Archives : all posts by Sean

Neutral Milk Hotel - "Naomi". Of all the musics I know, Neutral Milk Hotel's is the one that that thrives most unexpectedly in sunlight. You expect these hot & knotted songs to wither in the daytime - but no, no, every time I listen with the window open, all that shine streaming through, with kids' shouts outside and bicycles ringing and the full wild sound of traffic, the smell of flowers, I'm struck by how quick "Naomi" blooms. Long vines, new buds, curls of leaf that go stretching out and across the room; ivy come kissing over all of our hearts. [buy]

The Chordettes - "Mr Sandman". Some amazing things about Mr Sandman:

• Man, girls! Baffling, huh? And so typical! Here the Chordettes spend a whole song talkin' about Mr Sandman, plotting and begging and dreaming, and then when he finally arrives - when like the Kool Aid Man he sticks his big head into the room to show he's listening ("YEEeeeSSss?"), - what do the ladies do? Very little! They keep on singin' the same song and don't let him get another word in edgewise. Women!
• And seriously they want someone "with lots of wavy hair, like Liberace"?
• The saxophones appear only briefly, but while on the scene my pulse doubles. Yow!
• This song talks about a magic beam that brings you a dream. And you actually get to hear what the beam sounds like. (Exactly once.)
• It sounds like this: "AHHHHHHHH."
• What are "two lips, like roses and clover"? LEAF LIPS = HOT?
• Little known fact: This is the perfect music for icing wedding cakes.

Happy long weekend, kiddoes. If you're in Montreal tonight you should join me at Cagibi in ninety minutes, where Alina Simone will be playing with Snailhouse and Michael Holt.

Cody ChesnuTT - "Boils". It's Frosh Week in Montreal - that's like Freshers Week, but Canadian, - and all around the city are dewy-eyed kids who have stumbled into love-affairs. They're groping at each other with all kinds of astonished gusto. You see them making out at the bar and each half's internal narrative seems to be: wow; wow; wow; oh man, wow.

Cody presents a sermon - he sings the holy word of the Lord, - and yet his testifying reminds me not of church, but of these smoky shadowtouch brightlight scenes. Everything's a little lurching, a litle stop-start, with moments of spontaneous, unvarnished, trumpeted oh! It is the sexiest-ever song about BOILS.

[buy Plague Songs, with songs by King Creosote, Rufus Wainwright, Klashnekoff, Laurie Anderson & al]

Habitat - "Mess It Up". Habitat - and the couple who led it, featured here singing the words "Here's hoping we don't mess it up!" - have broken up. I guess this means that on some level... they messed it up. But forget that. Listen to the awesome way Habitat do this song, the glossola-la-lalia they layer over each verse. You need to like someone very much to let them loll that loud, all over you. It's easy to forget how much a relationship is an agreement - two parties in league with one-another. But here the consensus is writ large, and looping; a handshake sweet as a bowl full of cherries. [MySpace]

---

Things that are great:

Eleanor Friedberger doing the Fiery Furnaces' "Quay Cur" solo, introducing it in a robot voice that's so cute she might as well have slung me over her shoulder and carried me off to Denmark.

Old Time Relijun's funky-cracklin' Beefheart lunacy: "Daemon Meeting"

Hiran'ny Tanoran'ny Ntao Lo - "Oay Lahy E! (O! Dear Friend!)" [buy]

Dan Beirne, Jordan Himelfarb and I are friends, but we are not lovers. We have never been on dates (with each other). We have high-fived and embraced - like bears, with grunts, and sparkle-eyes, and berries in fur, - but never, no, have we, like, made out. Or had we gone out to dinner. But on Saturday, August 18th, 2007, Dan, Jordan and I went out to dinner. Just the three of us, just the Gramophone trio, cozied up at a restaurant called La Montée de Lait, gorging ourselves on a meal - and a bottle of wine - paid for by some of you.

