Archives : all posts by Sean

Kanye West - "Gold Digger (Diplo Final Remix)". This isn't a Kanye West remix at all - heck, unless my ears deceive me it's not even a Jamie Foxx remix. No - here's Diplo going round-and-round with Ray Charles, the same sample on and on and on, like a man dancing up the boulevard, hop-skip-and-jump, suit-tails flying. He whirls round the lampposts and lights each one in turn - gold! gold! gold! And then he gets down, breakdancin' in the middle of the roundabout, stars swaying happily with the handclaps, clouds stop-start-stuttering and then evaporating into a bare black still sky. (This fellow definitely wouldn't like it.)

King Creosote - "Marguerita Red". KC RULES OK. This is both the name of Creosote's 2005 album, and the truth. The secret to this song is the particular friendship of voices: man and woman together and melancholy, filling in the blanks in each others' sentiment. The piano's simple, the violin plain. Reverse the polarity and you've got Vanessa Carlton, slow it down and you've got Cat Power, but for now it's something gentle and earnest, a song that pulls tight the drawstrings of your heart, making sure nothing precious tumbles out.

[buy (uk)]

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Saw Narnia and King Kong last week. The former is a puff, a bubble, a disappointment that made me long for new CS Lewis books. And the latter - well, it's wonderful.

Any Said the Gramophoners thinking of attending All Tomorrows Parties weekend 2 in May? Spoon, Clnic, Decemberists, New Pornos, Shins, Sleater Kinney, Dinosaur Jr, etc? I'm looking for a cabin to share...

Oh, and since I'm doing some double-duty on Gramophone these days, if anyone's got any particularly rad songs they think I might like to hear (and which I've probably not heard), please do zap them to me. (YouSendIt and stuff preferred.) Thanks!

TAS - "Round Da Corner". I found this song while flitting round the net. It was in a directory of sumptuous indie rock. "What's this?" I thought. "What's da corner?" I put it on, casual-like, not paying much attention - and there (slip), the song's slithering persistent horn sample, its little green snake, slipped into my brain and lodged there. It's a sound green as palm-tree leaf, tail-wagging and twisting all over my dull and heavy grey matter.

I emailed the source of the song: "That's my roommate, Tracy," he wrote back. "Moved [to Toronto] from the Bahamas. ... She did this last week. ... Every verse is about a different dance. Apparently, people in the bahamas know how to dance to this song already because the lyrics tells them. It works a lot differently than it does here."

I don't entirely agree with Ryan. Things don't really work that differently here. When I put this on I listen to the rapidfire beat of feet, the imperatives of TAS herself, the way the music advances and retreats, like a party, the way a party's noise seems to swell and ebb away and swell again. And I can see how you're supposed to dance. Yeah - "skullin'" is like this... "Goombé is this". It's pretty darn clear. Just listen to the beat and move your hips like this - yeah, like that, you got it. Yeah. Let dem know who in charge.

Also - O less-ignorants-than-i, - is this ragga? What ought one call it?

[Thanks to Ryan. If anyone knows where to hear/buy more, please let me know.]

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Gavin Bryars with Tom Waits - "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet (excerpt)".

Gavin Bryars: In 1971, when I lived in London, I was working with a friend, Alan Power, on a film about people living rough in the area around Elephant and Castle and Waterloo Station. In the course of being filmed, some people broke into drunken song - sometimes bits of opera, sometimes sentimental ballads - and one, who in fact did not drink, sang a religious song "Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me Yet". This was not ultimately used in the film and I was given all the unused sections of tape, including this one.

Bryars copied the tape loop onto one continuous reel, he composed an orchestral accompaniment, and he recorded an album of the tramp's song - a meditation, a psalm, a slow-cresting paean. It was originally released in 1975. When a revised, extended edition was being prepared in 1993, Bryars secured a contribution from Tom Waits, who had cited the original as his favourite piece of music. And so, here is a slice of it.

I heard about this composition about two years ago. I made a note to try to find Jesus' Blood Never Failed Me, and then forgot all about it. And then today I stumbled across this track, from (I believe) the coda, and I remembered; it all came back.

It is amazing.

