Archives : all posts by Sean

The Speakers - "You'll Remember". The first two and a half minutes are about trying not to remember, and the last minute and a half are about nothing but remembering. There's an eternity between each resound of piano. Enough time to have a thought and then shove it away; enough time to be happy for a moment before there's that flicker of recall; enough time to imagine for a second that you could forget, that you could move on, that you could leave your sorrow with the water that spirals down the drain of the sink.

The Speakers haven't released anything official since the bloody marvelous Yeats is Greats (2005). (Though there's the Lightning Bug Situation side-project.) They have nevertheless got three whole unreleased albums, not to mention live cuts, odds 'n ends, and so on. So even if The Speakers have nothing new, they have something new: an extremely limited CD-R of their "best" unreleased material, including the above track. It's a very pretty record, perfectly suited to snowfall, with shades of Elliott Smith, Grizzly Bear, even Stars of the Lid. It won't be available in shops.

Said the Gramophone has three of these to give away. If you'd like the chance to win one, email me with the subject line "THE SPEAKERS", and include in your email the best thing anyone has ever whispered to you. Thanks to The Speakers for the invitation to do this.Speakers contest is over. Thanks for your remarkable entries. I'll email the winners. (There's still time to win tickets to Vampire Weekend's concert in Montreal, too.)

[buy other Speakers/Lightning Bug Situation things, or go to the LBS release party in San Fran on Saturday]

Freeway -"Take it to the Top (ft. 50 Cent)". A song borne entirely on the back of Mr Cent: forget Freeway's whingeing, even the cinema-carpet synth riff, we're here to hear Curtis sing the hook. His delivery is gentle, almost kind. "You gotta believe me," he sings, and when he says where he'll take you (to the top), the squeak in his voice is imbued with affection and play. "Shorty," he calls you, and for a moment you can imagine what it'd be like to actually be loved by this guy. [buy]

Broadcast 2000 - "Get Up And Go". A folk-pop song in the broken beat style, as if The Books gave Kings of Convenience the hiccups. Broadcast 2000 is Artisan's Joe Steer gone solo, but "Get Up And Go" is one of these songs that feels very much like it was made among friends. There's no loneliness in this - instead hope, pleasure, community. Light reflected off guitar-strings and onto faces.

[buy ('sanks Amy)]

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(image from Tradescant's Musaeum Tradescantianum, via the great BibliOdyssey)

Vampire Weekend - "Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"
Vampire Weekend - "Bryn"
Vampire Weekend - "A-Punk"

Never have I been so happy to have egg on my face. After months of ignoring the buzz around Vampire Weekend, contenting myself with the pretty-darn-good song called "Oxford Comma" and assuming all the rest to be blog hyperbole (hyperbloge?), I finally downloaded their "blue cd-r" a few of weeks ago. Other than singles it's their only release, at least until XL issues their debut next year. And you can't buy it anywhere any more - hence my willingness to share one, two, three songs with you today. My willingness, yes, and also my glee.

Because Vampire Weekend are terrific and these songs doubly so; a mess of glint, snap and bump that sends me happily huddled into my weekdays. It's indie pop informed by Spoon, Paul Simon's Graceland, Wes Anderson, and Baroque string quartets, and if this sounds good to you then THIS WILL PROBABLY SOUND GOOD TO YOU.

"Cape Cod Kwassa Kwassa"'s named after a Congolese dancebeat but the song's not in fact a kwassa kwassa, nor is it a slow jam, although it's basically about making out, pale and collegiate, and wondering what the heck you're doing. The chorus ends, at least to my ears, like this: "Does it feel so unnatural / to Peter Gabriel too?" And while critics fall over this as a statement about "world music", appropriation, &c, to me it's just a kid's clumsy, loopy wonderin' about the having of sex. Fresh out of puberty, fresh into university, jostling shoulders and hopefully bumping boots with the rich-girl in the Benetton t-shirt and with the Louis Vuitton bag, reggaeton on the stereo like the spiced sound of i-can-do-what-i-want! And our hero, our nervy art student of a hero, thinking as he takes off his undershirt about the man who was all through his youth the paragon of funk, of musically getting down, the bootiest music that 9 year-old Ezra ever knew. Does Peter Gabriel, too, find sex so... unnatural? So happily weird? So happily, happily, happily weird?

"Do you want to fuck?" Koenig exclaims the first time round, the crowing of a lad who can't believe his luck. But he's still too shy to be so explicit more than once: "Do you want ta'?!" he sings every time after that, a lustful lamp in his eyes, "'cause you know I do." Ooo-oo ooh-ooo. And in the song's final moments, before harpsichord snaps into position to show that this era has a cadence, that this soft jersey time will end, we have the sweetest love-scene of any song this year: a scene of white sheets and pink lips and fingers slipping round the curve of an ear, a few bars where we hear just Hammond hum and hands on skin and the bluebird coos of a boy slipping out of one skin & into another. Out of the young and into the old. (Out of the heat and into the cold.)

