Archives : all posts by Sean

Jessie Ware - "You & I (Forever)". One of the common tricks to pop songwriting is to write verses with specific, sited details, and then, in the chorus, to go big and universal. With "You & I (Forever)", Ware deploys an inverse strategy: the chorus contains the song's only specific reference, a line about going to tea. It's a subtle move but something in it, what she says and how it lands - it gets me verklemmt. I am, like most living humans, a sucker for the happy-sad; and although I'm skeptical toward this song's hamfisted interpolation of The xx, I love the shearing lap of the production, the buried drone, and that plaintive loon-call of a sample. Mostly I love that line, about tea, what she says and how it lands. I'm listening to a pleasant, melancholy pop song and then she sings she Only wanted tea with you, and I find myself in particular memories, or imagined memories, a hapless heart in a certain place & time. [from Tough Love - buy]

Jessie Ware - "12". You can dial back a song: you can dial back a song to make it less of a song, a sketch not a drawing. "12" is full of line and colour, crosshatching, but it is sparer than most of what Ware's now up to. It is a place where the sun is slowly rising, slow as ever, half-formed shapes slowly lit up and warmed. ["12" is a Tough Love B-side.]

(image is Bruce Conner's "Sound of Two Hand Angel", from 1974)

Caribou - "Silver". The silken reset was invented by a hacker in Yemen. The date isn't clear. One month the resets were as they had always been: crisp, jarring; the next month, some of them were silken. A silken reset on your favourite website, a silken reset on your nearest traffic light. Soon, joked the TV presenters, a silken reset on your life.. It was fall, and it was easy to imagine that this could soon be true. Everything crisply divided might soon be softly changing. One thing might become another thing without a tremor or a snap. We walked around our neighbourhoods slipping hands into pockets, hands into pockets, imagining that our futures could be reset, silkenly, with just as little force. [buy Caribou's sumptuous Our Love]

(image source)

James Irwin - "Face Value". When yr heart's so crowded; crowded with reflections and every reflection still separate, distinct. Minutes in an hour, faces in a crowd, motives like fish in deep currents. Whenever I am standing,, you think, standing at the bar, I am teetering. A tower on the verge of falling, all its rooms filled with scholars. A woman puts on a record, a shiny black piece of vinyl; you listen to it, teetering. Whole schools in yr heart, a hundred mirrors. The guide of a rhythm: a beat you can dance to, for a sec, making yr teetering seem graceful. A drumroll that tumbles like a falling moon. Guitars that ring like starlight. Synths all blurring, rain poured onto everything. And a voice, thank god for that voice, a guide through the empty night. Someone to murmur, like an arm around your chest, I am not becoming you / I am not becoming me. [website / soundcloud / previously / James Irwin is currently unsigned]

Luke James - "Love XYZ". A few minutes of arthouse R&B. akin to Miguel, Frank Ocean or Jessie Ware, but "Love XYZ" leans in instead of back - it's seduction as forward press, as push and push, skin on skin all asking. James craves his lover, goes to them, pleads. And yet he is undesperate. Ardour is around them like incense smoke. In the sonics of the song: distant schoolyard voices, hidden strings, dancing motorik. The hunger is layered overtop these subtleties - a chorus of calling; a voice that lands on its edge; rebounding beats that come & come & come again, undeterrable. You rarely hear a love-song that feels like a soft touch and also like a hard one. Here is one. [buy

(image is Patrick Henne's painting, "The Anatomy Lesson.")

Sharon Van Etten - "Our Love". I have probably listened to this song 75 times. You can consider me an expert. So after you have listened once, twice, 70 times, what I am going to suggest is that you listen to the moment just after 2:24, when this pretty song sounds an awkward, human beat. The overblown tom drum, or whatever it is, feels less like a beat than like an utterance - a confession from the rhythm section, a plea, a belch, something messily & bodily, less considered than the rest of the song. Less finely wrought. In such a pretty track, the human part is crucial:the sigh of a bending guitar string; the fading strain of Van Etten's voice. The suggestion that "Our Love" isn't just the recollection of feeling but a feeling itself. That it isn't theatre: it's a moment in time, remembered.

(photo via Alexis O'Hara)

Grass Widow - "Time Could Bend". "There are six ways to sing," the teacher told her. And so for the next two years, she learned the six ways: highsinging, lowsinging, clearvoice, falsetto, nightingale, hog. Every week, she studied the six forms; with lectures, in workshops, at home with a textbook and a tape-recorder. Her notes were smudged phrases, blotted treble-clefs. Her meals were composed of simple, separate elements: starches, proteins, fibre. Sometimes, for dessert, she would prepare a perfectly-layered yoghurt parfait. The woman dreamed of voices - separate voices, harmonizing voices, overlapping voices. She dreamed of clearvoice that was lowsinging, falsetto gone hog. She imagined her teacher looking through a telescope, staring at the moon. "Sing like a moonbeam," he said, "a moonbeam through a lens." [buy

(photo source)

Jeff Bird - "Souvenir Flutes". A baby blue tug goes putting down the Amazon. It is a battered boat, seaweed-stained, but its tiller still works, its radio, its hand-cranked orange juicer. There is a crew of three: a captain, a navigator, a cook. One of them is a ghost; they know one of them is a ghost, hear the rattling chains every night, but the other two haven't figured out which of them it is. At every meal, at every anchor, every time they spy another ship on the river or a bird of paradise on the shore, two are thinking, Are you a ghost are you a ghost are you a ghost are you a ghost? The third, the ghost himself, is not thinking anything. He is the perfect imitation of a man, afloat on the water, travelling somewhere. He sups with the humans, plays cards, talks dreamily about family back home, their distant destination. When they go to sleep he lifts his phantom chains, rattles them, stalks the deck. He feels lucky to be here, where it is humid and noisy, where the air smells of red flowers. The insects are chittering. The birds call. Around dawn, three men will sit up in their cots and stare across the room at each other and wonder.

[Jeff Bird plays music with Cowboy Junkies and a thousand other people. He also plays the theremin. "Souvenir Flutes" is from Rhythm & Entertainment. More music here.]

(image by Nicolas Amori)

Thus Owls - "As Long As We Try A Little". How far do you have to go before the world changes? A train bulleting through landscape; a balloon rising through jungle canopy; a drill boring through ice. Maybe the light begins to change, before the breakthrough, and you know you are close. Maybe there are sounds, promising Soon... But maybe not. Maybe the light changes but the world dos not. You can't know when the transition will occur, the change of state, until suddenly the lake has turned to ice or the world to fire. Suddenly you are in our out of love. "As Long As We Try A Little" is just voices and piano, a woman answering herself. There are some warning murmurs but truly nothing happens until everything happens. The train skids onto snow; the balloon crosses into monsoon; the drill hits frothing water, wagging anemone, coral. [buy]

(photo by anne deniau)