Archives : all posts by Sean

Maher Shalal Hash Baz are an enigma. Their name is hebrew. It means "the spoil speeds, the prey hastens." It was the name of the prophet Isaiah's son, as ordered by God.

The band, meanwhile, is Japanese, but inspired by Scotland. Their website is extremely opaque, filled with images of frontman Tori Kudo's ceramic work, and some errant pages with a handful of links. Blues du Jour was released by Domino in November, 2003, and it seems to have received very little press. Which isn't really surprising. I imagine it's difficult to write a fluff piece about a band who come out somewhere between Joao Gilberto, Belle & Sebastian, and Volapuk. I'm having the same trouble (and it doesn't help that it's four o'clock in the morning.) Maher Shalal Hash Baz do breezy tracks with clumsy singing, awkward english and the occasional sentence in Japanese. Bossanova and indie pop, wacky gypsy folk stirred through with a whinsome melancholy. They're as strange as moomins, but not as finnish. Blues du Jour isn't exactly perfect, but I love it all the same. I really do. (It's got forty-one tracks! I hear their previous one had eighty-three! My gosh!)

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - "Post Office". A little bossa, modest and small-smiling, acoustic guitars and sunnygold trumpets. It's a cloud that bops along the sky, hopping over church-steeples and making faces at the bushes. It's perhaps the wimpiest thing I've ever heard, but fuck you - wimpy is great. I want to be a wimpy cloud, with wimpy friends - just so long as there's music like this, for tea-shoppes and summer showers, for abashed or unrequited lovers.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - "For A Recorder and a Euphonium". MSHB at their most twee and sedate. The title pretty much sums it up, except that it leaves out the trombone (which is a pretty egregious oversight). There's a tambourine, too, and an acoustic guitar. But mostly it's a winding one minute of instrumental calm, a soundtrack for a village playground, which would feel like 'interlude music' if half of Blues du Jour wasn't made up of just such pretty nothings.

Maher Shalal Hash Baz - "Peter Said". This is almost a proper pop song, with electric guitars that jump in, heartfelt exuberance, and a dance-beat for nice-and-friendly dancing. Of course, that only lasts for about 30 seconds - but in a 78 second track, that's not so bad. What I appreciate is the way that it's such a gift: something sweet and small that will soon pass, certainly, but that's beautifully alive while it's playing. Such joys are fleeting, but lovely (and maybe somehow sad) while they last.

Et pour ceux parmi vous qui connaissent le francais, je répête la recommendation de largehearted boy: il y a d'excellentes petites choses à indiepoprock.net.

(oh yes - you must visit today's tangmonkey link-o-the-day: Subservient Chicken. It's an ad for burger king, but listen to me: it's better than anything you thought possible.)

to take a page from josh blog (which seems to be back)... some ideas on film, easily applied to the indie (mentalist, bourgeois) / pop (sensualist, working-class) "war". (see comments in the 'float on' thread.)

"What concerns me is how ... women, children, whoever, are being asked to dael with their previous enjoyment of [popular movies] - a pleasure shared wtih family, friends and their general social and cultural environment. It seems that they are being left little room for any response other than feeling stupid, or despising those who are still enjoying these 'perverse' pleasures. ... Rather than seeing the pleasures of 'the masses' as perverse, perhaps we should acknowledge that it is the bourgeois 'will to truth' that is perverse in its desire for knowledge, certainty and mastery. ... The crusade to save the masses from the ideology that dupes them can obscure the real social significance of their lpeasures and, at the same time, blind us to the perversity of radical intellectual pleasures. The alternative is not a populist defense of Hollywood, but a reassessment of what is involved in watching films. This becomes part of the experience of oppression, pain and desire. Watching a Hollywood movie is not simply an escape from drudgery into dreaming: it is a place of desperate dreaming, of hope for transformation." -- Valerie Walkerdine, "Video Relpay: Families Films and Fantasy."

!!! - "Dear Can". I like the dance-punk, I really do. It makes me want to dance. But while I worship the ground DFA walks on, !!!'s never really been my cup of tea. There just isn't enough whimsy, or restraint, or maybe there's too much grease. "Dear Can," however, is something else. It's the second song from the band's forthcoming Louden Up Now, and it's dance-punk with whiskey in the jar. Bassline, high-hats and jumbling, chugging guitars, certainly, but also a dose of eyebrowed rage, swearing at the top of lungs. It's a stretch to say it sounds like Limp Bizkit hanging out with the Rapture, but I don't think it's far off to imagine a stomping, smoky mosh-pit with a flashing, rainbow disco floor. And people in sunglasses. (I smile when the chorus comes back at around the five minute mark. At that point that anger's altogether silly, a gratuitous Furnaceface yell that can't (and doesn't want to) undermine the two minutes of crisp, funky plasticene beats that preceded it. But the punks gotta have the last word. [And it's even more silly because he's yelling "like i give a fuck!", which is delightfully contradictory.])

