Archives : all posts by Sean

It seems the rumours were true. sad sad sad day. i hope you find peace somewhere, elliott. me, i'll be honouring you by playing the happy songs, and not the other ones.

i bought an umbrella today, thanks to my dear mum. i think i must have spent twenty-five minutes trying to decide between fit-into-my-bag size, and large-sword-brella-sized-sturdy-thing. I opted for the latter: i'd just lose something that I have to carry around.

the only problem with having an umbrella is now I won't get to walk being rained on. that is, i'll probably opt not to. it remains to be seen whether this will cause a complete-and-utter shift in my musical taste. the days of sad may be over!!

or maybe not.

speaking of which, though - rumours suggest Elliott Smith committed suicide earlier today. If this is true - and I certainly hope it's not - it's terrible news. not only was Elliott Smith a beautiful, idiosyncratic talent - Figure 8 is a marvel, - who almost defines a genre on his lonesome, but the oscar-nominated artist was on top of his game. though the anticipated album has been heavily delayed, label-hopped, etc, the 7" released a couple of months ago (with two songs on it) counted among his best work. still, i'm leaning towards believing that this is empty rumour... still no kind of legitimation from official sources.

I picked up a cool Outkast promo photo thing at the laundromat, with photos of Andre and Big Boi in swanker suits than I will ever wear... it also happens to have a $3 off coupon for Speakerboxxx/Love Below at HMV. Between this and the $9.99 sale for the last Johnny Cash record, I feel like HMV may have won the marketing war and enticed me back into their hellish depths. I really hate that place: megacorporate rip-off artists... but a bargain is a bargain. (Unless someone wants to trade me a copy of Speakerboxxx? I've got the lovely Molasses double-record I'd be willing to part with... An old Counting Crows record? Between the Bridges? Hello?)

oh, about Outkast:

I bought shakeitlikeapolaroidpicture.com.

For the moment it simply points to tangmonkey (and sends email on to me), but if anyone has bright ideas for its use -- I plan to use something else as a personal storage (etc) site -- please share. A lyric that genius needs something genius to live on its webspace.

(And yes, you may infer that as I listen to the Outkast mp3s on my Grados right now, they are sounding very very good.)

so today's a bad day. more than 90 minutes traipsing through the rain, back and forth from downtown. i lack an umbrella (and the dollar store appeared sold-out), so instead I just let my "rain coat" get wetter and wetter, till i feel like i may be losing structural integrity.

on the first back-and-forth, i was listening to The Books' lemon of pink, which i bought yesterday. it's a fabulous record, many times superior to their debut - musical, coherent, surprising, exciting, etc etc. i though that its sunbeam beauty would be a comfort from the grey drech outside. instead it just felt "fancy"; i needed goya, not renoir.

when i went home, i dug out The Streets for some reason, and plunked that into the walkman for tramping back downtown. and look hey: it's brilliant. i never would have realized how rainy (English, i guess) it is. of course, the beats and frustration are explicit, but even the r&b samples come across like genius - they're not sunlight-and-fairydust, they're the twinkle of headlights on puddles. no, not joyous - just human.

inside now, the songs are losing their allure, and i'm back wishing for The Books. still, i can't get over the closing lines of "Too Late" - the rhymes never lose their (wonderful) inevitability, nor their power to astonish, to feel different each time. late/pace/gate/face/spirit falls from grace / escape / place / chase ... i sat down / frown / senses / this love game's expensive ... trance / wounded soldier stance / off balance / significance / relevance / her elegance.

So I guess I lied about updating last week, or the week before. But now I'm back, and I have a lot to write about.

Am downloading (and listening to), as we speak, Scott Walker's Tilt. Along with Talk Talk's Spirit of Eden, it's one of ilm's quietly-touted masterpieces, and to my ear it certainly does sound like something strange, strange strange (and potentially wonderful). Melancholy Mark Hollis-like murmurings/lyrics, but articulated through a wholly operatic, unstoppable voice. Strings swell in the background - far more lush and classical than Talk Talk's minimalism - but there isn't an entirely direct relationship between the arrangements and the vocal melody. This contrast makes it something quite beautiful (but genuinely, as I said, strange). I have a feeling I may come to like this very much... but it won't be something that will be on my "you gotta listen to this" list when people first come over...

Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne" clicked absolutely beautifully on the bus-ride back from Ottawa. It was dark, and I was floating across the bridge into Montreal, and his voice was whispering in my ear. My mum insists that the lyrics are mostly meaningless, but that doesn't stop the drifting images of body/rivers/mind/towers/honey/holy from affecting. this is music for when the clouds pass over the moon?

Saw Kill Bill: a gloriously bright, dazzling, ridiculous pastiche of all the best sorts of action movies, mixed with (and this is key) a fabulously cohesive New World, whose characters stride through it with absolute confidence and style, till stopped dead by a thrown knife or errant high-kick. I loved the limb-cleaving, the blood-spraying (Anyone for a game of tennis?), the colours and the music. Neale says that the music queues got old, for him, but me I felt a frisson of yesss! every time something badass started and the soundtrack punched in the door. i liked: snowflakes-like-petals, Nancy Sinatra ("bang bang"), David Carradine's hand, anime-calligraphy-lunacy, "square," last-line plot-twists, the eye-patch with the red cross. i liked most and much of it. this, from a self-declared action movie abstainer.

also: school of rock with mum and dad and my sister. Jack Black somehow endeared himself to me (though I find Tenacious D pretty intolerable), and the kids were wonderfully underplayed. That is to say, they were cute as characters, but Linklater didn't rely too heavily on them being cute as munchkins (see the Welch's/Jerry Maguire kids). Anyway - many genuine laughs, great character work from Joan Cusack, sweet and inspirational, and I felt a warm shiver when the little black girl solo'ed at their final Battle of the Bands show. hooray for well-engineered fluff!

