Archives : all posts by Sean

Shearwater - "Red Sea, Black Sea". With Shearwater's new album, Palo Santo, they feel for the first time like a real, real band: not an Okkervil River side-project, but something with its own fashion-sense, its own record collection, its own late-night habits. It helps that Jonathan Meiburg sings all the songs (there's no sign of Will Sheff's voice, dredging up black sheep memories), but it's more than that. Palo Santo sounds like a house with all the furniture taken out. They've taken as much time as they needed to take everything - the tables, the chairs, the curtains, - out onto the lawn. Everything out. And then Shearwater went in and looked around. They decided what they needed: an ash table. a vase with ferns. new gold doorknobs, screwed in. and white paint. Lots of white paint.

It's an album full of space. Even in its fiercer moments, there's no feeling of panic. Go ahead and open the cupboards: there are no glasses to throw. There aren't even any cupboards. If you're going to rage you'll have to do it in the wide white room, till your rage drifts slow in the air like dustmotes in the sunbeam. Shearwater, today, remind me most of Mark Hollis and late Talk Talk. They're not as phantom as that: they've not receded that far. But it's still a guitar with its strings cut; a man singing into its hollow body, summoning songs like ghosts.

Of course "Red Sea, Black Sea" doesn't sound anything like that. No, this is an eerie kind of rock song, shuddering synths and a disco-beat. It's Final Fantasy with a megaphone; the Arcade Fire stripped bare; a guy yelling in a room, stamping his feet, watching the band play a winter beach madrigal on the green grass outside.

(My thanks to Jonathan Meiburg for inviting StG to do this.)

[buy more Shearwater stuff here. Palo Santo is out on Misra on (probably) May 9. You can listen to the album's other uptempo song here.

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Gomez - "Charley Patton Songs". When I wrote about Gomez before, I didn't say how important Gomez were to my discovery of pop music, of indie music, or any of that. But they were. The things that most shaped my listening habits, heading off into the end of my teens, were:

1) Waking up before school one morning, standing in sock feet in the den, turning on MuchMusic and seeing the last third of the video for Sloan's "Everything You've Done Wrong".

2) Going to a party at Catherine's house where she put on this weird-looking red-and-black album by Belle & Sebastian.

3) Catching a ride home from a workshop one night with Avi. He was driving his older brother's car and put in one of his older brother's tapes. He said it was good. The cover looked unlike anything I had ever known - this wasn't a Beatles cover, an Aerosmith cover, the cover of a Mahler symphony. And then when he played it it didn't sound like anything I had known, either. Muddy, boozy, yearning, and full of ache. I bought it within the week.

But as I say in the post mentioned above, despite an early reverence for Gomez's Bring it On and Liquid Skin, since then they have done nothing but embarrass me. In Your Gun was bad but Split the Difference was a bloomin' travesty. The band had gone so very far from those smoky and compelling, "Tom Waits in a hot-tub" roots. Like The Bees, they were easing into this vapid jam-band existence - meandering songs about meandering feelings, the atmosphere light and easily brushed aside. I totally gave up on them.

So I'm really surprised at how much I'm enjoying this new record, How We Operate. It's not a return to that old stuff - if anything it's a progress into an even more lightweight, nimrod place. (On "Girl-Shaped Love Drug" they sing, over and over, that "The girl-shaped love-drug messes with my head".) But it's good pop. Gomez were always great at melodies - I'd happily hang my coat on the hook of "Rhythm & Blues Alibi", "Hangover" or "Whippin' Picadilly", - and now those melodic instincts are back, stripped of complicating factors, with songs as easy to enjoy as Coldplay's "In Your Place" or Maroon 5's "This Love".

Though this is no longer the band that made me fall in love with music, it's an easy listening album that glitters and spins, that gives me a little frisson when its hooks chime at once. "Charley Patton Songs" has absolutely nothing in common with the blues of Charley Patton - and yet who cares. Who cares when in the fourth minute it pulls out the chorus, pulls out the cello, window dripping with rain. And then that weird downward-falling bell-ringing break, the thing that runs all through the song - and the most "avant garde" (ha!) thing on the whole record.

[pre-order]

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A few more days left on the Matthew Barney/Bjork Drawing Restraint 9 Contest. The competition remains wide open - do enter.

