Archives : all posts by Sean

See the thing with Keith Andrew Shore is the vividness. The way his ink lines loll together, the way his colours stream, the way all the true things of life - gorillas, faces, mountains, girls - sit, stand and lie but also seem ready for you to crawl in and join them: your mannerisms, hopes and contradictions rendered in hand-drawn lines, curves, dots. Drawings that sit on the page (or the screen) and clang, life ringing out of them like old cymbals proudly hit.

-- Sean

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

Antony - "The Lake [live]". I wrote about this track in the summer of 2004. In the months since then, Antony's released a studio version of the song and of course with his Johnsons he's become famous, in a small way. But back in August 2004, nobody but me seemed much concerned with "The Lake". The comments on that entry are just a muddled dispute on James Joyce, with only Gretchen weighing in to say something about Antony. Now, a long time later, I still listen to this tune. Not to the studio recording - to this live one, a little blurrier 'round the edges, and better for it. And so I want to offer it again, for anyone who wants to take it.

My purple prose from last August needs to be dismissed, though. Forget "that darkbright still-lapping lake". Instead: a piano; an audience; and a singer with a voice that's light, light, light. When I saw Antony perform, what I was most struck with was this - that despite his melismas, despite his vibrato, nothing was weighed down. That there was nothing overbearing or heavy in what was sung. Just flight, flight, flight.

A song that flutters through the vents and out into the night - winding with the steam, the smoke, the city's sodium glow.

[buy Antony's The Lake EP (which features the studio recording, not this one)]

I also stumbled across this flash animation that is soundtracked by Antony's "The Lake". It is the story of a fox who is a knight and who falls in love with a goddess fox after being swallowed by a thornbush, but when he goes back to the real world he's old and he dies. There aren't any lakes in it but like i said there are two foxes who can wear clothes and ride horses and fall in love.

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Alexander Tucker - "The Patron Saint of Troubled Men". Alexander Tucker's Old Fog, released on All Tomorrows' Parties newish label, is a prickly, spooky record - bluegrass, drone, old-fashioned brit- and psych-folk. He sounds like someone who crawled out of a green hill: moss in his beard, mandolin in his rucksack, mic and fourtrack in his hands. "The Patron Saint..." has the multilayered flora of bands like Akron/Family but in places the vocals are a thinned-out version of something almost heavy metal. And of course throughought it all the pluck and spark and spur of those back-porch guitar-strings.

What I like best is that there's nothing elfin about this music. No gnomes or pixies or goblins. Just a man with mud on his shoes, scrapes on his knuckles, drops of something strong and red at the bottom of his belly. And his fingers are playing at some wooden instrument's steel strings.

[buy uk/US]

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"Mr. Himelfarb has served his country well during a period of considerable uncertainty."

This seems a truism of all Himelfarbs.

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You Ain't No Picasso has a new song from Bishop Allen's upcoming February EP.

McSweeneys is taking submissions for "the best sentences written in 2005. This means the best sentences, period, from any source—book, blog, newspaper, journal, magazine. Anything published in 2005 in a verifiable medium." (Thanks Kevin.)

Archive.org has the entirety of Mika Björklund's found-sound album Gunkanjima for you to download. Drones, creaks, field recordings and a bit of electronics, all a soundtrack to Japan's freaking incredible Battleship Island. (via MeFi)

Is it Friday already? I am sick-stuffed-up and the week has passed in a bleary blur. Some songs, therefore, for all your recoveries:

