Archives : all posts by Sean

D.R.A.M. - "Cha Cha". Let us consider the possibility that "to cha-cha" is to peform a particularly tricky move on Nintendo's Super Mario 3. I present this song as evidence. Should the premise be borne out, we may soon discover that "swag" is a Minecraft building material and the "International Players Anthem" is a theme-song for UGK's Counter Strike clan. Admittedly, D.R.A.M. explicitly submits that the act of cha cha has something to do with nice folks in a Latin bar. In fact, "to cha cha" may mean to, uh, actually cha cha. Neither Mario nor Luigi appear in the video for the song. I'd posit that the plumbers are all implied. They are subtext. They are passing back and forth under the surface of this track, in bright green pipes. [buy]

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Rozi Plain - "Actually". Contrary to Emma's assertion, summer may never arrive. Winter may cozy up, decide to see what May and June are up to. August! Been a long time! These months will greet winter with feigned delight, clumsy fancy handshakes, this pit-of-stomach uh-oh at the newcomer. Everyone except the kids can see that winter is trouble. Everyone who has been around the block knows not to lend winter money for his meter. It's only the kids who are delighted by the season with ice in its eyes, snowflakes in its lashes. I'm having a picnic - you should come! someone tells winter. Winter says OK, winter says it'll be there. September and November exchange knowing glances. But already winter's canoodling with someone in the corner, blowing breezes in their ear, holding a glass of white wine in each chilled hand, making smalltalk about blizzards and curling, the best places to go cross-country skiing. Sometimes, when change is in the air, people get the wrong idea. The maybes they begin to imagine are the maybes that should never be permitted to occur. They listen to the high pipes of possibility, its young harmonies and new rhythms, they think: Worth a try! No, not worth a try. Don't renew winter's visa; don't offer to let it crash on your couch. If there's a perfect new song on the turntable, a song by a London musician called Rozi Plain, let it be a goodbye song not a hello anthem. Don't let winter get any ideas, allured as you may be. Listen to the sunbeams, the postcards from warmer places: they are sending you a message. They are frightened of the forecast. They don't want February friends. [video/more]

Mount Eerie - "Books". There is nothing in the library. There are rivers, rapids, peregrine falcons. There is no one in the library. There are pilgrims, wrestlers, weavers. There is no when in the library. There are epochs, coronations, widowings. There is nowhere in the library. There is moon, Byzantium, Miami Beach, Florida. [buy]

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José González - "Open Book". Ke'mar's grandfather used to tell him stories about the days before Bollo was a desert. Once, long ago, before even they had been born, Bollo was an island in the midst of a wide sea. Kwii's southern face was like the rest of the summer planet: sapphire water dotted with tiny islets, with darting finbacks and spiderweeds. Back then, Bollo wasn't a desert capital - it was known for its pearl-divers, for its sailboat engineers. And yet, over time, sand accumulates. There is a Bollonese proverb: Sand comes. It appears in the corners of rooms, at the bottoms of cliffs - bit by bit the islet of Bollo became an island, the island became a larger island, and the island became a small, complete continent. A landmass with its own dunes and oases, insects and mammals, scavenging birds. No one living remembered when Bollo was an island but they had all heard stories of it, passed down folktales of flying fish and shipwrecks.

Bollo's sand gave it a special status on Kwii. Most of the planet was suffused with balmy saltwater, tropical groves; desolation was rare, and it attracted a special class of tourist. For two generations, Ke'mar's family had managed a guesthouse for these wilderness-seekers. They provided clean beds, fresh breakfasts, sonic showers to wash the sand from clothes and skin. They played quiet music during the evening meal, as all the visitors sat on carpets and ate. They provided long bouts of silence - their guests almost always preferred silence - as the house filled and emptied with wanderers, dreamers, lonely-hearts. Some mornings, when Ke'mar was toasting the cakebreads, he would stare out into the atrium and wonder if any of these travellers had ever met his sister.

All of this is because of me. This was one of the songs Ke'mar sang with his family, at dinner, as they sat in a circle before the visitors. It was an old song, maybe a prayer, but whenever Ke'mar sang these words he thought of Ki'ax. He imagined her singing this line, back when he was barely old enough to read. Did she hear it as reproach? As regret? Was she singing this line, one day, when she decided to leave Bollo?

