Said the Gramophone - image by Keith Shore

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by Sean

Moby Grape - "I Am Not Willing". Peter Lewis' voice goes nowhere in particular, bobbing like walnut shells. But the piano is insistent, fateful, even inevitable. There's peace in the karmic wheel; it's something to be "grateful" about. Moby Grape have enough confidence in the Way Things Are that the guitar solo can fade right out. If this is psychedelic rock, it's the kind that turns right inwards, watching the pulse of your own capillaries - following the shivering slow of your heart.

[buy]


Lloyd Cole - "I Am Not Willing". Strange that Lloyd Cole's new album isn't even out yet: everyone's been talking about him thanks to Camera Obcura's recent namedrops. Here he takes on the Moby Grape classic, and I hear none of Lewis' weariness. Cole is feeling new things as he treads through this life. He's surprised at his feelings (see the way the glimmering MOR synths give way to real life drums) - but he truly is grateful. A song about the end of a relationship can feel like a song about starting something new: pushing through the veil with the knowledge that you can always, always walk forward.

[pre-order]

thanks fred

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strange flickermoving painting of light & shape in a japanese way, over at red ruin.

by Sean

The Mountain Goats - "Get Lonely". Ernie wakes up early. It's before four a.m. and it's December and in Montreal, and it's very cold. He wears a large down winter jacket, a collar that goes high around his ears. He can only find one mitten so he doesn't wear any. His shoes are sneakers. He put on his headphones - this was important, there in the room at four a.m. when he was considering things, feeling the cool weight of the darkness out the window. He put on his headphones and then tried to decide if he should wear a hat. He would be cold without it, but he would look like such a dork, the tuque pulled over the earcups. But it's four a.m. he tells himself. It's four a.m. No one will see. He puts on the hat.

When he's outside and walking he keeps almost tripping on the patches of frozen rain on the sidewalk. He watches the whorls of smoke or steam that come out of the chimneys. The sky is the same colour as the street but the clouds are lighter, whiter, like a frosting of snow. It's so cold everything feels like it's shaking.

Ernie's walking and he doesn't know where. He just knows how good it feels to be moving at four a.m., listening to music, feeling the chill. Like a man shaking free of something, maybe. Or a man investing in something. Five nights before it became clear that a girl that Ernie liked, a girl whose name is Pam, does not like him. This made him sad. It did not decimate him but it made him sad. It feels good to be walking in the cold at four a.m., with the clouds and the sky and the road and the ice. The cars that pass him are all coloured grey, and are like ghosts.

Ernie considers carefully what music to listen to as he walks. He cannot walk for too long - he will get too cold, but more importantly the day will arrive. The rush and the bustle. The morning's mark will be lifted. It won't mean the same thing that Ernie is out there, walking. So he chooses carefully and the song he chooses is by The Mountain Goats. It's called "Get Lonely". He feels a pang of guilt at listening to this, like just from its title it's too obvious and thus false. But when he turns it on and feels the acoustic guitar, the guitar that reminds him of when he zipped up his coat and quietly so quietly unlocked the front door, he knows it's okay.

He walks and he listens to the song for the first time - the first time really. And he finds it's a song about going out early. About feeling lonely and going out early - trying to blend in with a crowd, checking the dead-lock twice. It's such a sad song. John Darnielle's voice, so much softer than usual, almost numb. And the horns and strings in the corner of the sound, like premonitions. The song is much sadder than Ernie feels - and this feels right. Like only a sadder song can speak to the sadness Ernie feels.

He listens to the words and hears the instructions. "I will rise up early / and dress myself up nice / and I will leave the house." ... "And I will find a crowd / and blend in for a minute / and I will try to find / a little comfort in it. / And I will get lonely." There are no crowds at four a.m. And Ernie's not dressed up nice. But he likes this line: "And send your name up from my lips / like a signal flare." Ernie's walking and he sees icicles. He sees bushes covered in frost, gnarled and sharp. He decides he will act out what the song is about. Later, when it is "early" but not as early as this. He will do this - he will do "Get Lonely". He will seek out the reassurance of this ritual. He will prove his own loneliness by following in Darnielle's narrator's footsteps, standing in the shadows of buildings. It's very cold outside. He knows what he'll do today. He'll get lonely like this. Yes. Already Ernie feels better.

