Archives : all posts by Sean

Grizzly Bear - "Don't Ask". I expect a band called grizzly bear to have two brown-furred feet planted firm on the ground. I expect an album called Horn of Plenty to smell of moss and wheat and pinecomes. But no, no, no. This is an underwater record. It's seeds in a stream, pebbles in a pond, anemones on the bank, a mind swimming in a big ole' bear's head.

The first song's called "Deep Sea Diver", so that's a hint. There's no sign of fur. Instead, overlapping seaweed voices, the emerge-jar-and-shatter of drum samples, an acoustic guitar like a waving length of old twine.

Why do we go swimming? Because it's fun. Okay. See below. But we also go swimming in order to think. This is stupid. When I'm swimming, I'm always too busy swimming to think. It sounds great beforehand - there's something beguiling about concepts of "water" and "clarity"; there was that thing I heard at a dinner party about the "liquid embrace" of the womb; and, yeah, unbound by gravity I'll really be able to be.

It's nonsense though, right? There's the exhileration of moving face-first through water, breaking through bubbles and into cool eddies and then up up splash into sunlight, but the only thinking happens when you're floating on your back looking at a rock-and-tree or a girl or the waves rippling against the shore.

I find swimming confusing. It's a sensory overload, sight and sound and taste but most of all, too much touch. Touch, all over. I can't keep track. Maybe if I paused I'd be able to keep track, I'd be able to consider these sensations, the clarity and the womb and the freedom from gravity, and I'd be able to really think. But if I pause, see, I drown.

So we swim for fun (see below). And if I want to swim to think, there's Horn of Plenty.

There are similar sounds (Liars, Mark Hollis, Cocorosie, Animal Collective, The Microphones), but these sounds aren't as tender; they live in shells. It's an album full of memory, and feeling. It's full of scraps of wisdom, suggestions, secrets. It's got water and jellyfish and bottomless pits. It's got deep sea diver voices, rattles and brushes, pieces of songs. You need to keep your wits about you, if you want to hear it all. You need to submerge yourself but still keep breathing. And if you do, well, there's a lot to learn.

"Don't Ask" is the easy song. It's the one you can cling to. The tricky thing is that it comes so early on the record. (You can always skip back to it if you need it.) As it repeats in circles, guitar and Kings of Convenience voice, that weirdly out-of-place organ, you might get bored but then you remember that it's there to help you pause and rest and think and so you listen to the words, you wonder about it, you think about Woody Allen's Manhattan, which you watched last night, and you feel - well, you feel pretty good.

This album's being rereleased in the fall, bundled with a CD of remixes. Solex! Final Fantasy! Tim Finney! Booty-shaking from the Soft Pink Truth! Oh yes. They're also in studio, working on a new album (with a band!). And i think it's going to be a marvel.

[buy horn of plenty for only $11.06]

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Girls Aloud - "The Show". If you're done with your stupid "swimming for thinking", come, friends, and join me in the POOL OF AWESOMENESS. Yes, this is the place. The water's azureblue and heated, there's steam, and you can zip around in doubletriplespeed. There's colourful swimsuits! There's tropical birds! And ohlook, there's Girls Aloud!

Girls Aloud don't seem to exist in North America, so I'm only just now discovering What Will The Neighbours Say. If you love a good pop song but mourn the dearth of consistent pop albums, well, guess what? You guessed it. Yay!

This song wears regular shoes but struts like they're stilettos, knee-highs, cowboy-boots. There are bits of Avril Lavigne, Anita Ward, The Killers, Savage Garden, Eiffel 65, Rachel Stevens, that obnoxious post-techno dance music that still charts in Europe, and everything's put together so it's great. I mean, even if the synths get your back up, pay attention there's a summer-jangle guitar in there, hiding at the rear.

