Archives : all posts by Sean

We/Or/Me - "Tell Sarah". This weekend in Montreal was sweltering. At night it was the sort of heat that makes half-moons feel full. Musically, there are two ways to cope with weather like this. You can listen & dance to sparkly summertime jams, barbecue cooking... or you can do as We/Or/Me do, as they did when I first heard "Aimless Day" three years ago. "Aimless Day" has just been reissued on the Ghostwriter EP (listen here), along with "Tell Sarah" and three other slices of dusk. We/Or/Me are a wondrous group - not just for the restraint and care of their songwriting, but also for the way these songs are recorded, slow and breathing. "Tell Sarah" glows, just of itself, like fireflies in a jar. [highly recommended - buy]

Sibylle Baier - "Tonight".
Sibylle Baier - "I Lost Something In The Hills".
Sibylle Baier - "Wim".

And this stillness brings me to Sibylle Baier, an artist who had made it into my peripheral vision but never further, until A sent me some songs. I wasn't just struck - I was smitten. Orange Twin sent me the record and now I'm not sure which is more flabbergasting - what a stunning album this is, or how little attention it received. It's an artifact, a locket, a lake; it's so many shades of melancholy; it's one of the most startling records to cross my desk in ages, and its songs linger long & long.

Sibylle Baier was a German actress (appearing in Wim Wenders' Alice in the Cities). Between 1970 and 1973 she recorded some songs on a home reel-to-reel machine. Then they were put away for more than 30 years, until Baier's son passed them to J Mascis and J Mascis passed them to Orange Twin, and the American indie label released Colour Green in 2006. And rather than attract the furore of Vashti Bunyan's Diamond Day, well - it didn't. Not very many people seem to have heard it, or of it. Bunyan's pretty album, and especially the very pretty "Diamond Day", became icons. But this - a better album, a stranger & more precious one, - seems to have languished. Never reviewed by Pitchfork or the New York Times, never sewn onto a million soft sleeves.

But this modest, captivating masterpiece should be in the collection of anyone with a taste for bedroom folksong. Colour Green is like a sister album to Leonard Cohen's Songs from a Room (a clear influence), and even Julie Doiron's Desormais (an impossible influence). And while the sadness of "Tonight" is at times almost deafening, there's elsewhere - as on "Wim", - a whimsy that recalls, say, the line drawings of James Thurber or Tove Jansson (see above). The spark at the heart of a lamp.

If you don't own Colour Green, you should buy it. I've shared three songs here in the hope that I can persuade you.

Sibylle seems to be working on new music.

[buy]

Young Coyotes - "Momentary Drowning". A song that's yell and thump but is still brilliantly slow - relaxed as it booms, as it dings and claps and bobs. Young Coyotes play this music like they've figured it out, like they've solved it. (The reason there are many bands who try to sound like this is that this sounds very good.) It's too early to tell if this is the kind of band that becomes a reason to go out at night, a reason to drive for hours, a reason to shell out bucks and stand in the sun. But it might be. They are young. Eighteen months from now we might all be standing around agog, like kids at a giant prayer meeting, faith-healed. All our denials rendered ridiculous: I can't be jaded because I am sodalite! I can't be drowning because I'm made of ice! I can't be in love because I'm unable! I can't be alone because my hands are clasped! Let's hope.

Denver's Young Coyotes are unsigned. [MySpace/blog]

Al Green - "Just For Me". Al lays it on a little thick, here. But it's refreshing - no, beautiful - to discover that the man can at 62 years old find just as much reason to, um, lay it on. That his heart's still just as big, just as sweet, just as pink and hungry. Me, I treat "Just For Me" not as a love song but as a toast: here's to this feeling and its persistence. [buy]

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Montreal shows! There's a great one at Casa tonight (Thursday), as the Luyas play with Burial Song for $7.

