Archives : all posts by Sean

The Dinner Ladies - "Muscle in the Bud". For those of you nursing your July 4 hangovers, here's the finest song the Dinner Ladies ever recorded. Originally from a 1987 7", I first heard it on a Hannibal comp in the mid-90s - it became an instant favourite round the house, a sprightly, catchy tune for mornings-after. Never has it been so thoroughly entertaining to hear about the perils of grape & grain: a ukelele strum, bass bounce, background coos, finger snaps and, indeed, a feisty oh-my-yes whistle solo.

Keb' Mo' - "Every Morning". Another track for the monday a.m. Keb' Mo's acoustic blues comes across without pretense, without facade: it's a steel guitar with things to say, a dawn voice that wishes to sing along. "It may be winter / it may be fall / I might have plenty / or nothing at all / but baby I mean it / whenever you call." The chime of strings, the incessant bass pad, the simple skycrossing sentiment. From his Robert Johnson-tinged, self-titled debut. (Another find by the magnificent Tuwa.) [buy]

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Stereogum's been doing very fine things lately, and not just with regard to Britney.

Oh - and again, thanks for all the songs. Wonderful, wonderful finds - if I haven't yet written you back, I will soon. Regardless, things have been so good that I'm excited to hear more. If you're in possession of The Greatest Song Ever, and it's something most people (including me) likely haven't heard, I beg you - send it my way. Thank-you!

A day of food, drink and good company; strangers walking by, emblazoned with the national flag. It's strange to see a city so polite as Ottawa overrun with loud, drunken revellers. But also fun.

My feet are sore. My eyes are heavy. My Grados are slung over my head. I'm feeling happy but quiet.

Thanks so much to those who have been sending me music. Please, more is welcome. So many wonderful things - and as I work my way through it, I will absolutely be sharing a lot of it. We start tonight. Such disparate and wise tastes.

The Mountain Goats - "Song for God". An unreleased song that you can also get from Tiny Telephone, but which came to me via my friend Monica. This is from John Darnielle's boombox days. Simpler times. While the two studio albums have given his songs a fine glass sheen, earlier recordings like this one let his plain words resound longer. Spare lyrics, the flow of voice and breath, the feeling of small confessions and large truths. The acoustic guitar sketches a surprisingly detailed landscape - long, straight lines, the dusty dots of dead-end streets. The song dodges the revelation it contains, rides around it as if afraid to stare plainly, silent in its devotions until the very last lines.

Taj Mahal w/ Toumani Diabate and Lasana Diabate - "Queen Bee". Courtesy of Tuwa comes the most beautiful thing I've heard all week, the most soothing thing I can imagine. Moments like this, sitting here, the music darkblue and brightgold in my ears, words fail me. How to say what I feel, what I hear? The dance of kora and guitar, the twine of blues and Mali soul, the dusty yearning of Taj Mahal's voice and the lightrising yearning of Lasana Diabate's. I feel like watching the stars fade into babyblue, like watching the sun rise and the trees sway. I feel like washing in clear water, like learning how the birds fly. I feel like knowing love - not falling into or out of, but simply living it, breathing it, being rocked by it. I feel alive, whole, like the richest man in the world. [buy (i certainly will)]

Happy Canada Day, Canada. Here's to fine contemporary Canadian music - to (in no order whatsoever) Julie Doiron, Kid Koala, Destroyer, the Tragically Hip, the Arcade Fire, Les Mouches, The Stills, Cian Ethrie, the Parka 3, the Diskettes, Broken Social Scene, the Weakerthans, the Unicorns, P:ano, the New Pornographers, the Dears, Sarah Harmer, Kardinal Offishall, Veda Hille, Sloan, Oh Susanna, Jim Bryson, Aaron Booth, Akufen, Greg Macpherson, Boy, the Hidden Cameras, Royal City, Ron Sexsmith, Manitoba, Leslie Feist, Danny Michel, Nathan Lawr, Avril Lavigne, Amon Tobin, Buck 65, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Kepler, the Constantines, Hayden, the Deadly Snakes, Frog Eyes, Be Good Tanyas, the Sadies, the Weekend, Do Make Say Think, Wolf Parade, Barenaked Ladies, and, well, the countless artists I'm forgetting.

