Archives : all posts by Sean

The theme at Said the Gramophone this week, through no efforts of my or Dan's own, appears to have been sex appeal. I had expected it to be coincidences, bling, the frustrations of noise music, or the cities built by buildings - but nay, no. Instead it's the way words slide on tongues, the clumsy and the quick; the way our pistachio-green background might just make you blush.

Or so I would like to imagine.

Let's imagine a photo booth.

Ola Podrida - "Photo Booth". I wrote about Ola Podrida months ago, with demos in my hands (fish-hooks were on the brain, even then). But now the album is finished, due out on Plug Research in 2007, and it's become pretty clear: this is a record I want to keep with me. David Wingo's songs at first seem modest and merely warm - lullabyes, irons & wines. But what I've found is that the songs are hot. Behind all that lull is organ churn, guitar resound, sharp want and skin-on-skin. "Down each-others' pants / in the photo-booth." The folksy calm lets the songs feel easy, lets them feel familiar; and yet deep in there, beneath the easy and familiar songs, is something more than status quo. There's a fierceness that feeds these soft-voiced things, something far too sensuous for bedtime. If this were a 2006 album, it would be one of my albums of the year.

Everybody Cares, Everybody Understands has the finished "Instead," perhaps the album's best song - the demo of which was posted on StG way-back-when.

[more info]

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Chet Baker - "I Get Along Without You Very Well". The xylophone that opens this song is the sound of everything, everything spilled. But don't worry. Chet starts singing. Everything's fine now.

Elsewhere:

Skatterbrain has a new song by Phantom Buffalo!

My Best of 2006 Contest is still on: enter and win an excellent CD.

Finally, do we have any readers in Krakow, Iceland or Istanbul? (Or for that matter, other than the ones I know, in Paris?) Please consider getting in touch - I'm coming to visit.

(photo by this girl)

One of the best mix CDs I've ever made was for a mix-swap held by The Diskettes'/Popsheep's Dave Barclay, interlacing gangsta-edged hip-hop (50 Cent, Dre, etc) with sad, soft songwritery stuff (Julie Doiron, Little Wings, etc). It was a little mischievous, admittedly, but really I did it because the juxaposition worked so well. Murmurs and ache interrupted by synths, gunshots, tough mutters.

Anyway, I gave my mix to some mystery-person, and never heard any feedback. I suspect they 'lost' it. I, meanwhile, received an angry-woman sampler, ripe with Bikini Kill, PJ Harvey and Ani DiFranco. Which I lost.

Clipse - "Ride Around Shining". There's a great reason that people are talkin' about the soon-to-be-released Clipse album, Hell Hath No Fury: it's really, really good. Hot as coal, hard as a hammer, charmingly devilish. On a blogger messageboard, Matthew wrote a good summary of what makes Pusha-T and Malice tick-tock: "they've skipped right by the 'anti-hero' default of most rap and straight to this mustache-twirling villainy, and that's why their characters are so seductive." This track's not the catchiest on the record but I can't get enough of the Neptunes' beautiful & menacing main riff. It's a deliciously slow harp arpeggio; a sound that's held resounding, resounding, while the boys glare and glower. And pose. [buy]

Leaves From Off The Tree - "Barbry Ellen". Leaves From Off The Tree is an album by, and project of, Meg Baird and Helena Espvall (Espers), and Sharron Kraus. Nine traditional folksongs, beautifully and simply rendered. "Barbry Ellen" is entirely unaccompanied, just three women's voices in plaint. It's a strange lament: what wrong did the narrator commit? Mere "hard-hearted[ness]"? Not recognising a love that was before her? Or was she cruel? The song does not say. All we have is the melody, full of want, and these three singers - solemn, sad, compassionate as dawns. [buy]

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Elsewhere:

A little while ago I jumped the gun and wrote about the outstanding new Of Montreal album, due early in 2007. You can now stream the whole thing. Pre-order it and get a limited edition bonus EP for $3.