Not just because it's beautiful, because that homeless man's voice turns back on itself and changes from weary to utterly joyous. Not just because of the shine on those strings and horns. Not just because Tom Waits takes his time, digging in his deep coat pockets for something to say - then dredging up a quiet expression of his heart's own discontent. Not just because of all this. But also because of all that it suggests must have preceded it. This is the end of a piece: the crescendo of feeling, the climax and denouement. And so there's a beginning and middle that came before. I feel like someone who has been wandering through the black woods, through the white snow, and who has fallen over the tip of something golden poking up from the ground. And you dig and you dig and you realise it's a tower, a shrine, a cathedral, a city, a world. All of it there for you to find.

[be like me: order it US/UK]

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You Ain't No Picasso continues its Xmas series of guests-choosing-mixes-of-mp3s with a guest selection by John Vanderslice.

Clem Snide's Eef Barzelay, ever the good jew, offers a free download of his version of "Joy to the World" [mp3]. It's tender as a hand on your hand, a soft expression of humble hope hope hopes. It's careful and quiet; it's gorgeous and very earnestly meant. I love Christmas carols too: all that community, all that feeling, so many dreams wrapped up in ivy, laughter and candlelight. And good tunes, too.

Download the Memphis Industries mini Christmas album, with artwork! Featuring the Go! Team live in Toronto, and The Pipettes doin' "White Christmas". Hooray!

Destroyer - "Rubies". It took a very long time, and a lot of talkin'-it-over, for me to enjoy Your Blues. So many synths, so very many glossy synths. I struggled against the Verfremdungseffekt, a little irritated that Bejar wouldn't let me enjoy the thing. And then I got over myself - Destroyer did want me to enjoy it, in spite of its falseness. That was the point. Maybe. It was the point I got. And so I did.

Destroyer's Rubies is a very different thing; a move back towards This Night and the earlier records - it's indie rock at midnight, the concert-hall overrun by giddy rockers. Part of me had been hoping that Bejar would now leap from genre to genre, each album a new sonic experiment: What happens to my art when it becomes bluegrass? Or opera? When I let other people sing it? Instead, Destroyer's Rubies is a familiar sound with a more voracious flash - a record with a gemstone glitter, a lusty, luxurious, deep bloody scarlet.

And it's bloody great. It's catchy and fun, epic in form and humble in feel. Above all, what Destroyer's Rubies is is jubilant. Each song is so thoroughly enjoyed: sounds tumbling out of cracks in the wall, bursts of chorus, lyrics that jumble and jangle in your mind. Lyrical pointillism.

The title track is the album's first song: it opens with buzzing and a mutter, but then it's a story, wry smile on face, a story and then clink-bang-boom, a pop song. With Destroyer, every line is an aside; no line is an aside; we listen from all sides, and he knows it. There are jewels, there is Ruby, there is a drumkit that keeps throwing itself across the studio floor. Bejar's wistful and moony; he's a dandy; he's exact ("typical / rural / shit"), and abrupt ("I won't repeat them here"). He's a Bowie-like frontman and later just a man with an acoustic guitar - a guitar with a plaintive reaching theme. He's a mimic; he's a looter. And yet he rejoices in the artifice, he chews the scenery, he celebrates the pleasures of the song and the truths he hunts for in the wood.

I want desperately for someone to do a dance remix of this - please please oh please.

(Destroyer's Rubies is the first great album of 2006.)

(I was trying to hold this back so I'd have the chance to read Carl's promised treatise first, but the song is oh-so-great, and I can no longer bear to wait. Update -- op! he put it online as i slept.)

José González - "Hand On Your Heart". Are your best friends the ones that hold your hand? Or the ones who don't? Are they the ones who scamper on ahead, into the snow-covered field, and wait for you there?

José González takes a Kylie Minogue song - a song of demands, yeah of sadness, - and he makes a case for love using only the promise of his voice, the persistence of his gaze, the warmth you sense in the fingers that play the guitar. A shaker starts, he keeps playing, but he's got no more to say. He stares at you. And there - one two three four - you are standing in that snowfield, deciding whether or not to follow. Snowflakes? None. Just you and him and a still afternoon that's about to move.