That night, we drank a toast - "To us!" - but we were being wry and backward-bashful, because really we meant: "To you!"

We had such a grand time. I don't know why we hadn't done it before. Dan showed up late, but wearing a tie. Jordan was wearing a hat. I had a large, framed etching of an iced-over river. We let the waiter (who might have been the owner) choose the wine. He chose something from Italy. Jordan's father is the Canadian ambassador to Italy, but we did not mention this. Jordan tasted the wine and: it was good.

Each of us chose four dishes. Let me repeat this: Each of us chose four dishes. This is how things work at La Montée de Lait. La Montée de Lait is a paradise. A couple of us had thin, raw-fresh slices of tuna. A couple of us had "Mac & Cheese", which did not include a single macaronus. A couple of us shared a cheese plate. One of us had a poached peach. One of us had some amazing chicken thing. One of us had something in bacon broth. Oh yes, readers, 'twas high & low cuisine at the Gramophone Dinner, and delight was a-dancing upon our tongues. Like fireflies on our tongues! Mouthfuls of fireflies! And did I mention the wine!

So we ate, we made merry. We talked about our lives, and our friendships, and about music and the internet, and about girls. We talked Business, and we talked dirty. (Jordan is the most lewd of us, Dan the middle-man, and I am a pure-as-linen monk.) We called the restaurant "Cheese Mountain". We ate almonds. They kept refilling our dish of bread. Did I mention that the wine list came in its own box? It did! And on two occasions the knives they gave us were ivory handled, like an adventurer's antique switchblade, and we imagined skinning zebras in the steppe.

The night would have been perfect if Hiran'ny Tanoran'ny Ntao Lo were there too, crouched around us in the dust, drinking a fine Chianti and singing an ode to us, to you, and to friends-in-general. There are several ways to communicate sincerity, in song: a particular kind of inflection, a thickness of voice, tears. The Hiran'ny Tanoran'ny Ntao Lo remind me of another way: to speak many syllables, rapidly, energetically, but without panic. Last Saturday night we were doing this, the three of us, and it feels good to hear the same thing in "Oay Lahy E". It feels good to know that others know the pleasure of dear friends, of O! Dear Friends, of birds of a fine fellow feather.

Thank you again for giving us the chance to be reminded of this.

Jay Reatard - "All Over Again" [buy]

BUT NOW IT'S A WEEK LATER AND IT'S BACK TO THE GRINDSTONE.

The Cay - "Company Store". We can't collect handshakes. We can't collect the times we've held someone's hand. We can't collect high-fives. Maybe there's somewhere someone with a Polaroid camera around their neck, documenting each one. A thousand snapshots of hands & hands. Maybe they decorate their room with the images, or decorate their Christmas tree. Maybe they keep the handshakes, handholds, highfives in shoeboxes under their bed. Maybe they burn them in their fireplace to keep warm in winter.

But most of us take these hands-on-hands for granted. We ignore the way they're each a small, distinct beauty. And so go our whole lives.

Not so The Cay. "Company Store" is a string of small splendours, like the line of white lights on a procession of bicycles, night-riding. It's a folk song that visits four seasons. In their knit of guitars, voices, rhythms, in their counterpoint and harmony, they're collecting each tiny moment. Each handclasp and gasp. "I see a bear and a child, and a baby grand." The small (big) pleasure in a long hard day where I can see the end. These are the beauties we forget & neglect, but they're the things that make a life. And before the end of the song, The Cay have marked each one with an exclamation point.

The Cay - "Littlest Hobo". The Cay is my friend Jordan's band. Here they cover the theme-song of a Canadian television show called "The Littlest Hobo". And while I snicker when they use the phrase "hobo-style", most of this song I spend just happy, simply happy. I feel such a pleasure in the scatter of shaker & guitarline, in the crooked voices, in the slang & slur. "Just turn aroun' an' I'm gone again," Christine sings, and I'm so glad to know her. There's a German word: Fernweh. The desire to be somewhere else. While wanderlust is the hobo's desire, a need to be on the move, Fernweh is just the opposite of homesickness. The wish to be distant. And as I listen to my friends' third CD, Don't Go Out Tonight, which is kind & complicated & beautiful & stirring (& without record-label!), - as I listen to this hobo's song, - I do not feel one tiny lick of Fernweh. I'm fine just here, with you. (Heck, come a little closer!)