"Bryn" is a handmade rocket, a skyward climb, the sweetest California sunrise of a sound. It's two minutes of sunkiss and the tumble of drums, it's longing and wishing and the knowledge of it-won't-be. And it's strings, wild and wheeling, the sound of the seagulls - free, certainly, but never ever home.

And "A-Punk", well, it makes Clap Your Hands Say Yeah feel defunct.

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(Vampire Weekend do inspire a whole lot of chewy ideas around race, class, appropriation and so on. The best analysis of these is probably Eric's from last week - it certainly feels like the most honest one.)

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Contest:

Vampire Weekend are touring and they come to Montreal on December 14th. The show's at Club Lambi. Said the Gramophone has two pairs of passes to give away. To enter our sweepstakes email me with "VAMPIRE WEEKEND CONTEST" as the subject-line. And in the body of your email please suggest an alternate name for the band, cos seriously, "Vampire Weekend" is awful.

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[Vampire Weekend's homepage]

(more about the site of the above photo, credit unknown)

There is a lot of snow here. Today's post is going to be a little late.

[photo source]

Siddhartha - "Holiday (Madonna cover)". This is a very different holiday than the one Madonna took. She went to a glassy swimming pool and danced from floating mattress to floating mattress; she clicked in heels past flashing clubs; she blew air-kisses like electric hummingbirds; she ate whipped cream, and soap, and light. Siddhartha, meanwhile, ate sludge and mushrooms and then went running into the desert, drone coming up like plantlife through the sand, skies filling with a horde of winter locusts and the sound of Siddhartha's inevitable oblivion. Their hearts were beating hard, hard, hard; their bodies voguin' like things possessed.

[buy the Madonna tribute on Manimal Vinyl: Lavender Diamond, Ariel Pink, & more. All proceeds to charity.]

The Unreliable Narrator - "The Fucking Mountains". From the opening line of this song you are forgiven for thinking maybe it's a joke song, a novelty hit. But listen: I hate joke songs, and this isn't one. Oh, it's got smile and humour and fake theremin - and a sidling, red-nosed bassline, - but there's more going on than yuks. Let me quote: "This impenetrable darkness / this brooding gloom..." When the Unreliable Narrator sings about "the fucking mountains" or, later, "this fucking carpet", he's smiling, sure, but so too is he shaking his head in awe. (When it comes to the carpet, this awe is because of how much the rug reminds him of the sea.) Like when you came out of that mountain tunnel and saw the Alps and were like: "Fuuuuuuuuck!" The Unreliable Narrator's been trapped in a well for weeks and now someone's lowering postcards, snapshots, upholstery samples, and he feels the sights so hard that he can only ba-ba-ba.

[MySpace]

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Elsewhere:

Pensione Popolo! Montreal's best music venue (and a darn fine bar/resto) now has a cheap hotel!!!! Stay not far from my house for a measly $30-50 dollars/night. Includes free entry to Casa shows! Finally I have somewhere to recommend to visiting phonograph salesmen.

Saw Dave Eggers speak here in Montreal tonight. I think the most inspiring thing about it was the conviction in his optimism, the certainty of his glee. The way exciting things not just can, but do succeed. "Good from good," he said.

(Photo is of Astana, Kazakhstan. Photographer unknown to me.)

Sam Amidon - "Little Johnny Brown". The tide brings in different things. One day: cockleshells, sea-glass, driftwood. Another day it's seaweed and turtleshell. This morning you wake and climb the bluff and there are jellyfish, millions of them, gleaming in the sand like rubies. The tide brings seagulls, planing, and buzzards, loping. It brings stones. It brings strangers in ships, and wide white sails. It brings salt. It leaves the salt on the beach. When you lie on the beach it smells like tears. The tide does not bring her back.

Sam Amidon's album with Doveman's Thomas Bartlett, under the name Samamidon, is one of my favourite folk records of this year: strange, wild, weary. "Little Johnny Brown" is taken from the upcoming All Is Well, due in February on Bedroom Community. It was recorded in Iceland by Valgeir Sigurðsson, who produced Bonnie "Prince" Billy's The Letting Go, with brass, string and woodwind arrangements by Nico Muhly (Bjork, Philip Glass). I cannot wait to hear the rest of it. (These are Sam's favourite albums and films of 2007: R. Kelly and Verhoeven sit at number one.)