Furthermore, in honour of Canada Day, here are two new tracks with American rapper MF Doom.

Viktor Vaughn ft. Kool Keith - "Doper Skiller". From the upcoming Viktor Vaughn album, VV2: Venomous Villain. It's a great track, a light press of synths and skyscraper rhythms - drums and electronic elevator groans. Kool Keith cameos with a surprising single-mindedness, wrapping things up in time for some fine scratching. It's a more curlecued production than we've seen from MF Doom in a little bit. It covers more territory, a sort of chorus-verse-verse-chorus, rather than just circling the same patch of asphalt. I love Doom's grim, rich flow, the solid way with which he releases rhymes. Keith's a fine, cocky contrast.

Zero 7 ft. MF Doom - "Somersault (Danger Mouse remix)". "Sommy- summer- somersault." Doom doses the whispery Zero 7 track with a different sort of thoughtfulness. The words of the rap flow out like carved, wooden figures - each has been handled, considered, perfected. While Zero 7 is content for summer to be vanilla and pink with sighs, MF Doom tells a more detailed, ink-sketch tale. "Ah, the stench of first love / the quench of the thirst made it worse / to need a burst of upper-thrust motion / trust / devotion / lust is like the sand where the beach meets the ocean." Danger Mouse's production isn't far from the song's original aesthetic - acoustic guitar, rhodes, handclaps. But that's fine because it's a sound for July, for drops of sweat and cool air on hot skin.

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Please keep droploading me great songs; the Gramophone-bank is running a lil' low. Thanks to all those who have zapped me things so far!

Veda Hille - "Plants". A track by the BC songwriter, from 2001's Field Study. The piano rolls across the song like wind over long grass, deep till Hille's voice leaps up, a light bright chorus of apples and wild childhood. Words play on her tongue - "fruits roots and berries" - a touch of darkness (poison? turkish delight?) lurking in the lilting ends of phrases. Like a little prairie whirlwind. [buy]

Shostakovich - String Quartet No. 8 in C Minor, 3rd Movement, as performed by the Brodsky Quartet. A plucky line of strings, stretched out till it's vibrating, zagging, trying to point in every direction. One of Julian's favourite pieces of music, I like the way the romantic theme sails in at the two minute mark, drifting idly while the rest of the instruments brood in the background. Then they take to the air and shriek, playing with their prey, piercing it with black eyes, transfixing it as they grin. They mock the simple beauty from before, reduce it to nothing, play with it till it's forgotten in the grey evening sky. [buy]

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Heard a good song lately? Something special that hasn't received the attention it deserves? Please - dropload it to me (sean@tangmonkey.com). Thank-you!

The Arcade Fire w/ Les Mouches - Montreal 27/6/04

In a drab, low-ceilinged room at a Montreal Spanish Community Centre, two bands made noise, Sunday night. The crowd was strangely quiet; attentive. Maybe we were nervous about the federal election that was looming the next day. More likely we were nervous about the return of the city's brightest, bravest band. A band that had been away for months, sequestered in the Hotel 2 Tango recording an album, then away on tour with The Unicorns.

Reunions are scary. Rejoining friends after a year away, I always wonder whether we'll be able to slip into the same play of laugh and gaze and nod. I wonder if we'll hear each-other's voices in the same way, or if we'll have forgotten how to be together. I wonder if the eyeglint will have faded.

So we stood in that dingy room, an enormous outdoors through the door behind us, and we hoped. The Arcade Fire climbed onto the stage and played a concert with that great familiar music, the swell of life we remembered from dawns and deaths and break-ups and break-downs - and from shows prior. And we dared not jinx this thing we were hearing. We dared not. So we cheered and we hollered and then we quietly waited for the next bolt of music.

The whole thing started with Les Mouches.

Three men and a woman in shadow - acoustic guitar/vocals, electric, drums, and steph comilang crouched over an overhead projector, playing with slides. Throughout their set, her cut-outs and gels flowed over the musicians: an analog disco-ball, a snip-'n-paste dream. There were quiet windings of acoustic guitar, the hesitant play of electric, and then out of the dark a yelp, and Rob Gordon's brilliant drum spalashes, accelerating and breaking and wild.

