Archives : all posts by Sean

Beirut snuck up on us. There was no PR machine, no celebrity guests. Gulag Orkestar (Ba Da Bing) appeared in some writers' and bloggers' mailboxes and we listened and we loved it. A riotous mix of trumpet and drum-thump, Zach Condon's bobbing voice and his boisterous melodies. It's fast become one of the year's most talked-about indie rock debuts, and even a few months on, the band's gypsy stomp has lost none of its gleam. Beirut has drawn comparisons to Neutral Milk Hotel, Rufus Wainwright, Calexico, Magnetic Fields and Hawk in a Hacksaw - he's drawn comparisons but the songs draw for themselves: tall and wobbling pencil-sketches, foreign gates and Slavic villages, mountain roads and fortress walls, wedding nights, dust and dusk.

He's from New Mexico, lives in Brooklyn, is playing summer dates in the Northeast, has mp3 samples here, and you can buy Gulak Orkestar for $10 or $12, postage-paid.

Today, Beirut is going to tell us about four great loves: Balkan brass, eurohouse, dub, and tropicalia. Please make Zach welcome. -- Sean

Balkan brass has inspired me more than any other music I've run into - so I'll mention one of the best songs ever written by the Roma, then move on to music I love from other, perhaps unexpected places.

First, a quick geographical rundown: Balkan brass music was born of the music of marauding Turkish marching bands pillaging through the Balkans, picked up and redeveloped by Gypsy musicians of Macedonia and Serbia. Hot dance music comes from Germany. The Germans are no longer making war. Barrington Levy is from Jamaica. Dub music was created there before dancehall destroyed and patronized the country's culture. Caetano Veloso hails from Brazil, a country he embraced and then was promptly thrown out of.

Kocani Orkestar - "Siki, siki baba" (from Alone at my Wedding) [buy]

Perhaps the best album title ever. The Kocani Orkestar was the first Balkan brass band I happened to listen to, and still remains my favorite. This song is Gypsy music at its most delirious and drunken best. Watching me listen to this song is like watching a hyperactive four-year-old without his Ritalin. Pure excitement. Oddly enough, the chorus of this song is almost identical to that of "Chaje Shukarije" by Esma Redzepova, who wrote and sang that song when she was fourteen... Fourteen! Another one of my favorite tsigane songs. it sounds suspiciously like an old Bollywood soundtrack, which is something I relish.

Justus Khoncke ft. Meloboy - "Hot Love (Freiland/Frei)" [buy]

Seeing as how we get an eviction threat every time we sneeze too loud in our apartment in Greenpoint, I'm entertaining the idea of blasting this song as loud as it will go on the last day of our lease. Who the hell could be mad with a song like this playing in the background? That's like trying to be angry while watching Sesame Street. When will we catch up with house music stateside? This song really pushes alot of the excess boundaries in my head, melodically etc; but that ends up being one of the most fascinating things about listening to it...

Barrington Levy - "Here I Come" [buy]

I'm broad, I'm broad, I'm broader than broadway, wo-oh-oh! It's rare to find someone so free and creative with their vocals. Most people (soul singers included) never achieve that level of total freedom. Where they would just noodle around in the name of improvisation, Levy achieves something beautiful, concrete. It's an unforgettable melody. More people should aspire to this.

Caetano Veloso - "Tropicália" [buy]

I should start this out by saying that deciding on a song of Caetano's to feature was one of the harder decisions I've had to make on this list (besides boiling down all of Balkan brass music to one song, which seems like a crime now). After the year in which I listened to nothing but said gypsy music, I found myself looking for relief from the intensity and darkness that can surround music from that stretch of Europe... a kind of pop music minus frivolity. And lo and behold, I found Caetano Veloso. "Tropicália" is a good example of what Brazilian music is capable of, and in a way, what I want to do with my own music. Caetano starts with the intensity of a traditional sound (here tribal drumming and a typically Brazilian instrumentation) and builds a pop song out of it, each of the two styles enriching the other.

[Zach Condon is the leader of Beirut. You can buy Gulag Orkestar direct (and insanely cheap) from Ba Da Bing, and if you live in NYC, Philly, Massachusetts or DC, see the band live.]

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

Deedee Pitt - "Laars Er Op". This song is taken from a comp of 60s Dutch girl-groups. And so we must deduce that the Dutch pop scene in the 1960s consisted of women in tall brown leather boots backed by troops of short Flemish kazoo-players. As Babelfish is unable to translate the title, I must assume that they were also known for singing exuberant and gibberish choruses. It's interesting how the brain plays with foreign words: I don't pay much attention to song titles and for a long time I thought this track's refrain was a castigatory "That's enough! That's enough! That's enough! That's enough!" But, of course, it's "Laars Er Op". Which is fine. But if it were "That's enough," this tune would be oh-so-ripe for remakes. It'd have that Nancy Sinatra mix of steeliness and pout - the sort of pop artifact that todays' popstars are so keen to recreate.