(You should read, too, what Nicola Meighan writes about this song, heard live, at The Stypod)

[buy the Stay in the Shade single US/CA/UK]

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SCTAS is holding a contest where lucky Americans can win a copy of the Chad Van Gaalen DVD - go enter, you sons-of-a-gun. (There's a cute mini interview with him, too.)

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The End-of-Year BMR Haiku Contest is over. We received over a hundred haikus, each a three-line description of the poet's favourite album of the year. It was impossible to pick just one, and so with the consent of the contest's instigator, the submissions were whittled down to two.

Sam Solomon and Scott Wilson will be receiving a prize-pack from songwriter Brian Michael Roff, including the dust-and-sun full-length called Inventory, a copy of the ultra limited Pre-Inventory promo EP, and a BMR button.

Their submissions were as follows:

And here are some more of my other favourite submissions:

Justin on Jason Anderson's The Wreath:

just write 'i love you'
sideways on your wrist and you
will feel like i do.

Justin on Sleater Kinney's The Woods:

Wrestled to the ground
By well-timed solo freakout
It's the loud we need

Christopher on Thanksgiving:

"We listen slowly.
The steady love of our friends
punctuates all loss."

Cory, double-barrelled, on Wolf Parade's Apologies for the Queen Mary:

Snare your mirrors light
in corners of eyes tonight
and I will miss you

Dance a foolish dance
and when rain falls from your hand
Ill be jealous then

dekadetia on John Vanderslice's Pixel Revolt:

news, blood for paint, our
home flecked in a frame, a dance
dance revolution

garrincha, en français, on The National's Alligator:

En novembre - silence
En novembre - attendre
Sous les frondaisons bancales

Josh on Broken Social Scene's s/t:

White die in a cup
Rolled until the shore of waste
Each toss soaked with zeal

Chris on Sufjan Stevens's Illinoise:

tinge, pluck, finger snaps
ghosts from fall's Catholicism
all our psalms/kisses

marc on Peter Licht's 14 Lieder:

A moment of joy,
a bright light in the shadows
that guides you from here

Yoshi, also on Sufjan:

he states his wonder
in a State of wonderment
writing all alone

John on Devin Davis's Lonely People of the World Unite!:

White black bang hit crash
Blue red smoke-filled brush stroke strums
Color in my ears

Miranda on The Boy Least Likely To's The Best Party Ever:

Songs sweet and sad like
when I drop my birthday cake
off a paper plate.

John Fahey was clearly one of the most important American musicians of the past hundred years. The "important" thing is so ambivalent, though. What does it matter if an artist influenced his peers? What does it matter if he inspired people with his adventurousness, his feeling, his chops? For me, listening at home, what matters is if he was good. Was John Fahey good? Yes, John Fahey was good. He was damn good. If Bert Jansch, John Renbourn and the British folkies could be said to have resurrected a pastoral spirit, something English-Scottish and green, then over the ocean John Fahey was starting something: he was pulling mud and weeds and inventing an America that feels obvious to me now. A mythic blues-and-folk-reared place that I can only really conceive of thanks to the compositions of Fahey, the Old, Weird sounds, his music's soulful dusty riverbed spirit.

When asked, Fahey would readily admit that he repeated things. His compositions are series of knots, themes untangled one after another. There's something cathartic in that sequence of unknotting. And there's something magic in it too. Each time you hear one of those same knots untangled, glinting with sun- or moonlight, the threads seem to come apart in a different way. Like John Fahey's fingers are finding strings where there oughtn't be any. Like that.

In February, Vanguard Records releases I Am The Resurrection: A Tribute to John Fahey. The calibre of artists they recruited is a testament to Fahey's talent: Pelt, Currituck County, (inevitably) M Ward, Calexico, Grandaddy, Cul de Sac, Howe Gelb, Devendra Banhart, and many more.

These are a couple of songs from I Am The Resurrection. And I'm including the Fahey originals, too, because they're even better.

John Fahey - "Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion At Magruder Park".

Sufjan Stevens - "Variation On 'Commemorative Transfiguration & Communion At Magruder Park'".