The Hussys - "Snowboard". On Valentine's Day I went to see The Research play at Cabaret Voltaire. Before they went on there were two other bands, one which was mediocre and irrelevant, the other which was amazing and great. The latter were called The Hussys and they're from Glasgow and they play pop-songs somewhere between pop-punk and The Beach Boys, Avril Lavigne in a tryst with Beulah. On stage, they were kids, they were goofs, each of them making faces and hamming it up, taking what pleasures they could in the almost-empty room. But the key thing: the songs. These weren't just hammered chords and a girl with pink hair. They were a girl with pink hair and melodic delights: bridges and arrangements that pinged and zinged, rinkydink keyboard bits and sweet woo-oo-oo vocal harmonies, six musicians making something together. They have a new EP out next month - it's called Napoleon Dynamite and has a song about Napoleon Dynamite (seriously!) - but "Snowboard" is the hit from their first EP, called Tiger. The chorus is: "I can't touch my snowboard since you broke my heart." They bitch about it being "zero degrees". Julian, who hates pop music, says "it's really good". I, who like pop music, just wish I was an A&R guy so I could sign these guys and then retire to Malibu.

[buy / myspace]

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The Research - "Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same".

Russell (from The Research): "This is our new single. It's bound to be our biggest hit because it's the only song where Georgia sings instead of me."

Georgia (from The Research): [laugh]

Russell: "It's called 'Lonely Hearts Still Beat The Same'."

[they play: the keen press of synths and the cool rat-a-rat of Sarah's drums. Georgia sings like a robot whose heart is glowing pink under her skin.]

Russell: "Thanks."

Sean (from Said the Gramophone): "Excuse me--"

Russell: "Yes?"

Sean: "That was marvellous. Georgia? That was marvellous."

Georgia: "Er. Thank-you!"

Sarah (from The Research): "What about me?"

Sean: "You were good too. And you too, Russell. That's a great song."

All (from The Research): "Thanks!"

Sean: "It's like the opposite of a Wolf Parade song."

Georgia: (skeptical) "Who are Wolf Parade?"

Sean: "A band. They let energy go all over, heartbreak shattering things. You let trauma lead you down into a groove, into a certainty. They choose the roughest sounds, you choose the sweetest ones. They choose a crackle of electric guitar, you choose another layer of sugarwater synths."

Russell: "We're a rock band too." [throws his keyboard to the ground, kicks it a couple times. it makes mournful Grandaddy sounds.]

Sean: "You're a band that will sound best on portable radios."

Georgia: "What does that mean?"

Sean: "It means I should be able to hear you even when I'm walking somewhere, lost, tired, hesitating. Even when I've forgotten that you exist."

Russell: [thinks about this] "Okay, let's play it again. But this time I'll sing lead."

[buy the single. New album out soon.]

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Aaron MacDonald - "Bluebird Liquor, Black Crow Wine". Yes, another. But see the thing is, friends, that even though this is just a song made from lyrics submitted to Said the Gramophone for a contest, it's really fucking good, like good as normal songs that get posted here. I do not exaggerate. Aaron's made a beautiful track that is "acoustic guitars, banjo, accordion, mandolin, bass, drums, moog, birdsong... harmonica, and [him] singing a few times" - it's part Okkervil River and part Lambchop, vocals dry as twigs over a backing that's green and mossy as forest ground. You'll slip it onto mix-tapes, you'll play it for friends, you'll lie on your back in the middle of the living-room and imagine birds circling, twittering, wheeling into the kitchen and then round back again, black masks over their eyes. And maybe you'll spot the flutter of someone's skirt, just out the corner of your eye.

[Aaron releases a song every day, but unlike most such projects, his songs are often actually great. Listen to them here, or follow them via his blog. He is in the Portland band The New Mexican Revolution.]

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There are a couple of (new) prints available at Evah Fan's website. I bought this one (only 25 to be had), and it arrived today. It is lovely, small and good in your hands, and much nicer in person than on the screen.

Otherwise Unavailable is a new mp3blog writing about very interesting things. Live recordings and out of print stuff by bands I've never heard of - Hubcap City's free and artful rock, or the Pounding Serfs - an early K band that inspired Phil Elvrum.

Schedule Two is a new website that I think I like. Clean and well-meaning, with videos of John K Samson playing Weakerthanks songs, or a full Julie Doiron live recording, there for the taking.