Jacob Borshard - "Grass Stains". I heard this as part of Ryan's Catbirdseat June Mix. It blew breezily past, the first time - but returning to the playlist this was such a stand-out; a beautiful little find. Borshard plays his ukelele in familiar ways, cute sing-song of bikes and mermaids - a sound squeezed in somewhere between Page France and Jens Lekman (& do I hear a touch of The Weakerthans' John K Samson?). But even forgetting the sub-Archies breakdown at the end, eventually the song's aesthetic tweaks a bit: there's something awesome and loose in how Borshard's indieboy romance takes a turn toward the sexy, the way he slips into talk of "birthday suits", the way he casts aside "your bra". Ultimately the artist "Grass Stains" most recalls is (early) Mirah: her casual, shrugging mixture of twee naivete and smouldering, savvy bedroom strum.

The whole record can be downloaded at Jacob Borshard's site. He's also a sculptor (and painter?), whose set of bronze dinosaur sculptures are steadying, tender and very, very nice.

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Elsewhere:

My new favourite blog is 1.618. Every day they post a song they love and, without any further commentary, an image to accompany it. The arrogant part of me would describe it as "Said the Gramophone... in photographs". But their imagery is far more successful than our fumbling phrases: like monks' illuminations of your favourite pop passages. My favourites (already, so many!): Royksopp, Belly and Sebastian, Ellen Allien, The Beatles, Junior Boys, Daft Punk.

I do not live in North America nor own a television but man I hope you caught Stephen Colbert's interview with Congressman Lynn Westmoreland. Hys-ter-i-c-a-l. Don't read the expurgated transcript - skip to the video. (Quicktime/YouTube).

PS: In less than a week I'm going away on a three week holiday. If you need to hear from me about something before then, please get in touch soon.

Dreamies - "Program Ten (excerpt)". Mike lived in Boston and Montreal and now resides in Sweden. He likes lots of bands I like. He told me I should hear this album. This is what he said, not verbatim: "So it's by a guy calling himself 'Dreamies'." "The Dreamies?" "No, just Dreamies. No the. He was an accountant in the 60s and he decided he wanted to make music. So he quit his job and spent all his money making a studio in his basement, learning to use it, learning to play instruments, recording an album. He spent a year doing this. And when he was done he released the album and then went back to work as an accountant and never recorded anything again. Each side of the LP is a single track. Experimental folk weirdness. Lots of samples. It just got reissued."

And then this is what I did not say to him, but might have, had I already heard this song then; had I already cuddled up in its thrum and drone, in its Roy Harper jangle and its proto-Grandaddy bliss; had I already felt the thrill of the theme that fades under sirens and broken dishes, returning like a lover you never expected to hear again; had I already done all this, I might have said:

"Mike, this is amazing. Is it a dream, Mike? Is it a shortwave transmission sent back to us from Venus? Is it what happens when you plug a transmitter aerial into a man's heart? How can a single strum and a multitracked voice keep my fascination for so long? How can something so long forgotten sound so much like Grizzly Bear or Wyrd Visions? How can this sound like "Mother Nature's Son" and "Revolution 9"? How can an accountant make such a beautiful music? If televisions were birds, is this what they would sing? Who was this guy, Mike, and why is his website so weird?"

[buy]

Camera Obscura - "Country Mile". We established several months ago that I like the sad Camera Obscura songs - well, that and "Keep It Clean". And while others go a little crazy for Let's Get Out of this Country, I'm left wishing there were more small and tender pieces - or, then again, that the glossy soul thumpers were even bigger, even tambouriner. But there's one song on the record I keep returning to, over and over. It's this one. A slow, sad one - a tune about long-distance love that's close to despairing. I interviewed Tracyanne Campbell a couple months ago and this is the song that most recalls her conversational voice: the pauses, the hesitancy, the sudden ardour. She is so front and centre here - forget the strings, the guitar, the keening lap steel. We're here for one thing: the woman spotlighted, sorrowful, and stronger each time she admits "I feel lost". It's not a depressing song, however - not for me. There's too much to long for when she sings "I wish you could be here with me / I would show you off like a trophy". There's a dusky promise when she sings "a blink of these lashes would make you come"... It's not depressing because there's no finality to the song. Strings swell in and out. "I hope," she sings. And it ends without any great climax. (The next song is the upbeat dance number called "If Looks Could Kill".) This is a song like a moment's sorrow. Like a pause for you to wipe your eyes. To write a postcard.

