Archives : all posts by Sean

Mary J Blige - "Whole Damn Year". A year is a year is a year, inarguable. Each of our years is entirely the same - the same 12 months, January to December, 365 or 366 days. The same and also utterly unique: my year was mine, yours was yours. We cannot swap. For better or for worse, time is something held separate and in common.

And sometimes it is for worse. Sometimes we want to take someone's year; borrow it, shoulder it, carry it for a month or two. Sit down. Give me your year. Maybe there are thieves who seek to steal winners' glad 12 months - but me I always want to assuage my friends' bad ones. I want to roll their years up, like old sleeping bags, and bury them in the forest. Somewhere where the leaves will turn and fall; and snow will land, and melt; and where ferns will grow, come spring. Give me your year. Let's gather them all up together, a frail shared fortune.

[pre-order]

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Cocteau Twins - "Lorelei". [buy]

On Monday night my novel Us Conductors won the Giller Prize, Canada's biggest fiction award. I thanked all of you in the speech. I thanked this song in the speech. My life's a rock in a rock tumbler, getting shone. My life's a tetherball, in orbit 'round its post. My life's Elizabeth Fraser's torn and starry voice, all new edge and possibility. I don't know who I am any more, just that for a few moments I'm tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I love this song and I never understood the words. What is she singing? Does she know what she is singing? Does she know what she is sending out into the world, atop coronated guitars? Or is she just trying to keep up with the pouring, pouring feelings in her heart - like a stick in the riverwater, like a caught kite.

Someone is putting crowns onto the heads of the guitars and Elizabeth Fraser is singing us down the river or up to the podium and and it'll never be yesterday again.

This is my love to all my distant friends (you): here, this is it, for you, here;

Natalie Prass - "Why Don't You Believe In Me". Is this a song from 1971? It is not. Is Natalie Prass your sister, singing in her bedroom? She is not. Are those flutes? Yes. Are those horns? Yes. How much of this is real and how much is pretend? You would have to ask Natalie. Instead, I suggest you forget such questions: jettison the theory, dump the analysis, just turn up this song and watch Prass's song push against the burlap of your speakers. Feel what it's like to have this song come into a room, like lamplight, like a remedy, a song for your own heart's questions. [pre-order]

(image from The Artic Sea - Erte)

Jonnie Common - "Better Man". What begins as an shaky nod to a club classic reveals itself as something more handsewn and cockeyed. Common lives in Glasgow but as much as he's indebted to his Beta Band countrymates, there's an even stronger kinship to Beck's sunny, gritty dilettantism. Again, "Better Man" begins like a wink to Dance Mix 96 until soon it's drowsy, brogued bedroom pop; but at the halfway mark it changes again, the gentle shuffle giving way to something almost metal-tinged. From leftfield there's the braided film-loop of an African music sample - then horns, horns, a glossy sax that's all refraction, prismatic gesture. The music feels expansive, like it contains multitudes; it feels surprising, curious, avaricious. I wonder if kids today can ever know the joy we got from those first sample-heavy hip-hop and pop records - that feeling of filleted newspapers, scrambled sequencers, genius emerging from life's modern rubbish/racket. I wonder if this will feel, to them, like a return to a tired form; or whether, as it is for me, like sheer giddy possibility, thrilling song, daft renaissance. [buy Trapped In Amber]

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EMBASSYLIGHTS - "Inside-Outside". It is too easy to overcollaborate. Working with someone else, with someones else, it doesn't take much to fill every gap, plug every hole, fit another new idea into every open space. So all credit to EMBASSYLIGHTS, which unites Icelandic musicians Benni Hemm Hemm and Prins Póló with Canadian songwriters Samantha Savage Smith, Laura Leif, Clinton St John and Woodpigeon's Mark Andrew Hamilton. This is an album with a lot of space; whole swathes, plains, pages of space. "Inside-Outside" is a song that starts sparse and then in fact becomes sparser, its serenade diffused into loose groove and mumble. It's that second part where I want to reside, like a comfortable granny under a shingle roof. I want to look out onto the bay, glassy water interrupted now and then by leaping fish, silver kicks, knowing that later I'll step outside, or inside, and have a different kind of fun. [buy / and check out the limited edition flexidisc book]

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Dva - "Zoppe". Are you a trumpet or are you a man? It is one thing if you ask this question of a person; it is another if you ask it of a trumpet. Would a trumpet say, "I am a trumpet! I am a trumpet! I am not a man I am a trumpet!"? Or would the trumpet try to pretend? Would the trumpet say, "I'm a person! I'm a woman! I am!"? Would the trumpet confirm or deny? Perhaps there are trumpets among us, pretending. Perhaps that pal with perfect mouth-trumpet is not a human pal at all: she is shiny brass, she is curved metal, she is a soundmaker lifted to lips.

Dva's "Zoppe" is an acapella fugue, a pliant cacophony, a summer's day flowing backwards into spring.

[buy / thanks Jonathan!]

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Moss Lime - "Calabria 2014". Montreal's dry-spirited post-punks pay tribute to Enur's club smash. They drain the ephedrine out, steep the tea for too long. It's a little droopy, a little bitter; a song for cracked concrete instead of a white sand beach. You could still have a party, but you'd probably have to be lying down, or wearing a heavy coat; and this isn't music for seducing anyone, it just isn't. It's for something more familiar, cats weaving underfoot. [Moss Lime are from Montreal / buy July First from Fixture Records / upcoming gigs 10/29, 11/04, 11/05, 11/10]

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