[Get Lonely was released this week. Buy it.]

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Sam Cooke - "Nothing Can Change This Love [live]". Have you ever felt a love like this? Listen to the the awe and tremble. Did you know that people sometimes feel this kind of soul-song-love? They do. If I go a million miles away / I'd write a letter each and every day / 'cause honey nothing, nothing, nothing can ever change this love I have for you / ... / you're the apple of my eye / you're cherry pie / and oh you're cake and ice cream / you've got sugar and spice and everything nice / you're the girl of my, my, my, my, dreams. Sing it, Sam. Play it, saxophone. Cheer it, all you young lovers.

[Yes, buy the essential One Night Stand: Live at the Harlem Square Club]

by Sean

Less the Band - "I Want to Know You". The Edinburgh Fringe Festival is in full swing and on Friday night I went to a play - Pulitzer Prize nominee Adam Rapp's Finer Noble Gases. I wasn't sold on the production. Despite the cast's antics as drug-addled slackers, the play's emotional core felt out of reach, ambivalent. Imagine my surprise therefore when the actors cleared away the set, threw on guitars, and closed the show with twenty minutes of hot, flickering My Morning Jacket-like indie rock. There was something magic in the way their songs resounded in the room, a voicing of things that the play's main action had left unsaid.

It seems that when the actors aren't acting, they're in fact a band (albeit a band with a lousy name). That band has a CD. And "I Want to Know You" is the finest of their songs. It's a track that glows with want, full of questions, hopes and riversnaking dreams. There's talk of robots but they might as well be singing about muscle and beating heart; voices gather in yearning, electric guitars remember. Feelings fly.

[buy/info]


Bonnie 'Prince' Billy - "Cold and Wet". The album's not all I had hoped but "Cold and Wet" comes awfully close. Though an artist known for his eccentricity, his queer monkish remove, Will Oldham feels here close enough to touch. (Not just by his love, or by his kin - by anyone! Anyone who passes him on his milkcrate in the street, voice crackling like stray chip wrappers.) It's a strange song. Oldham's guitar gets caught up in its own curls, running backwards like the stutter of a dripping eave. You can almost imagine a rainy sing-along. But upbeat, lads and lasses - upbeat. It's a song of sex and getting rained on, or something, a song whose umbrella would be bright and almost scarily red.

[Then the Letting Go is due in September - in the meantime order the fantastic Cursed Sleep single]

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Winners of the Silent Shout Contest:

On the 11th I announced a contest for The Knife's new, exquisite album - Silent Shout. There were two ways to win - by sending me a photograph of a ghost, or by sending a 55-word ghost story.

The winners are below, along with a few runners-up (who, sadly, cannot receive prizes). I would strongly encourage anyone who wrote a 55-word story to submit it to my friend Anca's 55 Word Story website.

Thank you so much for all the marvellous entries, congratulations to the winners, and thank-you to Mute and The Knife for letting this happen.


Photographs of Ghosts

Winners:


Christine
(who inherited this photograph from her grandmother)


sirc

Runners-up:



Stories
(the story entries were, dear readers, fucking phenomenal)

Winner:

"Untitled" (by somniac):
In China snow is falling on humble villages. Man A runs through the dark fields and his feet are black. He falls and freezes. Man B sits and looks up from his fire. Reaches up into Man A and climbs into his body. Man A returns home from war and kisses his wife in darkness.


Runners-up:

"Untitled" (by ncmojo):
Am I alive, she asked me in a dream.

I did not respond. Her blood was warm on my hands; her smell lingered on my clothes. I disregarded. I played Sudoku, drank gin. Anything to not sleep, to put off dreaming -- her mute, skittering eyes.

Am I alive, she asked. I could not respond.


"Another Thing I Really Can't Explain to My Mother" (by roseds):
The ghost slept under the bed. I preferred the suffocation of mattress and quilt. Once, I asked her why she slept beneath me. She dug her pistachio toes straight into the floorboards before answering. I don’t remember what she said—ugly letters smashed tight, all vowels. The next day I broke the bedframe, maybe on purpose.


"Untitled" (by Michael Van Fleet):
I never realized how much my father hated me until he passed away. I woke in the middle of the night to find him learning over me, his eyes milky, whispering "I hate you I hate you I hate you."

