Archives : all posts by Sean

Angela Desveaux - "Wanderin' Eyes". Ohboy ohboy. For months I've been cherishing this track, holding it to my heart as I fell asleep, carrying it into new days. I listen and I listen, I listen so much that I keep digging for new ways to listen, new lights to listen by - sunlight, lamplight, eyelight, window-light, twilight, midnight. It's sad but it's glad, it's closure and beginning, it's a warning and a dare. It's sweet, but a little bitter. And it's a country song.

I think my favourite thing is the organ. It's just there, like leaves, like hands on your shoulders.

Okay, no, obviously not. The best thing is Desveaux's voice, her voice in each channel, her wildflower Emmylou Harris, her Montreal swagger. Or maybe it's the simple tapflattap of drums, the marvel of that plain sound. Oh heck, it's all great. And it's catchy, too. And upbeat.

Obviously, there's a reason I didn't share it with you sooner, and that's simply that I thought the person who sent it to me didn't want me to. It turns out I was wrong.

Angela Desveaux is a Cape Breton woman now dwelling in Montreal. This was recorded with Harris Newman on bass, Mike Moya (Hrsta/GY!BE) on organ, and Howard Bilerman on drums. I don't think it's the final mix. And should all go well, there will be much more to hear later this year or early next.

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I can't believe I've never written about Ballboy.

Here are some truths:

* They were a favourite of the late John Peel.
* They are from Edinburgh.

The band is quite fairly lumped in with groups like Camera Obscura or Belle & Sebastian, softknit indie pop from a set of Scots. They've often got bite, however; the mangey scruff of a group like Sons & Daughters, the dry snark of Arab Strap.

But while they do jangly numbers and melancholily twee ballads, my most favourite thing that Ballboy do is spoken word tracks, like these, swelling sounds and Gordon McIntyre's so-committed wit, whimsical but stone dead serious, the deepest sort of jokes - the kind that mean something. It's poetry, really, like a daft conversation with your truest friend.

Ballboy - "A Day in Space". Taken from Ballboy's debut album, "A Day in Space" contains some of my favourite lyrics of all time, a conversation about what to do with £1,000,000, lyrics that when transcribed don't carry half the weight, the humour, or the meaning. This is a song about how awesome it would be to go to space. It's a meditation, a manifesto. It's been carefully considered, calmly assembled. He says "space-base" and I laugh. He talks about the training, "Hard? Hard my arse," and I laugh. But then he uses words like "brilliant" or "important" (he uses that word a lot), and something catches in my chest. Because what's important is, well, important. It's really, really important. When something's important to you - it's important. It's important! It's important! IT's IMPORTANT. Is this clear? Listen! What matters to you matters. Do it, live it, etc. And it's the most hackneyed thing in the world but it's so damn true and I'm so glad to hear someone say it with such skill and such wit, so casually that it sounds like both the most important thing in the world and the silliest throw-away of all time. To my friends: What's important's important! To anyone who might mock: Go fly a kite!

Ballboy - "A Europewide Search for Love". The band's got a bigger budget on A Guide For The Daylight Hours, so this time we've got moony swells of strings, vast swirling flowerfields of them, and a message of pure and melancholy romance. This is a lovesong for us all to sing, the chorus for the heartsickness of open Europe or post-9/11 Earth.

i didn't really care about the slump or the rally
it didn't mean anything to me
...
because tonight i'm thinking about much more important things
...
and they're wondering
if they can keep it if they find it
and if what they get will be what they want
and they're wondering if what they want is what they really need

If you live in Edinburgh, join me at their gig on July 2, as part of the G8-related RESON8 event.

[buy Ballboy stuff]

There are more mp3s you can download at their website, including an mp3 of the fantastic "I Hate Scotland".

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SubPop has an mp3 from the upcoming Wolf Parade LP. [via catbirdseat] Speaking of which, Apologies to the Queen Mary has leaked and it is a great deal of spirited fun. Along with the EPs, it will allow me to make one heck of a Wolf Parade compilation album. My mega-huge standout super-fave is "I'll Believe in Anything", but no one else likes it as much as me.

