Archives : all posts by Sean

Casiotone for the Painfully Alone - "Half Ghost". On a cold night a widower picks up a bible, something stolen from a hotel room 25 years before, and finds that the words are traced in gold. On a cold night a teenager picks up a Bach record, dad's dusty 12" of cello works, and finds that its sonatas know the outline of his heart.

Me, I'm late to the church of Casiotone for the Painfully alone. I was still a wanderer, a heretic, when he wrote for us. I once was lost but now I'm found. This is a song about what we do. About what Said the Gramophone does. We put everything on a song. Just like everyone else in this whole worn world: the widower in his parlour, the kid in his basement, Owen Ashworth driving down the highway til' the tape's done. Like wildflowers, like tides, like a clock's hands, we lean always toward the one thing that can give us solace. Put everything on some song on the radio.

[buy Twinkle Echo]

Frightened Rabbit - "Square 9". A song carried in the voice of its singer, in his burred, elastic spirit, the stretch and yowl of his accent. So much longing squeezed into such plain words. It's a lesson in delivery, in not wasting a single part. The band bides its time and in the centre of the circle Scott Hutchison clutches at air, smoke, steam, every peppered flick of memory; and when at 4:06 the swell finally comes, he raises his voice and hangs on for dear life. The thing about love is the way it is so deep as to be cellular, and the only thing that can shake it free from those mitochondria is either a dawn (and you won't know which) or, sometimes, a bare & old-fashioned yell.

buy

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Elsewhere:

Stephen Colbert and Neutral Milk Hotel.

Barack Obama speaks for forty minutes and stirs some hope into me, he really does.

Are you reading Brian Michael Roff's no-longer-so-new blog? He is piece by piece, song by song, going through every song in his discography. It's candid, evocative, an inside-out of the whole damn artistic process.

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Thanks for all your entries in our Wonderful Video Contest. The winners will be announced as soon as we've made our decision - but we probably won't do so in time for Valentine's Day.

[i somehow lost my note of the artist who made the above photograph. please drop me a note if you know.]

image by, and posted without permission from, the remarkable Riitta Ikonen

Lykke Li - "Dance Dance Dance".
Lykke Li - "Little Bit".

Oh jeez, uh... Hi! Yeah, yeah I recognize you. Sure. You're friends with Robyn and Feist and Lily, right? Yeah, I like them too. I'm Sean. How do you do? Uh- Lykke? How do you spell that? What a lovely name. No, I'd never heard it before. That's true. I've only been to Stockholm, and just for a few hours. I was born in Scotland. I know I don't! I moved to Canada when I was just a kid. A fraudulent Scot, yes. Were you born in Sweden? Wait, what? A Portuguese mountaintop!? Was it cold? Sure, I'll hold on to it for you. What do you want me to do? Rattle it? And stamp my foot too? Are we recording a song? Who's that? That's a very large saxophone. What were you saying about a Portuguese mountaintop? No, I was never in a one-piece band. Of course I wanted to be! I thought as a little boy I would one day be a tap-dancer. It didn't pan out. Why thank you. Yup, just hand it here. shakeshakeshake I'm ambidextrous. Of course I know Shakira. Your hips don't lie either? Ah, because you're shy shy shy. I like it. Oh man, this is good. Do you mind if I dance, uh, just a little bit? Oh that must be the choir. Hi ladies. I'm Sean. This is the Montreal cha-cha. That's the man with the very large saxophone. And that's Lykke. Yeah, of course you know her. She's sweet, huh? She told me to just keep on onning with this, until the end. Don't tell her but I'm hoping it doesn't end. A crush? Oh. Oh, oh. Oh, well, just between you and me, I think just a little bit.

[Londoners: Introduce yourselves on February 20.]

[buy]

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Throw Me The Statue - "Conquering Kids". A melody so sweet it seems plucked from the tracklist of Bridge Over Troubled Water. The drums don't feel played so much as dappled, the song not so much sung as released, like a blue balloon into a blue sky and us just watching it go up & into the clouds, murmuring to each other yes look at it reach so high. [pre-order (out v soon!)]