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Tiny Showcase has started selling t-shirts. Pre-order Jesse LeDoux's debut T and get a free signed print.

Molars reflects on the recent Alden Penner/Adam gig in Philly. And he has lovely mp3s of the gig, too.

I was gonna link to Popsheep's wonderful "Hold On"/"On Hold" Tom Waits/Edith Frost/Neko Case post, but it's not working at the moment. Maybe it will be when you visit.

And Marcello Carlin looks at Broken Social Scene, writing in a new, scary, swooping way.

We have a new contest today. See below.

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Bear Creek - "Without You (NYC)". So you're sure that you lost something. You spend the whole day in a daze, checking and rechecking your pockets, glancing under the sofa and your bed. You've lost something. You've lost something. You're sure of it. Something. What? You don't know.

You go on the road: cornfields, strip-malls, lakes, skyscrapers. You put a tape in the tape-deck. A tape made of rocket-fuel and hesitations. A tape made by some French kids who aren't even fifteen years old; kids who love K Records and Kimya Dawson and (i certainly hope) Herman Düne. You listen, fenceposts tickticking by, and as much as you hate to admit it - you've still not found that lost something. What was it? What was it?

And then you raise your eyes to the tape's little "you-who-you-hoo-you-who-you-hoo-who" and you feel like a dope, like a dummy. There's that thing you lost. Right there. Big as the moon.

[buy / MySpace]

Leo is also in other bands with his friends, namely Coming Soon and Ben Lupus & the Post Romantic Vegan Werewolves.

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Casey Dienel - "The La La La Song". Listen to Casey, here, as she sings her song and then figures out how to sing it better. Fluxblog introduced me to Dienel, and I'm so glad for it - it's such a bluebird album, eggs cracked into bowls and ice melting on the porch. It's part Mirah, part Sarah Harmer, part Regina Spektor, but really what it makes me think of is Feist's "Mushaboom". "Mushaboom" was an oddity on the Feist record, one track of jack-in-the-box indiepop on a disc of cooler things. But Wind Up Canary is thick with those feelings - the opening doors, the widening smiles, the chatter and chirp and chim-chim-cher-ee. Okay, "The La La La Song" is a bit different, it must be said. But I love so much what I wrote before - that Casey sings her song and then figures out how to sing it better. She plays the piano, singing, singing, words about peaches and clementines and regret. She sings all these words - and then she realises that the tangled-up things she's trying to say - well that bundle of moments isn't gonna come across in rhyming verses. There's a better way: just some "la's", high and reaching, and then a final one, low and sure.

La.

[buy Wind Up Canary - i promise, it's wonderful]

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Said the Gramophone exclusive newsflash!

Akron/Family just finished two days of recording with Hamid Drake (!!!) with a view to releasing something later this year. Yes, that Hamid Drake. The jazz drummer who is Jordan's second-favourite drummer in the world; the man who I watched and wondered at in Finland. When Dana told me, my jaw hit the floor with a clang.

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Said the Gramophone's Drawing Restraint 9 Contest

Drawing Restraint 9 is the newest film project by Matthew Barney, a visual artist/filmmaker who mixes astounding pretention with an amazing instinct for image. I saw Cremaster 3 with Dan in Montreal several years ago, and these were the things that struck us: how slow it was, ultimately dull; and how potent Barney's fantasyland was, how much the sights and sounds lingered in our minds. I remember standing on the subway platform, imagining the ribbon-knots of the maypole, the punks in the Guggenheim, the swimmingpool full of slippery alien showgirls. And Barney himself, devil-like, secreting teeth out his bum.

Drawing Restraint 9 is Barney's follow-up to the Cremaster Cycle and he's once again front-and-centre, all dressed up. It also stars Bjork. Bjork's not just a pal - she and Barney are real-life partners, and parents of a kid. Bjork acts (poses?) in the film but has also created the soundtrack (with help from people like Zeena Perkins and Will Oldham).

I've not seen Drawing Restraint 9, but I've heard bits of the weirdo sea-anemone soundtrack. Since it started screening at festivals last year, since images (and sounds) first started popping up online, I've been pretty fascinated with the whole thing. (watch the trailer)

It's with pleasure, then, that I announce a lil' Said the Gramophone-Drawing Restraint contest. The prizes are a signed poster (signed presumably by Bjork, Barney or both) and four copies of the Drawing Restraint soundtrack.