Les Mouches played the music of messy, bodily human life: the tender kiss, the ache of throat, the sores on face, the hurtling into black. Love came shuddering suddenly out, gulped and tumbled away. Owen Pallett's vocals are important only as a gentle noise - any perceived lyrics are needlessly distracting. We want to hear that stumbling human sound and then the breaking-open of beauty. We're ever lurching toward death, and then back out into sunlight. Difficult, hypnotic music.

Les Mouches - "What We Know As Buildings Have Always Been Canyons". From the band's superb new LP, You're Worth More To Me Than 1000 Christians. It's by far a better record than their EP: it's confusing and lovely and - if you let it, - moving. It's difficult and it bends in the wrong places. "What We Know As Buildings" lets the world explode and then come to order and then explode again. Beautiful peace is swallowed up by its own hidden shudders. The quiet lull of guitar and the greyblack crack of a wheezing living drumkit. Ghosts sliding into bodies. [buy]

Then, indeed, The Arcade Fire took the stage. They wore their army uniforms, and smiles. Win was taller, it seemed; longer. Howard walked more comfortably in his shoes. Tim was steadier - confident and thoughtful. Richard even freer with his feeling.

And Regine's eyes glittered.

They have an album to be released on September 14th on Merge. They have a 7" with one of their finest new songs, "Neighborhood #1 (Tunnels)," and a b-side by their late grandfather (see below). And when they played their dark, wise, dancing rock'n'roll, everything blazed. The words are vivid, the high-hats are hit, the band roars melodies like a furious new wave band that spent six months at Motown training camp. They care - good lord do they care! They care about the songs they sing, the things they play, but more than that they care about us. And they demand that we care, as well.

The Arcade Fire's first EP is full of gaiety. It's dusty and light and giddy. It's jubilant and it asks us to celebrate - laugh and dance and celebrate and learn to live.

But that's old hat, now. The Flaming Lips taught us that lesson. And The Polyphonic Spree. Even, arguably, the Fiery Furnaces and LCD Soundsystem.

So the Arcade Fire changed their tack. The wheeled out the big drums. And what they are now is bigger, fiercer - they show their teeth. "We told you to live," they seem to say, "but off of the dancefloor, outside of your little clubs, you didn't. You didn't learn." So no more pretty pop songs. Now the beauty is deeper, longer, higher. It's the beauty of a thunderclap, an avalanche, of the earth breaking under your feet. No more do they cajole you: they shake, they threaten, they yell, they plead. "WAKE UP." Parents, children, siblings, lovers, lonelies, human fucking beings - WAKE.

They sing of gripping lightning bolts, of tunnelling through walls of snow. Guitar and bass saw through our ears, synths build an ominous front, the bass-drum pounds at our skeletons and the high-hat tugs at our feet. And yet always a serious loveliness that can zip of of the sky, a streak of meteor - a slow sad song from Regine (breakmyheart), the grinding folk waltz, the hair that blows off of your face as they howl the "ohs" of "Wake Up." Les Mouches' Owen (also of the Hidden Cameras) assisted with violin; Dan from Wolf Parade helped open the set; they almost played a Unicorns medley, but didn't.

I'm not going to post the new song from the 7" - better that I wait for the CD-quality release, that we give things full credit. You have no idea how pleased I was to hear that the album will be released prior to September 23rd, the day I leave for Europe. I was terrified of flying away over the ocean, all copies of the album trapped on this forsaken continent. I almost hugged Tim when he told me.

That said, however, here is something from the archives. Brad expressed an interest, I'm very partial, and what with the Django post last week, it seems completely suitable.

The Arcade Fire - "Brazil" [live 16/05/02]. A moonlit take on the Barroso classic, with strangely broken-hearted vocals by Win Butler and the light starry sound of Regine Chassagne on rhodes. The departed Dane Mills on drums. There's a glow that falls over me, nostalgia and bittersweet memories. (Recorded at a loft at 1619 William St., in Montreal.)