The Lucksmiths - "Self Preservation". A complete change from the above, here's one of my most favourite indie pop songs of all time: jangly guitars, a circumambulating bassline, cool horns to downplay the neat-and-clever lyrics. If my imagination had its way, Australia wouldn't have beaches and sunbathers, just kids like this (and kangaroos, too), all dressed in cardigans and singing along with carefree pink lips. Oz could be a twee utopia, with ee cummings anthologies on every bench, bright blue skies that only rain when you feel like a few minutes of drizzly melancholia. This is from the group's absolutely fantastic Why Doesn't That Surprise Me?, which is like a picnic at the open-air library.

Jeff at the Architectural Dance Society had some interesting thoughts on the college music poll I mentioned last week. I think he makes some cogent points on what surveys like this (if they're true, more generally) should indicate to the music industry. As people scramble to explain the (successive) 10% drop in record sales over the past three years, particularly in the wake of that 'downloads don't damage sales' paper, questions like this are really pertinent: why [are] so many college students ... apparently more fulfilled digging through their parents' record collections (or their grandparents' forchrissakes) than buying new music (even if it's new old-music music)?

If you liked the Nickelback comparison song from Monday, you may enjoy the same treatment as applied (rather more clumsily) to Linkin Park.

Jeremy Steig - "Howling for Judy". Frenetic, stricken jazz with Steig's shrieking, howling flute. The calm, steady swiftness that opens the track is soon overtaken with a resolute wildness, a fierce-eyed fervour. Soon he's almost screaming into the instrument, pushing it further and further, driving it off the edge with drums and bass in tow. It's a far better track than the one that made it famous - thanks to the Beastie Boys' "Sure Shot," "Howling for Judy" is instantly recognizable, a feverish, familiar whistle. (many thanks to pog smuggler for passing it my way.)

The Bran Flakes - "Good Times a Goo Goo". 'Sonic scavengers' the Bran Flakes have put together a playful, pogo-hopping remix of the Muppets' "Movin' Right Along," and it sounds like a tasty pizza topping. The repetition and beats carry the listener over into an alternate universe where Kermit's a disco DJ king and banjos are a cliche of early 90s dance-pop. Plunderphonics for the kids who couldn't care less about its politics. Much more to download from the Bran Flakes available here (Thanks to Tuwa for this one!)

A very happy Passover (and a premature merry Easter) to all who are a-celebrating, this week.

Happy Monday!

Neva Dinova - "Poison". From Neva Dinova's split EP with Bright Eyes, here's a charming three-minutes-forty of poppy, sleepy alt.country. Xylophone and mandolin tiptoe over a fog of feedback and pedal steel. The singer's got a drawling voice I find it very hard not to like, especially with such a simple and pure melody, such long strips of blue. M. Ward at a sleepover with Wilco, and there are lights hung up in the trees.

Garmarna - "Greenest Branch (Viridissima Virga)". Sweden's Garmarna presents a skittering, minty interpretation of Hildegard Von Bingen's medieval lyric. Emma Hardelin's vocals are light but forceful; they push forward like a cold wind over the Atlantic, even as nordic strings saw, synthesizers blend, and a glitchy beat starts, stops, and starts anew. It's a rave for elves, music for the cyber-fjords (i can't believe i just wrote that).

William Hung - "I Believe I Can Fly". An extra-special third song, today - it's the third because I didn't feel right posting this at the expense of something genuinely good. No, this is for those who relish the truly terrible - taken from William Hung's new single, it's the American Idol reject in all his glory, raping and pillaging the R. Kelly original with shameless abandon. It keeps getting worse and worse, like an endless dinner with in-laws, where dinner-guest after dinner-guest admits responsibility for one genocide or another. It leaves me breathless, flabbergasted, awe-struck. In short, it's beautiful.

You owe it to yourself to download the astonishingly yay "Merengue," over at tofu hut. Franco and OK Jazz seem to have bottled Sunday morning fun, and this is just about the only thing that got me through the daylight savings time-change. (Obviously, you should be reading Tofu Hut every single day.)

Someone named Bumble has made a wonderful, silly track combining Nickelback's "Someday" and "How You Remind Me". He calls it "How You Remind Me of Someday" and it's not a mash-up or anything hip like that. No, Bumble's simply put "Someday" in one channel and "HYRM" in the other, made a few little edits, and revealed to us all the ridiculous (and almost masterful) symmetry of the two songs. Yes, if you ever had the inkling that Nickelback's songs "sound the same," here's your proof. And it's catchy.