[MySpace / email Jordan / say something in the comments]

---

I tweaked Said the Gramophone's RSS feed, so if anyone has any trouble let me know.

---

If you enjoyed the Luyas song I posted last week, you may be happy to learn that they now have a WEBSITE, featuring MORE MP3s (all great), and instructions for buying the CD. Faker Death is fast becoming one of my all-time favourite records of the year, dearer with every listen.

Jens Lekman - "Your Arms Around Me". (Removed at label request.) We're projectors, all of us! Such persistent projectors! The band called the Dirty Projectors has got it right: that's the stuff of artists, of memory, of all of us considering, remembering, living and retelling our lives. Dirty projections. Messy, flawed, innaccurate projections. But so help us it's all we can do. So I hear Jens Lekman's startling little song, "Your Arms Around Me", and what I write says more about me than about Jens:

And amid harp and uke and "MMmbop" guitar, Lekman tells a silly story about a guy who ends up in hospital after an avocado accident. As with much of Lekman's work, he uses the ridiculous to try and undermine the sentimental. But schlock doesn't cease to be schlock just because there's a goofy Swedish punchline wedged in, and both of Lekman's LPs are marred by maudlin excess. (His singles/rarities comp, however, is fucking amazing.) And yet despite the regrettable avocado plotline, "Your Arms Around Me" is beautifully composed, majestically arranged, and basically great. Most stirring & strange is the affection in it - the romantic chorus, the idyllic melody, - because there's such a disconnect between this and the lyrics. "What's broken can always be fixed / what's fixed will always be broken"? That last part's not a banality. Or when he wakes in the hospital bed: "You're sitting next to me reading the paper / I put your arm around me." It's a broken relationship, one half more in love than the other.

And you could explain all this by calling the narrator deluded, blind to the nature of his own love-affair. Or you could see the song as something else: a recollection. A snapshot & a story. The desire to go back to another time, to swim for a while there, and to cast it in rosy light. The doomed, daft act of revisiting a lost place and gilding it gold.

Nina Nastasia and Jim White - "In the Evening". I don't think I'm still in love, these seasons later. But in the evening I sit and sometimes I realise I am wearing it again. My jacket like an awning. My love like a jacket. And every time I put it away in the wardrobe, the cedar closet, it does not stay there. I take it back out. I don't understand the syntax of what happened, of what continues to happen. What's past and what's present. The past is present. We made an end in breaking, as Nina Nastasia sings. We darkened up our home. And nothing here reminds me, but here I am, wearing that coat, looking at photographs and thinking I oughtn't, that they're such empty windows. A false light always fading. Yes. And Nina Nastasia sings with pessimism of the uneasy knowing. "A moth can live this way", she sings. So I listen not to pessimistic Nina, dark-haired and dark-eyed; I listen instead to wild, serious Jim White, perhaps my favourite living musician, as he makes a speech of optimism, change & progress; of wisdom; as he makes a speech only by hitting things with wooden sticks and metal brushes.

[buy]

---

"As the hornet enters the nest, a large mob of about five hundred honey bees surround the hornet, completely covering it and preventing it from moving, and begin quickly vibrating their flight muscles. This has the effect of raising the temperature of the honey bee mass to 47 °C (117 °F). Though the honey bees can narrowly tolerate such a temperature, it is fatal to the intruder, which can handle a maximum temperature of about 45 °C (113 °F), and is effectively baked to death by the large mass of vibrating bees."

[photo by undertwasser]

Ivan Ives - "Victory (ft. Vast Aire)".
Arcade Fire - "Surf City Eastern Bloc".