His moustache was neatly trimmed.

It looked good.

When I was young, his kisses scratched.


"Untitled" (by Will Hubbard):
In her bathroom, finally, a pull, then pinch, of bowels. I sat down, the motor just perceptible some streets off. Time only to run water over the wound, check teeth for signs of lunch. Her face was like two faces and I thought of all the colors in my blood. How else-wise they came out.


I wish I could share all of them with you. Thanks again to all participants. You can buy Silent Shout here (and if you follow that link, StG even gets a tiny cut).

by Sean

Just a boy with an acoustic guitar. Not a man: a boy. A lad. A kid. And it's a very subtle thing that makes a given boy-with-guitar a something-special. Something I can't quite put my finger on: something about character and wit and voice and lightness of touch. Something about, it seems to me, corduroy and jeans, bright apples, brick, pussywillows and the colour green. What separated Elliott Smith from ten thousand imitators? Dylan from ten million? It's hard to say.

But I kind of, like, genuinely think Fionn Regan might have it. It's not the guitar-playing - though he's truly capable. It's not the voice - though it's got a bluebottle ring that recalls The Weakerthans' John K Samson. It's not just the lyrics - though these make me think of John Updike. It's all these things, and none of them. It's the way he is meditative without being slow; wry without being clever; sad and glad. I can almost, actually, imagine Elliott Smith doing a music like this - had he not been so deep in his own sorrows, had he been a little more indebted to "Eleanor Rigby" than "Dear Prudence".

Fionn Regan - "Put a Penny in the Slot". This is the song that's repetition, repetition, repetition, the same little lines of verse and chorus with different words slid in. Some rhymes are more natural than others, some scenes tenderer, but this is what real artists do: they let you see the sleight of hand now and then, they remind you that not everything's precious-perfect. When Regan namedrops Paul Auster and Saul Bellow it's not a name drop - it's just two names dropped, like each one had been sitting on a bench in Regan's mind and it would be rude to ignore them. Is this a song about love? About heartbreak? I'm not sure. Better listeners might figure it out - me I get caught in the images of a man with his matches; or "tears like flashbulbs"; or a girl ignoring her phone, hunting for a taxi, a "batallion" searching for her. For me it's the intersecting circles of this full, interspersed, greengreying life.

Fionn Regan - "Blackwater Child". This is the jauntier of the two of these - that means it has drums. As Regan duets with himself I'm reminded of Josh Ritter's earlier work - but again there's such a lightness to Regan's songwriting. It's not that he's not committed to what he's singing - but he doesn't try to invest too much in any particular lyric. He knows that different phrases will resound for different listeners, that a sound metaphor today might be a flimsy one tomorrow. So we listen and relisten, different things catching our ears - different glints of coins in your palm. When he sings "It's hard to cope" there's no belly-bottoming depression: just the flat ambivalent sadness that most of us feel, here and there. A hopping seagull can still raise a smile.

[info/buy]

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Elsewhere...

Bows and Arrows has the first track from an upcoming album by The Walkmen. It's called Pussy Cats and yes it's a track-by-track remake of Harry Nilsson's LP. The first song is, of course, "Many Rivers to Cross" - some of you may remember the original from when I posted it last week. The Walkmen's version is very faithful; they capture that familiar ache.

I really like 1.618's (ever-graphical) take on Swan Lake's "All Fires". (See what Jordan wrote here.)

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Finally, the Knife contest is closed! Thank you all for your fantastic entries. Winners announced next week.

by Sean

Belle & Sebastian - "This is Just a Modern Rock Song". Two thoughts:

1) I love Belle & Sebastian. I loved them more, once, back when they were murmuring and melancholy. Their new schtick is good & capable, and golden, but less suited to my rumpled heart. I first discovered them at a party at Catherine's house, when I was in high school. We had some classes together but she was two or three years older than me. At this party I didn't know anyone but Catherine and a couple of other kids from class, and them not well. In the opening hour or two, before too many people had arrived, eight or ten of us sat in the deep couches in Catherine's parents living-room, talking. They talked more than I did. I was a little intimidated. Catherine kept putting on CDs I had never heard, had never heard of. (And so you do not mistake these kids as more hip than they were, a Ben Folds Five record was among these.) One of the CDs was If You're Feeling Sinister. The band's name reminded me of the cartoon I had loved as a kid.