Hunter pointed me to Bishop Allen, the very finest Brooklyn band that I had (almost) never heard of. "Little Black Ache" (previously seen at Fingertips) and "Busted Heart" are out-fucking-standing pieces of guitar pop, brave and catchy and good good good.

Sincere thanks to all those who followed-through on my request for some new music. Some of the stuff that's been recommended is truly fantastic, and I'll be putting up some of these tracks later this week. I'm still looking, however, so if you think there's a song (or band) I simply need to hear, I'd appreciate it (a lot!) if you emailed me about it, or droploaded me a file. (An extra special thanks to Hunter, Kieran, quasimodern, Dave, Tuwa and, uh, Pog Smuggler.)

From what I understand, Gomez come out with a new album in May. I watched the video for the new single, and I wasn't impressed. It's dreadfully tragic to me that a band which was once my favourite in the world has, in a matter of five years, slid down my list into near irrelevance. In Our Gun was such a woeful, hollow muddle - Gomez with the soul bleached out, "swamp-rock furnished at IKEA". The band, famous (and maligned) in Britain, is in North America the subject of a small, devoted fanbase, and an amorphous blot of jam-band aficionados who think that Gomez fits the mold. I remember how upset I was when I heard that alot of British indie fans loathed Gomez, mostly because the members of the group look too college-reared and fresh-faced to legitimize their (once-) boggy, weird-o backporch sound. Now, however, I'm beset by a similar affliction: it's hard to like Gomez because their American fans are so annoying. That, of course, and the fact that they're recording forced, faux, vanilla music.

But anyway - Gomez's first two albums, Bring It On and Liquid Skin, are masterpieces of texture. Their sound takes all of these muddy genres - blues, soul, classic rock, surf, 60s pop - and sublimates them into something new, strange, fresh. Beck staying over with the Grateful Dead, Tom Waits in the hot-tub. I don't think the band was ever genuinely hip, but it really doesn't matter: not with the richness of atmosphere on "Hangover," the playful scifi tumble of "Whippin' Piccadilly". The albums are brilliant and smoky; they sound so thick that they almost feel wise.

Gomez - "Get Miles". The first track from Gomez's first album, Bring It On. A haze of guitar, the trot-along-the-docks percussion, and then Ben Ottwell's fine, throaty voice. Some people have criticized this for its insincerity, the way the listener doesn't believe Ottwell's assertion that he "don't get no peace." These criticisms are fair, but they miss the point. Ottwell's not singing the blues in the same way as Howlin Wolf or Leadbelly might. He's not trying to roar out his sorrows, to croon them into the fields. No - "Get Miles" is a mantra, an incantation, an affirmation of the narrator's position and (more importantly) the way to escape it. It's not someone looking for sympathy, it's the statement and restatement of the State of the Person, and what he must/should/longs to do. It's a drone, it's self actualization, it's will. "I love this city, man / but this city's killing me." Remember this, he's telling himself. "Gonna leave this city, man / gonna head out towards the sea." The guitars - feedback-filled, glittering - are the coughs of smoke that billow to other side of this wet, walking narrator, who is trying to pull and push his life together, out of the damp, mixed-up pieces.

(More than that, the song is sad - it's almost pathetic - because for all this singing, for all this bullshit, the narrator hasn't yet left: he's still trying.)

Gomez - "Shot Shot [Folk Shot]". The only good song on Gomez's latest album was "Shot Shot," a joyous, catchy, horn-filled riot. It has a theremin, saxophones, a chorus that sparkles more than anything you would expect. What we have here is something altogether different. A remix from the "Shot Shot" single, "Folk Shot" decelerates the original pop song, grinds it down to a simple voice and acoustic guitar, but then unleashes this dreadful volley of noise, a flattening gale. When the chorus still breaks through the stormclouds, fleet and almost beautiful, it's like an apple falling backwards, a glass filling back up, an apocalypse being undone. This is a golem falling in love, a giant learning to sing.

I'm interested in hearing some new sounds, off the beaten path. If anyone knows of any terrific tunes that I likely wouldn't have heard, and thinks they're worthy of sharing, drop me a note (or just dropload me the file)! Anything is cool - from bluegrass to indie to dance to folk to world music. Thank-you!

Julian's taking a class at McGill where the professor asked the 200 students to submit their favourite bands, which he collected and compiled into a global ranking.