From Pop Montreal come confirmation that The Unicorns' Nick Diamonds has been organising a compilation album (or just a charity single?) in support of UNICEF. (I think Alden's involved too.) It's called "Do They Know It's Halloween?". The project is definitely legit, as I heard about it a couple months ago from one of the artists involved, but who knows whether all the acts in this list are really gonna contribute. If they are, it's gonna truly rule. Dig:

The Arcade Fire, Beck, Thurston Moore, Karen O, Sparks, Wayne Coyne, David Cross, Spike Jones, Juliette Lewis, Devendra Banhart, Gino Washington, Nardwuar The Human Serviette, Clay Aiken, and more.

If you are a LiveJournal user, please consider subscribing to StG's LJ Feed (tell your friends).

The last weeks' mp3s are still offline, and will remain so until Apple answers my emails. We're not going anywhere, though - not to worry.

We received a Cease And Desist this afternoon, for something that we posted, but I don't yet know what. I'm investigating. All mp3s are gone in the mean time.

Thanks for your patience.

Hanne Hukkelberg - "Searching". The press materials would have her be the Norwegian Joanna Newsom, but no, that's not right. If anything, Hanne sounds like Cocorosie, wetmouthed, ringing, glimmering. There are, however, some differences: Hanne's one person; She would, I bet, would make you (good) breakfast; And instead of dating Conor Oberst, I can only imagine Ms Hukkelberg on the arm of Bill Murray. Some Slavic Bill Murray, I guess. He'd probably be an entomologist.

This song is underwater sunlight or a squirt of lime. It's scrapes and dings, Jon Brion organ, an unfliching brightbright faith. "But now that I can see / my man / will come to me." There's a true tenderness in these strange sounds, the squeezed voice, the theremin's distant sorrow -- I have the feeling we could break Hanne Hukkelberg's heart.

[buy from the Leaf Label]

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I had no interest in liking Flotation Toy Warning's debut album, Bluffer's Guide to the Flight Deck. I hate the band name, I hate the album name.

But wouldn't you know it - it's great.

Popsheep already posted the record's best track, "Popstar Researching Oblivion", but there's much, much more to be heard. Maybe there's even too much - you better know what you're doing when your debut is seventy minutes in duration and most of the tracks are longer than six minutes.

Flotation Toy Warning - "Happy13". I guess the album is what the kids would call "avant pop", and this is a good label only inasmuch as it keeps things very vague. "Happy13" trudges a bit, never reaching euphoria, while "Popstar Researching Oblivion" lolls in silly wagging cornfields. "Donald Pleasance" is impressionist sorrowful, "How the Plains Left Me Flat" stamps like a one-man-band. What's terrific about "Happy13", though, is the way that synth line cuts right through, grabbing you by the collar from those very first notes. Flotation Toy Warning have a bevy of resemblances - The Eels, The Unicorns, The Flaming Lips, Grandaddy, the Polyphonic Spree, even Chad Van Gaalen, - but they're also very clearly their own thing. That knife-edge synthline gives way to dusty drums and a dustier lead vocal, but later it's resurrected in a bed of twinkles, rhodes and maybe even distant choir. The song ends abruptly, but that's because it's not a radio single - it's part of an LP.

Yeah - The biggest challenge that Bluffer's Guide... faces, other than its absolutely awful moniker, is the fact that it's really an album album. There are a very many musical ideas, vignettes of melody and timbre and mood, snatches of song that bump into one another like so many brightly coloured boats. Unlike Ian, I don't find myself reaching to play the same track(s) over and over, but instead I compulsively hit 'play' to listen again to the whole CD. I relish the moments that are already familiar, I am brought to attention by the unexpectedly brilliant sound.

The band is from London. You can buy the album on Misra as of August 16th, and if the label gets its website troubles sorted out, you can already order it from the UK label, Pointy.

