Archives : all posts by Sean

Oh yeah - I forgot to say... That amazing Smog track, "The Well", works great in conjunction with Joanna Newsom's "Peach, Plum, Pear," if you set the Newsom track to play directly after the Smog. Do it! Go on! (I'm serious!)

It's Wednesday. We're going to make that Smog day.

According to the Drag City website, Bill Callahan a) doesn't look anything like I thought, b) has been recording music since 1990. His new record, A River Ain't Too Much to Love comes out in about two weeks. He is a very, very good artist.

Let's be chronological with these songs.

Smog - "Red Apples" (Floating EP version). It's strange that Smog's strange, inky song is, today, better known as performed by Cat Power. Her version is a great one: the blues of the song, its sadness, is more explicitly voiced by Chan. But Smog's LP recording of it, on Red Apple Falls, draws its power from a different rhythm, less swing and more plod, monotony giving weight to the images. The organ's deep in the background, the wavering silenced sound of - well, something. Something important.

This version of "Red Apples" is taken from Floating, a 7" released in 1991 (six years before RAF). It's lofi and silly, that warbling synth-squeezebox thing, like the song's being played on a wobbly jell-o piano. But as the song wears on (and it doesn't "wear" for very long: Callahan keeps it short here;) that goofy sound starts to sound more and more desperate, more and more absurd, awful and trembling and wrong. The narrative, sinister and enticing, gains a note of even more high-stakes urgency. It's like Eraserhead. I scare, I weep, I pang, I worry, listening to the last fuzzy words - "for us-" - and then he's cut off. (By what?)

I went down to the river
To meet the widow
She gave me an apple
It was red

For us

Smog - "Look Now". This single was released in 1999, although it's not included on that year's LP, Knock Knock. (Look at that cover!) One of Smog's calling cards is the circling instrumental line, chords that build for a few measures and then return home, repeating for minutes on end. He'll call things out over the circling sounds - here acoustic guitar, piano, - and make them change colours, his lyrics turning it all into something else. It's subtle but it's beautiful. On "Look Now", the track feels at times lonely, at times energized, at times immobile - when the overdubbing comes in, it's becoming empowered, joyful, it's gaining momentum. It's soft and it's also firm. It's an invitation. It's a love-song. Sort of. "Look now! Look!"

Smog - "The Well". A River Ain't Too Much to Love sounds fantastic. Every instrument seems to rub a different spot, and Bill Callahan's voice comes coffeecrackly in your ear, perfectly close-and-removed, perfect perfect perfect. "The Well" is a glorious song, funny and surprising and frankly, pretty close to transcendent. It's got that typical Smog repetition, but every time each part of the song arrives (cymbal shush, violin scrape), it's like a bud springing into bloom. It seems to be on a loop, but there are those little beats of difference, voices answering Smog's song, when everything changes (slightly, slightly).

And, of course, it's hysterical. When Smog first calls "Hooo!", it takes a moment to realize what's happening. And by the time he says "Hello," it's funny. Then you know what's coming, you get excited, you wait and wait and - yeah, Smog, he just slows everything down. It's a joke at your expense, he's going to draw this out - but when the punch-line does finally come, it's not said like a punch-line. There's an awkward sidewaysness to the delivery. It means something.

And where I'm moved is when the drums gear up in the end, in the rainbow moment where all the song's rhymes and themes burst up together, astonishingly written, wry and poetic, a lesson taught, a lesson learned, a joke and a parable. And my heart just swells on a woody springtime day.

A River Ain't Too Much to Love is released on May 31. You would do well to buy a lot of Smog stuff in anticipation: he is great.

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Said the Gramophone - Rilo Kiley/Idiot Jed Contest

Last week I called a contest because Warner Music was offering our readers new(ish) CDs by Rilo Kiley and Idiot Jed. Both are up and coming bands of some note - you've even heard Rilo Kiley here (albeit not from me).

The challenge for the contest was as follows:

You must draw a picture using rudimentary computer art software (MS Paint, Graphic Converter, etc.), or using PhotoShop but with one hand tied behind your back, which incorporates the words "SAID THE GRAMOPHONE". These pictures will be judged entirely on awesomeness - that is to say, neither the best, the worst, the funniest or the disgustingest pictures will win, merely the awesomest.