Perhaps you remember Felix Lajko, the hungarian/yugoslavian/gypsy violinist who fiddles sparks? The guy who I praised to the skies here and here? Well, he's been added to the bill on the Dirty Three-curated All Tomorrows Parties festival in England in April (alongside the likes of Silver Mt Zion, Smog, Josh Pearson, Low and Nick Cave). Are you thinking what I'm thinking? (Oh, and YouTube has videos!)

I didn't think that Herman Dune's "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" could conceivably get any better, and then... I saw the video. It's one of the greatest films I've seen this year. (I wish I had friends like Y, O and U.) Herman Dune also recently appeared in the Blogotheque's Concerts à emporter series, and there's an amazing bonus video of David and Neman (?) serenading Chryde's little baby boy.

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Finally, contest time.

The end of the year is coming up and I am again choosing my favourite songs of the year. Inevitably however there are things I've missed. So, here's the challenge:

Email contests@saidthegramophone.com the greatest-song-of-2006-that-I-haven't-heard.

There are currently 48 songs in my end of year long-list; if the song you send is not already in that long-list, and makes the cut for the short-list, you will win a CD from my pile-of-prize-CDs (Arcade Fire, Antony and the Johnsons, something like that).

How do you know what I haven't heard? You don't. But if it's been posted on this blog, is from a talked-about indie/mainstream release, or has been really popular on other blogs, chances are I've heard it. Then again, my awareness of chart singles this year has been abominable - so a lot of big-name hip-hop and pop stands a fair chance of being new to me.

Other rules? Entries should be sent to contests@saidthegramophone.com with the subject line: END OF YEAR CONTEST. Please do not point to or name a song: attach the mp3. Deadline is 11:59 pm on Monday, December 4. Please no more than two entries per person, and please no more than one song by a given artist. And please, send only the best! This isn't about great albums: it's about splendid, beautiful, fun and devastating stand-alone tracks.

Best of luck!

(img by tra selhtrow)

Swan Lake - "The Freedom". I love the Swan Lake album. It is dense, monstrous, beautiful. There's so much to it. Whereas with Joanna Newsom's Ys that muchness just means there's a lot to sit through (!), here it's that the songs have so much happening at the same time. Beast moans! Calls and faint answers; harmony and counterpoint; meanings and obfuscations. At a cafe, Dan Beirne mentioned off-hand that "Are You Swimming In Her Pools?" is "about Montreal" and he basically blew my mind. (He's right.) It's "The Freedom" that's my favourite, though. Thank goodness it's one of the two that Jagjaguwar is giving away for free. It's led by Dan Bejar, paddling with his acoustic guitar; but Carey Mercer's there with his electrified electric, Spencer Krug with his anenome synths. It doesn't feel like a Destroyer song - it feels wilder, and easier to like. But it does have the runs that mark so many of my favourite Bejar songs ("Testament to Youth in Verse", "European Oils", see below).

[buy / Michael Barclay has an exquisite set of Swan Lake interviews]

Destroyer - "Farrar, Straus and Giroux (Sea of Tears)". The song fish-hooked me.

I'm walking, listening, and then suddenly each image is a chime; each sentiment familiar. We want this from music - to hear something so close that you feel it slip down your throat and catch in your chest. We talk of "hooks" in songs. Of being "grabbed" by a "catchy" song. We remember such moments: strolling and hearing a track that expresses all that rustles in your bones. The song at the concert, that time, when you felt like you were tearing in half. The song as you walked down the aisle. Something on the tape-deck as your headlights are white beaming. The last dance. Everything just yes.

"Farrar, Straus and Giroux" was destined for a mix CD I never made. For many weeks I kept the song aside. And when I took it out it had changed. Become a long line of familiar truths - of coincidences (eerie, splendid) reeled out slow. From smiles to stones to my "temporary age of 24"... Each time one of these things rings & stings, I feel the fish-hook tug.