The song's got a gazillion different sections, and each one's more fun than a Shins record (cheap shot!). I love how it's sung, I love the "chic-a-cherry-cola" play of consonants, I love how each melody tops the one that precedes it, an ourobouros of pop. It's a song so fine I don't want to see the video, cause that would just be distracting. Instead - front-crawl and backstroke and jack-knife dive; swim and dip and arc and leap; yay and wee and zip and pow.

(they have a new "hot" single, too, but i don't like it as much as this. no sir.)

[buy]

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Over at ORTF, some surprisingly well-imagined trip-hop from an artist called Mig. Like early Morcheeba, but with a wider palette.

16mm is the newly discovered blog of an acerbic old friend and marvelous film critic. He was quoted on the box of the Jesus Christ Vampire Hunter DVD, he's got a film at this year's Fantasia-Fest, and I have myself a new bookmark.

"Why the hell would you want to spend all night in a sweaty dungeon listening to some guy in $700 sunglasses play two crappy records at the same time while you get felt up by twenty five ugly people at once? Of course, this is coming from a guy whose idea of a good time is curling up on the couch with a tub of Pringles and a snuff film, but at least I won’t go retarded from the snuff film."

Monster - "Charlatan". Edward sent me this song. We don't know anything about her. She might be from NYC. She might not. She's unsigned. And her name's essentially un-googlable. So this is all we've got. Well, I've got two tracks and I think Edward's got more. But all we've got is the music, the song, minutes.

Monster is fascinating. I can't wrap my head around her. For the first time in my life I have encountered an artist who is almost entirely redundant. Monster doesn't imitate, she re-enacts. She doesn't cover, she manifests. If the songs felt more self-aware, I'd think of her as an impersonator.

Because, see, Monster sounds just like Cat Power.

I'm not talking in vague stylistic terms. She's not like Cat Power in the same way that Joanna Newsom or Scout Niblett are like Cat Power. No, this is on an entirely different level. Her voice is like Chan's, her lyrics are like Chan's, her instrumentation is like Chan's. On "Charlatan" she plays guitar like Chan, on "World Go" she plays piano like Chan. Her back-up vocals, "wee-oh-ooh", are like Chan's. Heck, even in my iTunes Library they overlap, Monster leading immediately into Moon Pix.

I imagine all sorts of weirdo scenarios. Maybe Monster's Chan's new monniker. Maybe she's Chan's sister. Maybe she's the original and Chan copied her. Maybe Monster's Paul Auster.

I wish I could say that Monster "is like a [blank] Cat Power". The rockin' Cat Power, say. The funky Cat Power. The Cat Power who doesn't break down at concerts. But no, no and who knows. She doesn't sound like a weird Cat Power, but like regular Cat Power.

There's no point arguing who's better, Cat Power or Monster. Cat Power obviously wins because she's got a whole buncha records, several of which are fucking astounding. And me, I've only heard two tracks by this Monster gal. But the remarkable thing is no matter how redundant Monster may be, this song's still good, maybe great even, the longer it lives in your coat the more you come to cherish it.* And it shows you that as you listen to a few minutes of singing and sighing, sad guitar and distracted tambourine, toms, nothing really matters except whether or not you've been brought into that moment, whether the song is singing some part of you that wanted a voice.

Lady, introduce yourself. Please!

Update 7:25pm 19/7: Edward tells me they're a band, not just one woman. And they're from LA.

* (This is in contrast to the new Flaming Lips version of "Bohemian Rhapsody, which has no point whatsoever except to give Stereogum something to write about!)
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Soeza - "Brackish Waters". Okay so Soeza's from Bristol and their CD label is full of colour and their music's jazzy-glad with a krautrock bent. I feel like they're from an alternative universe, and they are. It's called the UK. The US was hit with a phase of arty emo some time in the late 90s, chugging guitars and surprising jerks of sound, soft harmonies and then the crush of a bellowed conviction. The UK doesn't know that, though. Soeza doesn't know that. So here they are, revisiting the land of Jimmy Eat World's Clarity, but since they don't know about some of the cheasier precedents they can pretend like their music is fresh and mind-blowing, and once you get caught in the spirit of things you might just get convinced.