The submissions were slammin', so I'm going to post them all. Click any image for a bigger version. First of all, though, the winners:

Contest Idea prize - Jgriz
(will receive one CD of his choice)

Jgriz came up with the "stupid-art-with-stg" theme, so he wins a CD. I even have his address already!

First Place - Arif Richter
(will receive both Rilo Kiley + Idiot Jed CDs)

Arif's contribution was indisputably the most awesome picture I received. It has an ant-eater tongue-unicorn thing nibbling at an MP3 book. It has a flying thing. It has a sunrise and a tree and another sun and skyscrapers out the window. It has a ladder leading into a palm tree. It has a chesterfield. And look! It has a turntable. Hooray!

Second Place - Elizabeth McKee
(will receive both Rilo Kiley + Idiot Jed CDs)

Trees with robot-heads and banana-arms are awesome. What sold it for me, though, I think, was the cute girl in the corner and the swirlycurly Gramophone font. And the fact that the "THE" was spelled out in pink space-battling, um, things.

Third Place - Mason
(will receive both Rilo Kiley + Idiot Jed CDs)

Awesome in a totally different way. Although it was clearly done by someone who knows what they're doing, I loved the sloppiness to it, the sullen-confused-breaking love that's caught in those thick-circled eyes. More importantly, the phone.

Fourth Place - Dustin Goodyear
(will receive one CD of his choice)

Fifth Place - Matt
(will receive one CD)

Sixth Place - Spencer Dobbs
(will receive one CD)

The other totally rad entries:

Winners: Please email me your postal addresses and CD preferences (Rilo Kiley or Idiot Jed), from the same email addresses you used to submit your entries.

Thank-you all for your submissions, and congraulations to the winners. Oh - and thanks to the Rob for making this possible.

Monday morning electric guitars:

Damien Jurado - "Simple Hello". For me the stand-out on Damien's new record, a dry and sandy approach to some of the same territory as Julie Doiron's Goodnight Nobody. The drumms patter-thud in perfect measured time, the guitar shfiting from red to yellow to black and back. As always, the biggest draw here is Jurado's voice, that bell-like groan, the sound of a big man singing small. I love the build-up of guitars every so often, and the way it evaporates in a second, huff-and-bother that has no place here. If I blank out part of my brain, I can almost imagine this track as an Arab Strap song... It's got the right rancour, the right prettiness and dread - all it needs is some more explicit sex! [buy On My Way To Absence]

Weezer - "Perfect Situation". If you, like me, gave up on Weezer after listening to the Green Album more than a few times, tune in. This is pure Blue, to me, updated for this year. The guitars soar blue and shiny, Rivers sighs but then double-hikes it to full-blown emo longing, and the chorus has the cheer of a chicken-chested man proudly clucking at the hens. It's fantastically written and produced, with that downward scale of guitar notes, the homey ding-ding-ding of piano hiding in the mix for the choruses. And where elsewhere on Make Believe, Rivers' autotuning is frustrating, here it's just a guy who fussied himself up for his visit to the cliffs, so that the sirens might give him a second glance as he bellows at them. [buy]

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I have internet at home, finally! So you are all very welcome to go back to sending me songs, as you used to do in the old days, with dropload. I am eager to hear anything you think I might like, might not have heard, ought to share, etc. You guys' taste is the best. :)

Rilo Kiley/Idiot Jed Contest is over. Winners will be announced Wednesday.

Due to poor planning and the continuing lack of internet at home, I wasn't able to upload any songs for you today. That does not mean, however, that we are without music!

Misty's Big Adventure - "Evil". I saw Misty's about a month ago, at a little club in an Edinburgh back-alley. They're a motley crew from Birmingham - guitars, horns, keys, drums, manic lead vocals and a dancing blancmange. They put on a phenomenally energetic performance, bursting pop choruses, sing-alongs, nonsense and horn stabs. Gladness, madness, jazz circus tomfoolery... when they sang "Smothered In Love" it was like a beautiful, true, head-over-heels, confetti kiss in the face. I'm currently waiting for a copy of their albu, but in the meantime they've released "Evil" for free online, in honour of today's British General Election. It's a political sort of song, yes, but the stair-climbing pomp of the chorus is enough to make up for that, and I do share in the group's strong feelings about the importance of matters such as your government's leader. For those of you lucky enough to be British citizens and on the voters' rolls, I do encourage you to go out today and vote for someone other than the Tories.