Silver Jews - "Frontier Index". Poets and comedians are in the same business. "I just want to say something true," David Berman sings, voice like a snakeskin. You can imagine him, late, drunk, standing with a microphone before a brick wall and knowing it's not going well. Getting belligerent. Poets do not necessarily make good comedians, nor comedians poets, but they are in the same business. Poems are like punchlines, or punchlines like poems. They rewire your brain, bring in cold and warm fronts. There are two jokes in "Frontier Index", and I won't spoil them for you. They are both about inevitability. Like Homer Simpson says: "It's funny because it's true." I did not laugh when I first heard them but I smiled and for a moment I forgot the cold.

[buy Natural Bridge]

(smiling bird photographer unknown.)

by Aurélia Frey

French Quarter - "Stay". Stay in my bed. Keep y--rself warm. No h--- or ---st, ---ven no --- will take me from your solitude. Stay in my bed -nd grow an-ther branch. No tug -f war or devil head w-ll pull me from your touch. Oo-oo. Stay in my bed and sleep anothe- sea. No ocean pull or ---ly tide will take you fro- my side. Stay here. Don't stray aw-y. And if you do, know I'll w---- why. I don't want -- keep you; I just want you to st--. Oo-oo. Oo-oo. Oo---. O----. -----. .. .    .   .

[MySpace / this band is on tour in Arizona, California and Washington state / (thanks sara.)]

Marshall Crenshaw - "You're My Favorite Waste Of Time". "You're My Favourite Waste of Time" was, as I explained, my first favourite song, ever, in my whole life. It was not this version of "Waste of Time" mind you. It was a version by Owen Paul, now lost in the sands of time. I had never heard this, the original, until Amy sent it to me earlier this week. It's great, isn't it? It's almost definitely better than the Paul recording. But would it have caught my fancy, when I was four? At age four I probably didn't even know what "wasting time" meant, preferring the verb "to play". And certainly I was only just getting enamoured with the idea of love. So as Crenshaw's band smashes, jangles and tambourine-shakes, I imagine four-year-old Sean would have been intimidated, if not outright terrified, by Crenshaw's zeal. There's something too forceful in the bass-drum, something too daunting in a solo which requires the introduction of "Hit it!" Imagine loving someone so much that you sing this song to them in all it's smiling, full-voice cheer! Imagine being able to call them "mine" and knowing they'll hug you back, unfazed! Imagine someone else actually being your favourite waste of time! Better than Lego, better than cake, better than watching the Penguin Parade at the Edinburgh Zoo. Sounds crazy to me. (No it doesn't.)

[buy]

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Okkervil River's Daytrotter Session includes a solo Will Sheff recording of Jimmy Webb's "Do What You Gotta Do". It's compelling, but large parts of me are still disappointed it borrows from Nina Simone's meandering rendition instead of the straight-ahead (and heartbreaking) melodicism of Roberta Flack's, or more recently Meg Baird's cover.

There are few things sweeter than projects of love (and few things sourer than projects of spite). Friends Jan Junker and Sebastian Hoffmann have now released two compilations in a series called Berlin Songs, documenting indie, lofi and folk musicians that have passed through their mostly-home of Berlin. I've heard the second disc, just released, and Berlin Songs vol. 2 is a really charming collection; all sorts of messy, dusty, beautiful songs, modest and easy to love. Most are by unknown artists, but there are several names (Andre Herman-Dune, Wave Pictures, Jeffrey Lewis) that will be familiar to lofi- or gramophone-followers.

Ish Marquez - "The Ballad of Jan and Simone". It's like this song starts with a different song - a few licks of acoustic angst, and then... ahhh. Ish Marquez begins to sing and instantly it's like that first summer Friday; boy and girl, shaker shaking, Stanley Brinks' alcoholic electric guitar. Ish's voice is wide and generous, and there's something unpredictable in it; the loose, mild madness that colours Devendra Banhart's best singing, or even Sam Cooke's. Sometimes without meaning to, his heart tinges his vocals a deeper shade of cherry. Clemence Freschard (who appears all over this comp) is the opposite: careful, careful, singing husky and listening to every single syllable of her partner. Making sure she moves her lips only when he moves his. (Under the kitchen table she air guitar's the solo, and no one notices, not even her.)

Coming Soon & Friends - "This Star Is Mine". Said the Gramophone's favourite troupe of French teenagers (plus adults), Coming Soon are here joined by a second sax player and Mlle Freschard. But instead of the band's typical garage pop, "This Star Is Mine" is a ballad in dusky shades. "This star is mine," Howard Hughes intones, like the narrator at an old planetarium. Everyone's pressed deep into their red velvet chairs, staring at the sky. There are art deco swoops over the entrances. It's eleven in the morning but any second now, they'll see the night sky. Any second the mechanical sun will set.

They don't hold their breath. They just sing softly to each other. "In between seasons / in between seasons / in between seasons." They'll keep their tickets until the dusk they die.

[buy Berlin Songs vol. 2/Ish Marquez's MySpace/Coming Soon things]

[Berlin photo by ninnx]