Archives : all posts by Sean

Okkervil River - "Unless It's Kicks". It's not just one of the greatest songs of the year - it's one of the wisest. Sheff sings with an urgency that is like an underlining of key phrases, like two hands tugging to make sure all the seams hold. And whereas wisdom's so often dull, here it's knotted up in the work of a band who love the Shangri-Las, and Sam Cooke, and the craft of a pop song. I'd not be sad if every Okkervil River song sounded like this: shaker, tambourine, a revelation at the moment you go leaping off the stage and onto the raised hands of the crowd. It's the gladness of art & kicks & true-feeling lies, the way a good song is a hand grabbing desperately for your arm. It's the hardest-hitting kind of hit. Glorious. [buy The Stage Names, with bonus disc and free downloads and stuff]

The Octagon - "The Narrow Road to Oku". It's a little disoriented, this sandy rock-song. It went wandering into the desert with a bottle of red wine, a Pavement album, and a few hours later is like: what the fuck? Whoever it was supposed to meet with didn't show up; whichever stars it was expecting to see didn't make an appearance. And now its shoes are tied in unfamiliar knots, its hair is filled with grains of unfamiliar minerals, and it's got a catchy song in its head - something it found in a dune, burnished and hopeful and even a little buddhist. Whereever the hell it came from, The Octagon's gonna carry it around for a while. (Tip o' the hat to former Montreal drummer, Will Glass.) [pre-order]

St Vincent - "Marry Me". This was better at Montreal's Sala Rossa, just Miss Saint Vincent and a baby grand, but we make do, we make do. Each of the opening lines is like a little glass of water, and we drink each one in turn. At its best this is a song of strange but unstumbling love - the sort of thing that makes me heartsick with envy for "John", the dude Vincent's batting her big eyes at. All the vocal effects, strings and muted horns are nice enough, but we're listening for the simple lilt of the chorus, the way the words balance on St Vincent's tongue, and that coy climax line: "Let's do what Mary and Joseph did / without the kid". [buy]

Fanfarlo - "Devil Town". I can't figure out if this lovely 1:55 ditty, piano & bass & horns & strings & glockenspiel & thunder-sheet & choir, is forlorn or resigned; if it's the first thing you sing at dawn or the last thing you sing at dusk, stumbling your way home. I'd like to sew it into a card and send it to all my wronged friends, the ones with stolen bikes or broken hearts. Fanfarlo have recorded such a pretty, pretty blues. (ps: shhh, it's a Bright Eyes Daniel Johnston cover.) [buy the "Fire Escape" single]

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Happy Birthday, Dan Beirne. I'd say more but for the first time in a three years I was here, Sunday, to give you my well-wishes in person. I'm happy for that.

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The full suite of videos from the Blogotheque's Soiree a Emporter is now online, in English, with amazing footage of David Herman Dune, Zach Condon, Kocani Orkestar, and many more. I even wrote a little blurb for them about a Sidi Ali clip.

Andrew Rose's story of seeing Leonard Cohen on the street seems to me either a) a true thing about Montreal; or b) a true thing about living in a world where artists dwell. Either way: good.

"After all that, how does live octopus tentacle taste? A little like fury fused with fear."

Animal Collective - "Fireworks". (TO BE PLAYED SO LOUD SO LOUD SO LOUD, KIDS, and WHILE YOU ARE STANDING UP)

And you say nothing because you don't know the words to say; and you know that the wrong thing, said, would become a regret; and you wonder who invented the word 'goodbye', and whether the first syllable is a lie or a kindness; and you think that if you had hours and a pen, perhaps you would be able to find the right thing to say; and perhaps you would not; but you do not have a pen, or hours, just yr lips and someone else's; and a kiss is too quiet to speak with; or I don't know, maybe it's just right; and you want to say a dozen things, all of them like bridges, stone and iron, and wood, things that you can leave behind & intact; and you want to say a dozen things, all of them like breaths on a cold night, misting & then gone; and you want to tear off your tie; and you want to throw your shoes at something; and you want to be on a street of pinkpetaled trees, singing, voice a-resoundin', a song of carefree la and these days' easy joy; because they were such an easy joy; and so full-feeling, her face; and so often hidden, her face; and you, dodging wry; and skipping stones; and lines on hands; and then; and then goodbye; and

[pre-order]

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this is the alternate photo to accompany this post.