With Suoni Per Il Popolo on this month, there are amazing gigs almost every June night. It's pretty wild. My highlights, trying to speak even half-reasonably: Greg Macpherson, Ravens & Chimes, Mt. Eerie (at Casa!), Vic Chesnutt + Silver Mt Zion, Sandro Perri, Tren Bros, Wyrd Visions, Retribution Gospel Choir, Free Fall, Frog Eyes and Shearwater, Adam & the Amethysts, White Hinterland and Tuneyards (!) on the 25th, Leonard Cohen (!!!)... ok i am going to get a headache. Also announced yesterday: BOBAN fuckin' MARKOVIC is coming with his 11-man band in July. (And we're not even talking October's Pop Montreal featuring Burt Bacharach accompanied by Julie Doiron and Final Fantasy, uh yet.) Phew. This is a nice place to live.

[my source of the top-down Beatles photo]

Kleerup ft. Lykke Li - "Until We Bleed (ft. Lykke Li)".
Kleerup ft. Lykke Li - "Until We Bleed (Mikael Karlsson cello version)".
Kleerup ft. Lykke Li - "Until We Bleed (Warsawastudion remix)".

Gavin and Lucy loved each other so much that they threw all their luggage into the river. They drove with their suitcases and trunks to the riverbank and threw them all right in. "We'll never need anything except each other," said Lucy, and Gavin traced her lips with his thumb. That night they had a fight, screaming and slamming, and Lucy packed her things into garbage bags. They tore as she clattered down the stairs. As she stood on the sidewalk and waited for the taxi, Gavin called out the window. "Come back!" he yelled. "What?" she said, through the rain. "Come back!" She couldn't understand. She got in the taxi. The next night she came back. It was still raining. She dried her hair on the comforter.

[Kleerup's MySpace / more of composer Mikael Karlsson]

(image is of a Geneva drive)

Carl Spidla - "Blackfly Rag".

It's a wide, wooden chest. It is larger than you expect. Two people could fit inside.

The first thing you put in the chest is a bowl of cherries.

The next thing you put in the chest is a chandelier, its lights still going. Then you add postcards, old glasses, a watercolour set. A tennis racket, never used. A large map, rolled up. Bike spokes, binoculars, pussywillows, linen. A window. A brick. One CD, four books. You take one of the books back out and set it on the floor. You pour some tea into the chest. You pour some wine. You add spent matches, old lightbulbs, melted snow. Sea salt, sugar, and ink. You fill the rest with broken chairs, the chairs you threw from your window into the parking lot last night. The broken chair-legs look like the masts of ships.

You close the chest. You lock it with a deadbolt. The lock is never as good as you remember so you wrap it up in belt after belt, round and round, and thick hemp rope, and chain, and fishing line.

And you do not douse the chest in paraffin. You do not let it blacken and crackle and turn into ash. You do not haul it to street-side for the garbage-men to pick up, for the recyclers to pick through. You do not throw it in the lake. You do not give it to the fishes. You do not toss it from an airplane; it does not smash in the desert, it does not leave a crater.

No, you leave the chest where it sits in the middle of your floor. You throw a giant carpet over it. You set on it a potted fern and a stack of magazines. Maybe a shoe-tree for your dress-shoes. And as you all know, you pretend the chest's not even there.

[More of Carl Spidla. "Blackfly Rag" was recorded at the Mile End Mission on April 27, not five feet from where I sat cross-legged. It's one of my favourite songs of 2008.]

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Montrealers ought to go see Receivers at O Patro Vys tonight, where they will be launching their luminous debut record.

Elsewhere: Go gaze upon the marvel that is Jez Burrows' Destroyer screenprint, analyzing Destroyer's Rubies with whimsy and verve. Jez helps to maintain the indispensable It's Nice That.

photo by katja mater

Mount Eerie - "In Moonlight". A hundred black cats cross your path. A hundred black birds cross your sky. A hundred black thoughts cross your mind. & in moonlight you go walking, not even knowing what i'm looking for / my life is just saying one thing / "i will find you". And there where you expect stillness: noise. The same black shapes, thousands of them, shrieking, and as the moonlight meets their fur & feathers you see your own face reflected there, the colour of never. [buy]

Rajaton - "Mita kaikatat, kivonen?". This is a song whose English translation is "Wherefore Grumblest Thou, O Grindstone?", performed by a Finnish folk-choral acapella group. It's also wonderful. The reason the grindstone is grumbling is that life seems hard, but the song Rajaton are singing says: uh, dude, no it's not; check out all the good stuff that happens. And then they sing it in sweet-tea, cardinals, bluejays, kites. [buy]

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Elsewhere: A thoughtful introduction to Jim Woodring's wise, broken, baffling, genius Frank comic. Love Michael's comment -- I always saw Frank as equal parts smelling salts and embalming fluid.