There's a girl yelling over a storm, a storm of petals and airplane parts, clamouring guitars and wails of french horn. There's a funky bassline. And then they keep getting interrupted; some prog-listening dude and his girlfriend who insists on singing along. It'd be irritating, except that it gives us a pause when we can hear the guitar on its own and then drumsticks-and-bass and then everything rushes in and oh yay it's this again!

[buy Why Do You Do?]

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Swedes Please introduced me to The Salty Pirates. "My Academic Beard", which is far too clever for its own good, is furry dashing fun, halfway between Herman Dune and Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. Dig.

Teaching the Indie Kids to Dance Again is back! Hooray! Welcome home, Keith!

Last month I wrote about a fantastic covers comp called Jeans Cover. Sweden's Groover Recordings is putting together its next release, the aptly named Gene & Cover, a tribute to Byrds co-founder Gene Clark. They're looking for artists who would like to contribute, so if you're interested, run-don't-walk to christian@grooverrecordings.com. I guarantee it will be good.

All of you hopefully remember Flotation Toy Warning, a band I waxed lyrical about a few weeks ago. Despite their awful name, their songs are swimming and joyous, mixed-up pop, all soil and space-dust. In advance of their debut's US release, Songs:Illinois and Misra Records have teamed up to let mp3blog-readers buy the CD early, through that special URL. Songs:Illinois still has some sample mp3s, . Please consider picking up the album - it's great, and this experiment makes pudding-proof that audioblogs sell CDs.

Boy, people have sure been quiet this week.

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We/Or/Me - "Aimless Day".

Sometimes you're exhausted. You're so hot - you're so hot. You're hot and you're weak and you're exhausted. You go home and you pull the blinds closed and you sit in the dark and you just try to feel things. You try to feel the dry cool couch under your fingers. You try to feel the cold water in your throat. You try to feel the air in your lungs. You sense the swell and blare of the sun outside the window, even through the blinds.

You look at your music. You think about putting something on. Coming home you were listening to some old Damien Jurado demos, ripped from vinyl, messy and angry, and that jangly gnash felt good against the white pavement and the heat oh the heat. But now such a racket seems unimaginable; so loud, so sore. So you think of softer things. And you quease. Yes, you feel sick. Because as much as that mamsy pamsy stuff might drag you out of your body, might sedate you and put you somewhere comfy and harmless, you don't want to be sedated. You want to stay in your body, you want to feel the ache and the heat. You want to be able to sense the glare on the other side of the glass and blinds. You don't want to be cut off from today: today was today. You want to know it. You're just so hot.

What you should do is put on "Aimless Day".

Oh, it's soft. Yeah. But-

I don't know how to articulate this. It's a man with an acoustic guitar. Two acoustic guitars. Glockenspiel. A woman sings too. There's a girl murmuring things I can't make out. It goes in circles. But it seems so belittling to say there's a man with an acoustic guitar. It lumps him with all the Toms, Sams and Johns, all the cover-bands and too-earnest jokers, all the crap that comes from letting human beings have free access to musical instruments.

Q: Why do so many people hate "folky stuff with acoustic guitars".
A: Because so much of it ought to be hated.

But this isn't chaff. This isn't boring, any more than a sunset is boring. Sure, you need to watch it. You need to watch it set. You need to project things onto it, to let those curtains of colour carry more than just rain, dust. But if you pay attention, if you crack your heart open and let the dusk in, it'll be a salve. It'll be a peace.

We/Or/Me is Bahhaj Taherzadeh. He's from Ireland but lives in Chicago. And tonight this song sounds better than "Pink Moon" (I just double-checked. It does.). It sounds better than "Astral Weeks". I don't know if it is better, but it's just what I need. It's nostalgic and sad and wiped but so happy in that place, so fondly imagining those trains that went by, those birds that circled, the things "we let slip away".

