Archives : all posts by Sean

Essie Jain - "Indefinable". If you slow a diamond enough, slow it right down, you begin to see a different glitter: there, beneath the prettty, something sad and beautiful and smelling of coal. On her album Essie Jain seems drawn to both the nice and the weird (both of which can be traps), but here she's found something perfect, flickering, and slow, slow, slow. There's a desolation to the song, a stillness that recalls the earliest (spooky) work of Kathryn Williams, and Imogen Heap's "Hide and Seek". Just Jain singing to the mines, tides, a doomed love. It's not those deep cellos that root the song: it's the guitar, uninterrupted, unflinching, inevitable. Breathtaking. [buy]

Cathy Davey - "Sing for your Supper (demo)". One of my favourites of last year, falling just shy of the list posted to StG. How you like it depends entirely on how two things feel against your ears: the folds of Davey's voice, indie-girl cute; and the martial press, the Western Front. It's rare that you hear a song of not-yet-requited love where the power lies with the lover not the beloved (that is, other than stalker songs). But Davey claims strength, conviction and bombast (drums, guitars, her own voice in chorale): "one way or the other / I'll be making eyes at you". You feel like she'd knock down warehouses just for the chance to stand and see you. (Thanks Shane.) [more of Cathy Davey]

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Elsewhere:

With "The Five Magical Sex Acts of Cory Kennedy", The Cold Inclusive continues its series of absurd, mesmerising, almost magic-realist celebrity fan-fiction. It's masterfully written, and very, very funny.

Nick Sylvester (not the biggest Funeral fan) writes something pretty on-the-money about the appeal of Arcade Fire.

Matthew Perpetua talks with Rob Sheffield about mix-tapes, music, zines and blogging. It's fun to read two people talking who clearly just love good songs. But my favourite line is a throw-away that Matthew makes about the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps": "the vocals are like subtitles". Yes.

Locust St. has a remarkable entry on the last days of Buddy Holly. The prose is spry, evocative, moving. (Unfortunately the rare Holly mp3s aren't half as interesting.) It's these kind of stories (albeit with a few more lies!) that probably make up my favourite kind of writing-about-music. (Thanks to Amy for the tip.)

Please do leave a comment for Eleanor Meredith, our guestblogger earlier this week.

Eleanor Meredith's work all but waved to me. I don't quite remember: perhaps it was a solitary mer-man, winking on his rock. Perhaps a mess of line & colour, like that dizzy moment just before you fall in love. She's an artist and illustrator who lives in Scotland and makes whimsy feel like something you could be serious about. Nothing makes me happier, she writes, than drawing people without them realising.

Please leave Eleanor your comments, and visit her website to see, talk, buy more.

(Previous guest-blogs: 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.)

Julie Doiron - "The Wrong Guy" (Julie Doiron/Okkervil River EP version [2003])
Julie Doiron - "The Wrong Guy" (Woke Myself Up version [2007])

Julie Doiron is an artist whose work trades on two feelings: love, and sadness. Like Herman Dune (with whom she has recorded), she is a francophone who sings mostly in english. Unlike Herman Dune there is no silliness in the lilt of her language. Her english is fluent & ordinary. But there remains the ghosting of any second language, something that translates into her songs as care, consideration, pause. Pauses fill her music - silences lingering in rooms, words lingering on lips, fingers lingering on the hot strings of an electric guitar. Choruses are unwilling. Her lyrics appear one by one, like flat stones set on a table.

It's not a very catchy music, and outside of her work with Herman Dune, The Wooden Stars or Eric's Trip, it lacks any real instrumental sparkle. Unlike with Cat Power or Songs:Ohia, her voice doesn't feel like the manifestation of a platonic misery: a throat finally expressing what sadness feels like. No, what makes Julie Doiron among my favourite artists is the feeling of honesty in her songs. For those of us who value this (the impression that an artist "really means it"), Doiron is extraordinary. She does not say too much, or too little. She sings with great care. And she always seems to be telling the truth.

And so her love-songs (particularly in french, on Desormais) are breathtaking: rose-and-dusk pleasures strung together on a melody. Her songs of heartbreak or indecision resonate long, long, long, when played on the right afternoons. And the songs that began to appear in the past four years or so, songs of motherhood & children & family, they are so unadorned in their sweetness that it's very hard not to, well, melt.

For those of us who have followed Julie Doiron over these years, her new album - Woke Myself Up - is an excellent one, among her very best. And it's also devastating.

Less than half of the record is happy songs of the domestic: kids and swan-ponds, weeding and long drives. The rest is about the end of love, the breakdown of love, questions & doubts & occasional certainties. The collapse of a marriage, of that same love we heard toasted on "Ce charmant coeur". These are feelings that were touched on with 2005's Goodnight Nobody, but not like this. The final, untitled track - which, the press materials say, was added at the last minute, - is to me just ridiculously sad, personally sad, the kind of song I wish nobody ever had to write. ("And all those songs that I sung / well now I know they were wrong / and now I'm taking them all back.")