To enter the contest... you need to take a photograph. A photograph that illustrates, evokes, imagines, or somehow reminds you of the song posted above - Bear Creek's "Without You (NYC)".

Photographs (less than 1 meg in size, please) should be emailed to sean@saidthegramophone.com with the subject line BJORK/BARNEY CONTEST, or posted as a link in the comments to this post. Contest ends at 11:59 pm EST on Sunday, March 26th. Contest now over.

The winners will be the 5 photos that I most enjoy as an accompaniment to Bear Creek's "Without You (NYC)".

One photograph per entrant, please. Original photos only (please don't rip anyone off).

When we invited Katy Horan to make pictures of some of her favourite music, she wrote back a couple of weeks later to say that the first song to draw was obvious - it was Devendra Banhart's "Mama Wolf", - but that she needed time to cook and simmer before choosing the others. And so this is what we did. She drew-and-painted-and-glued "Hey Mama Wolf", we posted it, and then we left things to stew.

Thank you, Katy. -- Sean

[More of Katy Horan's art can be found on her website, or you can keep track of Katy-developments on her blog. Write to Katy at katy@katyart.com.]

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

Espers - "Dead Queen". For the past year or two, Espers were my "new folk" punching bag. I thought that their recordings epitomised the genre at its worst and when I saw them perform with a turgid Devendra Banhart in Edinburgh, it inspired an "enormous indie folk rant", bemoaning the state of the genre. I wrote: [Espers would] be better off playing Fairport Convention covers. "Psych"-folk? Give me a fucking break. It's not even heavy enough to be stoner folk. It's just stoned folk, folk about to fall asleep, folk that doesn't give a fuck cos it finds anything funny.

Okay so imagine my surprise, imagine the egg on my face when Espers' new album - it's called Espers II and it's out on Drag City in May (not March), - turns out to be fantastic. I don't just mean a sort of "hey, this is pretty good"; Espers II is a thrilling record, affecting and beautiful, and one of the best folk albums of the past decade and a half.

It's a revivalist work, certainly - much closer to Fairport Convention or Pentangle than it is to Josephine Foster and Sufjan Stevens, - but whereas artists like Alasdair Roberts try to tread in the same footprints, bringing the listener back to the dusty green and brown, Espers II feels like a refurbishing of those folk tropes. Chord patterns and folksong adorned with a twenty-first century glitter and drone.

"Dead Queen" is the album's opening, and finest track. There's this recurring downward bit, every four or eight bars, more and more prominent as the song goes on - and every time it happens I feel like another layer of enchantment is falling over me; a glamour as I get more and more ensconsced in the song. It starts with the modest and expected instruments: acoustic guitar, tambourine, cello, organ. But before long there's a sundrenched electric guitar and the smell of ozone; of a fresh lightning strike. There's recorder and a keyboard that sizzles like an eel. There's all this stuff, enchantment after enchantment, Meg Baird accompanying herself to gorgeous effect, but by the end you realise you've not been transported to some wooded fairy dell - you're right where you are, here in the real world with straight grey streets out your window. But there's a trembling in the air, a dance in the sunlight, a beat in your chest, and wonder in the walls.

[Espers are on tour.]

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Nalle - "Ravens". Espers are from Philly. So what about here, in Europe, where this folk music is supposed to run in the rivers? What are we up to?

Nalle is a trio from Glasgow - a man who plays stringed and windy things, a woman who plays viola, and another who sings in a Newsom-like and billy-goat voice, jingling bells and stamping feet. Nalle's members are all involved in the Glasgow avant-garde/"free folk" community and this shows on their recordings - there's an eerie edge to their work, black mountains in the distance, strange birds. Both Nalle and Scatter can sometimes be a bit too diffuse, but other times there is something fierce and fragile in their work. A feeling rare and potent.

"Ravens" is a song that sounds like decay, like drooping wet branches and sudden flutters of wings. It might snap at you. It might feel like a tongue, unexpected on your face. Like falling into snow and cutting your hands. Or maybe like winter at its weakest point - at that moment when the season clings to landscape and to spirits, claws entrenched, slowly receding... leaving something tender in its wake. Tender and breathing.

[buy/info/samples]

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Too bad about the Bloggies. Thank you to all those who voted, and to the other nominees.

I still cannot get over the response to our (very brief) fundraising drive. Thank you so much. As I said, we will be in touch about gifts ASAP; we had expected to have a week or two! :)

i just arrived back in edinburgh after a weekend in hamburg (where there is snow! currywurst! and liquorice!) and so i visited this site and the dropcash thing dan put up and good lord, my friends...

in less than six hours, you funded Said the Gramophone for the next year.

i am speechless.

thank you so, so much.

i am not sure you can know how much your support means to us.

your generosity is overwhelming. and no more stupid funding drives for another year! yay!

as i catch up with things here i will be writing back to all those who contributed, or we will, or something.

i didn't even get to put up this image i had cooked up for tonight! (it wasn't going to have the "never mind" bit.)

Kepler are a band from Ottawa. I'm from Ottawa. Am I Kepler? No. I am not the band Kepler. But I am indeed Johannes Kepler, who discovered how planets work. My friends call me Kep.

Kepler - "The Changing Light at Sandover". A modest pattern of guitar and drums, a pigeon-toeing toward something. The something: loudness. Chekhov (the playwright, not the ensign) used to talk about introducing a gun into a play. That if there was a gun on stage, the gun must be shot during the course of the show. If you show me the gun, you must use it. If Kepler pigeon-toes toward loudness, they must eventually be loud. And they are - they luxuriate in the cymbal smash, the guitar growl. Then it's quiet again, and Samir sings some words. And then they show us the gun again, black and shiny in their hands, and although they take their time, melancholy stretching out over the horizon, Kepler do bring the loudness for us. They put it in the clouds so that when the time is right it can rain down. As Jeremy Gara hits the drums he is thinking only of bringing what has been promised; he does not think of the Arcade Fire as in these days he has not even heard of them; no instead he just plays with his band, Samir's band, and they sing a song of noise. (This song is better than the new Mogwai album.)

Kepler - "Broken Bottles, Blackened Hearts". Lots of people quit Kepler and the band almost broke up. When Samir put things back together again - with Snailhouse's Mike Feuerstack, among others, - the band was different. When I first heard Attic Salt (which was released in the US/Canada last year but which has only now reached the UK), I thought it was a quiet record. And it is. But what I've realised is that it's a quiet record that needs to be played loud. It's when you play it loud that you understand a song like this - the way each tremble of Samir's voice ought to hang in the air, just like those piano chords, just like the jagged guitar drone. Here they don't promise loudness. No. They promise something full and fullfilling. Something full filling. Something that will catch you up in its hands. Is this rock and roll? Naw. It's just the roll.

[buy 2000's Fuck Fight Fall and 2005's Attic Salt here.

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90 old, mostly b&w movies (scifi, bruce lee, dr jekyll and mr hyde!) that you can download for free!

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Because of a Toronto wedding, there is now a free berth in one of the two Said the Gramophone chalets at All Tomorrows' Parties (UK). Are you interested in joining other Gramophoners for a weekend by the sea with Destroyer, Joanna Newsom, Herman Dune, The New Pornographers, Spoon, Sleater Kinney, Dinosaur Jr, The Shins, Broken Social Scene, Mt Eerie, Clinic, Edith Frost, Dungen, The Decemberists, etc? If so, read this and then get in touch. Update: A few people have written in, expressing interest. If they all fall through, I'll let people know.