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This animation starts so sad it's uncomfortable and then the bottom falls out and the walls fall away and you no longer know what to think, except maybe awe or i hope wonder. (via Michael)

If Said the Gramophone were a video-blog, if we made videos for every song, and I had made this music video for Fionn Regan's "Be Good Or Be Gone", it would be one of my best posts ever.

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[photo by Darek, in iceland]

M.I.A. - "Paper Planes". FORGET IT'S SUMMER. Just forget it. THERE IS NO SUMMER. Summer's done. Come 2010 we'll only have one season anyway: THE HOT SEASON. So let's start early. Starting now, in 2007, l'été est passé. We'll just act like it's this all the time. Like it's awesome all the time. Like you can eat ice-cream and dance in shorts-and-t-shirt all year round.^* In the once-words of my good friend Dave: FUN TIMES FOREVER. And the sky will crisscross with sparkling jet-planes, and M.I.A. will be playing on the roof of the YMCA, just her and a sampler and a girl with a bass drum. And I'll learn to play electric guitar so I can learn to play this song - a high, keening guitar-line, lazy-crazy, useless for anything except "Paper Planes", but the only part you can learn. Because the sing-along chorus is literally impossible to sing along to: it's machine-gun pow and cash register kaching, and yet still the summer's second anthem, the best thing since ella-ella-ella. Sorry Dan: if "Paper Planes" is "filler" then it's like the cotton batten that fills yr favourite doll, the sap in the greening tree, the high-fives that make it worth getting up in the morning.

Hear M.I.A.'s KCRW recording of "Paper Planes" via Gorilla vs Bear - you can hear the way she's already singing it different, romping all through it, finding new swing-sets hidden in the pop-song's nooks and crannies.

* - I guess in some places you can ice-cream and dance all year round. But it's more fun if it's in Montreal.

[pre-order Kala, which is, unexpectedly, totally amazing]

Fleetwood Mac - "Walk A Thin Line". Jordan calls it The Summer of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours, but as I say in the comments to that post - for me 'twas the spring of Rumours and 'tis now the summer FUN TIMES FOREVER of Tusk. I do not know what this says about my life other than the need for a harpsichord in it, and my love of wooly mammoths.

On "Walk A Thin Line", Lindsey Buckingham sings in that mode which Fleetwood Mac perfected: a jubilant sorrow, a melancholy joy, an addicting lament. There's a dozen voices there with him, glad and ruined, talking about fate, want & wonder, all as the beat clomps on & on, at once trudge and soar. And with some of the most magnificent drums I have ever heard on a song, the wisest drums I can remember, the stumble &: smile of a man as goes to hug his unrequited love: oh heart, beat on, foolish and dear, oh oh & oh no & yes.

Apparently Buckingham blamed Tusk's commercial "failure" (only 4 million sold!) on home taping. If you're reading this Lindsey, I hope that you warm a little bit to Said the Gramophone.

[buy]

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Join me at this Friday's Bollywood Bike-In at Montreal's McAuslan Brewery. Cheap beer, projected films, and DJs under the stars.

It's been a few days of birthday! A verily and merrily, then, to Matt Perpetua, Andrew Rose, and Dan Zabbal.

[mammoth drawing by Christina McSherry]

Low - "Breaker (Daytrotter session)". Low are on vacation, somewhere very hot and dry. They were driving all day in the rusted-out van. They arrive at the hotel they booked weeks before, on a dry strip of yellow sand with the ocean just visible at the horizon. The building's made of white concrete. There's no one there to book them in, just a whiteboard in the lobby saying: LOW -- ROOM 310. They let themselves into 310. There isn't any furniture. They set up their instruments. Sweat's dripping down their arms and falling in drops when it reaches their wrists. They wish they had something cold to drink. They open the little window as wide as it will go and they pick up their guitar, bass, drum-sticks. They start to sing without even having warmed up. Alan and Mimi don't even look at each-other when their voices meet a little sharp. They're all just staring through the haze at the window, and beyond the window to that distant bar of sea. They sing the song with clenched fists and call the ocean closer, tide by tide.

