Archives : all posts by Sean

The Betsy Rosses - "Dreams". A melting candle of song, wet wax on an icy driveway, or maybe a hot driveway, either New Mexico or the arctic tundra; last night's dreams caught under a steamroller, caught on a turntable platter, shedding tiny filings, throwing sparks, giving off a smell, a floral smell, slightly vegetal; and in the noony present, where we wait for love or phonecalls, with disguised impatience, we are not often brave enough to sing; not with honest voices, flat and raspy; because bravery is rare, much rarer than sleep. [bandcamp]

Hoquiam - "Neck Bones". Folk-music splintered with an axe, splintered into pieces. Borrow them to produce a hip-hop song or to build a fence. Borrow them to stutter sincerely, to shoot down a bird. Remember: sometimes a day is just 24 hard strums, and a minute is just 60 hard syllables, and a clock is a spinning record, electricity jolting out from its tower. [buy]

Destroyer - "Son of Earth". A couple of weeks ago, in Montreal, Destroyer's Dan Bejar played the sincerest show I have ever seen him play. He was in a room with several friends, and it was just him and an acoustic guitar, and all his coy hexes felt tender. "Son of Earth" is a little song, it's short, it's not that long. It is a love note, of a kind, from a man who writes in invisible ink. I wonder if an arrow ever falls in love with its arrowhead. [buy]

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I have another set of video/song reviews on Beatclash this week, featuring Nicki Minaj, Freelove Fenner, White Hinterland, Mas Ysa and several more.

Ensemble - "Envies d'avalanches". A tremendous crashing avalanche of percussion, piano and howling steel strings. The kind of thundering roar that demolishes towns and woods, that repaints a landscape; and yet it is acoustic, not electric; not shearing distortion but a man singing poetry in careful French; and still everything will be remade, a sculpture sculpted by taking-away, revelatory dust, mass and velocity that change lives into new lives, leave them ringing and alone at the end of a hammered phrase. [website / buy]

Katy B - "Blue Eyes". The notion of the magic spell: a few words, a phrase, that change reality. Syllables that work like thrown stones, like weather. This is a song of spells, sung spells, hocus on balustrades of synth and drum. Katy B can sing like she's skipping, passing in and out of phase, flickering with her reality. She can sing while she dances and casts, a certain basicness to it - unecstatic, unwhirling. The plain structure of magic, blueprinted hex. [buy]

Burna Boy - "Yawa Dey". Calisthenic hip-hop from Nigeria's Burna Boy, both serious and playful. I could say like Big Boi but I'd mean the palette more than the sound: Burna's flow is more dancehall than OutKast, the beat's a thousand miles from Dungeon Family. Yet still there's something Luscious to "Yawa Dey"'s hot-cold shimmer, its pivot from grey-eyed rap to lightfooted refrain. This one would sound as good in summer as it does in winter; I'm gonna keep a copy with the deck chairs and patio umbrellas, set it up outside when there're leaves. [video / Burna might not be a cool dude]

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This week marks the launch of Beatclash, a new platform for discovering fresh music and videos. It's handsomely designed, with an emphasis on emerging acts and curated content. I was very happy to be commissioned for some video playlists of favourite recent things. The first is online now, with a mixture of clips by western familiars like Young Galaxy and Busta Rhymes, and far-flung sounds from Japan and South Africa. Please take a look.

Nudie ft Molly Rankin - "If A Heart Could Tell". The King mistakenly believed that his valentines were superior to any of his subjects' valentines. Whenever he presented someone with one of his hand-made cards, they grovelled and clapped and praised his valentine-making abilities. The whole court applauded. Heralds sounded trumpets and falconers released birds. This gratified the King. It justified all his hard work. So he always looked forward to St Valentine's Day, spending weeks in preparation, making as many cards as he could, for every pretty lass or handsome lad, not as tokens of true love but just as tokens of admiration, of appreciation; symbols of his benevolent tyranny.

[buy]

(photo source)

LIVINGSTON - "S/He Is Like the Angry Birds".
LIVINGSTON - "I Am A Weary Immaterial Labourer in a Post-Industrial Wasteland".

The artist is stated as LIVINGSTON but really these songs are the work of songwriter Henry Adam Svec, possibly (but not necessarily) with the Czech programmer Mirek Plíhal, plus help from musicians like Misha Bower and JJ Ipsen. I say "really" and "possibly" and "plus" because it's a high-concept semi-fictional enterprise: like Svec's previous projects, the CFL Sessions (with folk-songs ostensibly by Canadian Football League players), and Folk Songs of Canada Now ("field recordings" of Canadian folk musicians, inspired by an imaginary ethnomusicologist), LIVINGSTON's Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs of Canada is steeped in critical theory, cultural theory, and good old-fashioned LOL. It does seem a bit of a pity that I'm not playing along with Svec's conceit that these songs were written by LIVINGSTON - an "artificially intelligent, digital organism capable of accessing the totality of the history of Canadian folk music". Then again, with this collection (even moreso than its predecessors), I feel that Svec may be selling himself short by hiding these excellent, noisy, witty tunes in a fog of droll scholarship.

Don't be put off by these song titles: "I Am A Weary ... Labourer ..." and "... Like the Angry Birds" may seem like overthunk jokesong, Weird Al crossed with Planningtorock, but this stuff is raucous and - to put it clumsily - regular. That's the conceit, after all: LIVINGSTON has absorbed ten thousand songs and built his own little wonder. Svec, too, is working with great taste. These are folky, lively lightning-bolts - handsome rhymes with guitary hooks, worthy refrains; bars of noisy sax and rinkytink piano, filing-cabinet clunks, even what sounds like zydeco squeezebox. And they're never too nice. There's a guitar-solo on "Angry Birds" that's basically my favourite kind: frenetic and electric and very slightly dumb, more about letting something loose than expressing a cogent thought.

As LIVINGSTON's maker(s) is/are eager to point out, these songs come from a tradition. Neil Young, Bruce Springsteen, Willie Nelson, Gordon Lightfoot, the McGarrigle Sisters, the Eagles (one song on Artificially Intelligent Folk Songs is a splendid Eagles sandwich). But also a newer canon: 100 Dollars, Daniel Romano, Rae Spoon, Al Tuck, Gillian Welch, Herman Düne, