Archives : all posts by Sean

Ravens & Chimes - "Saint Jude in the Village Voice". Reichenbach Falls is one of the most charming debuts of 2007, a music that distinguishes itself not by the originality of its features but by its sheer fresh-facedness. Twentysomething indie-kids from New York: dime a dozen. But they sound like kids. Scrubbed, heartsick, rosy-faced, and maybe even a little naive. Far from a drag, this romanticism is downright refreshing - welcome respite in an industry where cool is often measured in nicotine stains and don't-give-a-fucks. When Ravens & Chimes play a love-song, when they sing of regrets or lusts, it's easy to imagine that they're singing of first loves, first regrets, even first kisses. Arcade Fire may on Neon Bible be wrestling with doubts and existential confusion, but back on their debut there was a similar stupid youthful determination - and so it's fitting that R&C chose to record Reichenbach Falls in the studio where AF made Funeral. (And the album opener, "This Is Where We Are", is very much a page out of Arcade Fire's book - songwriter Asher Lack even foresees Neon Bible's deluge metaphors.) But anyway: "Saint Jude in the Village Voice". No heavy drama here, no angst-filled pleas: this is an arcing, hoping, open-hearted popsong, chopped into pieces and scattered in a track of well-meaning white-kid soul. Lack's second-gladdest when he gets to yell "Whoa-oh!" at 1:27. And he's gladdest of all in the choruses, the love-song flying free, the whole band shaking the apples from a tree.

Ravens & Chimes - "Eleventh Street". I listened to this song so many times that I went looking on Flickr for pictures of Eleventh Street. Every now and then the lyrics feel precious, not-quite-right, but I don't know there's something magical in this not-quite-rightness, this groping around and not (not!) quite finding the right words for heartbreak. And while Lack tries to peel back months & years, like me just trying to find that Eleventh Street, the band plays the perfect other half to a song such as this. (The half that's missing from so many songs that look back at an evaporated ever-after.) The drummer makes a banging racket, those million fierce heartbeats compressed into two minutes. And deep in one channel a mandolin mandolins: strum and strum and strum, hard as it can, just like all of us, not knowing what the hell else to do.

[Reichenbach Falls will be released in June: homepage / myspace]

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Archivists! Those who wish to explore the Said the Gramophone stacks are no longer relegated to the calendar view on the sidebar: you can now browse our archives bit-by-bit by clicking on "Older posts" at the bottom of the main page.

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Arcade Fire's full freight-elevator Take-Away Show filmed in Paris, is now available. It's something special.

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I have a feature on Arcade Fire in the April issue of Paste magazine, including an interview with Win & Regine and a visit inside the studio. I think it's now on stands.

Stalkers should also watch for the upcoming May issue of The Believer, which includes an interview I conducted last year with Okkervil River's Will Sheff. We talk about Sam Cooke, knife fights, Destroyer, and forming a band to spite your girlfriend.

The Hidden Cameras - "Learning the Lie". With "Learning the Lie", The Hidden Cameras propose a hypothesis: The Velvet Underground, at their best, may be emulated by just mumbo-jumbo mumble-wacka-wacka'ing the lyrics. "Mumbo-jumbo mumble-wacka-wacka" is a phrase of my own creation, an attempt to formalise the bullshit Joel Gibb gets up to here. He's just tootling away, singing nothing at all, smirking in the confidence of his caricature. And I kinda want to sock him in the mouth for thinking that he can get away with this. A slouching guitar-line, a dented violin, forward-leaning drums: this is all you need to pretend to be The Velvets? He's "hilariously mistaken". But as I stride towards him, sleeve rolled up, cheeks sucked in so I look something like a death's-head Popeye, he gets me. Joel gets me. The swing's in my step and I can't shake it out, the hook's in my ears and I can't get them clear, I'm singing along and I can't help myself. "Ooo-do-do-doo doo, haw-aw oo-doo doo doo!" I feel like a square so I lean up against a building, put hands in pockets, wait for the man. Tap my foot and grin like a damn fool. [buy Awoo]

Low - "Belarus". Drums & Guns, the new album by indie careerists Low, is downright terrific, my favourite LP they've ever produced. It sounds real funny on headphones - mixed weirdly separate, far-right and left. But set it playing in a room and each channel catches the resonant frequency of a different object. They shattered my incandescents, my fluorescents, made my tables buckle, knocked tribal masks from my walls. All slow like, so I couldn't tell what was happening. I'd just feel a heat in my chest then hear splintering wood or shattering glass. It's a lulling music that's very, very hot - lows and highs in concert, like two candle flames touching. "Belarus" is trapped voices, canned drum loop, rehearsed vocals, bottled strings. The only thing that's free is the bassline, like the patrol around a field, the soldier whose been told to wait for the armies to arrive. [buy]

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One of the best songs I've heard this week is "Alone Again", by Illinois, posted over at Molars. It's three minutes that sounds like less than one - the chorus only comes once, only once! And that moment is handclaps and oohs and red-hot guitars and voices singing in harmony that "I'm alone again / I'm alone again / I'm alone again / I'm alone again". Like it's a happy inevitable, a triumph, the sweetest fish that Fate could hook on your line. Maybe it's psychopathy, or reverse psychology, but it feels rightest to me as a song for someone who's too far gone to be able to handle anything else. A sleeping pill, or a love-letter to keep you alive.

Fluxblog's written about LCD Soundsystem's "Someone Great", one of my favourite songs of 2007 so far. Matthew nails the description of James Murphy's vocals - "shell-shocked ... utterly lost within himself and unsure of his every feeling", - but he neglects the interaction between Murphy's singing and the instrumental portion of the song. Murphy sings with an ambivalence that should be wrenching: a hollowness that would send a happier- of sadder-'sounding' song into the annals of the utterly depressing. Instead he's chosen to do something else. The bassline matches Murphy's tone - submerged, lost, - but almost everything else is just slightly optimistic. Drumsticks click-clack, glockenspiel dings, and synths do little stints of break-dancing. It's not unhappy - nor is it so saccharine that the irony wounds. Instead the song's instrumental is just on the far side of fantasy - trapped on the same side of the glass as Murphy, but in a place his vocals don't depict. It's in the future that never happened, the could-have-been where Murphy - even as he sings the no-it-wasn't - still spends his time. "Someone Great" is filled with the imaginary nostalgic.

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La Blogotheque pulled it off: piece by piece they are sharing a Take-Away Concert in Paris with the Arcade Fire (english translation forthcoming, I'm told).

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Still looking for one more kind soul to join a small Gramophone chalet at the All Tomorrow's Parties festival at the end of April. (In England.) The lineup's got everyone from The Dirty Three to Joanna Newsom, Nick Cave to Cat Power, The Art Ensemble of Chicago to Felix Lajko. Get in touch.

If I lived in Russia, I would probably be a thief. Only - and I do mean this, only - because if I were sitting beside Irina Troitskaya on the Moscow subway, I suspect I would be unable to halt my compulsion to "borrow" one of her moleskine notebooks. For more than a year I've been watching them fill up on her flickr stream, and today the Russia I imagine is inhabited with her creations: full of feathers, light, animals and melancholy. The only thing that would stop me from nicking her creations is the knowledge that I'm already carrying them around with me, rolling like marbles in my head, or pressed into the back of my eyes like block-cuts.

I invited Irina to choose three favourite songs, and to make pictures for them. Here they are. I think you'll be as smitten as I was. Please tell her what you think.

(Previous guest-blogs: 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.)

Bill Callahan - "Sycamore". It's a song that borrows its guitar-line from the song that James, Donna and cousin Maddy record in the living-room on Twin Peaks. And just like that Twin Peaks number it's a track filled with a diffuse and undirected love. Neither Bill Callahan nor James know who to thank for this moment*, for the magnificence of it, for a hot heart on a cold evening. "There's sap in the trees if you tap 'em / There's blood on the seas if you map 'em." Callahan sings crooked platitudes, half-wisdoms, blind man's advice - and do you have a better idea? He's like the guy at the bar who's toasting the bartender, the mirror, the pint-glasses, the hairdos, the everything. Because nothing is a suitable container for the heat that he's feeling; he might as well just share it how he can, and if it's meaningless at least it's still warm. Only one thing seems to bear even a hint of what it truly is to feel how he does. And that one thing is the word "sycamore". Forget "cellar door". Forget "supercalifragilisticexpialidocious". Callahan borrowed one of my favourite words, but it's ok since he uses it as I would. To hold for a sec the can't-be-held.

Addendum:

* Bill Callahan does seem to toy with thanking the Christian "Papa". But not with much gusto.

[pre-order]

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Cerberus Shoal - "Sweetie". A tundra song, a wandering song, a lover's chant - forlorn but utterly determined. Cerberus Shoal play a long, glinting round, a psych-folk of strum & thrum & bell & sour harmony. Interesting how it sounds like a ghost's song, but is a song for the still-living. The living ghost, I guess. The man with a piece of his heart missing. And "Sweetie"? "Sweetie"!?! It's a term of endearment that belongs at a diner, an aunt-and-uncle's house, or sixties suburbia - what's it doing here on the moor? Our narrator is clearly in over his head.

[from The Whys and The Hows, a split LP by Herman Dune and Ceberus Shoal]

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Hi! You might notice something different at Said the Gramophone today. If you don't, try clicking reload a couple of times. Yes, we have a new header image, courtesy of artist (and guest-blogger) Keith Andrew Shore. He sent the image to us a year ago, but it's not til now that we've finally been able to make good on it. We now have two different headers: the familiar gramophone-and-butterflies, by our friend Neale, and Andrew's mesmerised gorilla. Every time you visit Said the Gramophone, one of these images will load at random. And in the coming months we hope to add a few more images to the rotation. Sincere thank-you to Adam R for helping us to get the code working, but really I want to thank Andrew Shore for his patience, generosity, and the flush, coarse brilliance that streaks through all his work. Visit his website to see more - especially notable is his contribution to the new Fantagraphics bestiary, BEASTS, and the accompanying letterpress set at Tiny Showcase.

In November, Said the Gramophone celebrated its third year as an mp3blog. The anniversary went unremarked. In 2005 we were already longer than Moby Dick, so I guess now we're basically its sequel. Moby Dick II: The Whiter, Whiter Whale.

On March 13th of last year, we held the first ever Said the Gramophone Funding Drive. Thanks to you, we raised enough money to keep StG online for twelve months.

But twelve months have now passed, and ole Ahab is rattling at our blowhole. We'd like to ask once again for your support. Click here to donate via PayPal. We are trying to raise $200 USD.

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Update: Before I had the chance to blink twice, we raised the full $200. Our readers are amazing. All of our thanks, many, many times over. Seriously - thank you so much. We promise to stay out of your hair for another year.

Of course if you live in a later timezone and your wallet is leaping out of your hands, you're always welcome to take us out to dinner.

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Said the Gramophone does not take any advertising. You may have noticed most other blogs do. This isn't because we're rich playboys, although Jordan is. It's because we don't like ads. We rely on your generosity to cover our bills, and we rely on our day-jobs to pay the piper.

It doesn't cost very much money for the server resources that run an mp3blog. (Only two hundred bucks!) Said the Gramophone's real cost is in time. In the past year, Dan, Jordan and I have together composed something in the order of 260 posts. We spend hours on each one - finding songs and writing about them.

Since March '06 we've posted more than 500 songs, introducing you (perhaps) to artists like Beirut, Horse Feathers, Basia Bulat, Parenthetical Girls, Sleeping States, The Low Lows, Ola Podrida, Red River, Fionn Regan, Coyle & Sharpe... the list's pretty endless. We've seen marvelous guest-posts by members of Arcade Fire, The Weakerthans, Clem Snide, Beirut, and more. Jonathan Lethem blogged for us. Eugene Mirman did. We welcomed the work of visual artists like Matthew Feyld and Daria Tessler.

And we tried to write like we had sparks in our fingers.

Please donate. There are even prizes! (Goal reached!)

(And once again - family members, ambassadors, zaidies, this is not for you! You already buy us birthday presents, bar mitzvah gifts, wedding bands. Please leave the donations to our daft, kindly readers.)

Said the Gramophone is a very peculiar website. We write nonsense, at length. We don't really talk about tour-dates or release-dates. We realise we're not going to be top of the charts. But it makes us feel so great to be read. And so regardless of dollars or cents, pounds or zloty, thank-you thank-you thank-you all for continuing to make this one of the most rewarding things in our lives.

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"Heirloom" is a short story written and performed by Sean Michaels, early last year. In the background is music by Toumani Diabate and Stars of the Lid. It is low-tech and clumsy, but well-intentioned. Hope you like it. (It would be pretty hypocritical to say anything about copyright!)

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The winners of the Fulton Lights Contest have been alerted. Our readers are such poets! So many beautiful entries, especially by Katy K, Todd L, Daniel S (!), Samuel H, Ryan O, Sam S, Adam R, Carlos d V, Donald J, Jacob R, Jason S, Maryam E, Emily B, Kris O, and Gregory P. I was reading sounds from all over the world; pretty magical. Thank you. The Fulton Lights album is of course now for sale here. The CD release is in NYC on Thursday. Andrew will be performing with strings and horns and guests, oh my. More info here.

Here in Krakow, there's no internet at home. Though last fall I spent several months waiting for broadband to be hooked up, forced onto the patio (in the rain) to leech wifi from upstairs, this is the first time in years where I've been living somewhere that there's simply no access. I know, I know: what a difficult life I lead! The reason I bring this up is not to talk of personal fortune or mis-, but rather to reflect on how it's changed some things.

I have a laptop and so often download my emails at an internet cafe, then answer them (leaving them queued and unsent) when at home. These days someone mentions an unfamiliar name - "Ira Glass", say, - and I can't just google them to find out who they are. No, I sit here trying to figure it out. Wasn't he the bad guy in Unbreakable?, I wonder. Or: He sounds like the kind of dude who would be involved with Mad About You, with Paul Reiser. The one thing I'm certain: He's a radio guy. Or a writer. Or maybe a psychiatrist. He's definitely got a good sense of humour. Ira Glass. I wonder for a moment if he's one of the siblings in a Salinger story.

Similarly, when I'm writing something, I sometimes lack a fact. What's the name of the Budapest airport? Sometimes it's something I should know, but I've just forgotten. What's the name of that hat that flappers wear? My memory's soft from years of Wikipedia and search-engines. I don't retain anything. Who needs to remember Ferihegy Airport or cloche hats? Well writers do, apparently. So sometimes I'm stuck for something, unable to google it - "What's a city on the Black Sea?!!" - and since I can't answer I get frustrated. I'm unable to just let it lie, unable to leave it blank to fill in later, and I just throw the whole thing out the window. Fuck that idea! Whatever I'm writing - email, story, novel! - takes an abrupt swerve. No longer are they visiting Bulgaria. Screw that! Now it's to Croatia, where I know there's a coastline.

So not-having-internet is affecting things more deeply than I would have expected.

And then there's the matter of music. I have some stuff I've only recently got. Or only recently am revisiting. And I don't know much about it. Normally I would just look the bands up on Wikipedia, speak eloquently, and appear knowledgeable. But here, right now in my apartment on ulica Wielopole, I can't. There's no pulling a fast one on you guys. I have no idea what I'm listening to. Or in other words: I have no idea what I'm talking about.

How, I wonder, does that affect the music? Is it a purer listening? Is it a truer one, to be without any truths? What do I hear?

Fóstbræður - "Swing Low". In Rejkyavik I bought a three-CD set by Fóstbræður. They are an Icelandic mens' choir: this much is clear from the booklet art, where they're tuxedo'd to the hilt. And this is some sort of anthology, tracks from 1916-2006. "Swing Low" is from 1960. On a set of 73 songs, all but this and one more cut are sung in Icelandic. It's 2 minutes 39 seconds long. And that's it. That's all I know. Everything else is made up.

"Swing Low" is sung by a men's choir not accustomed to singing jazz. Not accustomed to lightness and sunshine. It starts plausibly: a high male voice, balanced on a rafter. But the first wobble comes with the tenor that answers it - a tremor in the pronunciation, a dip toward sadness. Soon the whole choir's there and we're at least somewhere familiar - a chapel, a concert-hall. This ain't jazz: it's a hymn, melodious and fluid. But just past the minute mark, things get kind of crazy. The choir BELLOWS. They turn into bellowing men with hands in fists. (I can't even make out the lyrics and don't actually know them, and can't google them, so -) "...swing low, sweeeET CHERRY ROSE, COMING FORWARD TO CARRY ME home". This isn't some pansy bunch of Austrians or Canadians. No, kids. These are Icelanders. These are fishermen's sons. And they have SEEN THE SUBLIME. They've seen it in seas and icebergs and whales' breath. And so when Fóstbræður sing of that "sweet cherry rose", they sing it like it's the great fucking SUBLIME, beautiful and terrible, heavy as volcano spit. [info]

Lost in Hildurness - "Floods". Another purchase from Iceland. This one I forgot the liner-notes with my luggage in London. So what do I have: recollections. Lost in Hildurness is the work of one woman, responsible for all the droning gambas, basses, cellos; the dulcimer and percussion; the gusts of vocals. The cover art is an expressionist painting, naive, almost psyhedelic. And every song is like this ione: thick as sea-water, live as sea, beautiful as sky. There's something you can mistake for dread, for loneliness, but after enough listens you recognise it as a different feeling: that same "sweet cherry rose" as Fóstbræður, found, hard and terrible and so utterly splendid. [buy / myspace]

The Gongs - "The Dinosaur". This is probably not Icelandic. It was sent to me months back as a submission to our Best Songs of 2006 contest. I can't even double-check who submitted it! (Thanks!) And it's great. It's a minute and twenty-two seconds long and it's so lo-fi that you hear the vocals feeding back, the drum-sound scraping.

So who are these people? Who are The Gongs? Let's make it up: they're three linguistics majors and a physics major. They're all taking a class on dinosaurs, because they like them. And they all have to do a presentation before the class on the subject of dinosaurs. And as they're meeting at the library one day the physics dude - who is a music-head, a dandelion, a wannabe indiepop star, - he convinces the linguistics girls to do a song. He writes the tune and plays the glockenspiel. They write the lyrics, sing, play drums and piano. And they gather round his computer, the iMac's built-in mic, and they sing a song of boundless optimism. Meredith's imagining her shitty ex-boyfriend, Claire's remembering piano class with Miss Levine, Suzi's wishing she had a friend as kind as the protagonist of this song, and Pete - Pete's reflecting on how awesome 'twould be to be pals with a dinosaur! [myspace]

Ariane Moffatt - "Montréal"
Ariane Moffatt - "Terminus"

"Montréal"'s the one that will be of instant interest. There's not much that needs explanation: here's rat-a-tat percussion and a piano back-beat, Moffatt singing not unlike some French-Canadian Lily Allen. There's the same sparkle, the same toss of hair and flash of stockings. It's a song of return - the best kind of return. "Je reviens à Montéal," she sings. "Je rentre à Montréal." In short: she's back! She's wiser, more adaptable, at once all-new and still-the-same. The melody's marvelous, the loll of her vocals irresistible, the sun shining. The airport runway's been transformed into a model's runway, a springtime runway, a place to stroll. Man, as someone returning soonish to Montreal, this is the reception to dream of: this sun, this girl, this weird squeezy wheezy sound at the 1:00 mark.

And with "Terminus", later on the same album, Moffatt does something unexpected. She presents an imagining of just the opposite. The worst kind of return. The one I suspect (sadly) that we've each experienced. "Le succès peut être amer (Success can be bitter)" she sings, a mirror reversal of "Montréal"'s jubilance. It goes on:

Je me réveille au terminus
sans caresse
sans chorus.

Je me réveille au terminus
perdue
dans le premier autobus.

I wake up at the terminal
without caress
without chorus.

I wake up at the terminal
lost
into the first bus.

Perhaps you arrived in an airport knowing no one would be there, but thinking that maybe all the same they might have come. That maybe your life would be given a different spin than the earth's sad ole' inevitable.

But they didn't. No one's there. And you sidle to the bus-stop and lug your bag on board and sit with your head against the glass. And Ariane lets the guitar riffs give way, gone, replaced by a sound that's much more kind than any you hear in real life, alone on that bus. In real life there's no coo or sigh: just the vehicle engine, your own breath, absence like a hand in your hand.

(Thanks Bryan & Ken.) [buy]

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Fulton Lights Contest!

I wrote about the debut album of Fulton Lights a few weeks ago. Today Fulton Lights is available to buy, from Android Eats Records. It's a really strong record: creaks and groans, melancholy and fierceness, Andrew Spencer Goldman's murmurs atop droning production (helped in part by Oktopus, of apocalyptic hip-hop crew Dalek).

Anyway, we have two copies to give away. To enter, email contests@saidthegramophone.com with the subject-line "Fulton Lights contest". Tell me your favourite city sound. The Montreal subway screech? The Buenos Aires tide? The Sarajevo call to prayer? My favourite two will win copies of the CD, as it's being released by Android Eats. Deadline is Friday, March 9.

The rest of you can and should just order one.

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Right here:

Uh did you guys not hear how precisely on-the-money Dan was vis-a-vis Ford & Fitzroy? For any of you (like him, like me) with any affection whatsoever for "yelp rock" - Dan's right, singer is amazing.

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Elsewhere:

A group called Pink Nasty recorded a song with Bonnie 'Prince' Billy, which obviously got some play on the blogs. It's not particularly strong, though. But You Ain't No Picasso has by far the best thing I've ever heard out of Pink Nasty: a sincere, unironic, sort of country-pop take on Usher's "Burn". Really good. Even if it doesn't have Will Oldham.

There's no way to know whether or not she's back for real, but Abby's updated PopText with a write-up on the new Avril Lavigne single (a song I've still not heard). And man it's written like there's a parade in town, like fireworks are still hanging peppery in the sky: I mean it's written with beautiful vim. "This song may try and trick you into thinking it’s a harmless cherry popsicle – all spring quickstep double-handclaps, dripping sweet sugar rush, but..." Well, I'll leave it to her.