Joom II - "Bluebird Liquor, Black Crow Wine". A couple of weeks ago, Said the Gramophone held a contest, asking people to submit lyrics for a song I had imagined - a song called "Bluebird Liquor, Black Crow Wine". A couple of days ago I was idly browsing the web and to my great surprise came across a song by the same name. It's a song of overgenerous sounds - fuzzy strokes of acoustic guitar, a big and giving voice, a piano that rinkydinks so tinnily that I mistook it for steel drums. I was even more surprised when I listened to the lyrics, and found by some extraordinary coincidence that the words were identical to the ones submitted by the StG contest winners. How strange that Joom II (aka Mr Christpher Farstad) might independently derive these same scraps of words. It is synchronicity at work, coincidence harnessed to a attic-room pop-song that would sound appropriate on that recent Kelley Stoltz album. Shulgan sounds that happy kind of drunk - more bluebird liquor than black crow wine, - dancing in the early hours with a girl who has grass in her hair.

mc DJ - "Bluebird Liquor, Black Crow Wine (Electrosymphonic Mix)".
mc DJ - "Bluebird Liquor, Black Crow Wine (Tendo Mix)".

mc DJ has done two remixes of Joom II's "Bluebird Liquor". The "Electrosymphonic Mix" is a sea anenome kind of mix, warm and fluid and stuttering. The "Tendo Mix" is better, blipblooping its way to work, Joom II's vocals circling in the sky.

[NB: The above talk of coincidences is of course nonsense. Mr Farstad's song is an original work inspired by Said the Gramophone's contest lyrics. And we tip our enormous fur hats to him. If anyone else uses these lyrics for a song, of course let me know!]

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Angela Desveaux - "Heartbeat". Montreal's Angela Desveaux is now all but done her first album, a record of sunbursting country pop, a warm sweater for wearing outside when it's cold. The recordings were made at the Hotel2Tango with Brian Paulson (Wilco, Gastr del Sol, Rosebuds, Beck, Rock*A*Teens, Uncle Tupelo) and Gramophone-friend Howard Bilerman (Silver Mt. Zion, Arcade Fire, etc) behind the boards. I do this name-dropping in an attempt to articulate the sweetness of this sound, the way Angela's voice heats and lingers, the way the sky clears for the chorus. A deeper twang than Kathleen Edwards, a stronger grip than Sarah Harmer; here's a song for carrying in your basket when you hike with a lover to the top of those hills. (Angela Desveaux previously on StG.)

[not yet out, exciting label details to be announced soon / more info]

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The new music video for the Arcade Fire's "Tunnels" is by far their best yet: watch it. [medium-res WMV, imperfectly synced] I suspect that as with "Laika", it was made by former band-member Josh Deu.

There is a website called Ask For Cents. One day you will have to pay for the service, but for the moment it is free. The gist is this: If you email a question to q@askforcents.com, a human being will email you back an answer. Usually, in fact, you get two answers. And usually within minutes. The question-answerers are users of Amazon's Mechanical Turk service, and are being paid a few cents for every question they answer.

The answers aren't vouched for, aren't necessarily true. They're simply answers. And you can ask them whatever you like: advice on love, driving directions, gift recommendations, Excel problems.

Some questions I have asked, for you, dear readers (all q & a's, throughout this post, are true and real and from AskForCents.com):

q: If Kelly Clarkson's 'Since U Been Gone' was a fish, what fish would it be?

a: Flatfish

q: What is your favourite song, what animal would it be if it was an animal, and if that animal could talk what would it say?

a: My favorite song is "Daniel" by Elton John. This reminds me of a dog and it could talk it would say "I miss you".

q: Why should people have 'guilty pleasures' in music? Isn't the pleasure you take from one given song as legitimate as the pleasure from any other?

a: From a perfectly pragmatic point of view, the popularity of something has no bearing on itself the thing itself, assuming that the thing is macroscopic and does not change with observation. So it's absurd to judge anything by its popularity.

q: What is hip-hop?

a: Hip-Hop is music that makes you want to drink 40s drive an escalade and commit felonies.