01. Dave Matthews Band 02. The Beatles 03. Led Zeppelin 04. Bob Marley 05. Pink Floyd 06. U2 07. Bob Dylan 08. OutKast 09. Radiohead 10. Ben Harper 11. Rolling Stones 12. Counting Crows 13. Grateful Dead 14. Neil Young 15. Simon and Garfunkel

16. The Tragically Hip 17. Aerosmith 18. David Bowie 19. The Doors 20. Jimi Hendrix 21. Madonna 22. John Mayer 23. Sarah McLachlan 24. Phish 25. The Who 26. Michael Jackson 27. Louis Armstrong 28. Beastie Boys 29. The Band 30. CCR

This is both really and not-at-all interesting. I mean, it's hilariously accurate to the cliche. The jam bands are there, the stoner bands, and a very healthy dose of the rock canon. No sign of the contemporary Top 40, outside of heart-on-sleeve troubadours like Mayer and McLachlan, and OutKast. OutKast's presence is actually very interesting - it suggests that the Pazz & Jop tokenism thing is slightly more complicated than (rockist/racist/closedminded) critics trying to seem rounded. I doubt these students would have felt compelled to have 'at least one' hip-hop record on their list of "favourite bands." More likely, they genuinely engaged with Speakerboxxx/Love Below, in a way that they haven't with most other hip-hop albums. (I'm assuming that Dre and Big Boi wouldn't have made the list a year ago.) Maybe it's because S/TLB is more 'conscious' (or proggier?) than the (presumably mainstream) rap these white kids have been exposed to. (The absence of indie rock on the list is as telling as the absence of undie rap.) It's strange, though, to see that OutKast isn't just the hip-hop group for indie fuxxxors who dig the Flaming Lips - it's the group of choice for the chilled-out suburbanites who smoke fatties and listen to Zeppelin.

Also interesting: Radiohead below U2!

In other indie rocker news, the most-commented-upon thread on Said the Gramophone is my post on Modest Mouse's "Float On". Not because I said anything interesting, but because google likes it. The thread is a fascinating excursion into the indie ideology war - it's all right here in stone-engraved caps:

"I pray to the gods of indie rock that the rest of the cd has some merit and this is just the crappy radio single epic forced them to produce."

"a frat boy sing along chorus that is not becoming to a talented band like modest mouse ... now they are using pop chord progressions. [This is meant as an insult. --ed.]"

Then there's the indie kids praising Thrice/Dashboard and the other indie kids attacking Bright Eyes/Thursday. It's a bloodbath, really. But beyond all this - there's also a lot of really intelligent comments, of people who are listening to their instincts and understand that the politics/social hierarchy is stupid: what matters is the music, not who's listening. Whether it's "sold out" or not, is it any good?

The Beatles - "Norwegian Wood" [take 2]. Because the mainstream rules. (One day I'll post a favourite Dave Matthews tune.) An alternate take from The Beatles' Rubber Soul recordings of "Norwegian Wood/This Bird Has Flown". "Norwegian Wood" is one of my very favourite Beatles tracks, playful and wry and ultimately black-hearted. This version is fascinating, almost terrifying. All the life has been stripped away, all the humanity. The sitar's been sedated, the drums and bass are grey and lumbering. John and Paul's vocals, mischievous in the final recording, have been turned ominous and uncaring, nearly psychopathic. The ambiguous final lines are no longer solemn-but-grinning; now, they're almost threatening. Who let this man into their house? Didn't they see the white of his teeth? The mud in his eye sockets? The zombie's hands? It's a nightmare song.

Sloan - "Everything You've Done Wrong". There was a time when maybe, just maybe, Sloan would have made the college kids' top-30 (in Canada, at least). Now, however, they continue their slow slide into irrelevance. Nevertheless, I can remember the first morning I heard them, the first day I read their name. I had awoken early before school, had tramped downstairs to watch the tube before I had to catch the bus. And there on MuchMusic was this casual, earnest pop jewel - a magnificent melody, blushing vocals, horns and handclaps and a bassline like my stammering silly heart. "Sloan," I noted at the end of the video. "Who?" I wasn't one to follow contemporary radio music, especially not Haligonian pop bands. But so began my two weeks of Sloan hunting, waking up at dawn, waiting downstairs by the TV, and hoping (dreaming!) of maybe hearing "Everything You've Done Wrong". It was my white whale, my Loch Ness Monster, my first love affair. It's honestly one of the very finest pop songs that has ever been recorded - effortless, dazzling, catchy, perfect. Three minutes and twenty-seven seconds. Years later, I own two copies of the album and a half-dozen mix CDs with this track somewhere in the running order. As much as I may listen to other songs, "Everything You've Done Wrong" is always on repeat, over and over again, somewhere deep in the kindest, happiest parts of my brain.