She was out there somewhere, in the rainforests of Lama or Su, or off-planet, a trader on the autumn world. She was out there somewhere, miles or light-years from the desert, and she still hid this hot song in her heart. [buy Vestiges & Claws / it's just wonderful]

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In case you didn't hear: I have begun writing a weekly music column for the Globe & Mail. Read the first one here (and see if you can find my mortifying typo :( ).

(Image is Robert Frank's Untitled (Children with Sparklers in Provincetown), from 1958. Thank you Alex.)

The Libertines - "The Good Old Days". The hotel bartender handed Lionel his drink and Lionel took a sip and he thought to himself, What is this sour concoction? He had asked for a "fernet lemon" - it was listed on the blackboard cocktail menu - and now he received this tall glass full of minty white fluid. It tasted sour. It tasted like a concoction. Lionel didn't really want to finish it but he kept drinking all the same, because the prime minister was at the other end of the room and he didn't want to do anything conspicuously odd, didn't want to give the bloody PM another reason to shuffle his cabinet rolodex and exile Lionel to the ministry of fisheries, the department of sport. So Lionel finished the concoction and as he took these sour, bitter, thin swallows, an idea came into his head. The idea was: "I should resign." Not just that: "I should resign, quit politics, move to the country." The idea had come straight from the fernet lemon, he was certain of it, but now that it had lifted from his tongue to his upper palate to the vulnerable under-surface of his brain it was lodged there like a squatter. Every changing expression on Lionel's face, every chuckle and glance - the beat beneath was one of resign, resign, resign. The pub was wooden and golden, the company was eminent, power flowed from the men in suits to the chandeliers and through the mirrors on the walls, but Lionel had the ticking sense that his time was up, or ought to be up, and at the other end of a train journey was a refuge and a home. [thanks marco / buy]

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digitalanalogue - "NO. 99 ('I Love To Go A-Wandering')". To a certain degree, humans are programmable machines. Particular inputs result in particular outputs. Give me bubbles, I will hiccup. Give me bright light, I will blink. Give me joke, I will laugh. The Scottish group digitalanalogue has assembled this song from slow chords and sampled voices. There are echoes of Stars of the Lid, Jon Hopkins and the Happiness Project. There are lanterns raised and lowered. There are no jokes, bubbles or bright light. It makes me feel something - makes me, like it's throwing switches in my chest. I might resist or struggle, I might resent the manipulation, but there is no denying it: this music, deftly crafted, accomplishes an end. It is more end than means, I think; a treatment, or maybe an innoculation. [buy from Song, By Toad Records]

Stromae - "Formidable". As I enter my second year with this song, our relationship has changed. Lately I am even more struck by how stricken it is. I am inured to its beats and dance - yet Stromae's shaky voice, his bitter laugh, it is as they are changing with each repeat. The Belgian singer's heart is sinking. It is not the sadness that becomes more profound - it is the anger. More and more that's acrid in the song; more and more smoke that fills the derelict house. When some relationships end, they gradually fade away, blank to white. Others: what's left, the husk, it rots. Its shadow spreads across the floor. [buy this splendid song / view its splendid video]

Jazmine Sullivan - "Forever Don't Last". It was the same heartbreak as all the others but it was more acute. He found himself doing all the same things - staring out windows, listening to sad songs, banging his head on the door of his car's trunk - yet each act seemed more serious, more important, than it had before. He wept at commercials; wept more, harder, at the happy family and their dumb little dog. Sometimes the volume of his emotions felt almost too high to bear. Just sitting in traffic, a song on the radio, an acoustic guitar twanging - his vision darkened and his throat tightened, he thought he was going to die. The traffic lifted, the song ended, the darkness lifted... still part of him wondered if he had died back there, stopped during the sad song, suffering from the most acute heartbreak of his life. And he never enjoyed it, this feeling; usually, after the end of a relationship, he found a perverse enjoyment in the melancholy, cherished it almost. Here, now, there was no satisfaction in his sorrow - that it proved the seriousness of his feelings, that it entitled him to mope. His heart had broken and he just felt ruined, torn down the middle, grasping at what was left of himself, absolutely unable to sing. [buy]