Sufjan's "Variation" more than anything recalls his Hark Christmas records that have been popping up over the web - not just because of the reverent prayer that he sings at the end of the piece, but also in the song's sleigh-ride spirit, the wintry snowtracks of percussion, flute and oboe. If Fahey's original is a back-porch affirmation, a solitary coming-to-grips with epiphany, for Sufjan the song is a communal affair: it's a gazebo full of friends, a church choir with a Charlie Brown conductor. And yet Surfin' Stevens doesn't get carried away. This never gets too showy or dazzling. Fahey's modesty remains intact, there amid Stevens' glad frankincense and myrrh.

John Fahey - "When The Catfish Is In Bloom".

Peter Case - "When The Catfish Is In Bloom".

Peter Case is a name I didn't know, but his track is by far the best thing on all of I Am The Resurrection. Funny that it's also the closest to the original in sound. (When I got the CD in the mail I thought "Oh god - thirteen artists trying to outplay Fahey.") What's different between the two? Case's is warmer, softer, it's less fierce. Case is playing something about dusk or dawn, while Fahey plays about night. Case loves the song more than Fahey does - he's tenderer with it, more attentively examining the curve of its hip. Fahey's hungry and Case is content; Case plays from memory and Fahey plays from instinct; Fahey's dead and Case is alive.

[Hear more at the I Am The Resurrection MySpace page]
John Fahey: [buy Requia or The Yellow Princess]

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Haiku Contest results tomorrow, probably (and Destroyer, too): so many fantastic submissions.

"The Physics of Meaning." One day we'll have a physics of time-travel, okay, and Daniel Hart & Alex Lazara can go back in time and change their band's totally stupid name. The undergraduate cleverness of the name was enough to make me dismiss them outright - and my opinion did not improve as I perused the nonsense on their website.

But - (buts being so often responsible for the best things in life) - The Physics of Meaning is well on its way to great. While Hart plays a violin (yes, like Final Fantasy, Patrick Wolf and Andrew Bird), his band sounds more like Grandaddy, Broken Social Scene, John Vanderslice - crunchy drums, backward-spinning electric guitars, tumbles into cut glass. Though the lyrics sometimes carry the insipid philosophising bemoaned above, often they fall closer to the giddy side of emo: everyday phrases repeated until they begin to glow. The strings are arranged marvelously, with unexpected harmonies and then sudden dashes of feeling. At their best - stripped to modest pretensions, pop music instead of treatise, - they're electrifying.

The Physics of Meaning - "Down at Columbia and Cameron". See this is what I'm talking about. Roll-over-and-over drums, blended vocals that would make Fountains of Wayne blush, and it's a song about girls (or maybe boys - he doesn't specify). There's a breeziness here, the way the synths bump into the strings like they've been distracted by some cherry-blossoms. More exciting still is the way the band finds another vibe in the second half - a woozy regalness, the prince having a lazy spring fever spazz-out. The sort of song you want to parcel into a parcel, tape up, and send over the water to make someone smile.

The Physics of Meaning - "Manhattan Is An Island". Drum machine, boy and girl, Notwists of synth: a slippery song, slick and supple, strings sneering. And then the slap of sound, the surge of static, the ceiling slipping. I love the aqueous feel of the whole thing, with the vocals set slightly apart. (On an island, natch.) But when the voices stop and the skyscrapers begin to fall; well, they fall.

Also highly recommended - "Oregon, My Only True Friend", available here.

[buy for a scant US$12]

Mogwai - "We're No Here". The final track of the upcoming Mr Beast has a massive girth, a total ambivalence to everything - like the fat Mr Beast has come strolling through your door, stamping down the kids, tearing handfuls out of the drywall, gobbling your chandelier, raking finger-nails through the art. If he drinks, it's milk, and water, and crude oil. It's not him that lights things on fire - it's the punks who follow. Mogwai's always been a part-time metal band but now at last they're playing fat metal chords, too; they're playing with the gravity of the melody, seeing how weighty this instrumental rock can be, seeing how far they can throw the rock down the well.

