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Marcello Carlin may not be a name you know. It depends what sort of circles you move in. I'll be honest: for your heart's sake, I hope you move toward Marcello's circles if you aren't there already.

* It is a great tragedy that some of Marcello's previous blogging (mostly here) seems to have disappeared; I hope that if this was an intentional choice, he chooses one day to make them available again; regardless, his current online home is very much in bloom. It is a rich pursuit indeed to plumb the archives of that site).

Peter Bjorn and John ft. Victoria Bergsman - "Young Folks" [buy]

Heard in Brighton last weekend during a brief but heavy shower, the record is appropriately rainy and skeletal and seems to have sprung virtually intact from the early winter of 1981; Peter's male lead vocal has the same, slightly irked vulnerability of Andy McCluskey. For most part the dual lead vocals (Victoria Bergsman taking the shaky female role) are accompanied only by Bjorn's bass, which more or less carries the tune, and busy percussion from John, with tangents of whistling, footsteps and distant unattributable rattles - electronic squelches, a 'thundersheet' being manipulated - which suggest the original ghost boxes of Fun Boy Three and A Certain Ratio. She and he are doing less than anything in a less than crowded disco; weary, almost ready to resign from the world, but he gingerly approaches her with a timid warning: 'If you had my story word for word... would you go along with someone like me?' She yawns her response, though not maliciously: �It doesn�t matter what you did�we could stick around and see this night through.� Underneath Bergsman�s reply an organ slowly sidles into the track to provide a blanket of security, and it stays there with everything else slowly increasing in volume and intensity - but still that crucial space, measuring it all up, as though Cupid were tailor rather than archer - as they join in the chorus, where they don't care about anybody else; young folks, old folks, not even 'our own folks'; in their new world no one needs to exist save them - 'All we care about is talking/Talking only me and you.'

The symbiosis ripens as the disco and its inhabitants dissolve around them ('Hours seem to disappear'). They pledge, up to a point, to remain together, even if only for this night; there is what sounds like a bold Link Wray stroke which is actually an artful combination of Spanish guitar and tubular bells. There is so much space in the track, as though they are the only two people left in this world, their world; the angles and perspectives between the whistling and percussion, and the wider dimensions of the song's implications, reveal it as an encouragingly blissful halfway house between Pulsallama's 'The Devil Lives In My Husband's Body' and the Go-Betweens' 'Streets Of Our Town' as remixed by Yo La Tengo at their quietest.

Lighthouse - "One Fine Morning". [buy]

Their Best Of compilation, Sunny Days Again, was given to me as a more than welcome present by my fiancée. Legends in their native Canada, but not much heard of outside the American continent, Lighthouse were clearly a marvel of a group; active between 1968-76, they alone seem to have arrived at a workable equation between jazz, rock and Third Stream music which the likes of Chicago and Blood, Sweat & Tears attempted to capture. In both latter cases they fell at the expected MoR hurdle; the fall was profitable but artistically near-fatal. But with phalanxes of horns and strings - a young Howard Shore appearing in the sax section - they never succumbed to bombast or pomp; 1973�s big hit single 'Pretty Lady' is a wonderful and sprightly affair which sounds as though Super Furry Animals recorded it two months ago, and as emotionally intelligent AoR pop stands shoulder to shoulder with 'I Saw The Light.'

But 1970's 'One Fine Morning' has become something of an anthem for us; there are the busy drums and bass, the blasting horns, but the thrust is purposeful and seductive, and when Ralph Cole's epileptic funk guitar riffing strides into the picture it is difficult not to think instantly of Haircut One Hundred (a group who also found their own, albeit much belated, equation in this arena). Then Bob McBride's confident but vulnerable lead vocal holds the centre, so much more open and generous than the constipated teeth of David Clayton-Thomas. He wakes up, wipes the sleep from his eyes, goes outside and feels the sunshine, and KNOWS immediately that they will FLY; the euphoria of that 'FLY' extends over two syllables, one short, one long and a sudden octave higher. Viola and 'cello provide a continuo of warmth under the second verse with its miraculous everyday imagery - 'I�ll see your face inside a cloud/See your smile inside a window/Hear your voice inside a crowd� ' before the chorus takes off; one long, unending cry of 'FLY' over an utterly sublime series of chord changes. Lines such as 'candies made of stardust' are the only momentary reminders of when the song was recorded, but the promise, the fulfilled pledge to FLY is carried over the gliding extended main chorus, with cushions of rebounding embraces outlining the globe which their love will inhabit: 'We'll fly to the EAST! We�ll fly to the WEST!' It's ecstatic and sets up Paul Hoffert's piano solo beautifully. 'Every planet will become our home!' McBride exclaims as composer Skip Prokop turns up the pressure on his drums, sounding like two drummers, two souls united as an indissoluble ONE, and Cole's scorching lead guitar runs lays the carpet for the stairway to heaven which the horns gladly ascend, note by note, until it peaks in a CLIMAX and we come a great big glorious YES to make the Milky Way milkier.