The Clientele - "(I Want You) More Than Ever". This is a song from when the Clientele were younger. (Before the chill came.) When they could write a song coloured in leaf-shadow and train-smoke and all the rising glitter of a heart in full swung swing. (The days when the nights were all still to come, a starlit tunnel not yet walked through.) If anyone out there is reading this today, let us do the other way round: make it a song for when we're just a little older, (for when the chill subsides,) for when the nights oh are still to come to us and this day is just a premonition, warming by the second. [buy Suburban Light]

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Montrealers can still enter our contest for tickets to Yeasayer this weekend.

And of course you still have one day to enter our remarkable, unprecedented, gutbusting Wonderful Video Contest. It takes only an hour to take your little digital camera and string together a series of visions, a poem of light & look to go with a favourite song. Go on - do it. For yourself as much as for us.

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The initial lineup for this year's Suoni Il Per Popolo festival has been announced. Look who's coming to Montreal: Loren Connors, Nels Cline, Sir Richard Bishop, Carla Bozulich, Greg Macpherson, Mt. Eerie, Vic Chesnutt, Roscoe Mitchell, the Sun Ra Arkestra, and more.

Rings - "Is He Handsome". When it's three in the morning and the street-light outside is filling your room; when there are rattles in the walls and the same three lines of conversation are circling round&round in your brain. When everything feels a little off, and also much too on. The noise inside your head is sharp, flat, as off-key as your flickery dreams. Isn't it time to go to work? Isn't it time to fall in love? Is this guy something lost, or something you need to realise you found?

The band-name "Rings" evokes the things you wear on your fingers, or the circles that diffuse from where a stone meets the water. But it can also be the present tense of the verb "to ring". This song rings. Insistently. [buy from Paw Tracks]

Tangerine Submarine - "The Life of a Porcelain Doll". Every morning you wash your face - you get up and wash your face and look at your own eyes in the mirror. Sometimes the mirror's steamed over and sometimes the day is sharp outside the window. Always your eyes, there, deep in their sockets, and never a day younger. You remember when you used to look at your own face and see a child, a teenager, a boyfriend, a married man. The same face, every day, even as you go to pieces. And it'll be the same face when you surface, shaken, and set those sharded memories aside. [MySpace]

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Local yeasayers: Yeasayer is coming back to Montreal. One of StG's favouritest new bands appears at La Sala Rossa on February 10th, along with MGMT and Valleys. Tickets are $10 in advance or else, yes, in conjunction with Blue Skies Turn Black we've got two pairs to give away. For the chance to win entry, email me with the subject-line YEASAYER CONTEST, and tell me three things you say YEA to. Deadline is 11:59 pm on Wednesday, February 6.

Baby Dee - "Safe Inside the Day". Dee sent Antony (of the Johnsons) songs, thinking Antony might want to cover one. Antony said no but uh someone should put these out. And someone did. And then Bonnie Prince Billy heard them and he and Matt Sweeney played with Baby Dee in Cleveland and Bonnie Prince Billy said uh can we record you? And they did, for Drag City, on an album that was released on January 22nd.

And this is the title & opening track, a song that is hurled with so much spirit that it could pin clouds to sky and forests to mountains, that it could pin tomorrows to todays and wills to oughts. It's a manifesto and a prayer and an inflammatory writ; it's piano-keys laid like foundation stones; it's the greatest utterance of the word "safe" that I've heard in my life. Dee's day will dim yours, cast yours into half-light and make you aspire to change, growth, courage; to aspire to better things, to return again & again with redoubled spirits... until finally you lead a day such as hers, finding a tiny paradise of no goodbyes. To find a peace so gloriously hard-fought as this.

[buy!]

Please Quiet Ourselves - "Color Chart". This is no more a song about colours than Nick Drake's "Pink Moon" is a song about moons, or pinks.

Started to get a little black.
Started to get red.
Came again - there was blue, there was green, there was brown.
There was silver.
Silver!
Bronze.
Gold, silver, bronze.
Bronze.
Don't forget plum.
Forget plum.
Wait a second now: there's another colour.
What about orange / makes it so DAMN special?
What about orange
makes it orange
orange
[melodica solo]

We play drums with our hands and only when it's too late pick up the sticks.

Please Quiet Ourselves are teenagers, and they're already better painters than me.