Kate Maki - First Impression. Via 3hive, this fine track by Sudbury's Kate Maki. I've been listening over-and-over, lately, to a track called "Wanderin' Eyes" by Angela Desveaux, and while I haven't yet been cleared to post that song, "First Impression" is a near-equal piece of longing country music, with the wistful pangs of a steel guitar, Maki's cranberry voice. She sounds not unlike a twangy Sarah Harmer (and this is fine), but far more interesting to me than the latest missive from fellow Ontarian Kathleen Edwards. Lucinda Williams, eat your heart out.

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Tonight, Final Fantasy and the Arcade Fire in Glasgow. Jordan should be in tomorrow. Have a great weekend!

There's still time to enter our Said the Gramophone Rilo Kiley/Idiot Jed contest. Fantastic submissions so far.

[this is the sevent in a continuing series, exploring the music i discovered when travelling in europe last fall]

There is a lot of good music in the Czech Republic. We've already heard from hip-hop crew Nase Vec, but here's something completely different.

J and I were in Prague at the time of the Alternativa music festival. We only made it to one gig, however, and it was a showcase of four not-very-good Czech bands. The highlight, ultimately, was browsing the table that had been set up by one of the local independent record stores, marvelling at all the alluring covers.

I took a breath and risked $20, buying Nebojim se smrtihlava, by Petr Nikl and Lakome Barky. I bought it mostly because of the wonderful album cover - the folded-up sketched drawing of a mouse, in cardboard, with circles of colourful card for the liner notes. (It looks like this, but doesn't have the pink bit, and is tied together with a thread.) I asked the person behind the desk what it sounded like. She shrugged and said, in her broken English, that it was a collaboration between an artist (Nikl) and a children's choir (Lakome Barky). (Oooh!)

Googling shows that Nikl is one of the foremost young Czech artists, and has worked extensively in theatre, puppetry, etc. Lakome Barky are a little more mysterious but, well, they're certainly kids.

When I got the CD back to the hostel to listen, I couldn't have been more delighted. It's strange, dark, fairytale music - whispers, chants, children's singsong. Nikl has a voice with corners and holes. There's guitar, strings, bells, oboe, percussion. There's madness and joy and nervous close-to-fear. It's one of the finest - and certainly weirdest - things I heard last year. It's good.

Nebojim se smrtihlava won Best Alternative Album at the Czech equivalent of the 2004 Grammies.

Petr Nikl & Lakome Barky - "Curam". A stand-out track, rattling drum-stick and hazyday acoustic guitar, then the loping, looping stride of Nikl's voice, streaks of vocal colour, an alien on the lilypad beside Kermit. "Do do do-do-do," he sings, and I do too, mouth a smile that can't help itself: good things are happening, it's inevitable, hooray!

Petr Nikl & Lakome Barky - "Pomali Ptaci". A little more gloom, here. There's a clarinet, bat-squeaks, and the album's slightly sinister main theme, Nikl nudging toward the edge of a cliff, staring into a red-on-black river. It's a gradual dolly back, maybe a helicopter shot, the reveal of the expanding wilderness, the dark land, the circling birds. His voice shudders and breaks, still brave, but caught up and pulled apart by the wind. The clarinet's his only friend.

[buy]

Also, Mikael pointed me to a Swedish artist called , who (googling shows) was recently profiled on the mp3blog Swedes Please. (there's one for the next sidebar update!). And there is a song available for free over there that is beautiful, silly, good-time-fun and amazing. In other words, it is great.

Hello Saferide - "High School Stalker" (scroll down to the "mp3" section).

There is trumpet, a scrunched-up cutesy voice (see: Innocence Mission), copious handclaps, a whinsome goofy back-and-forthing of overdub. Everything sneaks forward at just the right times, the pop splendor never sacrificed for a gag. I love the way Annika references Altavista and Yahoo!, but not Google. I love the way the song holds back from going full-on creepy a la Dismemberment Plan "Crush". I love the way the song is lovely and catchy, unless you're paying attention, and then it's lovely and catchy and silly. It's a trifle but it's glorious, it's summertime pop, it's swedish, it's The Lucksmiths but less of a bummer, it's- it's great.