One fine morning, girl, I'll wake up
Wipe the sleep from my eyes
Go outside and feel the sunshine
Then I know I'll realize
That as long as you love me, girl, we'll fly

And on that mornin' when I wake up
I'll see your face inside a cloud
See your smile inside a window
Hear your voice inside a crowd
Calling, "Come with me baby and we'll fly"

Yeah, we'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly
We'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly

And on that mornin' when I wake up
We'll go outside and live our dreams
I'll buy you candies made of stardust
And little dolls dressed up in moonbeams
And everywhere we go we'll laugh and sing
I'll kiss you morning, noon and night
And all the universe will smile on us
'Cause they know that our love is finally right

Yeah, we'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly
We'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly

Yeah, we'll fly to the east, we'll fly to the west
There'll be no place we can't call our own
Yeah, we'll fly to the north, we'll fly to the south
Every planet will become our home

------ piano -------

Yeah, we'll fly-y-y, yeah, we'll fly
Yeah, we'll fly to the east, we'll fly to the west
There'll be no place we can't call our own
We'll fly to the north, we'll fly to the south
Every planet will become our home

[Marcello Carlin has written about music for Uncut, Time Out, The Wire and many others. He maintains the blog The Church of Me.]

(Previous guest-blogs, in and out of the Said the Guests series: artist Johnnie Cluney, 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.)

Shinobu - "T- T- T- Trepanning". If you had drilled a hole in your head, you'd stutter too. Shinobu are all over the place, guitars goin' wildly while the singer yells a song more slurred than sung. But the secret, inevitably, is in the hooks: one at the beginning of each line, in a whine that's totally pop. When the backing vocals come in ("Ahhhhhhhhhhh!"), I've just about resolved to go shoving through this rock'n'roll until I make it to the other side. This is an awesome minute and a half for fans of McLusky and men with megaphones.

[buy Worstward, Ho! for a mere $8]

Okkervil River - "O, Dana". The band called Okkervil River are presently (or were until recently) on tour in Australia and NZ. While travelling, they brought with them an EP, released on Oz's Inertia Records. It's a handful of new songs and a live recording of "Westfall". One of the songs that's received the most blog love is "The President's Dead", which is a sympathetic first-person eulogy on the death of a [presumably Republican] president. I interviewed songwriter Will Sheff much earlier this year (for a piece that is hopefully going to be published soon), and one of the things we talked about was Neil Young's recent Living With War record. It got Will mad. "Well, from a political standpoint," he said, "kudos to him. But from an artistic standpoint, that’s just so... It’s just so dumb. It made me want to write a song that gives people sympathy for Bush. I just don’t like things that massage your beliefs and say 'What you believed all along is in fact the truth.'" And so he did.

Anyway, I'm not posting "The President's Dead" because I don't think it's nearly as compelling a track as another song on the EP, called "O, Dana". This one doesn't have a political back-story: it just has a chorus. "O, Dana - o Dana come on!" It's the stuff that old jukeboxes are made of; honky-tonk piano, trumpet ba-ba-ba, everyone yelling that couplet. Like "The Latest Toughs" (from last year's Black Sheep Boy), each go-round of the chorus renders the rest of the track irrelevant; let me just hear that hook fading out all night, right til the sunrise.

Update: And of course a helpful anonymous commenter reminds me to check the liner notes: the song is originally by Big Star. Face: a little red.

[buy, replete with splendid William Schaff artwork]

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Contest time! Said the Gramophone has two pairs of tickets to give away to Grizzly Bear's September 26th show at the Bowery Ballroom in NYC. I last wrote about the band (and their album Yellow House) last week. If you'd like to go, email contests@saidthegramophone.com with a message guessing what Grizzly Bear (the band not the animal) would most like to eat, if it were lost in a forest. Either I or Ed Droste will pick our two favourite answers - and you'll be good to go. Deadline: Midnight EST on Wednesday, September 20th.

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Eric Marathonpacks writes some sociological thoughts on musicblogs. Please ignore my lightweight and scattered comment in response.

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Spoilt Victorian Child, an early and exceptional mp3blog, seems to have wrapped things up. I'd be sad if they had not done such tremendous work, over the years. All the best in what's to come, Simon.

