Archives : all posts by Sean

Black Before Red - "Underneath Gold". I like songs where you can't tell if the handclaps are fingersnaps, if the trumpets are just the sound the singer makes when he opens his lips. Black Before Red offer a Broken Social groove, a before-the-night dancebeat, a series of eye contacts. "There's girls here in summer clothes." A string of necessary nothings: "Yeah / in your head yeah yeah yeah / yeah / oh-oh oh yeah (yeah)." Bodies passing through doorways, new hands in hands, a summer counted in heatwaves.

[MySpace/buy]

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Elliott Smith - "Going Nowhere".

They sat on the couch in Wee's small living room and Wee played sad music on the stereo. Some of the songs were fast and some of them were slow. They were all sad. It was very warm in the room and Peter found himself loosening his collar, taking off his tie, folding it and putting it on his lap. He felt listless, hot. His belly was full, sated from soup and kreplach, as many kreplach as he wanted, but the rest of him – his arms, legs, neck, head, - felt filled with straw. Wee kept sitting down and standing up, putting on something new, pointing his finger at the stereo as a song approached the bit he wanted to draw attention to. When it arrived Wee would smile so unselfconsciously, nod his head and say "Yeah".
For a while, neither said anything.
"I was thinking maybe trip-hop. Did I say that?"
"Yes, you said that," said Peter.
"I'm thinking it could work."
Peter leaned his head back against the rear of the couch. Above the TV and stereo was the poster of a band, four men in beards, ivy weaving around their feet.
 
Later Wenceslas left to do something in the kitchen and Peter found himself alone in the room, a lamp in the corner, and a song was playing. Peter listened. He didn't realise he was listening until the singer sang and he felt himself reassured, the prick of fingerpicked guitar smoothed by a sorrowful voice. It wasn't one voice, it was several; double- and triple-tracked vocals, steadying.
"What is this?" Peter asked when Wee came back in.
"Elliott Smith," said Wee.
"It's good," said Peter.
"He's dead," said Wee. He sat down. "Killed himself."
"Oh." There was something disappointing in this. A sad song taken somehow too seriously.
"Stabbed himself in the heart," said Wee.
Peter grimaced.
"Yeah. Pretty emo."
But then they listened to Elliott Smith's voice and forgot about what happened to him and just sat until they felt tired, exchanging only a few words, feeling settled there, side by side, until the CD ended and it was quiet and Peter got up.
 
[buy New Moon, which is really excellent]

(photo by let's take your car)

Los Campesinos - "You! Me! Dancing!". Last December I wrote about an earlier recording of this song (a track that made by top 50 songs of the year), but this new version is rocketship to that one's horse-drawn carriage. It was recorded by Dave Newfeld, he of Broken Social Scene and You Forgot It In People, one of my favourite producers working today. And the finished result is a frantic mess, a deafening pop song, a band firing on twenty cylinders & adding new cylinders as they go. An electric guitar allumeuse, a bass-drum bricklayer, a glockenspiel chandelier, voices haranguing a violinist. It's like The Delgados are still around, ten years younger, stomping on the upper floor of a barn until the whole building collapses.

In Susan Cooper's The Grey King, Will, Bran and the Old Ones must hold back The Dark, all of 'em, even the mountain Cader Idris itself. And they do it: through magic, will, determination. But they should have got Los Campesinos on the phone; called them up from Cardiff to Gwynedd; and let them blaze their joy through the shifting ranks of evil, cleaving grief like a hot knife through butter.

They're a group that makes me wish I was in a band; it's a song that makes me wish I was a piece of vinyl.

[buy]

Sandro Perri - "Dreams"
Fleetwood Mac - "Dreams"

When Stevie Nicks sings "Dreams", she's still trying to seduce him. There's something tilted in the way she sings "Who am I to keep you down?" She may not mean for the song to be so barbed, such an elbow in the gut of Lindsey Buckingham. But as she sings of a heartbeat that "drives you mad / in the stillness of remembering," the drum-beat is maddeningly clear, an over-and-over that brings you to rest in just that place. And she sounds very good, singing it. And you wonder what it would take to have the chance to harmonize with her.

But when Sandro Perri plays "Dreams", the drums are sparse - the heartbeat itself has almost been forgotten. It's the chorus - fleeting, familiar, gorgeous - that represents the stuff which has been lost. And it's his voice, and the guitars, and the wide open sounds. It's a fitting dream-sound, and there's nothing pointed in it. It's a eulogy without subtext. It's a sadness. He's more bard than former lover, singing the melancholy instead of an ardour.