"If there is such a thing as ill-timed August rain?" Bejar sings, and the way he asks it would almost break your heart were he not caring enough to shrug and pivot, to say "all right" and then play the piano runs generous and inevitable, Destroyer-typical, that will remind me always of the "Aria".

Yesterday my friend Darek, whose first language is not english, asked me the difference between the words coincidence and synchronicity. I said that synchronicity was Jung. That it was a "system of coincidences". This system might spell the name of God, or humanity, or truth. Or love. Or nothing at all.

But I regret speaking of systems. Let "synchronicity" be instead the collective noun for coincidences. A flight of swallows, an anthology of flowers, a synchronicity of coincidences. A synchronicity. Who's with me? (Who's even still reading this?)

It's such a shiny word, synchronicity. Shiny as a new Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. Shiny as Destroyer's electric guitar.

Shiny, friends, as fish-hook.

[buy]

Sleeping States - "Rivers". The guitar strings are drawn back and away. We do this with oars, too. The river Sleeping States summon is so gentle, so Saturday, that the whole world can go fuzzy. A handful of grass in the bottom of your boat - squint and it's Pavement, it's Grizzly Bear. Mistake your memories for voices, your appetites for electric guitar, bass, and drums. Sleeping States is led by a man named Markland Starkie, who lives in London. He's got the same bruised croon as Beirut's Zach Condon. And this song makes me think the Thames is much, much, much, much, much, much more lovely than I ever knew.

[MySpace/ buy a CD here, or by paypalling £4 to sleepingstates@hotmail.com / tape EP available here]

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It's Ed of Grizzly Bear who first told me about the above song, and he's since written it up in a post at the band's blog. As many of you will have heard, Grizzly Beard were victims of a horrible robbery while on tour in Brussels. Stolen: cash, instruments, equipment, personal effects... close to everything. It's a massive, massive blow to them - as much psychologically as economically. The tour's now been cancelled and the band is praying that insurance will cover the losses. (It probably won't.)

I asked Ed the best way to help the band right now. And, shyly, he said something simple: buy their record. Yellow House is, as you should know by now, one of 2006's best albums. If you've enjoyed any of the songs we've posted, any samples you've heard, or if you're simply curious - buy it. You won't be disappointed.

(Emailing the band to wish them well probably wouldn't do any harm either.)

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At Jagjaguwar there are two songs from Julie Doiron's upcoming new album, Woke Myself Up - one as mp3 and one as video. "No More" is shiny-sad, sounding more like her stuff with the Wooden Stars than the last album (where Herman Dune was backing band). And "Me and My Friend", for which there is a silly-tender video, well... we already wrote about it. And I think I'll let my words there- I think I'll let them be.

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Rishi Hargovan has written a good piece for The McGill Daily on the subject of musicblogs. It's thoughtful and deliciously ambivalent. I feature (too?) prominently, but it's my and Jordan's alma mater after all. (Special StG bonus: hunt the Daily's archives and find my blistering rant against indie-kid elitism! read my undergraduate fiction! & read the first news article ever written on the arcade fire!)

And when folk music breaks - when the lakesurface of song is interrupted by whirrs and skips and lonely echoes, - there's something there that's just between real and ghost.

(The lingering parts of life (i.e. the slippery parts) all seem to live in that inbetween place. Memory & longing & eros & home.)

Two songs as demonstrations, both exquisite:

Samamidon - "Falsehearted Chicken"

Samamidon is the collaboration of Sam Amidon, banjo-wrangler and sing-songer, and Doveman aka Thomas Bartlett, wurlitzer-drum-guitarer. Their record - due in February on Plug Research - is pretty fucking special. It's called But This Chicken Proved False Hearted. And of course this song is called "Falsehearted Chicken". Let's dismiss the obvious question of poultry: let's focus on the falseheartedness. Or perhaps the question of heartedness. A hundred and fifty years ago, Appalachian musicians discovered a particular quality of the banjo when accompanied by certain voices. Namely, it can capture nearly the entirety of the human experience. Within the past fifty years, composers have discovered a particular quality of ambient sounds and knockknockknocking. Namely, it can capture everything else. Here Amidon and Bartlett put the two together: it becomes a song of presence and absence, want and wish. Of promise, ok?, and you can hear how much the promise means.

