Archives : all posts by Sean

Cuddle Magic - "Pillows". A voice like a trombone solo, which is to say at once mournful and vaguely funny. Like the Magnetic Fields after drinking a bottle of cough syrup, waking up in the orchestra pit. There's jazz in this insofar as there's jazz in all regrets, doubts, wondering (i.e. in the messy emotions), but in its succinctness, in its constancy of feeling, "Pillows" is punk rock.

Cuddle Magic - "Paper Mask". Cuddle Magic hide their convoluted time signatures in laze & softness, in crinkle and sun. "Paper Mask" seems like such a gentle wind-in-willows waltz, easy as afternoon - that is until a piss-drunk clarinet comes two-stepping, cackling, down the riverbank. It's like a scene from The Muppets where an intruder makes it in through a crack in the doorframe, through a mouse-hole, and Kermit has to run around flailing and insisting that the creature get out get out get out. But here the clarinet just laughs itself to sleep and Cuddle Magic are free to return to their song, warm, sun-dappled, unruffled.

Cuddle Magic's self-titled album is weird and wonderful and many of the things that make P:ano, White Hinterland, Born Heller and Bowerbirds so special. Write them to buy a copy while you still can.

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Elsewhere:

Would anyone like to buy me a moustache?

David Horvitz's artworks-for-sale delight me very much.

Ainsley Wallis, who made a Video Contest-winning clip for Sufjan Stevens' "Decatur" was approached by yuk-yuk folkster Joel Moss to do something similar for one of his songs. And so she did - a cute, notebook-animated, pencil-crayonned video about a penis. Who drives a truck.

[image from Antony Gormley's Field - thanks narges]

Elbow - "Starlings".

• Here's what a fanfare is: It's when the trumpets all go BADEDAAAAAAAAAAAAH. It's when they play their brass notes in ALL CAPS and it's when the drums they play fierce & fearsome ratatatat-tat. Fanfares startle, they wake you up. They're a coup d'or to the eye. They ANNOUNCE - they announce something is coming, a splendour is coming - "Sons & daughters," they are saying, "a gladness is coming!" They are rare. Fanfares lose their oomph when they are repeated too often; it's why we don't hear them every time we enter a room (and why royalty so quickly tarnishes). Elbow know this, the importance of the rarity. And they know that it is beautiful, so beautiful, to hear a fanfare in NOISE. To realise in all life's cacophony that the noise you hear is FANFARE, hidden there.

  And they also know oh oh oh man when you can ask someone "Darling is this love?", fuck, seriously, FANFARE.



• "Starling" and the rest of The Seldom Seen Kid are probably the best sounding album of 2008 so far. Beautifully, beautifully recorded.


• heart in mouth & empty handed i still have to say, world, that i love love love a good love song.


• [buy]

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The Lifted Brow is an Australian book/zine project that is excellent. Their TLB4, due later this year, will include stories, music, poems & scraps in book & cd form, with a hundred writers, musicians and so forths making things inspired by a fake bookshelf discovered by Michaela McGuire. They haven't announced the lineup yet, it doesn't look like, but I promise you it includes some of my favourite writers and musicians (and also me). They are also holding a contest for other submissions - and the prize is big as sin. Go see.

[photo source]

Eric Chenaux - "Am I Lovely". The beatiful new album from Eric Chenaux is mint and lavender, Scottish-tinged, but filled with enough Toronto smoke to keep yr eyes from getting misty. His jazz-folk is free but not scary; it is affectionate in its harmonies and accepting of all comers. Look how "Am I Lovely" has no question-mark at the end; it knows the answer and whispers it. "Asking each-other / since we're together / am I lovely?" he asks, but Eric Chenaux dusts every listener with yeses.

Chenaux was first mentioned here by Carl Wilson. He's an important member of Sandro Perri's band. And both Dull Lights (2006) and Sloppy Ground (2008) are out on Constellation. [contact Constellation to pre-order]

Super Monster - "Oohlalala". Super Monster take three las instead of two. This song ain't chic; it's instead a song a little about losin' it, part skiffle, part Velvets, part Clap Your Hands. "You can't be sure if it's all in your mind," Mr Monster warns us, but there's no trepidation in him. He knows "we're gonna make it right to the end," and indeed the electric guitar carries us all the way to the song's final minute, to the arrival of the "ooh la la la", the cake and flowers, the new friends and fresh smiles and all the ingredients for a new mixed drink. (We'll call it the Thursday.)

[MySpace/buy]

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In Sean Michaels news, there's a touch of Gramophone now in the National Post. I'll be writing a monthly column about six legal-to-download songs. The first one appeared on Tuesday, with a mix of songs familiar to Gramophone-readers and some stuff not yet discussed here. If you like the piece, um, let the Post know... I'm also rather pleased with an article I wrote for the Guardian website earlier this week, on rick-rolling.

Holly C, of Basia Bulat's band, has debuted a charming blog about weird rest-stop food. An asset for touring musicians and gastronomic road-trippers both. (Basia and Holly also did a Daytrotter session recently - the Daniel Johnston cover is def worth grabbing.)

Upcoming Montreal shows that I recommend fiercely: Sister Suvi on March 26, Dirty Projectors/No Kids on March 31, and the April 6 double-whammy of Receivers/Throw Me The Statue or The Luyas/Nat Baldwin/Sandro Perri.