And if we get too spacey, too lazy and distracted and dreaming, well there's always the glockenspiel. It's beautiful, yes, but it's also real. It sounds like someone in a bedroom hitting their glockenspiel with a stick. It's a real thing, rubber or cork on metal, like all those other real things that happen to us. Like that world out there in the light and the heat. Like our hands right here, this couch, our breath.

[we/or/me play on August 23 in Chicago. He's working on an LP. Visit the website.]

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Sloan - "Deeper than Beauty". When I was in high school this was maybe the song I'd listen to when it was really hot. One day after school I saw Marlene standing at her locker with Heather and they were singing the lyrics of this song at each other. I was way down at the other end but I watched and I listened and man did I want to sing along. I was so tired and acheing and so hot and I wanted to raise my voice to a yell, to a happy scream, and say "MOLASSES!" I wanted them to look up and see me and for there to be a look of recognition, of discovery, and then they'd be singing at me, with me, too. "La la la la la!" We'd all be singing, all three of us, hands balled into fists, bending at the knees with the pleasure of it. Yelling this song by a bunch of Haligonians who were signed by Geffen because people thought they'd be the next Nirvana. Of course, they weren't. This was just bare guitar and bare distant drums. He even laughs in the middle. But the next time I heard a guitar like that wasn't until I heard Alden play with The Unicorns, bright bright red, something shaking inside me like a bead on a string.

I wanted so desperately to be singing with them. But I didn't. I didn't have their courage under the yellowy Glebe lights. I didn't really know them. It would have been weird.

Don't worry - Jordan became friends with them instead.

[buy Twice Removed because it's one of the very best Canadian albums of all time. and don't just take my word for it.]

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p.s. Who knew that CUTE was so easy to find?

The Chap - "Auto Where To". Fluxblog tipped me to The Chap when Matt posted "Baby I'm Hurtin'", a greasy-haired electropop song with strings and madcap yells. But when Ham arrived, I found an altogether different thing: like the Junior Boys swirled with Datarock, it's cool synths and a clicking dance-track, all chilled and glassy and occasionally pop-a-pill crazy. "Auto Where To" lives at some middle point between the album's extremes. In the centre of the thing, in its twisty tree-trunk middle, there's that guitar-line. It hops and dodges, it navigates alleys in double-time. And it would be nothing without those pop-pop synths. They'd even makes fashion models dance.

There are vocals too, codeine English vocals, mostly nonsense, and then a racket of clipped percussion, buzzy Four Tet noises, and a growing synth threat. The crush of insects that descent on a land, drinks being spilled on the dance-floor, explosions shooting through the drywall, ash everywhere. [buy at Lo Recordings]

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Micah P Hinson - "The Dream You Left Behind". Okay for me this is a special moment kind of song, where I was just walking along and light glanced out unexpectedly and colours waved and a wind blew at my collar and at the same time this song was playing, gold in my ears, this simple mix of sounds, of noise. It's a drum and a shaker, bamf bamf bamf, a guitar, another guitar, another, and there's Micah's still-grim voice, echoing back on itself, and out of nowhere, out of the moon or up from the ground or kicked up by your boot, it's another guitar and this one comes with bells and sparkle. It's a slight and magnificent counterpoint, straying from the melody's path just enough. All of a sudden this quietloud folk-rock ditty has got a monumental strength, the power to jar the world to the right or to the left, to make light glance out and colours wave and wind blow at collars. Yeah, a special moment kind of song, but maybe you'll have one too. [from Micah's new EP, The Baby and the Satellite. I can only see it at Amazon UK, but go buy!]

I hope everyone (Matthew, Gooblar, Frances, Robin [Wilks], the Rosenbergs etc) and everyone else out there is ok.

Today, two songs about wishing other people were dead.

Herman Dune - "Walk, Don't Run". So Herman Dune have released the finest album of their career, one of the very finest albums of the year, an album full of so much humour, feeling, joy, sadness, and so much contradictory human experience that it feels like it ought to have been a group's life-work, the result of thirty years of sweat, tears and recording experience.