It's beautiful.

(You can't buy it yet but you can listen to several more mp3s here.)

Bonnie "Prince" Billy - "Cold & Wet"

Bonnie "Prince" Billy is Will Oldham. At first I thought this was a song about sex, but then I realised it wasn't. I don't know what it is. It's about something: something I know, something I'm real familiar with. (But what? I don't know!) Something to do with the way I got rained on all this week in Montreal, and the way I got inside and my skin was hot and there were sparkles in everybody's eyes. It's a song that breaks so, so, so, so so so good.

[buy]

John K Samson is a musician, poet, publisher, and one of the finest songwriters in Canada. His band, The Weakerthans, make some of the most fierce and caring rock music I've ever had the fortune to hear: charges of guitar, batteries of drums, lines of longing that shine, shine, shine.

In Edinburgh I've of course talked with people about Canadian music but the band that most seems to fire peoples' eyes is The Weakerthans. The punks and poets both, and of course the millions of us who fall in between.

Listen to mp3s of some of their songs here and here, and buy CDs through those links as well. (I guarantee you will not be disappointed.)

This piece was intended to be published several weeks from now, but of course last week came the news of the death of William Styron, and although it was written before his passing it seemed necessary (for reasons that will become clear) to put this online as soon as possible.

I was more than excited - I was blushing - when John agreed to write something for Said the Gramophone. The result far exceeds what I might even have hoped. Please tell him so - and take care.     --Sean

Open Your Clouded Gaze

Two women in Winnipeg killed themselves on the same weekend last month. What pushed this terrible coincidence into the local newspapers was the fact that one of the women was the founder of a support group for family members affected by suicide, and the other had dedicated her working life to helping teenaged girls with eating disorders. Predictably, there was little to be said — no explanations or insights. I don’t have any either. All I could think about was the fact that the few people I have known who have killed themselves have done so at this time of year. In the fall. That isn’t an insight, just a sad piece of trivia.

The novelist William Styron wrote a great short book about his own depression called Darkness Visible — A Memoir of Madness, outlining his preparations for suicide, eventual hospitalization, and recovery. Speaking of the strange lack of an appropriate vernacular for communicating depression he says, "To most who have experienced it, the horror of depression is so overwhelming as to be quite beyond expression, hence the frustrated sense of inadequacy found in the work of even the greatest artists."

Many of those great artists have been musicians. There was no single event that led Styron away from suicide towards recovery, but he does mention one moment that brought him back from the brink of killing himself. He tells of being alone late at night after trying to compose his suicide note, and forcing himself to watch a movie.

"...the characters moved down the hallway of a music conservatory, beyond the walls of which, from unseen musicians, came a contralto voice, a sudden soaring passage from the Brahms Alto Rhapsody. This sound, which like all music — indeed like all pleasure — I had been numbly unresponsive to for months, pierced my heart like a dagger, and in a flood of swift recollection I thought of all the joys the house had known: the children who had rushed through its rooms, the festivals, the love and work, the honestly earned slumber, the voices and the nimble commotion, the perennial tribe of cats and dogs and birds — all this I realized was more than I could ever abandon ... And just as powerfully I realized I could not commit this desecration on myself. I drew upon some last gleam of sanity to perceive the terrifying dimensions of the moral predicament I had fallen into. I woke up my wife and soon telephone calls were made. The next day I was admitted to the hospital."

A few bars of music somehow dove through depression, "the gray drizzle of horror," as Styron calls it, and led him away from danger. I decided the Alto Rhapsody would be my soundtrack for this suicide season.

