Archives : all posts by Sean

The Wrong Trousers - "Video Killed the Radio Star (live)". Some would say that you need to see The Wrong Trousers to appreciate them. But this is a lie. Yes, you should watch the video of them busking - because they look funny, and nice, and like a lot of fun. However the people who say you need to see them are doing the band a great disservice. They've not been listening to the way they play this song, how well and brightly and gut-wrenchingly they play this song. At the end of the clip, amid all the applause, a woman exclaims "Yea-ah!", amid a kind of laugh, and this isn't the exclamation of a girl who's just been amused by a novelty, by a kind of musical Star Wars Kid. It's a "Yea-ah!" that says: I can't believe how much that music was fucking great. A "Yea-ah!" of surprise & pleasure, of respect, of wonder come burbling happily from the gut. Because ok The Wrong Trousers are high-school kids who don't look anything like rock-stars; they're a trio on harp and ukelele mandolin and upright bass; but they have Herman Dune's instinct for the true, for making awkward things, peculiar things, feel affecting and real. It's in the way their voices jostle together, "aw-AW-AW-aw" and "oh-a oh!", sounds we feel every day and which usually go unsung.

[originals at their MySpace / a couple more covers here]

Charlotte Hatherley - "Behave (Luke Smith remix)". Sometimes love is a robot with a giant top-heavy box head and spindly legs. And you're in that box head, your whole world is in that box head, and as the robot lurches through the downtown you're thrown across the room - from floor to ceiling to wall, knocking over the floor-lamp and crashing through the coffee-table and splayed sideways over the chesterfield. And some joker's standing at the door flicking the lightswitch off & on & off, just to fuck with you, friends.

[MySpace]

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Elsewhere:

Forget LOLCATS: The Architectural Dance Society has invented LOLDERRIDAS.

Somehow, without any campaigning or even knowing it was going on, -- I don't know a single person who voted! -- Said the Gramophone came in at no. 7 in the Montreal Mirror's Best Montreal Blog poll. (And on write-in votes!) And "Space Jail", starring Dan Beirne, was voted 7th-best Montreal Play (coincidence?). Anyway - thank you so much to all who voted. What a nice surprise.

I've enlisted the aforementioned Herman Dune to thank you properly: see here.

(Or send your own beautifully sweet "Wish That I Could See You Soon" greeting.)

illustration from "i loved you at all the wrong times", by (of course!) sam brown

Feist - "I Feel It All". A song that springs a city into being, neighbourhood by neighbourhood; with each verse a borough, with each chorus a skyline, with each bridge a bridge. And when the xylophone rings, note by note, new parks burst from sidewalk cracks. She builds it and then they come: she sings a city and at once inhabits it. "I feel it all! I feel it all!" Fills the streets with lives, the skies with breath, sends water spraying through the fountains' rusted copper pipes. Towers soar, skies are scraped. The joy of a maybe, of all those million maybes, of a world too big for fate to contain it. For the wild card that's already "in sight"/"inside", the way even a string of heartbreaks makes a necklace, makes a life, makes a subway map.

I wasn't just ambivalent toward Feist's Let It Die -- I became antagonistic towards it. Boring music, brunch music, an album of lite & snoozy songs that, with the exception of (the remarkable) "Mushaboom", lacked even the whimsy of Norah Jones. So I ignored all the press about The Reminder, read not a single article, and was utterly blindsided when the new record turned out fantastic. Bird-like, sexy, personal, and with only about three dud tracks ("Limit To Your Love", "Intuition", "How My Heart Behaves"). Highly recommended.

[buy]

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Apteka - "The Sheet". If The Clientele were a punk band: people prone to fistfights with their brothers, with flicking light-switches til they break. If snowstorms shed sparks or cicadas caught fire. If you longed so much for something that you could never sleep again. Or if all your friends started playing electric guitars at once.

[MySpace]

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Elsewhere:

There's a surprisingly lovely & effective ongoing series at Music Is Art, where they invite various contributors to write about how particular songs have moved them at particular moments.

I make an appearance on this week's episode of Blog Fresh Radio, a podcast of songs introduced by musicbloggers. I talk briefly about Basia Bulat and her extraordinary song "I Was A Daughter".

Throw Me The Statue - "Young Sensualists". Few things are so suited to bittersweetness as pop songs. Scott Reitherman's bedroom pop - catchy melodies, uke and synth, part Guided By Voices & part Magnetic Fields, - wields a wistfulness that's sometimes breathtaking. "Young Sensualists" is pensive, honest, filled with the blossom-scent of nostalgia; the story of two pals, a mutual crush, and the way a friendship can simply end. It's not a warning, a confession or an elegy - it's a recollection, a witnessing, a message in a bottle (for the sea to read).

On this track Reitherman sounds oddly like The Dismemberment Plan's Travis Morrison (ca. "You Are Invited", especially) - a speak-singing that's ruminative and playful, like when you're sitting on an unfamiliar couch, staring at the wall, remembering; and your left hand dangles off the side, dangles without your thinking about it, and it strokes and pets and moves across the fur of your dear friend's kittens.

I Guess I'm Floating has posted Moonbeams' other amazing-standout track, the "hit", the one I almost wrote about, and it's a song called "Lolita".

[buy Moonbeams (it's pretty exceptional)]

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Georges Brassens - "Le Gorille". A song of up-and-down acoustic guitar and a good-natured, kids'-song refrain: "Gare au gorille!" (Watch out for the gorilla!) It also happens to be the tale of an escaped & sex-starved gorilla, his impressive anatomy, and the dilemma he faces when all the pretty young women flee - leaving just a grandmother and a (male) judge to choose between. (Full lyrics in French, and in English translation.) Brassens rhymes with the gusto of a randy limericist, and enunciates with all the panache of Joanna Newsom - albeit in the language of love.

[buy]

The Tragically Hip - "Ahead by a Century". It's strange being back in Ottawa. This is the city I (mostly) grew up in: the one where I learned to multiply, to swim, to fall maybe a little bit in love. Visiting now, after years in other places, I see different things than I once did. I see the wide spaces between the buildings, the pockets of community, the specialness of the waters that run through it - and the gentleness of its passions. As kids vroom down Carling celebrating a Senators victory, they're answered with quiet hurrays, single waves. Even the Byward Market, on these nights, is far, far from the pubs of Britain (No Team Colours, No Singing of Songs).

The Tragically Hip are of course one of the most famous bands in Canada, and this is among their most famous songs. You'll almost certainly hear it if you listen to the radio all day. Or if you sit by a lake, leaves rustling, and listen to the music that comes wafting over.

They're Canada's REM, or maybe even their Pulp. A band that's been around too long to be consistently great (or even very good), but that at its peaks evokes and invokes the anglo central Canadian experience with just as much potency as The Group of Seven, In the Skin of a Lion, Blue, Robertson Davies, and The Littlest Hobo.

"Ahead by a Century" is memory painted in acoustic guitar and a clock's percussion, in maples and in pines. It's all the biggest things (revenge, doubt, longing, regret) and the smallest (hornets, rain, and - yes - dreams). You can listen to it with a stony heart - unmoved, angry, hot as clay. Or you can do the other thing: dip your toe into the water, smell the woodsmoke, remember.

[buy]

Paul Duncan - "Memory Curves". If "Ahead by a Century" is about clear-eyed remembering, lucid dreaming, "Memory Curves" is about the other. It's about the submerged, the hidden, the things that rise unwilled. It's not among but Above The Trees.

There's an expression: "It all came flooding back". The beginning of this song is about the "It". And the rest, guitars & trumpet & noise & creaks, is the "flooding back". It's a thousand dams breaking, gently, one by one. One landscape overwhelmed and the other left barren, dry, just vast coral reefs.

[buy Above the Trees]

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If you haven't heard, there's a new Okkervil River song at Pitchfork. I'm not quite convinced.

Keith Shore, guestblogger and designer of the Gramophone-header-graphic-with-the-gorilla, has a new website and a new exhibition with Jesse LeDoux at Giant Robot NY. A plethora of drawings & paintings & portraits of men with beards.

In a similar vein to Childish Gambino, The Hood Internet is a new (great) source of indie + chart hop mash-ups. Dude is cranking out some pretty awesome stuff, especially Spoon vs Ghostface and R. Kelly vs Broken Social Scene.

Can-crit demigod Michael Barclay's put online the full transcripts of his extensive, probing interviews with Arcade Fire early this year. They dig real deep into Neon Bible. Parts: 1 2 3.

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Voluminous, sincere thanks to The Morning News' Editors for their warm words. We're surprised, touched, and made very glad. I've been reading TMN since 2001, and in these years it's become the gold standard for writing on the web. Congratulations as well to Gorilla vs Bear; Chris is very rightfully commended for his curatorial sense, and it's his fine ears and general magnanimity that keep us coming back. And to latterday indie saints Daytrotter, rightfully recognized for their musical recordings, their writing, and their visual art.

Yeasayer - "2080". On the back of one song, Yeasayer have become my biggest discovery of the year so far. We all often hear music we like - catchy melodies, clasped lyrics. (I share such stuff with you here.) But the rarer feeling is to be exhilarated by something. To feel in a song a promise: the suggestion of a bigger, wider, longer song that's as yet unsung. Stepping into an empty street and smelling the pepper fragrance of a fire.

"2080" is Fleetwood Mac, Akron/Family, Paul Simon, Arcade Fire, Cree chant, schoolyard song. It's dancing alone under a streetlight, in your room with the lights on, or in a club on those hot strange first hours of the new year. It's a night garden. It's a pop song. It's soft rock, New Wave, and art music. It's got heart-thump drums, distant xylophone, clarinet, guitars, voices in harmony. It's got piano and backwards-playing tape. It's got the kitchen sink -- and all these things under starlight.

I haven't heard Yeasayer's (upcoming) album. I haven't seen them live. All I know is that "2080" is a string of good ideas, a necklace of a hundred rubies. It's weird and great and not like the work of any other band I can think of. There is something in its beauty & boldness that makes me very, very excited; like I've stung my finger on a rose-thorn.

Yeasayer are from Brooklyn and their debut is due later this year on Monitor Records. At SXSW they provided tambourine, dance moves & backup vocals at a Hanson gig. Now they're opening for Frog Eyes. I should not have to tell you to pay attention to a band cherished by both the creators of "MMMbop" and "One in Six Children Will Flee in Boats". I should not have to tell you, friends, but still I'm going to: PAY ATTENTION.

[Yeasayer on MySpace]

Upcoming Yeasayer tour-dates (you guys know i do not often do this):

May 25, 2007 at Beachland Tavern in Cleveland, OH (w/ Frog Eyes)
May 26, 2007 at Bluebird in Bloomington, IN (w/ Frog Eyes)
May 27, 2007 at Schuba's in Chicago, IL (w/ Frog Eyes)
May 28, 2007 at 7th Street Entry in Minneapolis, MN (w/ Frog Eyes)
May 29, 2007 at Vaudeville Mews in Des Moines, IA
May 31, 2007 at DC 9 in Washington DC
June 1, 2007 at Johnny Brenda's in Philadelphia, PA (w/ Datarock)

(photo by *son*)

Meg Baird - "Do What You Gotta Do". Meg Baird, who plays with Espers, has released a solo album called Dear Companion. There's a tenderness I like just in that title. One day I hope we will all write such a letter - one that can begin Dear companion, and end with Yours sincerely. Or perhaps, if we're feeling feisty, with Love. Baird's record is a little bit of two things: British trad-folk, sung longingly, and agile, clear-eyed songs that strongly recall Joni Mitchell. And nothing on Dear Companion is Blue-er than "Do What You Gotta Do". Once they became familiar, the opening chords gained a power that stop me silent. I listen in a kind of trance. I hang on. Baird harmonising with herself, sadly singing, and overhead just endless white sky, a cool steady thing that will never push free from over the high-rises.

"Come on back and see me when you can": it's sung so sweet that for a moment you can almost imagine it happening.

[out Monday!]

Bowerbirds - "Olive Hearts". A party song wrought in bass-drum, acoustic guitar and accordion. A song of hygge, that Danish word which means good times, close friends, hot fires, cold beer. A song that begins in stillness, loneliness, and with friendship & nostalgia & persistence & browns, blues, golds, brilliant viridian greens, moves thumping to the moment when glasses clink, when hearts pound big, when "our plastic swords stab our olive hearts". "Cheers to the wives of the drunks. Cheers to the husbands that tag along for good luck. Cheers to the months it took to get here."

[order the very fine debut LP by Bowerbirds, whose Danger at Sea was the best EP of last year]

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Silence is Not (Always) a Good Medicine is an exhibition of drawings by Erik Jerezano and gramo-friend Kit Malo, open now at Montreal's Sharon Ramsay Gallery and continuing through May 26th. I visited yesterday and it was really great: brave creatures that hide, fold, dream, long, change. I'm leaving town this evening but if you're around tonight (may 18), check out the the big Opening from 5 pm on.

an early happy birthday, robin.

Corinne Chaufour is a French artist who joins us today at Said the Gramophone with illustrations of three strange, wonderful songs. Each of her chosen songs is misty, blurred, infused with a sense of mystery - and her drawings are cut of the same cloth. Three triptychs of mostly black on white: faces, trees, animals, shapes. Dreams, memories, visions, forebodings. The tiny thumbnails below give no sense of the works; please do click on them to see the larger versions.

On a rainy Wednesday we're very happy to be sharing Corinne's work with you. You can see more at her blog, and it'd be great if you left her a comment here with your thoughts.

(Previous guest-blogs: "Jean Baudrillard", artist Danny Zabbal, artist Irina Troitskaya, artist Eleanor Meredith, artist Keith Greiman, artist Matthew Feyld, The Weakerthans, Parenthetical Girls, artist Daria Tessler, Clem Snide, Marcello Carlin, Beirut, Jonathan Lethem, Will Butler (Arcade Fire), Al Kratina, Eugene Mirman, artist Dave Bailey, Agent Simple, artist Keith Andrew Shore, Owen Ashworth (Casiotone for the Painfully Alone), artist Kit Malo with Alden Penner (The Unicorns) 1 2, artist Rachell Sumpter, artist Katy Horan 1 2, David Barclay (The Diskettes), artist Drew Heffron, Carl Wilson, artist Tim Moore, Michael Nau (Page France), Devin Davis, Will Sheff (Okkervil River), Edward Droste (Grizzly Bear), Hello Saferide, Damon Krukowski (Damon & Naomi), Brian Michael Roff, Howard Bilerman (producer: Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc.). There are many more to come.)