Archives : all posts by Sean

Pops Staples - "Somebody Is Watching". There are times when heat feels all abiding. Feels kind, welcoming, come in / come in / have some mint tea. Not summer: just heat. Just sun on earth, sand, bricks turning redder. A sky's blue polished like tile. You see a dog or a cat, meandering. You think to yourself, Me too I am meandering. Meandering like a guest in a big hotel. Meandering like a body in all-abiding heat. Sometimes it is so hot that every single movement gains purpose, meaning. Even seeing. Even meandering. The sun is watching you and if you are moving there must surely be a reason.

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love from morocco

Ranglekods - "Lost U". The orderly panic of a Paris air terminal; white light, cobalt blues, red carpets. Signs for Hermès and one-euro coffee. The certainty that you're supposed to be somewhere, somewhere particular, and the plummeting feeling that you will only end up there if you follow every single clue. Wake up! There's no better time. (Sun's shining.) Be brave.

Alphatra - "La Fuite". Like trying to reason with your laptop battery. C'mon guy, give me five more minutes. Batteries cannot be reasoned with. Like your torn shirt: it's torn, no taking it back. Like the lightbulb gone out. Negotiating with a part of life, arguing with it, finally raging at it. Gathering your friends and their guitars and instructing them to help you make your point, like that can accomplish anything, like you and your hoarse voice and your thundering amps and your stamping drums can build a convincing case for anything besides the solidity of your chords and chording.

[from La Souterraine's latest anthology, Vol. 7]

Tyler, the Creator - "Buffalo". Tyler jacks Pusha T's abrupt and cheering sample to offer his own disorienting, deteriorating cri-de-coeur. You have the feeling that Tyler's spirit's all scoured with Tide and Mr Clean, flecked with white powder, the give and weave fighting whatever cleaning agents got admitted to the studio. Self-doubt and criticism swing like medallions around his neck; every time his head droops to stare at them he distracts himself with another cheer, blurt or crash. A haunted house with a funk band in every rickety room, a hundred James Brown impersonators trying to keep you from looking at the ghouls. See here, see here, kinder glints than all the cruel flash on those swords. [buy]

David Thomas Broughton - "Ain't Got No Sole". A song of losing your shoe. Maybe it starts as something more than that - a song of dark heart, fatal intention. But before long it's haphazard and scrapped, distracted, a loafer bobbing away in the water. I think it's the story of a narrow escape, a near-miss. Life's daft logic can lead you to the end of your rope but by the same token it can save you. Every day we get fucked by unfair, arbitrary and incompetent moments; then sometimes we get rescued by them. Broughton's tune feels light as a schooner, uncapsizing. It feels as giddy as a backwards clock. [buy]

Kehlani ft Coucheron - "Alive". Here's a secret. This right here: a secret, the kind that doesn't long stay so. Many pop songs start this way - as secrets, clutched, treasured, strung around your neck or hung across your room. But then of course they get out, spread, the way wishes do, blowing across a birthday cake. And that's good, because everyone's enjoying them, the secret in the commons. Everyone's rerecording them onto mixtapes, rerecording them as hard-drives' bits and bytes. Kehlani's voice, her bandmate's guitar, her chorus-catchy, radio-friendly R&B - they're all going kaleidoscopic, copied in a thousand places by a thousand people in a thousand ways, one secret becoming ten, three minutes become a year. [buy]

Loosestrife - "job hunt". The word is this: gamely. Loosestrife's Claire Lyke and Shaun Weadick gamely toil, gamely work their shitty dead-end jobs, gamely clatter and riff, gamely harmonize, gamely yip and ooh, gamely shout out the woe of the workaday. They gamely sing their compact, sing-song punk-rock, abetted by drums and guitars. So gamely! And yet maybe not. Maybe this is only as gamely as a game of throwing knives. Maybe it is only gamely until the revolution comes. Loosestrife will participate in this sorry system for exactly as long as they need to. And when one day the bosses stop paying, or when one day finally the workers have had enough, the stuttered first syllable of the chorus, p-p-p-pay me, will be the sound of the popguns going off.

[bandcamp.]

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The Passovah Festival is the precocious pint-sized maven of Montreal's indie rock scene, a young institution that manifests the whole spirit of what this place and thing is all about. Every summer, amazing shows by a wild gang of artists; energy and kindness and community racket. This year, though, they're growing up a bit - staging a fundraiser so they can pay their bands a bit better. Donate here. If you can afford it, throw some bucks their way. If you love Passovah or the Montreal scene, do it. If you plan to attend the festival, buy a pass right now. If you plan to attend SappyFest, or to go see Nicki Minaj or Shamir or Purity Ring or Omar Souleyman, pick up yr tickets by giving pledges to this campaign. And if you're a Montreal-based business which wants to earn big love from a loving scene, make a mark by giving big to this small great thing.