Arab Strap - "New Birds" [from Philophobia]
Arab Strap - "New Birds" (live) [from Mad for Sadness]
Arab Strap - "The First Big Weekend" [from The Week Never Starts Round Here]

Earlier this week, Arab Strap announced that they were not going to be recording more music together. "we simply feel," they write, "we've run our course". They were one of the most singular bands of the 1990s and one of the finest Scotland ever produced. They were - and are, as they will be touring in support of a compilation due late in October, - small, crude, beautiful, honest, free, lonely, wild, fucked, shining. Aidan Moffatt murmuring scuffed late-night stories into a microphone; Malcolm Middleton, head bowed, asking his guitar to sound nice. A very strange mix, Malcolm's golden playing and Moffatt's brown-sauce confessions. But a singular one, yes. A fine one. One of those precise musics that catches a person at just the right time and then leaves a mark. You don't forget the moments when Arab Strap was playing exactly what you felt.

My favourite Arab Strap song is "New Birds". Usually my favourite version is the one from the studio, released on the LP called Philophobia. It's about a reunion: a man and a woman meeting after a long time apart. And it captures the perfect glint of a perfect kind of melancholy; the precise gleam of a why-am-i-sad. Moffatt's narrative can at first seem off-the-cuff but no, it's not. Listen to each act, the balance of contemplation and deed. Which moments linger in his tale? The meeting; the walk; that moment face-to-face; the having-parted. "You can see her breath in the air between your faces as you stand in the leaves and she just asks you straight out if you want to come and stay in her flat / But you make sure you get separate taxis." None of the in-between. That's always the part you can't remember. It's the having-done that roars in your chest as you lie in your bed or sit in the dark. As you stare at yourself in the mirror. As the electric guitars rise, yellow.

The live version of "New Birds" is sometimes my favourite. The tom and bass drum hit harder. The crescendo at the end is Mogwai-heavy, full of something much closer to regret. An anger that needs to be played out in full.

And "The First Big Weekend"? It was, and remained, their biggest hit. What kind of hit is this?! Ah, Scotland. It rambles. It drifts. And it moves - forward, forward, forward, on and on, just like that first big weekend, you know the one, you know the one, months ago, and you - just like Aidan - walked through the park and took a shortcut through the playground. All the colours are here: the colour of a man talking just as he gulps down some beer (0:46); the colour of the first violet blush of the night (0:56); the colour of a man pretending he doesn't care (2:07); the colour of a man regretting having been too mean (3:13); the colour of summer's wafting love (4:00). All the colours. It's what scientists call a rain-bow.

Thank you, lads.

[buy things]

Grizzly Bear - "Marla"
Marla - "Of Course You Can't Go Without That" (exclusive)

I wrote before about Grizzly Bear's Yellow House. I said they had taught their garden to sing. That's a strange thing to say: how can a garden sing? It would have to be inhabited. With crickets and moths, maybe. Or nightingales. Or gardeners.

Or with ghosts.

I've carried Yellow House with me through many days and nights, on the streets and in my home. (When my mood was soaring or when I was drifting, woozy. Both of these things.) It is a music at once diaphonous and bodily, like a hand you can occasionally take and occasionally not. Like the way you can feel sunshine, sometimes, as you walk through a dusty band of it. There's an insideness to the music, - close, murmured, tender, - brought outside. Or an outsideness - wild, fertile, ripe, - brought in. Things walking where they should and shouldn't.

The Grizzly Bear song "Marla" is perhaps the most haunted of any on Yellow House. A piano sounds, an attic whispers, and voices gather like spirits in a cup. The strings, arranged by Final Fantasy, dip and rise like an old phonograph (gramophone?) record.

And here we come to a woman called Marla.

The song "Marla" is named for the great-great-aunt of Ed Droste, Grizzly Bear's founder (and a StG guestblogger last year). In the 1930s she moved from Boston to New York to be a singer. She failed, and by the end of the forties, she had drunk herself to death.

"Marla" takes its melody and words by one of the few things the real Marla left behind: this song, all full of sepia flowers. There are no attic sounds, no voices gathering in a cup. In the original recording we hear just the lace of Marla's voice, the ringing rise of the piano line - quickening, breathless. But already there's something unsettling in the cadences; something that wants and lingers. Not the sound of a ghost, yet perhaps - just a little - the premonition of one. Something already stirring in the drapes.

Ed explained to me, by IM:

"she's looking for things
before [my great grandfather] goes on a trip
to teach at a university
i believe that's what the song is about
she's running around the house
fetching his things
funny to think he'd travel with his file/drill and clam shells
I believe by drill she meant a hand drill that he'd use to crack the shells into various shapes
then he'd file the edges
so they were soft
before he'd fit them together
the color of the clam shells go from white to blue/purple
and various shades between"

From white to blue/purple
and various shades between.

Do you ever wonder the colour of memory?

[Yellow House is now available to buy (US/UK) and it is certainly one of the finest albums of the year.]