Low - "Hatchet (Optimimi Version)". Later they go for a swim in the pool.

[buy Low's Drums & Guns, presently my fourth-favourite album of the year / check out the rest of the triumphant Daytrotter session / try to find the Hatchet 7"]

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The first Concert a emporter video from last week's Blogotheque concert has the Kocani Orkestar playing their hearts out with Beirut's Zach Condon, thick in the throng of Parisians. If I was there I would have turned to leaves.

(photo above by Sara Padgett)

Bottom of the Hudson - "Rusty Zippers". We've never shared a meal, or had a conversation. I've never stood and watched them play their songs. Bottom of the Hudson were, and are, strangers to me. I cannot even name their members, without looking.

On June 29th 2007, outside Clinton, North Carolina, one of the tires blew out in a van carrying Bottom of the Hudson across the I-40. Their bassist, Trevor Butler, died in the accident. Their drummer, Greg Lytle, is in intensive care.

It seems tasteless to write a eulogy to a person you never knew. An obituary - okay. Just the facts. But a eulogy? Who am I to light a candle in a stranger's memory? A man whose eyes I've never seen?

At moments like this it feels so clear that music is a touch. If nothing else it is a hand placed on yours. How can I call this a band of strangers, they whose hands I've felt on mine? The men whose voices, whose fingers on strings & keys I've brought into my room after dark? They have given me these songs and me I have heard them with my heart held wide open.

Now Trevor Butler has passed away. I feel a pang of such sorrow - I don't know why. Perhaps it's just that a band who made beautiful, startling music has now met calamity. Perhaps it's sympathy for my fellow human beings. But perhaps it's that I know I will hear his absence, even on a recording. Where the bassline appears, there will be no shadow.

I'm not even certain he sat in on the Fantastic Hawk recordings; and yet my feelings are unchanged.

Trevor probably didn't play any bass on "Rusty Zippers" (I don't hear any). But the thing is, that might leave him some room to visit. The song is wide and sensuous, with clarinet and vibraphone and moss-filled guitar, and I wonder, part of me, if perhaps the man could rest with us here for a while, with jay's eyes and a body strafed with light. If he might find somewhere peaceful in the awning. And if he cannot put his hand on ours, perhaps we can incline our heads toward each-other and hear the same song, sung.

[buy the splendid Fantastic Hawk / send donations to Trevor's family and for Greg's medical bills by Paypal to both@absolutelykosher.com / please, please, may everyone hurt be well]

Billy Bragg & Wilco - "Ingrid Bergman". Ingmar Bergman died yesterday. I realised that all my life I have confused him with Ingrid Bergman. The two figures - director, actress, were vaguely conflated in my mind. They are not related, and they are not the same, and yet in death I would rather let Ingmar keep the qualities I have endowed him with over all these years. Let him remain beautiful, and luminous, and desirable, and a figure who Woody Guthrie & Billy Bragg would long for. A face to launch a thousand ships, to bring men to islands and flash to cameras. Someone who teaches the rest of us about beauty, and in small, sure steps arrives wherever they are ever, ever going.

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Stereogum has a new Weakerthans song which I like very, very much.

Frankel - "Thermostat". This is not the sound of 2007. It's not even the sound of 2006. Frankel have here unearthed the feel-good guitar-pop of 1997, a time before I had these stresses & melancholies, before I had to cook & clean, before I had to put on a tie when I got up in the morning. It's effortless verse and chorus, catchy in five places at once, unthreatening and blue-eyed. It's as good an argument as any that I've heard for playing with tamagotchis, listening to "Mmmbop" and "Tubthumping", watching Titanic, reading the first Harry Potter, and goin' to Neale's house every lunch-hour to play Tekken on his Playstation. Frankel suggest I don't need a time-machine: just a new pair of shoes.