But if you're new to (or have never been convinced by) Julie Doiron, that song is not the best illustration of why she is great. (Without context it feels too casual, too pretty.) Instead, here are two recordings of another unhappy song - "The Wrong Guy". Taken together, they are a perfect manifestation of Doiron's unvarnished music: the same song, two or three years apart. Each one sung true, and different.

On the Split version (which doesn't feature any members of Okkervil River, before you get excited), it is her and a guitar, slow, still in mourning for the realisation that "he was the wrong guy".

On the new version, Doiron is less delicate. She is almost wry as she sings - describing a kiss, he-and-she, with a bitter humour. Years later, she doesn't feel the same way about her mistake. And now her old band, Eric's Trip, is here to be loud - guitars and drums and distortion, a noise of the inevitable, the past, the tragic. She is not for a moment sorry for herself. But she wonders at how easy it is for us to make such vast mistakes.

[buy Woke Myself Up]
(previously)

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Oh dear, a major RIP to Arthur magazine.

The Underpainting - "The Underpainting".

First let us talk of "underpaintings".

An underpainting is a painting that lies hidden beneath another, on the same canvas.

If we add capital letters & definite articles to the above, we can get metaphysical: The Underpainting is the painting that lies hidden beneath The Painting, on the same canvas.

Or in other words, The Underpainting is the meaning of life.

The Underpainting is also the name under which Brian Michael Roff now records. Furthermore, The Underpainting is his new album, due soon (with artwork by Matthew Feyld). And "The Underpainting" is the title track.

So. Is "The Underpainting" the underpainting of The Underpainting's The Underpainting?

Yes.

But listen, before I get too lost in my own silly circles, let's pay attention to the song. It's a gentle, thoughtful work, perhaps the best track Roff has ever composed. "Hey there Bobby Kennedy," he begins, "I wrote a song for you." It's a song, he explains, about "the long winter, small spring, and the persistent incumbent summer". And there it is: so much of my own work, encapsulated. Grappling with the long winter, small spring, and the persistent incumbent summer.

In a great run-on sentence, Roff then sings the "contour figure", the body of the song, the image that distracts us from the small secret of that opening. And a saw sings, and a piano plays, and an electric guitar makes things so simple - a man's hands singing all the loose parts together, whole.

[more information]

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Groom - "Waking Up Before Her". "The Underpainting" is a song of great maturity. It says nothing foolish. Whereas the appeal of "Waking Up Before Her" is entirely in its foolishness. It's childish, playful, not-at-all wise. A guitar waggles through a barnyard, handclaps join shakers, someone ye-hoo-hoo-oos like it's his birthday every day of the year. And here's the dumbest, falsest, most naive line (and they make it the centrepiece of the song!): "I'm in love with you, and that's really all that matters!" By the end of the track, Groom have almost realised the lie - but still they're yelling it, all together, like fools, like fools, like lovesick fools.

[buy]

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Elsewhere:

Skúli Sverrisson - "Séria". Two weeks ago I almost died. We were skidding down a road near Selfoss, Iceland, on our way to Vik, and then suddenly as D accelerated we began, so softly, to slide. The car moved dreamlike, diagonally, over the ice. I touched D's hand where it held the wheel. I said something - I don't know what. And he said something to me. And then we were over, and over, and over. The sky flashed white in every window as our car fell off the road. It just fell. We flipped and flipped and flipped again, and I heard the sound of breaking glass.

When I opened my eyes I felt to see if I was all right. I was all right. The inside of our car was a mess. I didn't know which way was up. I remembered that mountaineer's instruction, for those trapped in an avalanche: Spit to find out which way gravity falls. I almost spat. But instead I looked out the window. The snowy ground was at my shoulder - the passenger side window.

It was with fear I turned to look at D. I didn't know what I might see. I thought of so many things before I looked at him: setting my life in order, touching this & that memory, before seeing what shadow might fall over the rest of my year. But there was D, shaken, shocked tears in his eyes, safe and hale and whole and my friend, hanging in the air by his seatbelt. We were ok.

Skúli Sverrisson (with Ólöf Arnalds) - "Vaktir þú". The next day we went to 12 Tónar, maybe the best record shop in the world. We had spent the day on a guided tour - to the waterfalls of Gullfoss, to the lake Thingvellir, to the geysers of Geysir and Strokkur. Now we were back in Rejkyavik, the sun setting, and we wanted music. One of 12 Tonar's owners greeted us as we entered. He wore a neat beard and a professor's jacket. He introduced us to the shop, explained how things worked, then made us neat little espressos. And we browsed the racks of avant garde classical and jazz, of folk and rock, all this icelandic music with cover-art I wanted pinned to my walls. Whatever we wished to hear, we took downstairs. We sat on old couches with our coffees, portable CD players set in our hands, and we scrabbled off the CDs' plasticwrap and listened.