[buy]

Tom Ze - "Ave Dor Maria". A revelation of production, a marvel of sound - one song can't do Estudando O Pagode justice. But even in these scant few minutes you'll hear alligators and bikini straps, tobacco roll-ups and clothes-lines, operatic choirs and fenced-in neighbours. At more than 70 years old, Ze is proving he has more ideas in one Brazilian finger than Sufjan Stevens has in his whole rosewater brain. Ze out-Gueros Beck; out-squeaks Psapp; borrows Final Fantasy on strings; and teaches yours truly to dance.

[buy]

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Loki - "Across the Room". The best artists are the ones who leave you swinging round with your finger, trying to track the influences, name the predecessors. The important part is: trying. The best artists are the ones who slip through your fingers, fish for whom you brought the wrong nets.

Loki is an MC from Glasgow. He doesn't camouflage his accent, nor does he inflate it like some parade float for him to ride in on. It's casual, dry, sharp as a straight razor. He sounds like The Street sometimes - Mike Skinner's humanity but never his awkwardness. He sounds like Nas, leaning upside-down into his subjects. And there's even a touch of Aidan Moffatt, of Arab Strap's plain work-a-day melancholy: the tragedy of plain old real life. It's all here.

Although I live here I'm not really fit to say whether this is Scotland's first great MC. I've not been listening. But I love this. I love the mournful circling of piano; I love the plain drumkit beat; I love the way Loki scampers from horny to bored to melancholy, like all these things are beads on the same length of twine. (They are.) I love the way this song keeps lifting itself up and putting itself back down, a raincloud hiding behind chimneys, a sad song that lurks in a playground swagger. And oh, friends, listen to those closing lines. Insufficient, truncated, true.

[info / more info / buy]

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Nothing But Green Lights is the relaunched mp3blog by Mike from Take Your Medicine. It's UK based and excellent, posting only the things that his heart is set on. Mike's also continuing the take your medicine podcast, and the June mix is superb. Beirut, Herman Dune, Robin Allender, my favourite Psapp track - and more.

Marathonpacks' new podcast playlist thing is also v. good if you're looking for 60 minutes of song. Dig the Lupe Fiasco.

Brian says a few interesting words on Live's "Lightning Crashes".

This week's Contrast Podcast is on the theme "I'm the only one who likes this". And so I chose to talk about the Barenaked Ladies' Gordon. This is the ILM thread I refer to, sadly, between snuffles of tears.

Jonathan Lethem writes books. Shorter things too, but he's probably best known for writing books. Fortress of Solitude, for instance, is a novel about friendship and Brooklyn and jazz and rock'n'roll. It's about comics and loss and life. It's about magic - several kinds of magic. The cool kind of magic. The kind you leave at the bottom of your pockets for the moments you might need it. Like an alcoholic keeps a little bit of liquor in a back cabinet.

I wrote to Jonathan almost a year ago, asking him to write something for us. I can't express how sweet my creaky heart sang when he followed through. -- sean

Danielle Howle - "Still in Love with You" [buy]
Johanna Billing - "You Don't Love Me Yet" [info]
Vulgar Boatmen - "You Don't Love Me Yet" [buy]

It was Southern California in those days. We all worked in a used record store and we all were a certain age, a clerk’s age, the long middle of our twenties, already wrecked. Some of us were in their thirties already! All the clerks played vinyl on a turntable behind the counter in turns, getting royally sick of one another’s music, a certain bluegrass album a dozen times and you’d start trying to time your lunch break to that track about the horse. Somebody else played African music and you might be coming around slowly. The Go-Betweens, every album was on a different label, it was like putting together a puzzle. All the best bands were from New Zealand, mostly, except if they came from Australia. The guy with the suit and the clipboard from ASCAP came around and said we’d have to pay royalties on the songs we played behind the counter since they were being broadcast in a public place and we said they were only for our own pleasure, our customers didn’t even like to hear music, everyone else tittering behind their hands while someone offered this explanation. We’d all been in a band or were about to have been in one or else just owned a leather jacket. Confused about the difference between Syd Barrett and Roky Erickson and Robyn Hitchcock among other things. Everyone was always breaking up, the record store was even built on a fault. A chasm between failing to start and not knowing when to quit. Embarrassed to say you were applying to grad school. Somebody started coming in early and got promoted to manager. Big Dipper, Big Star, Big Daddy. The Fastbacks. The first CD came along, some rock critic dropped it off with a bunch of other comps he was selling and we regarded it like the apes in 2001. Letting some high school punks sell a zine on the magazine rack, they looked at you like you were an adult. One day your life would start. In the meantime we all worked in a used record store.