Herman Dune - "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" (mp3 removed at label request). Herman Dune's new album is made with major label lucre: horn section, expensive studio, backup singers. But it's also made with familiar stuff: tambourine jangle, sneaker squeak, rhymes like high-fives. "I Wish That I Could See You Soon" hides nothing. It's about wishing that I could see you soon. It's about seeing a photograph and hearing trumpets; it's about talking to yourself; it's about wanting, wanting, wanting; about there being no way to say and nothing you can do. Part of me wants to rerecord it at half-speed, just murmur and lazy-strummed mandolin, singing all the sadness that the song submerges. Herman Dune don't wallow even for a second: they consider the worst-case, they sing it, but then they move on to the more important stuff. To wishing. And wishing is fast enough to dance to.

According to the dictionary:
wish n.
1. To have or feel a desire: wish for the moon.

[Giant is out in October. In the meantime maybe read Herman Dune's MySpace diary post about a visit to Montreal, and dressing up with Julie Doiron at a Flaming Lips show. (Or hear one more mp3.)]

Julie Doiron - "Me and My Friend". This is a sad song. It'll trick you: just a cute girl with a guitar, you'll think. She's singing about swans huddling together. About times when you were dancing and singing. And then: oh wait. Oh shit. That was then. And now you don't see each other no more.

The first snowflake of the year falls in September. It's unlike any other snowflake that will ever fall. It winds its way down to the tip of your freckled ear.

[I found this song on Julie Doiron's MySpace page, but I don't think it's been released anywhere. But you should buy her albums, especially Goodnight Nobody and Desormais, the latter being one of my favourite albums.]

Said the Gramophone is a big fan of Daytrotter, that strange young project of words, art and sound, where artists are invited into an Illinois studio as they travel through one of America's more barren stretches. These sessions are presented for free download, accompanied (usually) by Sean Moeller's precise, curling writing; and paintings by a man called Johnnie Cluney. When I visit Daytrotter it's not the music that first arrests me (not even in the case of Bonnie Prince Billy's recent & marvelous session): it's Johnnie's art. The works are full of life and movement and clumsiness, ripe with accident and a Polaroid's fertile glance. But, yes, painted and drawn. The work of hands.

- Sean (Michaels)

(Previous guest-blogs, in and out of the Said the Guests series: 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.)

New Order - "Temptation". I don't listen to lyrics except when I care to. I was told, once, that this is a song about a break-up or something nasty like that. Ha! I don't think so. Listen to the forward slam of the drums, the filigree of synths and guitars, the smiling human surge of the coda: "I've never met anyone quite like you before." "Temptation" has always for me been a song of love, love, love; of when your heart's so live it slips right out of your chest and takes - straight white flap fast - into the air. When your heart's more bird than organ. When your life's more serendipity than inevitability. When your feet dance spontaneously on the pavement, when you find yourself smiling wide at anyone who crosses your path. When when when when when... but it's a song of now! Listen to the drums: now! Find this life: find it! Now! Go on - go get it. You deserve it. Come, I'll show you. The Northern Lights will go discolight; the Southern Lights will go bedroomlight; s/he'll blink his eyes and you'll know. Green eyes, grey eyes, blue eyes - it doesn't matter. The one you want is just around the bend. You'll find your soul as you go home.

Oo-oo-oo-oo-ooh! Ooh oo-ooh! Ooh oo-ooh!

"Temptation" is one of my favourite songs ever: it's all the things I want the stars to be.

[buy

Bob Dylan - "Spirit on the Water". Have you heard of this guy? I think he might really have it. He once had a young man's bray; now he has an old man's creak. It's still nasal of course: but here it's because he's stopping to smell the flowers. What flowers? Lavender ones. Not just lavender itself but flowers in that same tone of mauve: tiny round flowers, large and leafy ones, tight buds. All kinds of lavender as his band plays the most beautiful melody of any Dylan song I can remember: peace and quiet, chance and possibility, bliss and ease, all of it right there in the blush of steel strings. It makes me wish I had a linen suit and a straw hat - a sunny path to walk along. And a girl? Does it make me wish there was a girl, too? In the crook of my arm? Friends, it goes without saying. "When you're near / it's just as plain as it can be / I'm wild about you, gal / you oughta be a fool about me."

Shine your shoes.

[Modern Times came out yesterday: $9.99 at Amazon.]

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CONGRATULATIONS to Marcello and Lena.

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I see that Uncle John and Whitelock are playing six! dates in NYC, starting on Friday. If you live there, I'd really strongly encourage you to go. UJ&W are my favourite new band in Scotland - I've written about them here and again more recently in that piece for Pitchfork. It's fearsome preacher-rock, black-and-blues, horror honkytonk. etc etc etc. And terrific, live. Let me know if you go and liked 'em.