As you will doubtless have observed, Ask For Cents is also - given Said the Gramophone's rather unconventional taste in aesthetic descriptors - a most beautiful source of music writing.

And so here we are.

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Gene Vincent - "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)".

q: If Gene Vincent's song "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)" was riding a vehicle, what kind of vehicle would it be? And where would it be going?

a: A huge, purple semi on its way to San Francisco. (Source: imagination)

The beginning of the song is a trick. You think it's a blues tune, that we're going to circle round and round, listening to the lonesomeness of that electric guitar. But no, no no. Oh no. Because then the drums storm out of the closet, the saxophones pop out from behind the furniture, keys are grabbed from the hook by the door - and out we go, all piled in, heading crosscountry. There is a cactus by the on-ramp, sunlight in the air, not a cloud in the sky.

q: If Gene Vincent's song "I'm Goin' Home (To See My Baby)" were a meal, what would that meal be? Would the saxophones eat the same thing as Gene, or something else?

a: The meal would be a turkey. The saxophones would eat the same thing as Gene. (Source: Gene Vincent)

[buy (thank you "P")]

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Young People - "Your Grave". It's night, there's an open window, and the curtains are waving, slow-slow, in the breeze. Watch, watch, watch, til' the watching becomes a trance and the curtains become a lesson.

Young People are here just bass, guitar, voice, and a strange circulatory system of beats in the deep, buried background.

A blues that you can't put your finger on, can't keep track of; just something you'll feel one night, after which you'll spend years waiting to feel it again. I think of a tiny hotel-room in Hull, Quebec, friends falling asleep, dawn just suggesting itself. The sliding door to the balcony is open and it's cold.

A constellation: Vincent Gallo, Cat Power, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Liars.

Bits and pieces.

q: In the Young People song "Your Grave," what is the electric guitar saying at the end?

a: It is singing the lyrics of Morphine's "Do Not Go Quietly to Your Grave":

Listen young people I'm 74
And I plan to live 60 or 70 more
Yeah I've been all around I've done a few things
And I spent a few nights on the floor, oh!

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Moistworks, that finest of mp3blogs, is doing the extraordinary: Writers Week(s). Including contributions by Jonathan Lethem (!) and Christopher Sorrentino, writing about songs.

At Amazon, you can buy a Badonkadonk Land Cruiser. The reason I point it out is the reviews.

How to make Garfield funny: remove his thought balloons. (My favourites: 1 2 3 4)

Jo Mango - "My Lung". I'm writing this on a Sunday night but you, I bet, are entering into a Monday morning, drops dripping outside your window or else a full and lazy sun. And so I give you Jo Mango, the opening song on her debut LP, a song that's pretty and girlish but which more importantly has a distorted thumb piano, yes the thing of Konono no. 1 and Laura Barrett. Here it's not used for buzzy-booty-shaking or for wry indie-pop observations: it's just the sound outside Jo's window, like the one outside yours. Icicles dripping and then clattering to the ground, puddles filling, morning slowly slowly warming your bones. Wobbly notes that echo echo echo, gleam gleam gleam, that make me wish I was part harp, part viola. That make me wish I had strings that could be plucked.

[Out soon! Go see her gigs and buy her EPs.]

The Flaming Lips' "Yeah Yeah Yeah Song", which you can just go and download at one of the other indie rock mp3blogs, is terrific, exactly the sort of thing for people like me who don't have much time for Lips albums but who love their best singles. (eg: "She Don't Use Jelly", "Do You Realize") It's a straight-ahead pop-song with lunatic interjections, a demented yah-yah-yah-yah hook, squelches of synths and a fantastic, fantastic bit in the third minute where there's a fool singing, like a fool, but also like me. While the last Lips show I experienced was among the best gigs I've ever seen (LINK FIXED), I'd been hemming and hawing about paying £18 to peer at them from the almost-sold-out balcony of Usher Hall. But now - well, I've got phone-calls to make.