The red and black album cover caught my attention before the record had even come on. Everyone else in the room knew it, and they sang softly along. The evening was throwing blue-grey ribbons through the window. I had never heard such a quiet music - had never heard anything like it. I felt like someone was opening a door in a high wall, revealing a garden.

On Boxing Day I went to the big sale at the HMV/Sam's on Yonge Street in Toronto, looking for this record. (And some others: Sloan's Twice Removed is the one I remember.) I walked into the 'Alternative' section, pretty proud at how edgy I was. I doubted they'd even have it. But they did, in a big stack. I bought one.

Later I bought Tigermilk. And then The Boy with the Arab Strap. And Fold Your Hands Child. And then I stopped buying every Belle & Sebastian album.

In Napster's heyday, the main songs I downloaded - other than exploring the work of the Elephant 6 Collective, - were Belle & Sebastian b-sides. I must have got the lot of them - all those EPs and singles. Some of the songs caught me, - "Pastie de la bourgeoisie", "I Love My Car", the alternate "State I Am In", "Judy is a Dick Slap", - many didn't. These receded into memory, like you forget the way that certain trees blossom at certain brief times of year. Like how in the winter time you forget how thick a tree's leaves can look.

About six months ago this song, "This is Just a Modern Rock Song", came up at random on my computer. I had been in the other room so there stereo was turned up very loud. I had just come back into the living-room and sat down on the couch to read. The song starts very gently and so it slipped easily into my hair, the folds of my clothes, under my arm. It slipped between the pages. A soft presence.

I read, and the song grew. And then when things in it began to build, when the tambourine, drums and violin came in - I put down my book and stared at the stereo. I stared at it. Something was happening. The song was rising all around me, like seeds sprouting thick tall trunks, like the ceiling flowering with colour, like the bare lightbulb turning hot. There was such a richness that had come over the room. A gold & melancholy: a thrilling melancholy, a burnished gold. The song seemed to shake with feeling. It seemed to shake with sound. Played loud it felt as immersive a song as I had ever heard; it carried me more surely than anything I could recall. I'm not sure where it carried me, just that it did. Just that it does.

I bought a copy of the EP. How could I not? I had to own this, not just have an ephemeral and illegal download. And I would come home from long days of work, or wake up on long Saturdays, or arrive in the early hours from a late, late night on the town - and I would hope that the neighbours would understand as I put this song on, loud, and listened.

It's one of my favourites.


2) The song, for me, is in this line: "I'll admit I'm feeling strange." These are the words of someone who knows something is happening. Who doesn't know what. He doesnt turn away. He doesn't say "I was feeling strange." He says "I am". He's still in that place and he'll explore it. He'll keep feeling. He'll fill the room with the the strangeness-of-feeling; he'll summon whatever it is that's being summoned. He doesn't know what's happening to him, why or what or how, but he'll let it come. He'll let a fanfare sound, an invitational. They'll welcome the feeling, they'll feel the feeling. They'll play it in guitar, drums, tambourine, organ, violin (?), trumpet. And through magic, simple Glasgow sorcery, they'll put it on tape.

[buy the single / buy the Push Barman to Open Old Wounds rarities comp, where it is also included]

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Our Knife - Silent Shout contest is still on.

by Sean

Antarctica Takes It! - "I'm No Lover". Am I more inclined to listen to a band when my name is thanked in the liner-notes? I admit it: I am. Is that vain? It is. But oh, it feels great to have my plain 'sean michaels' attached to a song like this - like a ribbon bobby-pinned to the band's galloping heel. I've never even met these kids!

Did I say galloping? I did! Because this here is a cavalry. On their MySpace page they cite Belle & Sebastian, Otis Redding, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra - but forget that. It's Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hannibal at their head. Listen to the exclamation of this song! The band earns the '!'. Listen to the cannonade of percussion, the charge of clap-clap, the hoarsening voices and the go-insane of the piano... the closing horn fanfare like a cavalry of rainbows that the general's added "just because we can! On, men! On on on!"