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Some great entries so far, but the Said the Gramophone Rilo Kiley/Idiot Jed contest continues.

To begin the week, a shout-out to my grandfather, my Zaidie:

HI ZAIDIE!

Zaidie found out about this site a few weeks ago and has, I'm told, been dutifully reading it every day. You can, for instance, read his comment on yesterday's post:

"i STILL DONT UNDERSTAND IT !!

ZAIDIE"

In some ways my Zaidie's incomprehension is a relief. Still, I appreciate very much his interest - and I love him very much. If you leave a comment today, please consider saying hi to my Zaidie. Thank-you.

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The Cribs - "Another Number (Rollercoaster Project remix)". Mike sends us this gangly and broken-open remix of a song by The Cribs. Of that band, he says "The Cribs have unfairly been lumped in with the whole Gang of Four revival crap and tour with the likes of Bloc Party. This does them a disservice, since they're much more interestingly melodic and poppy than most of that scene. They are from Leeds in Yorkshire." The Rollercoaster Project, meanwhile, is from Sheffield. The original "Another Number" was a bow-legged electric guitar tune, with a little stamp and twirl. The Rollercoaster Project's made it even more awkward, that guitar riff at the center, voices ducky as they fold and overlap. I imagine an empty dance-floor with various dancers slowly stepping away from the wall, each breaking into their own special dance, the smooth-and-perfect representation of everything in their soul. If Air were more fun and had teamed with Spiral Stairs, they might sound like this. [buy Cribs stuff]

Cat Power - "Leopard and the Lamb". This is a recording from a Cat Power White Session on French radio in December, 1998. (It's very strange to think I sat in on the Arcade Fire's White Session a month and a half ago...) I saw Cat Power last night, in Edinburgh. It's the second time I've seen her, and once again I was entranced, moved, made sad and serene. She played "Good Woman", "I Don't Blame You", some covers (including "Who Knows Where the Time Goes" and "Satisfaction" [with chorus]), but mostly it was new stuff. They were sad and beautifully-written songs, some of them about true love, some of them about heartbreak. She played the Pink Panther theme. She played "Names". She played me like a fiddle.

And she looked pretty ok, I thought.

"Leopard and the Lamb" is a lovely song, peacefully nestled in that curl of guitar, the slow set of dusk. From this Splendid interview it seems it was maybe-hopefully going to be on You Are Free, but (clearly) it wasn't. Instead I listen to it here, trying to burrow into and hide in it, trying to pull the guitar's glitter, Chan's longing, over my head. Taking shelter.

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Okay, the contest.

Thank you all for your suggestions about the form our Rilo Kiley/Idiot Jed contest should take. I was hard-pressed to decide. At first I was extremely tempted by Kurtie's suggestion that we make it about cute cats. But I don't actually like cats very much, and not everyone's got one (thank god), so it wouldn't be fair. Drew's polar-bear-wrestling idea was appealing as well, and so was the "web-based dance-off", but I decided they weren't practical.

I also didn't want to make the contest something that would take too much work, because these are just CDs by Rilo Kiley and Idiot Jed, and I certainly wouldn't go to much effort over them.

BUT - the winner is jgriz. (please email me along with which CD you would prefer.)

To win a copy of a recent CD by Rilo Kiley or Idiot Jed, so long as the record company actually sends them out...

You must draw a picture using rudimentary computer art software (MS Paint, Graphic Converter, etc.), or using PhotoShop but with one hand tied behind your back, which incorporates the words "SAID THE GRAMOPHONE". These pictures will be judged entirely on awesomeness - that is to say, neither the best, the worst, the funniest or the disgustingest pictures will win, merely the awesomest.

Depending on how many good submissions we receive, winners will either earn copies of both CDs, or the top entries will get the CDs of their choice and the rest will receive what's left. (Something tells me Rilo Kiley is in higher demand than Idiot Jed.)

Email submissions to: contest@saidthegramophone.com.

Contest deadline is Friday, May 6th, at Midnight, Scottish time. Good luck!

It's the weekend and it's summer so let's listen to music from names we know. I wish I had a barbecue to go to (it's early evening here and the sky is blue).

