Archives : all posts by Sean

Jolie Holland - "Mexico City". The "free" song from Jolie Holland's The Living & the Dead and it's splendid, golden, with enough swells of feeling to swell your heart even on a sullen, sodden, storm-soaked day. M Ward is on guitar but I'm not complaining - anything that gives Jolie Holland the chance to sing, to sing, not to sing along but just to sing. Her voice still full of briar. [info]

Frenemy - "I Know, Fuck Damnit". You gotta cut down trees to build a house. Wait - no. You could mine stone and make bricks. Or um make walls out of plastic using the process-for-making-plastic. And let's not even start on coral. But to make a house you need to build. You need to work & do. You don't build a house by dreaming. You don't dwell in your imagination. Lift that rock, heave that brick, hear the song of the hammerhead against the nail. [MySpace]

[photo source]

photograph by Mario Simnch

Für Amel - "Pink Eyes". It's stargazing when you stare right at the sun. You don't need a telescope or a clear night sky. You can lie on your couch and look out the window and even with a headache pounding you can come up with names for this constellation. The Blot. The Wheel. The Full Stop. There are other ways to stargaze as well. Fall on your head. Get up too fast. Bring your face up close to a glass of champagne. I think maybe Für Amel did all these things in one day: champagne, falling down, getting up, sun-staring. "Pink Eyes" has a halo - the way everything looks when you've drunk too much, fallen on your head, stared at the sun. A fuzz that seems to mean something. I think Für Amel have almost figured something out. They've collected all the blurs that look good together, flares and sunspots and the skirted edges of an eclipse. Don't stop rubbing your eyes - you're on the right track.

[Für Amel are from Montreal. This music is a love-song.]

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Other things:

• We rearranged our sidebar a week or two ago. I encourage you to explore some of those great sites, especially the ones that are new to you. Foremost among these is Five Whys, the newish project of friend (and StG graphic designer) Neale McDavitt-van Fleet. Neale's fascinated with design, ergonomics, the environment and urban issues, just like you (probably), and his posts are a joy to read - succinct, insightful and teeming with Neale's amazing curiosity. Also, he can teach you how to make your own cleaning products.
• In Montreal, Thursday through Sunday, St-Laurent is again closed for a street fair. And once again, Pop Montreal is programming whole days of free outdoor concerts at Parc des Ameriques (St-Laurent and Rachel). The only difference is that this time I helped with the programming. I particularly recommend some of StreetPop's Saturday shows (Max Henry, Mussaver, My People Sleeping, Shapes and Sizes), and basically everything on Sunday, since that was the day I was in charge. Some of the city's greatest emerging music - and some feisty kids from out of town. Here's the Facebook event.

  Sunday line-up:
  14h00 Deleplage [Mtl]
  15h00 Georgia's Teeth (aka Carl Spidla) [Mtl]
  16h00 The Bitter End (improv ft. Dan Beirne) [Mtl]
  16h15 Little Scream [Mtl]
  17h00 very short modern dance works by Laurel Koop and Andrew Tay [Mtl]
  17h15 Postcards [Mtl]
  18h00 Construction and Destruction [Nova Scotia!]
  19h00 Videotape [Ottawa]
  20h00 Snailhouse [Mtl]
  21h00 Orillia Opry (acoustic) [Mtl]

  Many thanks to Pop Montreal for the invitation.

Freak Paeans - "Civet Cat Civet Cat".
Freak Paeans - "What Have I Always Held Forth?".

Freak Paeans is a secret person. His identity is not disclosed. He recorded a cassette in 2005 and now Caff/Flick have reissued Now When I Wear An Anchor on CD. You can buy it for £1, or for more if you like. I think it is fitting that a secret person sounds like a cross between Elliott Smith and early Devendra Banhart. Both of those people feel half-secret, half made-of-secret. So here's the whole-secret version, glimmering hard. I wonder what it feels like to be a secret person, living in a shabby hut on a hill, wind blowing through. I wonder what it's like to cultivate a secret garden that no one knows, tulips and poseys. I wonder whether the sun feels different, when you're secret; or the moon. And whether falling in love feels like a kind of joke.