(many thanks to Shane for the Sandro Perri song)

[buy Fleetwood Mac's Rumours / I highly recommend(ed) Sandro Perri's first EP, but unfortunately "Dreams" is from a limited edition tour-only CD-R]

(photo of Cwm Idwal by Dave JG)

Slaraffenland - "Polaroids". A hundred cannonballs in uneasy orbits above your head. You fired them only one by one, over the years, and not often. You thought nothing of it. You liked the fizz and boom. But now you wait for the bus, you lie in bed, and you imagine them swimming up there, each in a separate trajectory. You wonder when one of the things you set in motion will lunge at your resting form. It's the only thing you dream about. It's the only thing you hope for.

[buy Private Cinema from Hometapes (pre-orders come with a free poster)]

Detroit Cobras - "You'll Never Change". She sings this: "You walk around looking mean and evil, each and every day." But no one's walking, here; it's all slither. A golden slither in the guitar, a silver slither in the doobie-doobie-doo. Sin displayed in all its sweetness, all its pocketful of glimmer. (People were badder when the radio sounded like this.)

[buy]

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Elsewhere:

The motley cover-songs of Jacob M. Ruefer.

Carl Wilson on Hilary Clinton and Celine Dion.

And... Ill Doctrine is the outstanding new video blog by hiphopmusic.com & WBAI's Jay Smooth. Hiphopmusic was of course part of a recent hostile takeover by Just Blaze. (Seriously though, the new hiphopmusic.com lineup looks awesome.)

Ray Rumours And The No-Eyed Deers - "No Way To Know". So you move to a new city - you're there and when you walk down the street you marvel at the colour of the asphalt, that unfamiliar grey, that new grey, your new grey. And you meet new friends: people like the history student who wears polkadot dresses, or the painter in the straw hat. You spend every weekend in conversation, clinking glasses, thinking about how much you like lamps, how they cast a better light than overhead bulbs. Every time you get a phonecall from one of your new friends, your heart gives a leap of excitement. It's new territory. It's literally new territory and you never know what's in the telephone ring.

And you've heard that one of your friends, a girl named Ray, has a band.* And you've never heard them, because it seems a little silly to ask, and instead you often walk down the street, staring at the asphalt, and wonder.

One day you go to Ray's house and everyone's there, all your friends and her whole little band. They're cross-legged on the floorboards and the lamps are on. Ray's got an acoustic guitar under her arm and she plays a little ditty when you come in, a welcome ditty, and Gill rattles his tambourine. And you realise that her voice is precisely the thing you hoped it would be, precisely the mouse-hole murmur. It's a voice with nooks, and smile, and the same peachfuzz fur that you find sometimes on the surface of flowerpotplant leaves. It makes you love your friends very much.

Then they're playing a song called "No Way To Know" and they ask you to play melodica. The first time round, someone shows you how it should go. After that you're on your own. You stand awkwardly as they play the first verse, listening, waiting, tapping your sneaker at the same time as everyone else is tapping their sneaker. And suddenly Ray nods to you, grins, and you furrow your brow and concentrate and try your goshdamnedneess to get the solo right. You're concentrating so hard, staring into Ray's eyes and Gill's eyes and everyone's eyes, that your whole history disappears. There were no years before this one, no places before this one. There were no other homes. You play the melodica and a smile's on your lips and you get it wrong but you know, with certainty, you're getting it right.

Caz Mechanic - "If I See a Bear". A song like a secret casually disclosed; a "So there!" murmured so quiet that the pride is lost. Sounds gather above Caz Mechanic's head, crowding like clouds. If she ever sang this song before You, the You of this song - the bear, the no-longer, - she would stare him right in the eyes. "And ok if I see you, and you look really great, 'Don't worry' I'll say. But you're a dangerous hesitation - so get out of my way." Like the most important thing about de-clawing a bear is learning that it can be de-clawed.

* Ray is actually in three bands: this one, Sisisi Sisi, and a little group called Electrelane.

[These songs are from a terrific split CD EP by Caz Mechanic and Ray Rumours. The CD also has v hot cover art. You can buy it from Tome Records for just 5 squid.]

[bird image above by matthew feyld]

Taken By Trees - "Too Young". Peter Bjorn & John's "Young Folks" is still a song that makes me dance every time I hear it; and because of the joy "Young Folks" engenders, I can't now hear Victoria Bergsman's voice without some part of me unfolding. "Too Young" is far away from PB&J, and not even in line with the sleepy pop of Bergsman's former band, The Concretes. She sings sadly, haltingly, with just the barest of drum snaps. Organ and hum suggests just the earliest, silvering dawn light. And it's a song about growing up, a song where the unsteeled try to steel themselves, a longing for your parents as you once had them. Its second half is recounted entirely without words: stumbling piano, chattering shaker, sensing bones in arms and hope bred deep. It's a compelling mirror to Arcade Fire's coming-of-age anthems: none of their desperation and all of their want.