[buy / MySpace]

Kelly Clarkson - "Irvine". I don't know that Kelly Clarkson quite out-feists Leslie Feist, here. But she certainly feists Feist. It's a beautiful, beautiful song, smally sung, its rhymes like so many red-brown berries in a briar bush. A prayer sung like a goodbye - And maybe to you, our readers, so often silent, this seems like a vapid thing to say. "A prayer sung like a goodbye" -- what does it mean? what does it mean? What's a song like a prayer sung like a goodbye? But what I hope is that, like me, you can lie there and know of what I speak. The way a thing that's not a goodbye can sound like one; the way words, farewelled, go feisting past your ribs and sink into your heart. The way I can sit in the dark at a rock concert and listen to a woman happily sing the words "Marry me", and yet find tears at my eyes, a not-so-distant goodbye suddenly traced in charcoal on my mind's grey glass.

Where's Kelly's Irvine, I wonder. Or who.

[buy]

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The band named Da Bears, whom I was thrilled by here, play Ottawa tonight and Montreal's Absynthe (1738 St-Denis) tomorrow, Friday. I suggest that you go.

I highly recommend that you read and listen to Jordan's post of yesterday. The upcoming Sleeping States album is not ordinary (it is v good).

Blood Red Shoes - "It's Getting Boring By The Sea". The "death disco" genre of 2003-2004 kind of kicked the bucket when people decided normal disco was more fun. But I still love the stuff, the kohl-eyed pop-song roar of it. Often it's a disco for the apocalypse, or for the dying; but here Blood Red Shoes have made a song for the dead - the ones hurtling toward oblivion. And there's enough tambourine, cow-bell, handclap, stampstamp and yell to make the dead start crawling their way back. It's hard to believe this is just a demo. I adore the crowded thud of it, the hot spray of voices, the english accents with their sharp corners. The fire running fizzing into the tide. (And they're a two-piece?!)

[homepage] (thanks to Andrea at Warped Reality for the tip-off!)

Jim Bryson - "All the Fallen Leaves". The new album by Jim Bryson, one of Canada's finest singer-songwriters, is the most intimate he's yet recorded. The band recedes to the background and Jim stands quietly in the front, his throat hoarsening. He sounds more like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy now, and though I miss the electric guitar flare-ups that make his live show so great, a song like "All the Fallen Leaves" is rescued by its retraint, made altogether special. It has a modest Ottawa Valley funk, a backbeat and swing that would be grating if they were not so shy. But instead it's just lovely. "All the Fallen Leaves" could coax a non-dancer into dancing, a non-singer into "ooh-ooh"ing, a girl into smiling. Let's hope.

[buy Where the Bungalows Roam on CD, vinyl or mp3 / Jim will be playing Cambridge, Mass on the 26th; NYC on the 29th; and then the Blue Skies and Wolfe Island festivals in early August.]

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I like Blog For Dogs' Short Story Saturday - this time with William Faulkner and Ola Podrida & friends.

As you may be able to see (if not, reload the main page), a new Said the Gramophone banner has been added to the rotation alongside the ones by Keith Shore and Neale McDavitt-Van Fleet. This one is by Daria Tessler and it's pretty wonderful.

The initial lineup for Pop Montreal 2007 has been announced. October 3-7 we've got the likes of Patti Smith, Cody ChesnuTT, Pere Ubu, Half Japanese, Mort Sahl, Sunset Rubdown, Grizzly Bear, The National, A-Trak, Born Ruffians, Tiga, Bobby Conn, DJ /Rupture, Magnolia Electric Co., Chad VanGaalen, MSTRKRFT, Ndidi Onukwulu, Miracle Fortress, Ted Leo, Basia Bulat, &c, with many more to be announced. And, um, you never know... Said the Gramophone might be involved somehow too. I suggest you buy your plane-tickets now.

[photo by Jessica Williams]