Johannes Brahms - "Alto Rhapsody (Op. 53)", by the Berliner Philharmoniker con. Claudio Abbado, with Marjana Lipovsek. [buy]

The piece starts in a minor key, moody, apprehensive, and trying to my ears, which are fairly unaccustomed to classical music. Then, around seven and a half minutes in, it starts stepping over to the major, and the remaining five and a half minutes are astoundingly beautiful. I can find little in language to accurately explain or describe it. Brahms, it seems, felt the same way. According to Barry Creasy, Chairman, Collegium Musicum of London, Brahms wrote the Alto Rhapsody in 1869 as a wedding present for Julie Schumann, who was marrying an Italian count instead of marrying Brahms. When he played it for Julie’s mother Clara (Robert Schumann’s wife, who Brahms had also been in love with, long story), she wrote in her diary,

"Johannes brought me a wonderful piece... he called it his bridal song... This piece seems to me neither more nor less than the expression of his own heart’s anguish. If only he would for once speak as tenderly!”

The lyrics are in German, a poem by Goethe called Winter Journey through the Harz Mountains, and I began to wonder if it could possibly compare to the music itself. I was astonished and contrite when I found this translation:

But who is that apart?
In the underbrush his path loses itself.
Behind him
The shrubs clap together,
The grass stands up again,
The wasteland engulfs him.
Ah, who heals the pains
Of him, for whom balsam became poison?
Who drank hatred of Man
Out of the fullness of love?
First despised, now a despiser,
He furtively consumes
His own merit
In unsatisfying egotism.

If there is in Thy Psalter,
Father of love, one note
To his ear audible,
Then refresh his heart!
Open his clouded gaze
To the thousand springs
Next to the thirsting one
In the desert!

Goethe, tenderly, clearly, spells out depression and pleads for its defeat. And the music Brahms set these words to - when he wrote it to ease his own pain, then more than 100 years later through the speakers of William Styron’s television, and perhaps now as you listen on a computer somewhere - actually embodies the poem. It becomes the "one note to his ear audible," to "refresh his heart." Goethe to Brahms to Styron to You. Each link a little closer to expressing the inexpressible.

Elliott Smith - "I Didn't Understand" [buy]

The Handsome Family - "Lake Geneva" [buy]

[John K Samson is the lead singer of The Weakerthans and a founding member of Arbeiter Ring Publishing. The next Weakerthans album, tentatively titled Civil Twilight, will be recorded sometime in 2007. Unless it isn't.]

(Previous guest-blogs: 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.)

Tartit - "Assinaina". The Tuareg of the Sahara desert play a music that is someone rapping with hard knuckles on your chest. I imagine myself laying on sand and staring at so much sky that I pass out. The Tuareg come: rap rap rap, Assinaina assinaina assinaina. And I come to. I imagine myself drinking water so cool that my belly glows, and I pass out. The Tuareg come: rap rap rap, Assinaina assinaina assinaina. I come to. I imagine myself in a city called Montreal, so familiar in its morning whites and browns, and I think that somehow if I put ear-to-tree I'll hear a music coming up through the roots from a much hotter place - something to help me come to.

This is a band of five women and four men, drums and handclaps that go in circles, voices chiming and cresting. To me it recalls the intricate jubilance of Toumani Diabate. Crammed tells me Tuareg men are veiled, women are not. And I tell you: this music, a song called "Assinaina", is absolutely unveiled.

[buy]

Mirah - "Apples in the Trees (Pash remix)". One of the rare highlights in a new album of Mirah remixes, Pash's version strips the song to just two lines - then sets these spinning like plates on sticks. Bells ring and ding, bluebells rattle, apple blossoms fall to earth like brass ball bearings. Mirah doesn't sound like the boxing clever folkie that she is: she sounds like someone already forgotten. You know when you think of a song, or a lyric, that someone sang long ago at a concert? And you don't even remember what the band looked like, let alone who they were? All you have left from that performance is the curl of Mostly-Forgotten? Well this is that, in a broken music-box.

[buy Joyride (or, better yet, buy Mirah's very best records)]