonight. But it's OK. You have nothing to do tomorrow anyway.

Burning Spear - "Down By The Riverside"

Today, as a birthday present, my friend Kyle gave me the complete Studio One Burning Spear recordings. It was an impulse purchase, based on the front cover: a picture of Burning Spear looking straight ahead, his eyes smouldering, burning his pain into us, hotter than the serene sun setting behind his left shoulder. He is playing an ancient-looking guitar, dwarfed by his impressive, confident hands.

And, man, the music is so hot. It's intimate to the point of inducing claustrophobia. This gut-wrenching soul reggae, although for the most part concerned with Jamaican politics and the living of a righteous Rastafarian life, is astoundingly expressive of a broad range of human emotion, from desperate depression to manic joy.

"Down By The Riverside" is the intoxication of new love and the fragility and vulnerability that comes with it.

A guitar plays the steady familiar reggae rhythm. The organ sings the newborn connection. And the muted lead guitar line is the ecstatic beating heart of Burning Spear.

He pulls his love into him and points to the beating heart:

"Don't break this heart that loves you."

The heart is not within his control. It loves without his permission. And so he pleads. Not only an acknowledgement of love, it's an expression of his complete vulnerability.

It is with the same passion and focus that he sings of Jah and of Jamaica.

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Love - "Alone Again Or"

Arthur Lee was (and is still) a true pop auteur: the intricacy of his arrangements and the full realization of his vision are here to be heard on "Alone Again Or." The sunny folk of the acoustic guitar, the Spanish tinged solo and trumpet, the restraint of the ascending strings and the seamless vocal harmonies all combine to create a piece of elegant, transparent pop. Lee puts on a songwriting clinic in Forever Changes. Nothing is out of place. It is a truly ambitious and ingeniously constructed record.

Love was unjustly overshadowed by their California psych-pop rivals, the Byrds (as great as they are, is there not room for two genius jangle bands?).

The Halo Benders - "Halo Benders"

The way I see it, nothing can be bad about a song that shares its name with the band that plays it.

The Halo Benders were the first Calvin Johnson band that I ever heard and are probably still my favourite. (Though they are equalled by Beat Happening at their best, the Halo Benders are the more consistent band).

The Halo Benders are like two schoolyard outcasts (one tall and skinny and the other short and plump) railing passionately and innocently against injustice. Maybe they aren't ideal bandmates - the tall skinny one being completely preoccupied with treble frequencies and the short plump one interested in the bass end of the spectrum to the exclusion of all else, but the jarring incongruity of the two sounds together create something like perfect harmony. These are two buddies with a shared purpose and no other friends.

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The United States of America - "The Garden of Earthly Pleasures"

This United States of America, like the other one, is an ominous country. This song is a maddening psychological journey into a sinister synthesized jungle taking shape in the chemically altered mind of a lady. "Venomous blossoms, violet nightshade, blackening mushrooms and petrified willows, twisted and brown" are just a few of the things you will find "in her eyes." But be careful, because like in that other garden of earthly delights, obtaining the wrong kind of knowledge is gonna change things. For the worse.

I finally got my new computer. Rejoice.

However, I can't figure out how to use it. Be saddened.

Sometime, hopefully later this morning, I will be posting.

I hope you're all sleeping. I wish I was.

Jackson C. Frank - "Blues Run The Game"

In his childhood, Jackson C. Frank was one of the only survivors of a schoolhouse furnace explosion. His face was severely scarred by the fire and he was tormented by depression from that point on. Later in life he was institutionalized off and on for paranoid schizophrenia (misdiagnosed), lost his only child to cystic fibrosis, and was shot point-blank in the face, leaving him blind.

The depth of his sorrow and the extent of his suffering should be kept in mind as you listen to "Blues Run The Game," a song about the imperative importance of hope and perseverance in the face of whatever adversity.

As Frank himself wrote in the liner notes to his one and only album, Jackson C. Frank: "Living is a gamble . . . loving is much the same . . . There's always a chance to break even"

Though his words may leave something to be desired, his song is as clear a statement as there is.

But don't be sad...

Two fun facts about Jackson C. Frank:

1) He dated Sandy Denny for a while.
2) Paul Simon produced his album.

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Cerberus Shoal - "Asphodel"

In Greek mythology the asphodel is the flower of Hades and death. If this song isn't underworldly, it certainly is otherworldly. I can not positively identify any (any!) of the instruments used in "Asphodel."

I guess this song was recorded sometime during the medieval period, but I can't be any more specific than that. Maybe it's something like what would happen if Boethius, Aquinas, Eno and Tiny Tim got together to write a funeral dirge.