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Elsewhere, and perhaps of interest only to Canadians:

Rick Mercer's got a blog! And it's funny!

It seems like only yesterday that we posted a Wolf Parade song on Said the Gramophone -- oh wait, it was our last post. Well, I apologise. But the season is ripe with new material, and they're the band that's making our blood buzz. Yes, the Wolf Parade's debut EP on Sub Pop, self-titled like the last two (this, I'm sure, is a tactic to fuck up eBayers) has leaked. And it's pretty fucking brill. Messy as puddle-water on a table-cloth, but so too has the band's pop elements have been greased and set spinning. We are in for one great treat when the album drops in the fall.

This is a band that play prog and brokenbottle garage rock, brown-grey and cut-lipped. Or, as I said in Plan B:

Theirs is a skewed rock’n’roll which is part New Wave schizo, part old-school rhythm ‘n blues. Spencer’s synths sneer, Arlen’s drums pound, Hadji’s theremin warbles, and Dan bursts open like a cocaine piñata.

Wolf Parade - "Shine a Light". The opening track of the new Wolf Parade, the opening song on their CBC Radio 3 set, and (who knows?) maybe even the opening cut on Apologies to the Queen Mary when it's released in September. It's a great opener, each element of the band entering in mud-caked gear. The drums are brilliantly up-down jerky, there's the sliding slur of organ, and then the sharp thrumble or guitar. The band's only got one guitarist, but in studio they can have a million - they chime, they claw-back answers, they keep the pace with Dan's monologuist voice. He sounds like a man who's gone blind, who's gone deaf, feeling music in his chest and then giving a manic sermon to the crowd. He's so serious. So drunk, and so serious. Perhaps most brilliant of all is the backing-vocals, Spencer's "wo-oh OH oh" and then the bluebright "oooh-oooh-oooh-ooh"s, something more restful and Beautiful just around the corner. "Shine a Light" sounds so smoky, but so gladly so, so celebratory in its smog and grit and mud.

And I know they don't sound like Spoon, but they do, too, don't they? Spoon after getting soaked to the skin, dumped, and beaten up? Yeah?

Despite the band's problems during the Isaac Brock recording sessions, I'm assuming this was produced by him.

[pre-order for less than $5!]

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Yes, it's a new-releases kind of week. Look what else has arrived:

The New Pornographers - "The Bleeding Heart Show". So Twin Cinema is due on August 23, and delight-of-delights, is just as good (and just the same) as the last two Pornographer records. For some bands this would be a criticism, but me I don't want the Pornos to deviate from their formula. This is a formula that blows people down with galeforce pop winds, a wedding-cake in a pill, a rainbow in a lightbulb, a pony. Matt would call it joycore, but when it comes to the New Pornographers, for me it's sour-pop. It's so direct, so fierce, so strong - that blast of lemon to your tongue, lips, head. And then there's the notes, the intervals, or something - everything just a little sharp, somehow, a little weird, a little sour. It's engineered, of course. This sourness, this weirdness, it softens you up for the perfect tonal burst of the chorus' capping line, or something.

But let's talk about "The Bleeding Heart Show". Such a deceiving song, tiptoeing through the first minute-and-a-bit, serene niceness. But then the drums and organs poke their heads out of the meadow, and - boy oh boy, - do we know where Carl and Neko are headed now (hint: it is somewhere awesome!). And yet they delay, they delay... Oh yes, there we go. Anthemic arena ooohing. But wait! Did they ever get you. That's not the peak, no siree, that pleasantry. Nah - we've got a whole new drumbeat and some old-fashioned "Hey Jude" chanting for you. "Hey-la hey-la, hey-la hey-laaaaa!" There's no clouds, didn't you notice? There are kites flying, didn't you notice? In the wide open green of the Meadows this afternoon, I saw a girl do a cartwheel, for no good reason, just hanging around on her own. And here's Neko - it's a call-back to the opening and it's so joyous and so sour and it's like she's made something else appear, made the birds appear, or made them change colour, or just made me think they did.