There's an effervescence to that old Russian sound - a shine & sparkle to the burnished brass swordhilts. It's the glitter on pocket-watches, tea-sets, tram-tracks, soviet medals. It's not just a music of triumph, or of potential triumph -- it's the holy-shit yes of a people's pride. When a good song comes on at a club, when the whole crowd dances to it right, you'd hear the same sound if you knocked on everyones' heads.

Russian-born Ivan Ives enlists the Hermitage's brassest trumpets to boost his bragadocchio. He's up on a stage throwing wedding-cakes at his detractors, crackin' Fabergé eggs between his molars, lighting a cigar with the czar's old chandelier. His rhymes aren't actually that clever, but when he breaks into Russian it sounds an awful lot like I'd sound, as an MC - spouting spirited gibberish, nonsense that'll knock ya flat.

And on the Arcade Fire b-side "Surf City Easter Bloc", an old song at last recorded, Win Butler is unable to express any kind of hooray until he brings a Hungarian men's choir on board. Most of the song is trudging, weary; it's hard work. He's caught in Neon Bible's fog, that cold war freeze, even as he sings about escape, escape, escape! So thank goodness there are some good, stern men, some men with moustaches, to lift their fists to the air and present an Eastern European HUZZAH, mouths open wide to celebrate the flight that Win's so reluctant to exalt.

[Ivan Ives MySpace / buy the No Cars Go 7"]

---

Dan and I are now writing for a website called Ajisignal, updating them with reports of up-and-coming happening in Montreal. We join Justin from Aquarium Drunkard, representing L.A., Liz in Minneapolis, and Ben & Christian in SF. Our first post is a piece on the marvo popsters Miracle Fortress.

OneByOne is a new mp3blog where there is writing & drawing about every single song. The picture for Of Montreal's "Oslo in the Summertime" is so right-on it hurts.

WEB 2.0-ers: A guy called greatslack has created a Said the Gramophone group on Last.fm .

And finally: Pornography, Said the Gramophone-style.

The Luyas - "Dumb Blood". I'm all mixed up, Jessie Stein sings, and without distress. It's a state of the union address. It's like showing us the palms of her hands. This is how she is. And meanwhile I'm in my apartment on Parc Avenue and I stick my head out the window into the rainfall and I see her walking in her blue dress, soaked from the storm, hair dripping & lifting & curling. And I want to tell her hi, yeah, I see you. Hey there. And I want to tell her to step onto the cloud she's made, the little one floating beside her, and to go sailing into the gale. In spite of her dumb blood. In spite of all that's wrong and all the crash and want and blow and oh. Her friends are playing her pain with drums and french horn, the kids from Torngat and Bell Orchestre, but they'll trace her gladnesses too. This is the suggestion I'd make, the kindness I'd offer for a song as marvelous as this. I'd try to offer a trade: some hope in exchange for this great glowing ache.

[buy / MySpace. Faker Death is like Les Mouches, but further from death & closer to heartbreak.]

Sandro Perri - "Family Tree". I should not have to tell you anything but this: Sandro Perri's debut album is available for pre-order. I have written about music from both of his earlier EPs, but now there is something called Tiny Mirrors and boys, girls, lovers, fighters: his music's the summerest thing that this summer will bring. They're chilled-out songs - cool, smooth, silvergold, - but performed in a room with some of Toronto's finest improvisational musicians. Free and easy listening. Perri's sings in his mossy voice of trouble & its resolve; he kicks his kick-drum; and around him there's trombone, cymbal, a narcoleptic keyboard. A song for the passing of days, or seasons, or the passing from one time-of-life to another. Of searching for the things you've already laid eyes on.

On the final track they remake "Family Tree" as an instrumental, Perri not even in the room, all its stuffing laid bare. (And this you will have to buy.)

[buy!]

---

Tuwa's appeared at the Tofu Hut, to tell a beautiful lie about Betty Davis.