McLusky - "To Hell With Good Intentions". OKAY SO MCLUSKY. THEY'RE FROM WALES. THEY'RE DEFUNCT. PEOPLE HAVE HEARD BITS AND PIECES, OF COURSE YOU HAVE. IF YOU LIVE IN THE UK MAYBE YOU'VE HEARD MORE THAN BITS AND PIECES. MAYBE YOU'VE SEEN THEM LIVE. MAYBE YOU'VE STOOD NEXT TO A SPEAKER AT A MCLUSKY SHOW AND GOTTEN FUCKING PUSHED RIGHT OVER, SHOVED LIKE HANDS ON SHOULDERS AND FACE TO GROUND. YOU LAND ON THE GROUND AND YOU'RE A LITTLE DAZED AND THERE'S SPILLED BEER ALL OVER YOUR HANDS. BUT THIS SONG IS STILL PLAYING, YEAH? IT'S STILL PLAYING AND THE BASS-LINE SAYS ONLY ONE THING TO YOU AS YOU LIE ON THE GROUND. IT SAYS: GET UP. SO YOU DO. YOU GET UP AND THE DRUMS ARE HITTING, THEY'RE HITTING, THEY'RE HITTING EACH OTHER AND YOU'RE WORRIED THEY'LL START HITTING YOU. SO YOU DANCE. YOU DO AS MCLUSKY SAY. YOU DANCE. THIS IS THE HEAVIEST DANCE PARTY YOU'VE EVER ATTENDED, BECAUSE YOU'RE A COWARD WHO STAYS HOME AND LISTENS TO NICK DRAKE INSTEAD OF GOING TO THE CLUB WHERE THEY PLAY SOFTCORE HARDCORE, HEAVY MUSIC LIKE THIS TO DANCE TO. OH YES, I KNOW YOUR SCENE. BUT NOW YOU'RE DANCING, AND I'M TYPING ALL IN CAPS, AND THE ONLY PLACE WE CAN GO FROM HERE IS A CITY LIKE BRATISLAVA OR DETROIT OR SOMETHING. A CITY WHERE THEY BUILD CARS OR CONCRETE OR SOLID BLOWS TO THE CHEST.

[buy]

Odetta - "I've Been Driving On Bald Mountain / Water Boy". SHE'S AN AMERICAN FOLK SINGER FROM THE 1950S AND 1960S. SO WHY AM I STILL PERSISTING WITH THESE CAPITAL LETTERS? WHY AM I PERSISTING WHEN IT'S SO HARD TO READ? WELL BECAUSE ODETTA'S VOICE IS AS HEAVY AS MCLUSKY'S SNAP 'N SNARL. BECAUSE SHE SINGS WITH A SOULFULNESS THAT SLEDGEHAMMERS THROUGH INDIFFERENCE. BY THE TIME SHE STARTS SINGING THE SOUND OF AN EXPLOSION - I'M TALKING ABOUT THE SECOND MINUTE, WHERE SHE MAKES A SOUND LIKE MOUNTAINS FALLING, LANDING ON CITIES, DEMOLISHING THEM, BREAKING HEARTS, YES A SOUND WITH HER VOICE, - YOU'RE CAUGHT UP IN THE BREATHLESSNESS OF IT, THE VOLLEYING RUSH OF A WOMAN AND A GUITAR AND AN UPRIGHT BASS. JUST THAT: BUT OH HOW IT'S HEAVY.

and then there's the second half, the "Water Boy" bit, and for a long while things are bluesy and lonesome, sincere without too much shoving. but then. but then. but then - THEN THE MOUNTAINS ARE BACK. THEY'RE BACK. THEY'RE FALLING FROM THE HEAVENS AND THEY'LL GET YOU TOO.

I've only just discovered Odetta, because I'm a fool. She's playing Triptych at the end of April. I bought Odetta Sings Dylan, which the above track isn't from. But do listen to "Baby, I'm in the Mood For You". Listen to the robustness of the arrangement, the drums strutting all over, cocking and peacocking, shaking and shimmying, Odetta just the solid voice of confidence and desire; and the ability for love to make it happen, yes to make it happen, yes love can make it happen. It can.

[buy]

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A beautiful post about The Clientele over at Molars.

Happy Birthday, Tiny Showcase! Many happy returns to Jon and Ms Finch!

You must listen to the sloppy, jubilant version of "Amazing Grace" by The Chowder Shouters, over at Otherwise Unavailable.

We Heart Prints is a good thing.

Yesterday's post by Jordan, on this very blog, simultaneously solved my lady troubles and (re)justified the existence of this blog. I am lying about the lady troubles thing.

My friend Anca has a terrific not-really-love-story up as part of the NY Collective's Collectanea, including a radioplay version that will make your skin tingle.

Tuwa's got a cheerleading post about a Florida band called Morningbell - and I do like the yelling from the back of the studio, the whistling, the handclaps. Better still is the track by Tigs, who collaborates with the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Nick Zinner to do something blues-punky and full of galeforce winds.

The Drama is selling a small portfolio of William Schaff prints. (!)

And finally, I am now contributing to Wired News' new music-related blog, The Listening Post, along with Wired News columnist Eliot Van Buskirk.