(My only complaint with Twin Cinema, so far, is that despite the purported increase in the Bejar-quotient, Destroyer Dan still doesn't make nearly enough of an appearance. That is, we hear his voice, we hear his words, but I love when he reins the Pornographers to his own chalky-beauteous ditties - see "A Testament In Youth in Verse". And for that, I guess, I'm going to have to wait.)

[hopefully you'll be able to pre-order soon, at Matador and Mint]

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Popsheep's got more Wolf Parade, kinda, in the form of Spencer's solo project, Sunset Rundown. The album's pretty great (we may post about it too). They've also written about the new record by Floatation Toy Warning (I know), which, well, I'm definitely going to be posting about as well. They steal all our ideas, and stuff.

Yesterday at Fopp I picked up the remastered version of the first Arcade Fire EP (with new Seripop artwork!) It sounds great. You should get it.

As an appendix to yesterday's post about Three Gut -- I invited Guelph native Tim Kingsbury (of the Arcade Fire) to say a few words on the label's lowering-of-the-lights. And I'm very pleased to say that he has obliged.

I moved away from Guelph, Ont. in 1997 and Three Gut Records was born within a year or two. I always felt that Three Gut and I had a lot in common and thought it sort of took my place when I left. We shared alot of the same friends, the same musical interests and it involved a lot of people I really admired. Some were close friends and some I watched from a (short) distance.

They moved to Toronto fairly early on and people were taken with them. People came to their shows and people talked about them. My Guelph friends went on to earn a lot of respect in Toronto and across Canada. Even some attention outside of Canada. It was very exciting to watch and listen. Oddly enough, I was never very close to Lisa or Tyler (the heart of Three Gut) at the time, but I always thought they did great work and really enjoyed watching the label grow. Part of me was sad that I never got to be more involved. It was through them that Arcade Fire played our first show in Toronto at Jim Guthrie's CD release for Now More Than Ever, and I also played my first show with Arcade Fire in Montreal opening up for Royal City.

Three Gut has put out some of the most solid records of any label I know and that’s something they should be proud of.

Thanks so much, Tim. And thanks again, Three Gut.

Via Zoilus comes the exceptionally sad news that Three Gut Records is packing it in, later this year. Three Gut was (is) a fantastic label, warm and enthusiastic, totally without pretense. They released good music. They contributed a great deal to the indie rock in (Central) Canada. And from what I understand, they were very good people. I really wish them all the best in their future projects.

My favourite Three Gut band is Royal City.

Royal City - "O You With Flowers". On Royal City's debut, from which "O You With Flowers" is plucked, they were a simple band in white, silver and ink-blue. Their fragments of songs were sung as if they were whole ones, what's left out somehow getting left in. The band became something else, mustier and more alive, for their middle album. And then they came back to the white, silver and blue for Little Heart's Ease. (They added gold, too.) But I'm speaking in clumsy metaphors; let's turn to the matter at hand. This is a song as thin as Neil Young might write, and as beautiful. There's a harmonica that sounds sad but is as happy as you'll ever be. There are notes that ring out. There are words - "flowers", "wayward", "rain", "colour", "beloved", "crocodile". Aaron Riches sings: "I stumbled in / to the iris of your eye." Do. Do, please. Do.

(Win Butler once wrote a love-song called "Alligator Mine". He also once considered signing his band to a label called Three Gut. This is synchronicity, and it makes me glad.)

Royal City - "Bad Luck". I can't believe I've never posted this to Gramophone, this blinging scary-glad track - with skulls bending to kiss, skeletons rattledancing, last breaths joining in song. It's as if we're stomping the vegetable patch and staring at the gnarls of deadvined crops, the piles of earth, trying to be wry instead of sad. It's time to look Bad Luck in the eye and tell it to get lost. No more whispers: we'll sing its name out loud. "Bad Luck, Bad Luck, Bad Luck!" "Bad luck is a terrible laughing god," sure, but we'll say it with half a laugh, a whole grin. And here's the kicker, big guy (moan all you like), we're going to have a fluttering electric guitar and the ding-ding-ding of a piano, we're going to name all your hiding places, we're going to tell you all the things you can't do. "You will never know / the places that I go to without you!" Never! Tell him, banjo! (From 2001's Alone at the Microphone.)