[Jonathan Lethem's next novel will be published in March 2007.]

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

Hookers Green No. 1 - "Bloody Great Big Fucking Party". With "Bloody Great Big Fucking Party", Hookers Green No. 1 come closer to capturing the spirit of The Unicorns, so dear and departed, than anything I've heard since Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone. Aberdeen, Scotland is a very long way from Montreal, Canada - but there is no mistaking the rattle of glee and melancholy, like front teeth in a coffee tin. Electric guitars swagger and droop, a synth-line wiggles, voices woo-woo from the back. And then, well, there are horns, drums, ratatat and tickticktick. There's a coda that arrives like a parade rounding a corner - giant balloons, floats, a marching band; whistles, percussion, a roaring team of pals. It's a crowd of rowdy Scots whose chants will rouse the housewives, whose coo will call the fishes, whose hot-cold sass will fry your egg, flip it into a roll, set it warm in your hands. And it's one of the best singles of the year so far.

(the music video is shambolic and suitably joyous)

[Hookers Green No. 1 are unsigned. (MySpace)]

Ola Podrida - "Instead". Sometimes the horizon's like a hook, a flash of silver that catches your heart just as the day is fading into its night.

Old Podrida is the project of David Wingo, the Texan musician who has scored or contributed music to all three of David Gordon Green's feature films. This includes 2003's All the Real Girls, one of my favourite movies. When Dan screened it for me at his apartment a few years ago, the room was red, my heart was tender, and next to the flutter of that moving picture the rest of my world felt like a melting waxworks.

Ola Podrida's music is murmur and lift, the bird you can step close close closer to, that then turns and flies away. (If you are quiet you may feel the wind from its wingflap on your face.) "Instead" is as beautiful as a sad song can be. It guards the listener with as much care as the Red House Painters do and it grows to meet the shape of your silhouette: be there one of you, or two. It's a calm that implies a coat full of turmoil; a sunset that implies the broken-and-mended day. It's the way, the way, the way a lover can look so beautiful even as s/he leaves. They won't turn to see your face.

[MySpace]

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My writing elsewhere: I have feature review in this month's Plan B of the Silver Jews' remarkable gig in Edinburgh last month. And in The Skinny you can read an interview with Camera Obscura.

Londoners, take note: Plan B is looking for editorial staff.

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Bishop Allen's May EP is now available. The first track, "Butterfly", is a free download. It is light as, um, well, you know - and it will make you sway. Dig the girl singing, but dig even more the roasted sound of the saxophone.

Shelly Blake - "Home Movies". Open your mouth too wide and cherries fall out. No? Is it just me? Me and Shelly Blake. More cherries fall out of his mouth than mine - and more cherry-pits. He sings sloppy and achey, Daniel Johnston in a wagon with the dude from OMC's "How Bizarre". Eventually he introduces the electric guitar and this is a moment that you know, this is a moment that is familiar. It's when you're at the Scrabble tournament and you've just spelled the word "singersongwriter" and there's a squawking sound, a brief electric buzz. You look up and there's a stork in the corner, long-legged, bearing an electric guitar. He stops playing, he looks at you, he blinks his eyes. "Yeah, what?" he seems to be saying, in stork. And when you look back down the word "singersongwriter" has been changed, either by cheating or by some obscure rule. And your tiles now say: "Elope, elope, elope, elope!"

Am I trying too hard?

[buy/info]

David-Ivar Herman Dune (w. Lisa Li-Lund) - "Burn Burn". My bus was a few hours late to All Tomorrows Parties, a couple weeks ago, so me and all my new friends missed Herman Dune. I did get to see them loitering at the Broken Social Scene show, though. And then I think at Destroyer. I hope so. And then I went down to the merch table and I was easily persuaded to buy "Demented Abduction" - Nova Scotia Runs For Gold, the David-Ivar Herman Dune solo album plus Lisa Li-Lund. This song is from there. It was recorded on tour in Nova Scotia, mixed to mono on a Panasonic tape recorder.

In this song, the narrator does these things: pets a dog, makes coffee, puts a record on, sings, makes a call to NYC, pours drinks, is sick, misses her, gets a gun, practises shooting, goes for a drive, shows her what he can do, drives into the sidewalk, drives into the bridge, drives into the wall, drives into the river, dies, finds god, gets a criminal record, pisses off the police, meets the enemy, gets immolated.

In this song, David-Ivar Herman Dune and Lisa Li-Lund do these things: sing like a hairy morning, sing like chorus girls, play ukelele, make a chorus of sloppy folk-pop a thing of effortless pissed-off grace.

[buy]