[buy]

Drew Danburry - "I'm Pretty Sure This Is Someone Else's Song, But I Couldn't Figure Out Whose So I'm Keeping It!"
Evidently Drew Danburry doesn't know where this song is from. I don't recognize it but it does remind me of a few familiar ditties. The song of chestnuts falling, for instance, or the melody whistled as guy-in-apron pulls the chestnuts from the oven. The song you sang when winter became spring and then receded back into winter, but still it's a nice day. When your bicycle's suddenly working ok again, or when you bump into your friend on the street and you only talk for a sec but it's clear in the clear of their eyes that they were really happy to see you. And you were happy to see them, too. Because there's a bright shiny sunny day / beyond the storm.

And I wish you were able to keep all things when you can't figure out whose they are. Like: "Whose is this ice-cream you are holding? Who knows! It is mine now." Or: "Whose is the moon? I'm keeping it!" Or, and finally: "To whom does this pretty girl belong, sittin' next to me here; well I guess maybe [whispering] i'll call her mine." [MySpace/buy]

Xiu Xiu - "Under Pressure (ft. Michael Gira)". Xiu Xiu throw themselves at the Queen/Bowie classic, like strawberries catapulted at Quebec City's walls. (Swans'/Angels of Light's Michael Gira's there too. So are saxophones.) It's a splendid, beautiful, bloody fucking mess -- like if we stretch the earlier metaphor I guess I'd say the strawberries knock Quebec down, -- and if you get distracted by my run-on sentence and Xiu Xiu's masterpiece you might start thinking about Quebec as Jericho and "Under Pressure" as Joshua's shofar-call, or Quebec as yr defences and "Under Pressure" as yr sweet baboo, or Quebec as yr (my) Xiu Xiu skepticism and "Under Pressure" as the thing that man, blows it altogether away. [pre-order (out next week)]

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Elsewhere:

Sing a message in nightingale.

Gramofriend Casey Dienel has a new record coming out in April March and it's under the band-name White Hinterland. You can listen to a song here. The album is wonderful and I hope to write more about it soon but in the meantime you can read the big ole' press blurb I wrote for her. Casey's voice is more hidden here, crouching amid swish and drone and the wildflower jazz of her friends.

And finally, to my surprise and delight, some of you out there have nominated Said the Gramophone as Best Weblog About Music in the 2008 Bloggies. They are like the Golden Globes for blogs, only I don't think we even get an honorary press conference. StG was nominated for "Best Writing" in 2006, but here we are this year in a more straightforward category. Please consider voting for us, or for one of the other nominees - it's not the usual mp3blog dramatis personae and we're definitely not the only ones I'd be happy to see win.

As always, thank you so much for reading.

[photographer unknown; photo taken from heaven & here]

Dave Ross - "Difference".

Kid in Oklahoma City's sitting beside a cardboard stand that says SONGS in felt marker letters. Got a cassette boombox on his lap. Guy walks over in a white linen suit. Seems on his way somewhere.

"What's this?" he says.

"One dollar," says the kid, "and record a song."

The guy smiles at this, thinks for a sec and pats a beat on his trousers. "Okay," he says finally. He pulls a raggedy bill out of his wallet and hands it over. The kid takes it solemnly and slips it in his polo shirt's chest pocket. The guy in the suit squats on the lawn.

Next the kid heaves over the boombox until it's just in front of the guy who's gonna sing. "Go?" says the guy. "I'll count you in," says the kid. He presses play and record at the same time, pushing hard. Three, two, one, he mouths.

The guy sings a song. The cars keep rushing by, all glossy in the sun. The grass smells like the end of spring. The song's a lazy song, a sweet one. The guy sings it looking away, out and over the houses.

Fifteen years later the kid finds his old & beat-up tape player at the back of his parent's garage. He sits on the concrete beside their Honda. It's chilly. He hits play. He hears hiss and wind and cars and sunshine and the song, this song, the song the guy sang for a dollar, before he waved and said thanks and strolled away. And the kid, he's not a kid any more. He listens to the song and rewinds it and listens again. And he rewinds it and listens to it again. And later that week he buys a guitar and he learns the song and he forms a band and he makes a record and he knows for the first time that he's really found the thing that makes him happy, and that that means everything will work out. Every thing. [MySpace]

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Avey Tare & Kria Brekkan - "Lay Lay Off, Faselam"
[backwardsed, because the original is in reverse, and via The Popfilter]

What we want is for our hearts to be like magnets, like the kid with the golden arm throwing a new white baseball. What we want is for our love to be like the tide, and to hear kisses in the surf. [buy]

[image source]