i promise to get to the other stuff I foreshadowed some time soon. thanks for reading!

as it reads above, in bold type: boy have i been neglecting this. school, work and tangmonkey headaches conspired to keep me away from writing here as i intended. and now i'm going away for a few days, so expect no further updates till next week. at that time, however, i promise to write about a) outkast, b) lost in translation, c) the deadly snakes record that pitchfork loves, d) the turgid arcade fire/wolf parade show of a couple of weeks ago.

tonight's mates of state show did not leave me in the mood to write about music, it's 1:24 am, and i still need to pack. i know i know, my life is so hard.

So today the chalkmarks are almost completely gone, wiped out by several smatterings of rain. I don't think I've ever looked at a patio-filled stretch of street with so much melancholy. (talk about a rapid transformation from exuberance to regret: maybe flashmobs should be called 'flashregrets,' or 'flashnostalgia'.)

i've been listening to the new(ish) Long Winters record on most of my commutes back and forth to Downtown. it's an astoundingly great poprock record, and my review is percolating nicely. i keep skipping a couple of the tracks, though - not because they're bad songs, but because i know the lyrics too well. this is a new experience: the words in the chorus (not the music, or the way the words are sung) are grating on my nerves. the songs in question are the ones about being "stupid," and the opening "gang-signs" track.

when i get home, i almost always throw on "Unhappy," from the upcoming Outkast record. There's something chill and familiar about it - a domestic party. plus, the lyrics: i'm confident i might be mishearing things, but doesn't big boi say that as a child he "found out that santa claus was nothing more than vanilli"? vanilli? as in Milli thereof? as synonym for "inauthentic"? I love it.

i've been looking at the pop montreal lineup, and between my trip to toronto that weekend, and a growing dissatisfaction with live music, i'm tempted to forego any and all shows, instead spending that money on CDs. on the other hand, this Melon Galia mp3 has me itching for some jaunty twee french pop...

another revelation these days is the limited-edition demo record that came with the first x copies of Songs:Ohia's Magnolia Electric Company. my promo lacked the bonus CD, so I've only now managed to download these lowkey acoustic-strummed roughs. they're in stark contrast to the big, bold, shining things that emerged on the album - but listening to each i hear different things, and put together, this is jostling with Four Tet, the Clientele and the Microphones for album of the year...

two recent additions to the blogroll on the side of this page: tangmonkey's Kevin has started a film-music-pop-culture blog, widescreen and stereo sound, which is full of insight, and PopMatters' David introduces a fantastic blog called Damaged in Transit. both made recent posts about The Strokes' preview single, "12:51", so I shan't.

Today, the second Montreal Flash Mob. It was absolutely great fun, a break from the every-day, an opportunity to live life differently. Transcendent? No. Silly? Surely! Arty? I guess. Elitist? Perhaps. But probably the most fun twenty-five minutes I've had this week.

Julian, Neale and I arrived at Else's early, in time to sip upon $3.50 cranberry juices and speculate about the other mobbers lurking in the shadows. At five, Julian noticed the appropriate party wearing "two hats" (as our emailed instructions had indicated), and we obtained our orders. Make our way to Prince Arthur and De Buillon, drawing chalk arrows to point towards the destination. Arrive at 5:25. Spend three minutes drawing twisty crazy point arrows like madmen. Then disperse. Ta-da!

The mobleader handed us each a stick of sidewalk chalk, and we were on our way. Loop-the-loop arrows, straightforward ones, dashed arrows on the sides of buildings. It looked like we were going to arrive too early, so we rounded a couple of extra blocks. We noticed others drawing their arrows, and soon there were swarms of brightly-coloured markers traced all over the pavement, all pointing to a single (still-empty) spot.

And then at 5:25 an explosion of activity as suddenly there were 30? 50? 80? people dashing about on their hands-and-knees, making a madchaotic mess of lines and arrows and circles and smiley faces. Prince Arthur is full of patio-sitters on Sunday afternoons, so we pointed arrows at them, we pointed arrows at their feet, we pointed arrows at other arrows, at pot-holes, at nothingness. When asked questions ("WHAT ARE YOU DOING AND WHY?" was the popular one), people either ignored the questions or acted ambiguous. Onlookers were bemused. Waiters wondered what to do. We simply drew.

At 5:28, poof, we dispersed. Sauntered non-chalante back home, leaving backward-pointing arrows in our wake, till our chalk ran out. Hopefully it'll not rain over night, and I'll go back tomorrow to see what we wrought (and how well it survived). A glorious bit of insanity.

The best part, of course, is that there will inevitably have been men who went to get another drink, women who visited the bathroom, and who were absent during those three minutes when 75 chalkers went crazy on the sidewalk. I imagine them emerging from the greek cafes and upscale ice-cream joints, unable to conceptualize what they see before them, the changes that the street has undergone in merely a few minutes. [photo, not mine.]

There are some things that could be improved upon: we were asked to each bring a dime (presumably to help pay the organizers back for the chalk), but no one collected ours; it also would have been handy to have some lines of scripted dialogue to use if asked about what we were doing - all of the answers I came up with were either awkward, contrived, cruel or stupid. Finally: no one was smiling! Everyone was so committed to drawing their feverish arrows that there was very little giggling, grinning, or collectivity. It was solo work. And I would have loved to feel more laughter. Next time I'll smile enough for ten: I promise.