Archives : all posts by Sean

Gigantic Hand - "SuAnne Big Crow". I wonder if you know this feeling: You're like a building with the foundations blown out, still upright but all the struts and supports weakened, all the everything ready to go, ready to collapse. You feel like that; hollow. You go down to the subway and stand on the platform feeling grey and paper-thin. The ventilation shushes. And then suddenly, thwackkkkkkk, a subway-car slams into the station, slaps into the station, flies past you volatile & violent and it's like you've just been shoved. You rock back on your heels and realise: I'm still standing. You take a breath. I'm still standing. // Anyway I wonder if you know this feeling. (I haven't felt it in a long time.) Gigantic Hand do. "SuAnne Big Crow" is a song of a hundred station-slams, a hundred heel-rocks, four shoves per bar. But you're still standing. [MySpace/buy in February]

Bobby Digital ft. Thea & Monk - "Drama (Spoolwork remix)". Dave Fischoff releases electro-folk music on Secretly Canadian and remixes songs by Jens Lekman and Radiohead as Spoolwork. But I like him best when he takes off his indie duds and makes beats that are practical, just tomato-red rad. Here he recalls Jay-Z's "Hard Knock Life" (but happier) - transforming the RZA's "Drama" from classicism to hopscotch, cathedral to playgroup. [MySpace]

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My newest music article for McSweeney's is now online: a piece on the 2008 Pop Montreal festival.

Mayo Thompson - "Dear Betty Baby".

Mayo Thompson grabbed his stetson, his ratty tweed jacket, and he headed to the library. "Hey kitty," he said to the first librarian he found. "Happy Tuesday."

"Can I help you?" she said.

"You know what it is: show me to the phonebooks."

It was 1970 and the librarian showed Mayo Thompson to the phonebooks. He hung up his stetson on the corner of a bookcase and draped his jacket over the back of a chair. He unfastened the top button of his shirt. "Ma'am," he said to the librarian, "I am thanking you." Then Mayo Thompson started hefting telephone directories from the shelves, stacking them on one of the broad tables. He chose the phonebooks for Glasgow, Istanbul, Cannes, Lisbon, Reykjavik, Alexandria, Sydney, Heraklion, Cape Town, Brasilia, Halifax. Set in a pillar on the table they reached to the ceiling. Then Mayo Thompson scratched his knee and sat down. He started going through the phonebooks, one after another, looking for something. He was looking for the mailing address of the dawn.

A little while later the librarian came back. She had fallen in love with Mayo Thompson during their brief encounter. "Hello," she said shyly.

"Yo bluefin," he said, not looking up. He closed one phonebook and extruded another from the stack.

The librarian waited for a while. She was wearing a serious felt dress, blue with faint polka-dots.

Mayo Thompson finally lifted his eyes. "Oh, hey," he said.

"What are you looking for?" she asked. "A long lost family member?"

"Need an address for the dawn," Mayo Thompson said. "Want 'em to play horns on my new album."

"Sorry?" said the librarian.

"It's a solo record," he explained. "Songs by me. Love songs and work songs and not-love songs. Poetry set swinging."

"No," said the librarian, "what do you mean 'the dawn'?"

"Mornings, roosters, light," Mayo Thompson said.

"Is Dawn your sweetheart?"

"Wish she was." He squinted at the librarian. "Oh," he said at last, seeing the lustre in her eyes. "No, not a bird called Dawn, some blondie. No. The dawn. Daybreak. Aurora. Sunrise. Sunup."

"Like, the sun?" she said.

"Yeah. Like the sun."

"I think it lives in California," she said.

"It's for a song called 'Dear Betty Baby,'" he explained.

They found dawn listed at a San Diego address. "Honey!" Mayo Thompson explained. He tore the page from the phonebook. The librarian didn't say anything, just squeezed her fists at her sides.

"I gotta go write a letter," he said.

"I'm about to go on break," she replied.

Mayo Thompson grabbed his hat and jacket and made his way from the reference section, phonebook-page held in his teeth. The librarian scampered after him, grabbing her clutch from behind the Returns desk. She had to run to keep up with his long jeaned legs. He crossed 4th and dashed across 9th and stopped traffic on 1st. She was at his heels. Finally Mayo Thompson headed into a typewriter store. He gave the librarian his hat and jacket to hold. He peered at the Smith Corona "Electra" demonstration typewriter and smoothed out the dawn's address. Then he started typing a letter, pecking each key with his right middle finger.

"What are you doing?" asked the librarian, her arms full of ratty tweed and stetson.

"Writing a letter to the dawn. Asking 'em if they want to play horns on my new album."

"Trumpet?"

"That kind of thing. Trumpet, French horn, trombone."

"Why?"

"'s what the song needs," he said. "Shush a second." He stood staring at the keys. "What's another word for 'sweet'?"

"Sugared."

"Sugared. Dig." He continued typing.

"Couldn't you just get some musicians to play the part?"

"Sure. Session musicians flockin'. But this is different. This needs sunrise on horns. Needs it." He typed a row of x's at the end, just to hear the typewriter go ding. "Sugared," he said. Mayo Thompson unscrolled the letter from the "Electra". He took his hat back from the librarian and tipped it to the typewriter salespeople. Then he winked at the librarian. "C'mon," he said.

"What next?" she asked as they crossed 15th.