Alvino Rey Orchestra - "My Buddy". And finally, here is the absolutely wonderful, charming track that comes as the b-side of the Arcade Fire's new single. Originally from a 1940 radio recording, it's Alvino Rey - late grandfather of Win and late father of the pedal steel guitar. "My Buddy" opens with the loving and summery strum of guitar. There are brief swells of horns, like a lovesick one-sided conversation. Then, like a weary robot, a voice comes through the guitar - "Nights are long since you went away / I dream about you all through the day / my buddy". It's sad and warm at once, it's playful and light, and even - perhaps - quietly devastating. [buy]

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enough of that blather, eh?

i applaud tonight's canadian election results! based on polling and pessimism, i made a bet with my friend Jason, insisting that the Conservatives would win at least 100 seats. and it's the happiest bet i've ever lost. the liberals chastened and intact, but more importantly - a doubling of the NDP's last showing, and a loud voice in the next parliament. hooray hooray!

Keith from TTIKTDA has launched an utterly fabulous new project, Memos to Ourselves, a free-for-all audioblog that hopes to collect song, sound and nonsense from across the world. As soon as I work out the Canadian long-distance thing, I'll be contributing; you should too. Wonderful!

I'm heading up to Montreal tonight to see The Arcade Fire and may not be back till late, so as not to disappoint the Monday mornin' visitors, I'm submitting this very early. Cheers.

The Organ - "Brother". The opening song from The Organ's new LP, "Brother" is like a classic cut of 80s pop: Cure guitars and the sharp line of Katie Sketch's vocals. It's a sour and melancholy mix; guitars gnash, drums smash, and the organ pushes toward a long cliff drop. If Joy Division were a quintet of Vancouver women, this the song they would record after a long drive through a Saskatchewan summer. If female tigers learned rock'n'roll, this is the music they would play for their long lost boyfriends. When Sketch sings the word "rapture," it's a small and classic moment, a strange and perfect beat. [buy]

Sam Phillips - "Reflecting Light". Richard passed on this track by Sam Phillips, a name I didn't know. Further research shows that she's been releasing albums for years, with guest spots by the likes of Elvis Costello. "Reflecting Light" is an elegant waltz, Phillips' deep voice rising and falling with a considered poise. She doesn't over-emote: things are kept plain, true, even slightly mysterious. The song's show emotion is relegated to the long, swooning notes of the backing string trio. There's a lovely push-and-pull between these aesthetics - the indulgent romanticism of the strings, the slow-and-casual hook of the vocal melody. [buy]

Django Reinhardt - "Brazil". My favourite standard, performed by the world's finest gypsy jazz guitarist. This is, I believe, from 1947 (first released on the hard-to-find Péche à la mouche), shortly after Django 'went electric'. While some critics feel that Reinhardt should have stuck to acoustic guitar, he invests his work here with a beautiful, lingering, longing tone, a nostalgic slightly bop flow of notes. The final repetition of the theme, abruptly cut off, is like the sadness of recovering the old postcard, the one with the long lost blue sea.

Cool Blue Halo - "Too Much Kathleen". Indie pop from Halifax, ca. 1996. Cool Blue Halo was part of the booming East Coast pop scene in the mid-90s - they performed alongside bands like the Superfriendz, Sloan, Eric's Trip. Then Sloan moved to Toronto, the Superfriendz and Eric's Trip broke up, and Cool Blue Halo vanished into the ether. This is a silly, ripe pop song, high harmonies and chiming electric guitars. The central pun is awful, certainly, but it's made charming by the smiling sincerity of the verses. He's crushing on the waitress, and who can blame him. Like the Fountains of Wayne, had the guys been Nova Scotia boys instead of New Jersey hooligans. (OOP, I think, but from Kangaroo, on No Records.)

Pop (All Love) has got a leaked Fiona Apple track called "Extraordinary Machine," from her on-hold upcoming record. It's extraordinary all right. The angst's fluttered away from Apple's voice, leaving the spaces in between words to do any gnashing. I hear bits of Chet Baker. And she's adopted a terrific chamber-pop backdrop. It's like Nellie McKay, or even Mushaboom-y Leslie Feist, only - to be honest, - I like it more than both.

Spoilt Victorian Child is the new mp3blog from Simon, the man (i think) behind cool remix/bootleg artist Empire State Human. One day in, it's messy rock'n'roll.

Apologies for awkward writing today; I'm quite exhausted. I promise better tomorrow.