I'm also not sure if I fully articulated how awesome this song from Moe Rex is (offered here to help spare his bandwidth):

James Murphy & Munk "Kick Out The Chairs (Replayed by WhoMadeWho)"

Moe says it got passed around mp3blogs two years ago, but it's new-new-new to my ears, and man, yeah, good. A ginger electric guitar, the requisite LCD Soundsystem cow-bell, some hoarseness of voice, and - oh so sweetly, - a truly-sung chorus to truly-sing along to. "Kick out the chizz-airs, motherfuckers!" He means it so kindly. "Sign me up!" Oh I can hear the smile. It makes me want to dance, obv, but when James begins to cheer his partner (Munk?) along, toward the end, what I want to do is be in the studio with them, being cheered along too. So I just imagine that I am, that as I walk down the street, yelling "All right!" like a madman, headphones on head, fast-footworking to the organic funk unhs, there's a gang of pals behind me, (carrying guitars and amps and horns, one guy with a drum-kit on his back,) who really really really want me to express the song's awesomeness, loud and glad.

Moe Rex provides context out the wazoo, the who-what-and-where of this remix, and you should be reading his site super-regularly anyway, because it rules.

[buy]

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mc DJ wrote me after my last post to point out his Regina Spektor remix. It's really, really good! Over at his site there are also Jens Lekman, Wolf Parade and Feist remixes to be had.

There's a new William Schaff print for sale at The Drama.

The Stypod ruminates on Spencer Krug and (new) Sunset Rubdown.

I have a few pieces in the latest issue of Plan B - a big review of a Belle & Sebastian gig a few weeks ago, and shorties on the Grizzly Bear and Yo Zushi records. (You need to buy it to read them.) Also some new stuff in The Skinny: [live] Regina Spektor, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Herman Dune; [album/single] Jo Mango, Mitford Girls, Audio Bullys, The Pipettes, The Hazey Janes; a Broken Social Scene preview/interview, and my Easy Gramophone column. Phew. The live writeups are the things I'm happiest with.

Clinic - "Jigsaw Man". A guitar tuned to sitar, a voice tuned to ghosts. And the melodica? The melodica's just a melodica, that inbetween instrument that appears in the strangest of places, here creeping among the weeds toward the Wicker Man. The fire leaps at the Man's knees, leaps toward the weeds, but the melodica's not gonna get too close. If you're smart, you'll stay back beside it. If you're brave (brave and not smart), you'll dive in with the guitar and the voice, doing a dance in the dust, flames glinting in your eyes. And you know what that means.

This is the b-side from Clinic's new single. The a-side, "Tusk", is exceedingly different - a trashy rustynail punk song, - and I love setting the two tracks next to each other, listening to them in sequence, imagining them as siblings. Tusk could beat Jigsaw Man in a fight. But Jigsaw Man, oh Jigsaw Man could swallow Tusk right down, quick as silver.

[Hear "Tusk" at Clinic's website, anticipate their upcoming LP.]

Peasant - "Joanna". A song with the quietest handclaps I've ever heard, but they're enough to pull me in. It's a song where everything rests upon the modest hummability of the chorus, just how sincere the sincere singer sings. "Joanna / forever. / You'll be / remembered." It's earnest almost to the point of caricature. "You'll never be a sad song." No it's earnest to the point of caricature. But what counts is not the silliness. What counts is whether I believe it, and want to hear it again. And I do. A song to snuggle into.

I think the best description would be the description composed by my friend P, writing about a different song, and making fun of me: If a song can remind you what it felt like to be buying cheap snails at the shellfish market during a primary school field trip, this song would surely be one of the top two choices of that specfic genre.

[buy Fear Not, Distant Lover / myspace has NY/PA tourdates]

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Bishop Allen, the best unsigned rock band in America, are releasing an EP a month for a year. They are lunatics. But boy, does Justin Rice have an ear for song. "Corazon", which you can listen to at their site, is good - but "The Bullet and Big D", for which you need to pay yr measly $5, is even better. Go on then - there are only 1000 to be had.