Last of the Blacksmiths - "Autumn Vacation". Takes a lot of guts to start an album this way. Takes a lot of guts to sing this slow, this way. Takes a lot of guts to make music that recalls the New Year, of all people (they have a new song too). Takes a lot of guts to stay outside while it's raining. Takes a lot of guts to ice-skate while it thunderstorms. Takes a lot of guts to pretend summer's autumn. Takes a lot of guts to take an anvil to bed. Takes a lot of guts to roadtrip past the coast. Takes a lot of guts to fall in love. Takes a lot of guts to get down, a little, when no one expects you to. [MySpace/website/buy]

Young Coyotes - "Hell Is...". A new volley from these precocious scamps, and once again their da-na-na-na-na-na-na gusto has me setting campfires in my living-room. Wouldn't mind a little more menace in this glockenspiel-along, more Wolf Parade and less Shins, but under the gloss of dings there's a tumbling, river-rapid thrill - the whirl and yay of a good team, a good squad, a good gang. A band that might do anything. [MySpace]

[Photo is of Graeme Patterson's Hockey Organ]

Matthew and the Arrogant Sea - "The Wizard". Okay, yeah, I gotta admit - this is what the theme-song for a wizard ought to sound like. No harps, no celestas - just some explanatory notes and then a long electric jam with the repeated intonation, HE IS THE WIZARD. Because the essential fact of wizards is not their magic, their beards or their pointy hats; it's the fact that they kick ass, all over you, 'til you're a crumpled dweeb of a warlock who's asking meekly to be allowed to go. [Out in October! MySpace]

Lykke Li - "I'm Good, I'm Gone (Metronomy remix)". Most of Lykke Li's music lives in lightness - I wrote in Plan B of a girl from Sweden with bedroom eyes, dancing shoes, raspberries and mirrors in her hair. So what I love in this remix is the way Metronomy have added heaviness & weight. In The Dark Knight, every time Batman punches someone there's this tom-drum boom, like he's throwing medicine balls around. And here it's the same deal - Li's got oomph now, she's got knock-out, every little glance knocking the poor boys flat. [buy]

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Elsewhere... Loving the BPA track at Fluxblog.

[photo source]

Y'All Is Fantasy Island - "With Handclaps". This song could be called "Mostly Without Handclaps", or "With Guitarline". I mean sonically speaking. The handclaps wait almost the entire song to appear, and it's the guitar-line that marks your brain, colours your day, sends you humming a scale to yourself while you wait in line at the fruit-stand. But Scotland's YAIFI have written a song that's in part about handclaps, about living with handclaps, about seeing handclaps for what they are. And one of the things about life with handclaps is that it's sort of like living life inside a great song. And here, well, Y'All Is Fantasy Island give you glum snails a home.

[buy / MySpace]

Ruby Isle ft. Amy Dykes - "Solsbury Hill". [Removed at artist request] When Peter Gabriel wrote the song "Solsbury Hill", he described a feeling by singing "My heart goes boom, boom, boom." This is a very good lyric. Listening to Gabriel sing, you know what he is talking about. (You know what it's like when your heart's going boom, boom, boom.) That said, your heart is arguably always going boom, boom, boom. That's what hearts do - they boom and boom and boom, forcing blood through your body. So what Peter Gabriel meant was more than just a heartbeat - he meant a thundering, a quaking, a fist beating against the inside of your chest. He meant a feeling that's thrilling & terrifying, that feels half like certainty, half like un-. It's trembling and unsteady and vulnerable & yet at the same time BOOM, BOOM, BOOM.

The members of I Am The World Trade Center reunite here to do an electro version of "Solsbury Hill". And one thing they do very right - other than simply choosing a great song, - is in the way they recorded that "boom, boom, boom". Here it's the sound of your knees buckling under you, the ground cracking under you, Solsbury Hill shaking with the moment's terrific awe. Son, you can grab your things - I've come to take you home.

[Night Shot is out Sept. 16 / MySpace]

[photo source unknown]

Johnny Foreigner - "Cranes and Cranes and Cranes and Cranes".

send to: stg

am lovng ths cd by Johnny F. (trrble band name!) it'ssort of like Los Campesinos meets Avril Lavigne, but i mean tht in a totally gd way. call+answer+yells, but bttr dynamics, bttr places to sing alng, like instd of thnkng of witty twee songtitls they focusd on BEING AWSOME. (thrs just 3 of em!) & ths song simltnsly remnds me of ball-games @ school (chalk on pvmt, red ball), alleywy fights (fistswing!), & being arrowstung with love's spring hummngbrd bit. also mks me thnk the kidsll be alrght after all. xxs

[send]