"I need stamps."

"I got stamps."

He stopped in the middle of the street. "You do?"

"Yes," she said. "At my flat."

She took him back to her apartment. They rode the tiny elevator in silence. Mayo Thompson smelled of straw and tangerines. Her keys glinted when she lifted them to the lock.

Inside the apartment she pointed at a small armoire. "They're in there, at the top." Mayo Thompson opened the armoire, ran his hand along the smooth of the wood. Behind him the librarian slipped out of her dress.

[buy]

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Elsewhere: A long interview with Spike Jonze about his forthcoming Where the Wild Things Are film, scripted by Dave Eggers.

[photo source]

Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit - "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" (Vampire Weekend cover).
Esau Mwamwaya & Radioclit (with Ben Brewer) - "Dinosaur On The Ark".

For a long time I have had an eBay Alert set up for Esau Mwamwaya. So that when he finally releases something, I can buy it. He hasn't released anything, though. And I haven't posted about him. But I love this stuff. It's like the indie rock version of Juluka - joyous, rousing, easy. It's chewing on sugarcane and floating on your back. He sings with such unselfconscious glee, as only a furniture salesman can. But Radioclit's beats (or, Vampire Weekend's, or MIA's, as the case may be) are also responsible for the songs' sky-blue sweetness. Sunbeams bottled, rainclouds fizzed - clean and undistorted glitter, a hundred shades of shine.

"Dinosaur on the Ark"'s Ben Brewer - who was once best known as one of Canada's wealthiest heirs, and is now best known as MIA's fiancé, - sings with an earnesty that is sterling silver, okay maybe stainless steel. Like Phil Collins or Adam Levine it's uncoloured & true, a perfect partner for Mwamwaya's utopian cheer.

"Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa" has Mwamwaya taking on Vampire Weekend's melody and riff, saluting them at every opportunity, but whereas VW find their feeling in ambivalences, verses, nostalgia, Mwamwaya's version is straight gleeful - in love with life, with dancing, with the squeak yr sneakers make on the floor.

[MySpace/download the entire album]

(Thanks to the reliably keen ears & eyes at Gorilla vs Bear for catching the mixtape release!)

(photo is of Olle Hemmendorff's 'Nike Air Max 90 Burger')

François Virot - "Say Fiesta".
François Virot - "Cascade Kisses".

Can't get enough of Virot's Yes Or No. Whereas Animal Collective are at times too diffuse to soothe your heart, and the Dodos' steady lustre grows into something hard & grating, Virot's songs are both simple and crooked - like gnarled hooks you can hang your coat on. The way he sings radio on "Say Fiesta" - well it's silly, endearing and French but it lets the song's emotional oomph come out of nowhere, like an alleycat sprouting roses. Virot's looped-up strums, snaps, thumps and coos remind me of a paper model city - precisely folded, brightly scribbled, not meant to last.

[buy/MySpace]

[edit:] we're back!

Our mp3s are offline at the moment. Working on bringing them back.

Pretend You're Happy - "The Other Side of the Earth". Pretend You're Happy usher in the Messianic age with rattling drums, whining violins, trumpet, cello, a whack of distorted guitar. It's the sort of Ever After where people carry bouquets like torches, burn their houses down, and everyone's perished pets come blinking back from the dead. Marvelous. [buy]

Dirty Beaches - "In Dreams". Fifteen thousand years from now & every human being is dead. Waves play on an empty sand. Lizards lie on rocks, blinking. Dragonflies weave round raspberry brambles. A cocker spaniel stands knee-deep in saltwater and feels like she's forgotten something important. [buy Horror - $7 - the best dream instrumentals since William Basinski's Disintegration Loops and Vincent Gallo's When]

(painting is Arnold Böcklin's Die Toteninsel)

Herman Dune - "Try to Think About Me (Don't You Worry A Bit)". Herman Dune are a band diminished by the departure of brother & co-songwriter André H-D from the group, diminished by the clean $ studio sound of their last two LPs, diminished by the disappearance of the umlaut from their name. But for all this they remain a great band - particularly so, now, live, - the beautiful lost link between Ivor Cutler, Bob Dylan and Motown. Whereas David-Ivar used to share songwriting (and singing, and lead guitar) duties 50/50, he's now totally in the lead - making Next Year in Zion consistently, disarmingly sentimental, for better or for worse. This is a better record than 2006's Giant (which isn't saying much), but lacks anything like the mixtape classic "I Wish That I Could See You Soon". It's also a far cry from the joyous, raging, fuzzed confusion of Not On Top - one of the greatest albums of all time.

But while the above paragraph is weighed down by backhanded compliments, let me say it again - they remain a great band. They deploy a perfect quilt of sincerity and wryness, of sing-song and verse. Frenchmen singing in English, their songs have all the clumsy-perfect scansion of The Streets, a pronunciation that's hilarious and desperately endearing. Listen to the way Yaya says "croo-ked cop", here.

And they try so hard to write good songs, lyrics with rhyme & joke & that are true, with moments that glimmer.

"Try To Think About Me (Don't You Worry A Bit)" is one of the softest songs here, and is not particularly clever. But what it lacks in punchlines it makes up for with a perfect chorus - the sort of thing you can murmur on skateboard, airplane, bird-back, bed. Tender as a stamp set onto a postcard.

[buy]