[Photo from Gourmet Magazine - via No More Twist]

Hanne Hukkelberg - "Obelix". According to Hanne Hukkelberg, Obelix is brave and kind-hearted. Obelix is a man come coming for you through the woods. Obelix has a sure step and strong hands. Obelix is a wind at your back. Obelix is the inevitability of your happy ending. Obelix can be trusted. Obelix likes cats' purrs. Obelix sleeps with you in the grasses. Obelix is gentle. Obelix is a good lover. Obelix's favourite instrument is the double-bass. Obelix will wait for you. As if patience were the easiest thing in the world. [buy]

Extra Golden - "Obama". According to Extra Golden, Obama is knowing the apple in your lunch is red and fucking fine. Obama is the sun crackling like orange-peel through the mid-morning clouds. Obama is dancing a few dance-steps at the entrance to your cubicle, with the cute girl from Accounting. Obama is slamming the microwave shut and having the sound be good. Obama is hope, pleasure, voyage, a road to the horizon. Obama is Monday. Obama is guitars like brothers, afropop that at 4:50 turns on the fuzzboxy pedals. Obama has eyebrows. Obama doesn't settle down. Obama is the kind of ambition you're allowed to have. It's knowing you're going to tip like hell tonight. [buy]

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Lately I've been enjoying millionnaire businessman Mark Cuban's blog, of all places. His post on rules for startups is sound advice for all manner of projects, not just internet companies; and there's wisdom in his over-arching advice for life, I think. But what the hell do I know.

Sam Cooke - "You Send Me (demo version)". (Is that you there? Are you reading? Is that you? Well listen in: this is how it would be.) We would be in love and it would be summer. And I would be doing the dishes and singing this song, in this way, with the shush of the water running over my hands. You would be in the other room, reading. And I would be listening to you as you turned the pages of your book & through the open window I would be listening to the wind as it turned the leaves in the trees. And we would be in love, did I mention that? And it would be warm, love. Our apartment would be summer-warm. And listen (shh, listen) the plants would be watered, all of them, every soft & single one. [buy]

Retribution Gospel Choir - "What She Turned Into". Mark Kozelek produced this record for Alan Sparhawk (Low), Matt Livingston and Eric Pollard. That means that he strode into the recording booth and turned the amps up. He turned them right up. He slapped Sparhawk across the face, tore Livingston's shirt and punched a hole in Pollard's tom. He glowered at them. Then he went back to the mixing desk and set the thing on fire. "Play," he said over the crackles. "Play me a pop song." It was going to rain that night, hard. [buy/preorder]

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Lovers of The Wire: this is an outstanding interview with David Simon, if you missed it.

"You know, that puddle should have its own blog."

One of my favourite writers in all the net, Ftrain's Paul Ford, has written six-word reviews of mp3s by all 763 bands playing at this year's SXSW. It's admirable more for its ambition than for its insight, I think. Favourite writeups: Brooklyn, Canada, Cary Brothers, The Clutters, Deadbeat Poets, Elizabeth Wills, Faceless Werewolves (lol), Kalashnikov, Kate Walsh, Ladyfinger/Ladyfingers, Neptune, Sybris, Wisely, WIZ KHALIFA, The Basia Bulat one strikes me as peculiar (but I think Basia would be delighted).

May I also just say that I went to see Snailhouse last night, with band, and man oh man was that shit hot. Loud and luminescent. The new record is great & the show was all lit up, and kind. Will be writing about Lies on the Prize when I'm allowed to.

[photo by lala ladcani]

So sometimes I feel like Said the Gramophone ought to act as a document, and so if I go with that for a sec I have to admit that basically I've been listening to nothing but this BARR record for the past week.* The song that Dan posted more than a year ago is something I've been returning to for months but finally I went out and got Summary and it's baffling me in the best kind of baffle; making me go wow holy whoa god, huh, he did that.

Because basically it's Arab Strap meets Casiotone for the Painfully Alone, which is to say that they're ripe-hearted soliloquies but instead of talking about his cock, Brendan Fowler sings about art & worry & kindness, candid and cadenced and clear. And these songs depend on listening - you need to hear the words, listen to them, to get it. So I've been discovering the tracks one by one, slow slow slow, digesting just two songs a day or so. Finding new truthfulnesses in each listen.

BARR - "Untitled". Here's a song about loving a friend, but also a song to a friend, an act of love to a friend. A request: come back, come back! You HAVE to make it OUT. And while Fowler is confused about many things he is certain about others, so certain, and you can hear it more than once, here, the clearest earnest things I've heard in a long time.

BARR - "Was I? Are You?". And this is a song about having a friend you "hang out" with, that is to say who you just have sex with, and it's a fug of bass guitar and hands fumbling at cigarette smoke. And it is special not just for the play & real of it, but for the way it shows this music isn't improvised bullshit - it isn't sloppy, it isn't frayed. BARR are precise with their punchlines.

[Buy this record right here, or follow that link to listen to the band's hottt single "The Song Is the Single".]

* There was a break on Sunday afternoon as I walked down the middle of the street - the sidewalks are all foot-high snow - listening to the African choir called ZCC Mukhukhu.

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Basia Bulat did some great radio sessions with Radio K (at the University of Minnesota).

Yeasayer did a Take Away Show with Vincent Moon, Chryde & co, and it's so great, the band in the subway and then even moreso the band in an apartment, too late, making a racket and attracting the neighbours. My favourite part is the end of the second video, a new song called "Tightrope", with four hands on piano and twenty hands on kitchen-tile, and raised voices, and beerbottle clink, and when the video begins swiftly to reverse to beginning, our hearts running backwards to somewhere, somewhere. For those who do not understand French, the text above it says this: Chryde did not much like Yeasayer, and now oh well he does.

[photo is from during Up Helly-Aa, one of the Shetland fire festivals. Photographer unknown.]

And that's it: Funding Drive over. For the third year straight we asked for some help and you responded with your remarkable generosity. Now we'll stay out of your hair for the next twelve months.

Thank you so much.