Many of you may have heard "Not On Top". It's extraordinary, silly, plucky, a happy blues to persuade you to get out of bed. At their website you can listen to "Good for No-One", brooding, self-loathing, a sort of opposite.

"And then you told me we had some chemistry / and I ran away and scared the shit out of two little Greek kids who called me a freak ... And I rushed to Seven Sisters and I met the magic rabbi there and he called me by sweet name and he took me in his magic cape and he told me the mission that god had planned for me / he said take a plane to Brazil and buy some good drugs there, baby, and then bring them back in your guitar case and sell them at twice the price you paid."

But here's "Walk, Don't Run," less funny than some of the others but jumpy in the shoulders, stamping over pavement cracks and nasty tufts of grass. The way that extra words are stuck at the end of lines ("bastards", "baby"), I think of Datarock's vivacious "Computer Camp Love". But there's none of that glee, here, just a triumphant pissed-off-ness. Julie Doiron's messy backup vocals are glorious, glorious, this tangled-up chorus full of snippy anger and gentle humanity. It's a song for an After, resigned but still raging, surprising yourself at the corpuscles of anger in your heart. You suddenly notice that your hands are in fists, and you don't know why. Oh wait, you do know why.

[buy US/Canada | UK]

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Jon-Rae and the River - "Prayer to God".

Popsheep taught me about Jon-Rae Fletcher. So now I've ordered the album and boy, you folks ought to as well.

"Prayer To God" is perhaps the most off-kilter of the songs on this album, the verses that don't quite scan, the half-collapsing swagger of the piano and bass. Inevitably, however, there's much to be gained from this gambit; we'll cheer, we'll roar, we'll explode when everything works out, outta nowhere, "THAT'S WHERE YOU OUGHTA KILL HER, IN THAT PARTICULAR PLACE!" Oh yes, it's an angry one, this - angry and harmless, drunk, on the verge of tears and laughter. There's something so wonderful about the sentiment: Jon-Rae wants these two people dead ("him, just fuckin' kill him!" ha!), but for all his Lear-like hollering, he'd never, never do it himself. No - this is a prayer to God, a plea, a hysterical request. It's a torrent of feeling, really, a release; everything coming coursing out through the mouth (yes), all that stored resentment, and just as he runs out of energy there's a girl there singing too, a comrade in arms or an alcohol mirage, but foremost she's simply some company, someone he can sit beside as he finishes yelling and sobers, sobers up.

[buy]

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Over at the John Guilt website, you can listen to the title track from their new EP.

It's called "By Any Other Name" and it's about Winona Laura Horowitz and Robert Zimmerman, only not really. It's a handsome song, a tender one, and it doesn't linger on the things it holds dearest: it wouldn't want to break them. The strings are great, thick cords of sound, like human hair. And just when you think you have it figured out, there's pizzicatto, an organ, a lap steel, and the sky opens up a bit wider.

Josh Rouse better watch out -- people are coming up from behind. (Also: Nashville sucks.)

[buy]

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Ok, again, if anyone knows anyone at mp3blogs.org, please tell them to update their freakin' links.

(Teaching the Indie Kids, Catchdubs, My Old Kentucky Blog, Final Fantasy, Blogotheque, Scissorkick, Scenestars, Leaf and Lime, Golden Fiddle, Popdrivel, if you wouldn't mind as well?)

Happy Canada Day, to those of you over there. (And my woo-hoo congratulations huzzah [to Spain as well!] on the passing of the gay marriage legislation.)

I wrote about Canada Day in a blog entry two years ago. I talk about fireworks, melancholy, and riding on the bus. I still quite like it, and since (probably) none of you were reading back then, you might like to take a look.

I don't have much Canadiana to share with you right now that I haven't already, but I'm absolutely delighted to bring you this.

I was mint-green with envy, reading Carl's review of Final Fantasy's gig in Toronto earlier this week. New songs in a perfect setting, string quartet at the rear. Has A Good Home remains my favourite release of the year so far, but I'm more excited still for what Owen has in store for us later this year.

