Archives : all posts by Sean

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.]

---

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]

Vic Chesnutt - "You Are Never Alone".
Vic Chesnutt - "Glossolalia".

The new Vic Chesnutt album, North Star Deserter, was recorded in Montreal with the entire lineup of Silver Mt. Zion, Guy Picciotto from Fugazi, and various members of Franki Sparo, Hangedup, and Godspeed!. It was a brilliant idea, - (let's please get Leonard Cohen to collaborate with the same gang,) - but what's happier still is the way the idea has translated into reality. Chesnutt's lyrics have never sounded better than in this bed of straw and rust, with the Hotel 2 Tango's attic glow and the occasional squeal of Mile End noise. A singer-songwriter of eminence and poetry playing with musicians of bristle and shriek - fingers and throats in search of the sublime.

Vic Chesnutt - "You Are Never Alone" is the record's most easygoing track. "It's okay," Chesnutt sings again and again. It's okay if you take this drug or that drug, or if you take a condom; it's okay. Keep on keeping on. And before you have the chance to wonder if he's beying sincere, if he really so deeply wishes you well, there's a chorus from all sides. You are never alone, they sing, with smiles on faces and arms wide. A reassurance that makes it possible to imagine putting down the cannister of pills, even with the knowledge that it would be okay if you took them.

Vic Chesnutt - "Glossolalia" is a different creature; one with claws, fangs, slick black organs. Strings wait with predator patience, settling into their footing. When finally they rise and really emerge, when everyone's singing and the contrabass is prowling, you feel all the rightness of a longed-for terror. The satisfaction of standing on balled feet by the window when the lightning strikes.

[Pre-order the singular North Star Deserter on gatefold CD or 2x180g vinyl. Highly recommended.]

[Photo by Jessica Williams]

Spoon - "Don't You Evah". The first few times I listened to Spoon's new record, an album called Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga (these are, as Mike Powell has sagely pointed out, a baby's first 5 words), I thought that this song was addressed to a person called Evah. Don't you, Evah. Don't you dare. And I was very jealous of this Evah. To have a song like this dedicated to her: a song of jerk and handclap, of leap and slide. A song with a guitar solo that sounds like the electric guitar sprang up from the floor and played itself.

I stood in line with the multitudes at NYC's Port Authority, grimy white-tile & humid, waiting to leave the myriad harbour, listening to this song on my headphones and feeling the floor squeak under my shoes. It was almost one a.m. and everyone but the bootleg DVD seller looked pissed off and sweaty. We were staring at each-other bug-eyed, like children on a bus. All eyes were on eveyrbody. Me I was listening to "Don't You Evah" and panging in my heart with envy for the girl called Evah, wondering whether if I found her I could date her, and I was actually dancing there in line. I felt the urge - oh man i kinda want to dance - and then I made the conscious choice - oh fuck it i don't know anyone here - and then I began. It was a modest dance, hopefully not too obnoxious. Under scowling New Yorker scrutiny, in little movements, wrists and toes, like a man in snowshoes or like a general who's retired, like a cat on a saturday, trying to live my life through in small slip steps, to do as Britt Daniel instructs and not evah, not evah attempt to cheat death.

[buy Spoon's exemplary Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga, which reminds me more of the wit & rock of The Beatles ca. White Album and Let It Be than any album I can recall in the past 15 years]

Konie - "History/Science". A song about a guy who is going to cease his moping, forsake his carping, dismiss every distraction in favour of Learning Stuff about Stuff. He'll develop machines for playing these guitar riffs, derive formulas for selecting the snippets of archival sound, determine the optimal dance-moves for his skinny-jeaned legs. He'll run the whole thing on a grapefruit, electrodes plunged deep, a traveling rock'n'roll show that's powered by citrus.

[buy]

---

Anyone within leaping distance of Paris: La Blogothèque will host its first ever Soirée on July 30th, and it's a show that's just about worth flying across the ocean for. The lineup's not yet been made public but they are giving us short little teaser-tastes, the first of which is now online...

Blogothèque/Take-Away Shows' filmmaker of record, Vincent Moon, is also looking for recommendations of the world's most amazing music festivals. Events like Guca, Gnaoua, ATP... If you have any tips, particularly in South America or Asia, please get in touch with him.

---

Last week the art/design blog It's Nice That invited me to recommend a couple things and share some of my own work. So I talked about a zine and an artist I like, and I also wrote a short story called "FRESH FLOWERS, AND CINNAMON," or "JOEY FRIEDMAN'S GIRLFRIEND". It's about how heartbreak doesn't explain itself. (Thank you Anna, Jez and Will.)

[Ink drawing by Guilherme Kramer]

Alina Simone - "Country of 2". In the twenty-three months since I first wrote about Alina Simone, she has gone out of her house on the occasion of every thunderstorm and she has brought a mason jar. She stands under the low dark needles of a spruce and she leaves the jar in the open, with the lid off. Rain doesn't fall in the jar. She collects thunder and lightning dust. She collects the low cracked heat and the sharpness of the wind. When she went into the studio to record her debut LP, Placelessness, she again brought her mason jar. She put it on the studio floor and she opened it. But this time she did not collect lightning; she loosed it. She stood at the microphone with her guitar and felt the electricity like sharkfins. When the drummer hit the kick-drum the air flashed. She swallowed and sang, feeling the air tingle in her mouth. With every rhyme her heart thumpthumped. She closed her eyes and she longed, and she tried to sing the greyblack of what she had weathered.