Skúli Sverrisson's Séria is one of the CDs I bought at 12 Tonar, a recommendation of the owner. Many of the tracks are instrumental - webs of guitar-strings, organs, bass clarinets. Some, like "Vaktir þú", have vocals. (Though one song is sung by Laurie Anderson, most centre around the sad sea voice of Ólöf Arnalds.) I like it very much.

The next day we rented a car again, for two nights. I did all the driving. We went north. We went looking for the Northern Lights. I said the place-names out loud: Reykholt, Stykkish, Borgarnes, Akureyri. We rounded fjords and wove through volcanic rock. Snow lay over everything. Steam rose from the ground here and there. I wondered where all the clouds had gone. We learned that in its long dawns and dusks, Iceland's sky is a sky of pinks. One night we stood by the ice outside Grundarfjorthur and listened to birdcalls and watched something green-glimmering beside the stars.

As we drove we listened to the music we had bought - this album and others. "Séria" was our theme for the aurora borealis. "Vaktir Bu" was simply a song I love. There is something magic in this album. All things beautiful, glowing, but also vaguely disquieting. Songs of an absence. Ghost-songs, forget-me-nots, lullabyes for the days after an almost.

[buy Séria]

Fulton Lights - "Breathe In, Breathe Out". Andrew Spencer Goldman sings like so:

"And then

just like that

he fell in love
with the city."

1. Just like that is miracle wrapped in a language of normalcy. Just like that the duke could visit. Just like that the ship could founder. Just like that the sky could fall. Or you could fall, yes, for me.


2. He fell in love. In this idiom it's this word I like: "fall".


3. With the city -- this is why I travel. This is why I go places. I am in London now, was in Iceland yesterday, Istanbul a week ago. Tomorrow I leave for Austria. And all that I seek in these places, by glaciers or in mosques, my face full of chocolate cream or my eyes lit with laughter, is to enter into a communion with the city. To lie with it a while: to see how it rests, how it wakes, how it wipes the sand from its eyes. To read the lines on its face, all the tracings of its past lovers. And to see how it breathes: soft, but soft.

[more of Fulton Lights // pre-order the special edition of Fulton Lights, from Catbird Records. Only 150 copies, letterpressed, with a bonus disc.]

Cem Karaca - "Namus Belasi 'Mogollar'". Cem Karaca was one cool cat. Look at his hand-gestures, his glasses, his suit. If I made those gestures, I would be arrested; if I wore those glasses, I would look dumb; if I wore that suit, I'd be the king of Panama. But Cem ("Jem") pulls it off like a lizard sheds its skin: no big deal, no worries. He's all 'just another day as a Turkish rock-star'. During my time in Istanbul, my friend Anne hummed this song at every opportunity. As our dolmus van careened down the freeway; as neat men rushed by, glasses of tea balanced on trays; as the sun set on Beyoglu and as the wind whisked up the Bosphorus. Every so often the city seems plain: greys caught under cloudcover, pigeons leaving a square, an apartment building sitting flat along the harbour. But then the sun comes, a kid runs by, a minaret pokes its head up from below the skyline. Or Anne starts to hum. A bassline starts to play. And Cem Karaca takes a bite out of my day - honey, pistachio, flakes of baklava everywhere.

[more on Cem]

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This is pretty last minute, but I'm hoping to attend the Dirty Three-curated All Tomorrow's Parties in England at the end of April, and a couple of people have just dropped out of our prospective chalet. If there are any Gramophone-readers who are thinking of going, please get in touch ASAP if you're interested in joining myself and another (fine) Gramophone reader. Open to all gentle, funny souls who sometimes like to dance. (The lineup includes: Dirty Three, Nick Cave, Smog, Cat Power, Joanna Newson, Yann Tiersen, Lajko Felix, Low, Silver Mt Zion, Magnolia Electric Co, and water slides.)

Andrew Shapiro - "Detectors in the Eyes". The song's sound at first seems dated, dyed in the pastel shades of late-90s trance. But within moments the cascade's everywhere - these ringing bells, these glowing synths, like a room filled with butterfly wings. Much more The Knife than Paul Oakenfold, Shapiro's made a proper song - beautiful as get-out, like Douglas Coupland's "slot machines clanging out silver dollars, rubies, and sugar candies". A clarion of kisses.

[buy]

Honey Is Cool - "Something Above the Mountains". And here, meanwhile, is The Knife's Karin Dreijer Andersson from the days before she was in an electropop band. Dan's written about Honey Is Cool before, and he said then that it was "simultaneously in danger and safe". The same thing goes, here: it's dazey, dreamy, hammock-slung guitar rock, but then the cymbal slams and the glitter's almost blinding; something's deeply hoped as we swing on our swings, lay in our beds, ball our fists and, wet-faced, dream.

[can't find their stuff for sale anywhere]