The CD's hand-painted, they're from Santa Cruz CA, they're the band I wish I invented at summer camp... oh and did I mention it costs only six dollars!?

[buy/info]


The Desks - "Stop!". This song, taken from The Desks' new free album, eschews slowness and sigh in favour of hesitating beats and fey soul (much more Robert Smith or The Robot Ate Me than Sam Cooke). The best parts are when the song creaks so hard it almost falls apart. For instance: a cracking voice, split with giddy feeling! a lyric so cute ("like maybe we could get some gelato?") that it breaks any spell! a raft of voices all echoing at each-other! Okay but I should lay off the exclamation points: the Desks are not Antarctica Takes It! There's a modesty here; my enthusiasm is earned with eccentric squeaks and instinctive performance. No army was trained: a man just sang it right, into his computer.

[download/obtain]

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two terrific blogs called it quits this week:

i didn't discover Vain, Selfish and Lazy that long ago, but I fell fast in love with fred's spurred, true and feeling writing. the archives are deep wells.

and Otherwise Unavailable goes out with a brrrrang, offering us a bunch of music by the author himself - as with most of what he's posted, they're mysterious, varied tracks, in places exceptional, like something brought in on the wind. I particularly like the songs by Cool, and the Trillion Dollar Trio.

godspeed to you both.

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Paper Thin Walls, meanwhile, is a new e-zine with music news and daily mp3blog-style writeups of rad songs. Contributors include um luminaries such as Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddie, formerly Village Voice music ed.

And TW Walsh has written up an extensive, very illuminating interview with STG-friend Brian Michael Roff.

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Finally - it's CONTEST time again! Spooky Swedish electropop duo The Knife have released one of my favourite albums of the year, Silent Shout. Said the Gramophone has three prize-packs to give away, courtesy of Mute Records. These include copies of the record, posters, masks, singles, etc - whatever the label throws in there.

There are two ways to win:

1) Email a photograph of a ghost to sean@saidthegramophone.com, with the subject-line "KNIFE CONTEST". Make of this what you will. Knife CD prize-packs will be given for my two favourite images.

2) Email a 55-word ghost story to sean@saidthegramophone.com, with the subject-line "KNIFE CONTEST". Stories should be excellent, and no more and no less than 55 words (excluding the title). A Knife LP (yes, vinyl) prize-pack will be given, label-willing, to the author of my favourite story.

Contest ends Midnight EST on Thursday, 17 August. Good luck! The contest is now closed.

The rest of you really ought to just go out there and buy the thing! It's fantastic.

by Sean

Cibelle - "Green Grass". Cibelle's hidden things in this song. Amid the voice and acoustic guitar there are knocks, bells, ghost voices, horse whinny, harp. (And when I looked in the liner notes, after, I saw that the voice is even credited as a "ghost's voice"!) She sings like the breeziest breeze, pensive and then so, so, so happy. When she sings "birds from the blossoms!" her smile is like the flap of a wing, the kiss of a snapdragon.

Tom Waits - "Green Grass". The most important thing in this (the original) rendition of "Green Grass" is the recording of Tom Waits' voice. I don't mean just the plain fact of his voice - that scratchy ruined thing. No, the exact way it sounds here. It reminds me of candle wicks about to be lit; whistles about to be blown; a thistle carried in a man's hand as he walks down the street. No breezes here. Here it's about how feeling can fill a still space. (Yes like a ghost.) It's about a spirit who knows precisely what he wants to say, and how. As composed, certain and tender as the place where he now resides.

[buy Tom Waits' Real Gone]
[buy Cibelle's The Shine of Dried Electric Leaves]


Wrapping Paper - "Hold Up The Neon Sign". Wrapping Paper play a furious pop music and it's impossible to imagine them doing anything but tramping through a field, poppies and straw up to their knees, making their way to the neon song that reads: "YES". I adore this sort of overdriven recording - drums that sound like thunderstorms, guitars that sound like drums, glockenspiel that sound like meteorites shooting through roofs. It clears my arteries. (Other artery cleaners: The Exploding Hearts, McLusky, Guided By Voices, Konono no. 1, Devin Davis.) It exfoliates. (That is, shakes leaves from trees.) It, um well to put it plainly, rocks.

[info!]

There's lots more in the archives:
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