[album not available for pre-order yet, so buy Mogwai things here]

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The trailer for Sofia Coppola's next movie, Marie Antoinette is now available. And holy cow does it look great. I love the braveness in its choices, the period-drama mixed with late 20th C coming-of-age: arm waving out the side of a coach, royals scampering down the manor stairs to the electric yellow of Bernard Sumner's voice. History is just lives, and how I love to see these lives filled with a familiar shade of vitality. The title graphic makes me grin ear to ear.

A newly uncovered Elliott Smith song at (the indispensable) You Ain't No Picasso.

New little Skinny live reviews by me: Hawk and a Hacksaw/George, Martha Wainwright.

Last chance: Our BMR/haiku contest ends Monday night is now closed.

Nils Økland - "While My Guitar Gently Weeps". Nils Økland takes his Norwegian fiddle, his Hardanger, and unaccompanied he makes me forget The Beatles ever played the song. There's something in the timbre of the thing, the play of strings on strings, the wood-and-string dissonance. Strange that slow, stripped, tender, "Guitar" sounds lighter than the hackneyed classic rock version. Strange that these wild twists of notes feel less diffuse than the original, like there's something surer in Økland's winding phrases than there is in the solid chew of an electric guitar.

I played it for my flatmate. "Do you recognise the song?" I asked, a little smug, certain that he wouldn't. "While My Guitar Gently Weeps," he answered immediately. I was astonished, I couldn't understand. I can't keep George and Nils side by side in my mind; I can't hear George in Nils. When I try to sing along, - awkwardly, plaintively, - I lose my balance. Like a man coming up out of the sea and wondering Is this what walking is like? This clumsy thing?

I wonder what this would sound like if I didn't know it was from Norway? Would it still sound of a wood? (With tree-trunks straight as slats, a clear-blue horizon between the parallel lines?) Would it still smell of salty sea?

If it was from New York would I hear streets, halal hotdog carts and rock & roll? Would those traintrack whispers, reel-to-reel murmurs, be the subway? If this were from Montreal would I hear rooms in an old house, and not the out-of-doors? If it were from Liverpool, what would I hear?

[Ripped from BBC Radio 1's One World broadcast of White Album covers. The recording seems to be unreleased, but Økland's got a few CDs - recommended by Wire, - so BUY: US/UK. (I will do so in Oslo.)]

Jens Lekman - "Maple Leaves [EP Version]". Yeah it's pretty with those rose-garden violins on repeat, but I thank god (I thank god and I grin) when the bass and proper drums kick in at 0:23. Suddenly this song's got a bit of boogie; you could maybe even take it to one of those twee club nights. And there on the dance-floor you'd dance with your shy friends, lean into a rosy face, kiss on cheek. You'd imagine the song's springtime swell was enough momentum to take you all the way through a love affair. (It's probably not.) But don't worry, chickadees; don't worry. Just enjoy the sweetness of this, the icing, the way Lekman's like Magnetic Fields but with pathos instead of arrogance, earnesty instead of cleverness. "And when she talked about the Fall / I thought she talked about Mark E Smith / I never understood [cue jingle-bells!] at all." The secret's in the jingle-bell cue. And the twirl.

I was late to the Jens-party. Last year I was sent When I Said I Wanted To Be Your Dog but I'm not even sure I ever made it through the whole thing. Too rich, too rich, and with such dog-dumb rhymes. So what happened? To be honest I think it's just that Oh You're So Silent Jens is oh so much better - such songs, such melodies, such lovely humble stories. My favourite comp of the year.

[buy / then go and convince Jens not to give up music]

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Our end-of-year Best Album Haiku Contest is still on (til Monday, December 12) is now closed. Enter to be witty and maybe even win a Brian Michael Roff prize-pack.

While you're here...

I'm thinking of going to Oslo for a few days between Christmas and New Year's. I'd just wander around and drink warm drinks and write prose. And maybe stare at snow and ice. Anyone know somewhere good (or cheap) to stay? I'm looking at this place and this one (the latter being twice as expensive). Friends and tour-guides are, as always, welcome.

The last time I was in Oslo it was for less than 24 hours, with the Arcade Fire, and what I remember most clearly was the sushi we ate. (It was okay.)