[buy: US/UK]

Damian Weber - "Rickshaw". I can't quite make out what Damian Weber is saying. His lyrics are like nuts I find in a bowl and put in my mouth without looking at, without knowing what they are, and I feel their brown taste on my tongue, curves and corners, and when I chew & swallow I smell fall leaves burning. He whistles like a man on the road but plays guitar like a man who's stopped travelling. Folk music that's sugar taffy, a giant trout, a single cloud in a cornflower sky.

[MySpace (thanks Tawrin)]

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If anyone hasn't heard, McSweeney's is in troubling financial straits and everything they sell is on sale. You could buy me pretty much anything they sell, or if you're buying for youself, perhaps you have not yet read my interview with Will Sheff? For all the reasons there are to criticise Dave Eggers' publishing empire, I think that what they do is amazing, amazing, and strongly encourage you to help them out.

The Leaning Towers - "Rich Enough to Ignore It". In music, in art, the why-didn't-wes are rarely meted out like this. Usually it's dragging feet, dusty drums, a weary man hounded by flashbacks. Here: tambourine, tuba, synths, fanfare, and of course that golden guitar-line. The guitar never leaves the moment of open possibility; it curls back over and over it, like a life can always be remade. The song seems... happy. Resigned to its regrets, comfortable in its shoes. Nostalgic in a pool of warm tender sun. "Probably should be singing redemption songs / instead of filling out exemption forms."

[download The Leaning Towers' entire album]

Miranda Lambert - "Desperation". This song's beautiful and low-key, and it's about stuff that pop-songs usually keep secret. Truths rarely sung: that persistence is dangerous, that sometimes the only reason we hope is so we can forget, that often we love half-heartedly. Over drum-thump and guitar-glitter a country-pop princess explains this, subtle truths in simple words, and at the end of every chorus her advice falters - at the end of every chorus she can sing just one thing, that she's still "desperate for you". And I don't know, it's beautiful and sad & in its way wise, but I wonder if perhaps the greatest kindness "Desperation" offers is just in its use of "you". A song for the lonely, and its narrator longing for "you".

[buy]

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The remarkable artwork of Betsy Walton is currently in exhibition at the Compound Gallery in Portland. You're looking at some of it above.

Michael Barthel- "Hallelujah". Although the catalyst may have been his EMP paper on the movement of Leonard Cohen's "Hallelujah" through pop culture, Mike Barthel's full-length reimagining is a joy in its own right. There is none of the sadness of Cohen's, Buckley's or Wainwright's versions, and whereas the intimacy of those renditions rested on their acheing slowness, Barthel places the song's eroticism in a landscape of fun, whimsy, and easygoing pleasure. The call and response in the track's opening verse ("And it pleased the Lord" "He's a bit picky.") may at first seem irreverent, almost undercutting, but it's in some ways one of the sexiest sections of any "Hallelujah" ever: a man and woman united not in po-faced transcendence, but in play. (Swagger-smiling: "There was a time when you let me know / what was really going on below...") Through falsetto, synth washes, fake drums, we never lose track of that weird, great melody at the song's core, and in places it feels liberated for the very first time; I love the eagerness in Barthel as the song accelerates and he sings lines that have (bafflingly) never been allowed to sound excited before: "I remember when I moved in you / and the holy dove was moving too / and every breath we drew was Hallelujah." Like true love's not just souls caught unmoving in trembling moonlight - it's a dude in a smile and a girl in a sundress, a park full of dandelion & hibiscus.

[read Mike B's "Hallelujah" paper / read Clap Clap / read his excellent piece on Amerie and Rihanna]

Säkert! - "Sanningsdan". Säkert!'s a band with an exclamation mark and "Sanningsdan"'s the kind of song that makes you stamp your foot in exclamation marks, each toe-tap leaving an aspirate gasp in the air. "Safe!" the band-name means, like safety is something awesome and amazing, which I guess it is, or like you're playing hide-and-seek and you totally just won. It's a new project by Annika Norlin, aka Hello Saferide, aka a voice who is dear to Said the Gramophone, but here singing in Swedish. And at 1:19 she squawks like a buzzard and at 1:43 the drums start playing fast enough to turn the worlds' oceans to ice, and the chorus is horns and ahhs and drums and harmonies and the certainty of new splendours always just around the bend. !!! ! !

[$7 digital download / swedish blog / Hello Saferide guestpost on Said the Gramophone]