More Three Gut mp3s, including Royal City's take on The Strokes' "Is This It".

[Buy At Rush Hour the Cars, Alone at the Microphone, or Little Heart's Ease (which I like a lot, too). Heck, buy the whole Three Gut discography.]

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Self-plugs:

I've got two articles in the June/July issue of Plan B magazine, which hit shops last week: a capsule review of last month's Edinburgh Micah P Hinson gig, and then a longer piece about contemporary Canadian (indie-rock) identity, with words on/with Final Fantasy, The Diskettes, and Wolf Parade. After writing the two articles I was very happy with the former and less so with the latter, but seeing them in print my feelings have mostly reversed.

I'm extremely proud to be involved with Plan B, as it's the best music magazine I've ever read. Passionate and personal writing, full of conviction. Do pick up a copy if you can - and not for my sake.

They've also published online a review I did of Joanna Newsom's appearance in Glasgow on April 13.

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Elsewhere:

One of the strangest things I've heard in a while is Bjorns Vanner's version of Weezer's "Across the Sea" (from Pinkerton). No idea if it's a cover or a spoof, as, well, it's in Swedish. Catch it at the quickly-becoming-essential swedesplease.

Carl's "Outsider music" piece in the Globe this week, is (like I said in the comments,) "tidy and insightful". That is to say, it's graceful and thoughtful. I like the way he was able to get a little wise on us. Better still, check his blog-post on the subject for a couple of replies from Irwin Chusid himself. I hadn't imagined Chusid to be so deferring, tolerant, or thoughtful (just passionate!).

DANGERDOOM - "Mince Meat". Oh yes sirs, it's MF Doom plus DJ Dangermouse, a pentatonic flute sample and Doom's marshy words. There's something almost Seussian about how this sounds, a 5,000 Fingers of Dr T scene, dark courtyard and strange spires. "Give the drummer some rum / I'm sure he could use a shot / just to get his queues hot / and make sure he don't lose a spot." It's dirty, though, like worn shoes and worn jackets. Crunch and strut, solid enough to hang your hat on. Instead of hooks, it's got antlers.

This track's available on the Epitaph comp Punk-O-Rama [buy], and may be included on the duo's upcoming LP, which'll be affiliated with Adult Swim (?!).

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Tunng - "Mother's Daughter". I first heard Tunng at a Stockholm record shop, browsing the racks before an Arcade Fire gig. The cover is gorgeous, an interwoven print of faces, flowers, a rabbit, an owl. this is... tunng, it reads, in inky letters. There was a clipping stuck up next to the stack of CDs. The review was in Swedish but I recognized the words "The Books", so I asked to listen. Swedish folktronica! Hooray! Only it's not. I questioned the record clerk and he explained that Tunng are from England. This was for the best, really, as I didn't have to pay in Swedish crowns but could order in plain old quid when I got back to the UK.

All this to say that I own Mother's Daughter and Other Songs and it's a fine, light piece of cloth, sewn with sequins. A long line of sound-alikes apply - The Books, The Beta Band, Kings of Convenience, Appendix Out, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra, - but the album's got a lovely breadth, bouncing between gauzy glitch and very trad britfolk ballads. "Mother's Daughter" is a great demo of all this: it opens with mixed up recordings and a skipping acoustic guitar, the grassy main melody appearing only half-way through, blended voices and the ebb/flow of sound. It feels at once like something here-and-now, something easy and tangible, and something that's just about to flickerdash away.

[The album seems sold out at Simbiotic, but if someone finds another buy link, I will update accordingly.]

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Hope you didn't miss the new Arcade Fire track, below?

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Sombrero! [via whimsy]