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Visiting the site today you might be lucky enough to have landed on our new header graphic by Kit Malo. If not, you can hit reload a bunch of times til you see it. Kit's a dear gramo-friend and long ago did a guestpost for us, with Alden Penner. Thanks so & so & so much, K Quebec.

The Tough Alliance - "Taken Too Young (cover/remix of Taken By Trees)". The Tough Alliance rediscover "Too Young", by Victoria Bergsmann's Taken By Trees project (& which I wrote about last July). They make it one of the songs of the year. And when I say rediscover I mean they found it in among diamonds, saffron and milkweed pods; in with childhood, sex and distant waters; in with the way you feel, your eyes laying on hers, when all that's green in you curls. [buy things]

Darker My Love - "The Fool".
The One AM Radio - "Wayward Wind".

Two bands record songs from 1956, and what they find there is very different from the usual nostalgia. These songs are not in shades of sepia, they're in shades of white ("The Fool") and green ("Wayward Wind").

Darker My Love slow down Lee Hazlewood's "The Fool" until it can fit in the space between heartbeats. Here's a singer so full of regrets that the day stops moving, that the sun's disc never dips in the sky, that all things are covered in the still light of melancholy. The band's psychedelia is kept gorgeously restrained, just a ghosting of dream at the edge of an insomniac's sight.

One AM Radio's "Wayward Wind" cover is meanwhile perhaps the best track they've ever recorded. Instead of turning the song into a drudge, the often-sleepy group lets it stay a skipping pop-tune; only the corners are dusted with fatigue. It's part Yo La Tengo and part Camera Obscura, the texture of click and thump and ba-ba-ba like all the postcards you've ever sent.

The strangest thing about these recordings is that they were made as part of a cross-promotion with the PF Flyers shoe company, who are reissuing the 1956 Bob Cousy All-American sneakers. And I view these corporate tie-ins with such cynicism - not because I hate all corporations, not because it's an unethical "sell-out" thing to do, just because it almost always produces mediocre art. But here are Darker My Love and One AM Radio making exquisite little songs, making them for a sneaker company, and the thing we learn again, well, it's that artists - it can be okay to get paid. [more info]

Bon Iver - "Blindsided". I was up by the lake, this weekend. I listened to this song in the dark. I thought, then, of a story to write about it. I can't remember the story now, just its gleams. Its gleams were blue, green, and gold.

The song's central lyric is: because blinded / I was blindsided. These are two events: the blinding, and the blindsiding. Justin Vernon lost his sight, and then something knocked him over. First the gold, then the blue and green. (First the kiss, and then the dream.)

[buy]

The Wave Pictures - "I Love You Like A Madman". The Wave Pictures' David Tattersall is not sure he's going to make it through the Christmas holiday. He's going crazy. He shakes Her father's hand, smiles at Her mother, uses the correct knife & fork at dinner. He teaches Her little brother to play Chinese checkers. And then every night he kisses Her on the cheek, bows his head, murmurs good night to mum and dad. Then he goes out into the guesthouse and lays on the single pallet bed and amid the smell of spruce feels himself going crazy. She's so close. He imagines Her closing the door to Her childhood room. He imagines Her slipping off Her jeans, leaving them in a heap by the illustrated atlas. He imagines Her in Her sheets. He imagines the frayed, stuffed seal propped up against Her pillow. And he imagines the slope of Her cheek, and then Her breast, and then Her hip, and David's alone in the back-yard, writhing in his quilt like a saxophone solo, waiting for the morning and the way their knees will touch under the breakfast table. And his eyes are ever-darting through the guesthouse window... Throw the back door open / let me see your breath.

[buy]

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Over at Fluxblog, there's a remarkable string version of Vampire Weekend's "Campus" - by the band's own Rostam Batmanglij. (Yes his last name contains the word 'batman'.)

[image of amethyst from The Nonist Bluebell.fm (by Arthur Smith)]