It was a great pleasure, therefore, to find at the Final Fantasy LiveJournal community that someone had made an unexpectedly exceptional recording of the event. And it was available to download.

So here is a song from Final Fantasy's performance at the Music Gallery in Toronto on June 25.

Final Fantasy - "If I Were A Carp [live]". Somewhere between Caetano Veloso and Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet (yeah, the one about the bombing of Dresden). It's a song thick with dread, utterly compelling, but also a rising dark shape that you daren't look in the eye. The orchestration is frankly remarkable; there's the burnished main theme, those slow sea-strokes, but then you'll hear a shimmering, a sigh, and a lighter motif... But it's an uncanny breeze, a Wrong Wind, and suddenly there's the blackness yawning before you, unshakably so.

In this terrifying section, amid the screaming damning truths, it's hard to make out the lyrics. So I'll share with you what Owen told me about this song, writing a couple of months ago.

"If I Were A Carp" is about necromancy. It's the saddest song I've ever written, there's no humour in it like Les Mouches stuff. It's about a dead man coming back to tell the living: "Death fooled you! No black robes! No scythe! No skeleton! No throne of bone! Nothing! It's all nothing!"

[buy Has A Good Home and stuff. "If I Were a Carp" should (?) be on his next LP, He Poos Clouds.]

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And because I don't feel right leaving you both in this place, here are two fantastic, beautiful, wonderful songs about girls. They might look like opposites, but they're not. (And if you want, they can also be songs about boys.)

R. Kelly - "Kickin' It With Your Girlfriend". TP-3: Reloaded is a marvel of smooth, round sounds, of heat and melodies and finger-snaps, so masterfully composed that its complexities are essentially invisible. I'm beginning to understand why some people scoff at the Postal Service, say, when used for purposes of seduction. "Such Great Heights" is nice enough - but gosh, isn't this a more true statement of love? Or at least of like-very-much? I don't deny Ben Gibbard's feelings, but the clarity of Kelly's rhetoric seems much more difficult to doubt. His feelings are so sweetly, so gently, so totally confessed that I can't, I cannot disagree with him. Sung like this, so slow-and-easy, his logic seems so sensible. "I did not ask for this / it just happened outta nowhere since the day we kissed." So now he's "kickin' it with your girlfriend". It was meant to be. "I never meant to hurt you / but girl I LOVE HER." (And it doesn't hurt that there's a closet reference.)

[preorder at Amazon]

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Damien Jurado - "Apart". I don't recommend listening to this when you're on your own walking through a park on a bright greenyellow leafypicnic summer day. Because it's one of those lovesongs so simple and sappy and magnificent that it can also be real hounddog sad. This is just a man and his guitar, but when Jurado sings with his river-run voice a statement that you believe, a truth that you feel, it's so purely powerful that it may just take your breath away. So plain, so fair, so lovely. The sweetest Rothko painting ever sung.

(from the tour-only Walk Along the Fence LP)

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Tonight I saw Antony and the Johnsons at the Liquid Room here in Edinburgh. It was an excellent show. And not excellent because I like Antony and so all he does must be gold - no, because he performed beautifully, because he gave us more than he had to, but most of all because he surprised me. His voice is far more lovely than even his recordings suggest; it's so supple, lifting with every palpitation of his heart, but in person it's also plummy, soft, very easy to listen to. Furthermore, whereas on record he's a rather ferocious performer, (melo)dramatic and forceful, every song very boldly sung, tonight Antony's power was much more restrained. It was an immanent presence there on stage, with vastnesses and fastnesses of feeling that didn't impose themselves on you if you didn't choose to reach out and take them. It helped that his band (cello, violin, accordion, bass and wonderful classical guitar) were superb. Better live than on CD, I think, and definitely worth seeing if you can.

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Please consider commenting on today's post. I'd really like it if you did.