Spoon - "Sister Jack". Don't bother listening to this song. Not until you burn it onto a CD or throw it onto your iPod and step into the street with somewhere to go. It's not simply a song for walking, it's a song for walking somewhere, because if you are, and you do, and this song is in your ears, it kills. It leaves dead suits like me in its wake. It makes you wince, it kills so much. Spoon have always been a band of songmakers, of melodymakers, but here's the sort of song that lives in a Platonic universe somewhere, where it kills people.

First of all, there's that guitar, drang drang drang, sounding like straight can-rock guitar, no joke, the Gandharvas or Treblecharger or, yeah, Sloan. It kills. And then there's the cracking drums, the tambourine, the stall, and Britt's gruff-lax nonsense-deep lyrics. He's like John Lennon here, John Lennon making a racket in his loft above a kebab shop in Austin.

And we mustn't forget the tape loop weirdness, the backward guitar squawks and whizzing and hiss that's the sound of the song's loose seams, the places where light bursts through and blinds you. These squiggles of sound like someone spun round and pointed at the Transformer who has a cassette-player in his body, ordering him to "Do a solo!". And the Transformer's caught off guard but he still does it, there he goes, manipulating his buttons and doing something amazing because unbeknownst to the pointer, Transformer's been practicing these solos for months, in his mirror at home, before going out in the pitch-black to learn to skate-board in the parking-lot near his house.

Phew!

Gimme Fiction's due on May 9. Pre-order and win cool stuff!

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Sufjan Stevens - "Casimir Pulaski Day". Gosh. "Casimir Pulaski Day" is a coalescing, for me, of everything Sufjan Stevens does well. It's got all the trademarks: homorhythm, oboe, mandolin, wispiness, layers of harmony, repetition. But on this song these things rise out of their bodies into something so much greater than "pretty". Listen up, haters! Even if you've dismissed Sufjan in the past, even if you think he's a samey Iron & Wine prat, if you have any love for Smog or Mountain Goats, Leonard Cohen or Neil Young, I defy you to dislike this song (at least until the instrumental at the end) - it's a masterpiece. There's brilliance in the lyrics, in the way the words weave around and reappear, the way these domestic scenes flutter into view and then fade into memory, a cascade of sights/sounds/touches that accumulate... It's all repetition, the same chords over and over, but this too accumulates, until you notice the slightest change, until the playful everyday sound is for a moment erotic, sad, transcendent, or Sufjan's casual real-life images turn full-bodied with a sense of Love, God, or Death. It's a marvel, and I wonder at the fact that something so deep, so insightful, so rich, so human, can also sound so pretty, so light, the kind of trifle that you might ignore, forget, pass by. (This too, I suppose, is a metaphor.)

(Unfortunately, Sufjan's not really outdone himself with Illinois. Like Michigan it's pretty, it's proof of a mighty talented artist. But it's much the same, really - pretty, sometimes dazzling, too long and too repetitive. The shock and awe of Seven Swans (which isn't much different anyway) is absent. Some of you might have heard the single at TTIKTDA [keith, please update your StG bookmark!]. The album sounds like that. But "Casimir Pulaski Day" and a few other tracks... oh my.)

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Went to a gig last night. Archer Prewitt and then Sam Prekop & Archer Prewitt literally put me to sleep, but they were very pretty lullabies. The Earlies were swirlies, the first English jam band I've seen (more Beta Band than Grateful Dead, mind, and half the band play synths/electronics, but-). Stealing the show, though, in amazing ways, was Micah P. Hinson, whom I'd hardly heard of but who seems pretty well know. (He must have hit while I was gallavanting in Hungary or something.) Apparently the album's all cello and singer-songwriterness, but on stage last night with drums and bass he was a small beast, a creature with an electric guitar that snarled and hissed, that roared (cf. Greg Macpherson), singing songs like a far fiercer Dallas Good, shout-singing three lines, over and over, till I thought my heart might burst. I will look into his stuff and share.

CONTEST! Apparently we can give away some Rilo Kiley and Idiot Jed CDs. Five of each. I have no idea who Idiot Jed are and I think Rilo Kiley totally suck, but some people like 'em. One CD goes to whoever suggests the best contest idea - post your suggestions in the comments.

Have a lovely weekend! (Especially the folks like me for whom it's a long one!)