Archives : all posts by Sean

Jim Sullivan - "Plain As Your Eyes Can See". The question of this song is whether Sullivan is faking his rollickingness. Yes, the music has some melancholy, but mostly it bounces, rollicks, romps. This is a little odd: he's singing brokenhearted lyrics; he's "doubtful that I'll ever be someone that you love". And yet: bounce, rollick, romp. Drums from the first summer's day.

Here is the question: Is Jim Sullivan sincere, gamely grappling with unrequited love? Or is he a passive-aggressive faker, the worst kind of valentine? Is this healthy emotional dealing or a bullshit, guilt-seeking woe-is-me?

Let's hope it's the former. Let's hope Sullivan's OK, processing, using this song to mark the mileage of his heart. And though there's still sorrow in him, in the ends of lines and the drift of that guitar solo, that he knows the right place to keep it; that he's kind to the person who refused him, that he understands the way all this sometimes goes.

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Follies - "Drag". This dusty concerto is made of guitars and drums, weary voices, ponging sounds like an elevator that's just come in. I say concerto because there is a stateliness to its ramshackling, a precision to the timbres. Musical notes arranged in a certain order, like colours on a spectrum. ROYGBIV. Never BOYGRIV, never VOYBRIG. Except maybe not never VOYBRIG. Maybe there is a principle by which VOYBRIG is the order of the spectrum. VOYBRIG, BOYGRIV or even the greatest anagram, BY VIGOR. One day, perhaps, we will look at a rainbow and see it ordered BY VIGOR, blue to red. And so this song: musical notes arranged in a certain order, according to Follies' one particular logic, that autumn day they made "Drag" a solid, fading thing that can never be undone. [bandcamp]

Σtella - "Picking Words". The young librarian overestimates her own importance. It is a regal profession, a crucial human achievement - but all the same, Jennifer, you are not yet a pillar of learnéd society. Watch her as she dances through the stacks, putting books away. Watch her as she spins in the reference-desk office-chair, giddy on indexing. Listen to the click of her flats on the library's old tile. Listen to the flick of eyelashes over owlish eyes. The young librarian imagines herself as the treasured heart of a John Hughes film. She imagines herself as the object of your affection. She is named Jennifer, it says so on her nametag, never forget. [Σtella is Greek. / buy]

Astral Swans - "Park Street". There is a herd of lean animals. Lean and clever, given to acts of virtuousness and virtuosity, to sudden darting runs. Their owner has given up on trying to keep them in their pen. The fences are for show, the gate is unlocked. The lean herd will exit whenever they wish to. Later, the herd moves to Park Street. They've found a small house, a cottage, with two rickety floors and a tall porch. There are two birches in the front yard, a mulberry bush, a feral cat. The herd remains lean, clever, virtuous and virtuosic. They remain untamed, relentless, free. But they do begin to fight. Someone sleeps with someone, then an argument, light switches flicked on in the middle of the night. Two messy conversations on the porch. The herd has freedom and limitless power. The herd is lean and clever. But eventually the gang will splinter, half of them trotting away between the birch and the mulberry bush, half of them not even saying goodbye. [buy]

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La Baracande - "Tout en me promenant". Twice this week I have found myself using the word obliterate, and before then I don't know that I had ever used it. Where did obliterate come from? Why has it stumbled into my random-access memory? I have tried to work out if I heard it in a movie, read it in a book. But honestly I don't know. Sometimes a word is like a forgotten bird that appears in the sky after a long winter. There you are, yes of course, I didn't realize you were away. Obliterate like a Canada goose sitting black and white on my lawn.

Since I have been obliterating things lately I have been thinking about the idea of it: obliteration, wipeout, blinding annihilation. Sometimes obliteration is a razing from the earth, sometimes a mere forgetting. But obliteration is also a soldiering on. There is an obliteration of doubt, of hesitation: the straight line that does not deviate, the faith that never wavers. I obliterated a day, the other day, plunging into the city amid the city's March blizzard - marching, head down, into everything. I obliterated dessert. I obliterated my taxes.

The act of obliteration is a source of infinite power. For a moment you are feeble, doubting; then you decide you will not doubt, you will not hone or temper - you will simply do, charging forward. Roaring, victorious obliteration. If your spirit is a song then your spirit is no longer a woman's asking voice, a searching acoustic guitar, a fragile violin. It is the thunder of electric guitar. No, better still: the obliterating din of bagpipe, hurdy gurdy, fiddle and bumblebee box. "Tout en me promenant" obliterates utterly. It is a siege weapon, a steam-train, a man snapping your heart in half. It is a new age, undoing and remaking the old. You cannot win, you cannot stand in its way, you lose, you lose, you lose. You are undone.

Or else you are a part of it.

Those are the two choices: obliterated or obliterator. Victim or destroyer. When the drone is in the air you must make your choice, quickly, before the roles get set. If you hear La Baracande beginning, rouse yourself, decide, form or put away your fists.

[from a free compilation of music from France's La Nòvia collective]

(photo via The Art Counsel)

Wishbone - "Over and Over". Would that we had spells. Would that we did. One of the great sorrows of my life, maybe the sorrow that ushered me out of childhood, was the comprehension that we do not. There are no spells, there never have been. Just deliberate syllables, thrown bones, without effect. Just empty hocus pocus. Would that we had spells. On a morning like this I could slide up to someone and ask for a spell; ask for magic just as I'd ask for the time, for a tissue, spare some change. Every person's spell would be different. Some spells rough as ripped concrete, others slick and rainbow as oilspots. Some float, some sink. Plunge your heartsick life into a perfect spell, dip your calloused hands. Bare your heart, unclenched. Take a deep breath, or five breaths; maybe five breaths make a spell. Would that we had spells. Then, any action might be a ritual. Every move could be a rite. The bar could be an altar, each of your friends high priests. Your home could be a cauldron.

This song - this one here - hear it as a hex. A kind hex with effect.

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(image by Okamoto Kiichi, via A London Salmagundi and 50 Watts.)