[order Placelessness]

Robin Allender - "The Memory Trap". I'm not sure Robin Allender can tell us anything that we've never heard. The vocabulary of guitar and voice is not, as some might think, limitless. But there is much in the reminder: reminders of autumn nights, or the Red House Painters, or love, or loss, or lying in your bed as evening falls and waiting for the world to sway against you. The way a nightingale can remind you of all nightingales, or the way the idea of nightingales can remind you of one in particular. The way a beauty can shock a forgotten feeling out of you: a certain walk, a certain laugh, a certain sky, a certain place. Robin Allender used to be called The Inconsolable but he sounds like someone who has been consoled. Someone who remembered the names of the constellations, who remembered night after night that he could pick up his guitar and summon every memory he had ever had.

[buy the very beautiful Bird and the Word, now out on Dreamboat Records. More mp3s are available here.]

---

Elsewhere:

Tuwa writes about a young Elizabeth Mitchell, walking on her hands, playing songs. (Jordan on Elizabeth Mitchell.)

Shelby Sifers - "Blackberry". A song with distractions: unwanted phone-calls, a glockenspiel, a joke, a clever rhyme, a chorus. Shelby doesn't need this stuff. She's trying to impress us but she doesn't need it. She wrote a perfect first verse - if one could knit words onto a wall, and I could knit, I would knit the first verse into my wall. I'd lie in my bed with the sun coming in and watch the curling wool. She sings it strangely, slowly, beautifully. Her words are deliberated, like the notes of her guitar. Her feelings are measured into syllables. We can only feel so many things in a day and this first verse gives me all I need for Monday. It meets all my dietary requirements. I'm not hungry any more.

From this
blackberry bush
we can pick flowers in June.
or harvest berries in October.
and bake cobblers for our lovers.
and spill sugar on the tables.

Mixylodian - "River of Milk". This song's finest moment is when the room suddenly starts to spin at 1:45ish. He sings the lines with a greedy desperation, like someone who really wanted this to happen. And then the synths and drum machine pile on and you can see all the little automaton parts of the party he's at - the taking off the shoes, the hey dude!s, the fridge opening, the hunting for the bottle-opener, the bottle-opening, the tired cheerses, the two people left alone in a room when everyone else leaves for the kitchen & who don't want to talk to each other but do so out of social obligation & pretend like it's fascinating & the guy misunderstands her enthusiasm and goes home that night wondering if maybe he should track her down on Facebook and see if she likes good movies & if so then ask her out - but when the breakdown stops, the protagonist is in the street, drunk as Stephen Dedalus, doing a Sunset Rubdown impression, waving goodbye. The next morning he wonders where the hell he left his clarinet and why he keeps doing this. Is he an alcoholic? Does he still love her? Does he hate himself? That night he buys another old keyboard and stays up till 1:30 am eating Ritz crackers, listening to each drumbeat in turn, waiting to hear the right right right one.

[Mixylodian is from Montreal - MySpace]

Cassie - "Me & U (siik remix)". This remix's crisscross of synths are like so many shafts of stained glass light, Cassie pussyfooting from one illuminated square to another. She boasts and she offers and she promises and she moves so that certain parts of her catch the light in certain ways; and it's like the song's been remade out of scraps of desire, patches of hope, everything sewn into a single shimmering scene.

[siik = great]

Vincent Gallo - "I Wrote This Song For The Girl Paris Hilton". I don't know who Paris Hilton was when Vincent Gallo recorded this song in 2001. Was she really still a girl, then? Was she already the faint-spirited, banal creature she is today? Was Gallo writing a song for a previous Paris, The Girl Paris, some distant memory? I do not know. But let us conceive of this song as a kindness, as a gift. Whether retroactively or no, Vincent Gallo imagines a life for Paris that is different than the one she chose. He paints this life in guitar, piano, saxophone, vintage organs. He measures it in tom and bass drum. He imagines a patient life, a lush one; he imagines a life of will and accident; he imagines splendour, crocus, thrush. A bell she could have rung. A song she could have sung. A dream she could have had, soft.

[buy When]

---

Many belated but sincere congratulations to Simon and Liz at Spoilt Victorian Child. It is good to see kind people made happy.

Basia Bulat - "In the Night". An unreleased song, a living-room demo, four walls & a floor and sounds bravely sounding. It's a lighthouse desperately seeking its ship: that brave white beam scouring a million nighttime wave-tips, grazing two hundred low-flying birdwings. Too much hope, love, fate, joy, fear for one voice; instead it's a host of them. Too sick to be seasick, too awed to be awestruck - the song just whirls and whirls, the light-house-light spins and scours, and the drums & autoharp gallop with the whole breathless pace of possibility.

I raved Basia Bulat's Oh My Darling in January, and my enthusiasm remains steadfast. It's now out in Britain, and a North American release will follow in the fall. (Some cool tour-dates are also in store.)

[buy! / MySpace / website]

The Children's Hour - "SOS JFK". This one's a ship in search of its lighthouse. And the personal ad runs like so:

Josephine Foster's voice is wind in sails, whales in tide.

[buy The Children's Hour's single (?), exquisite LP.]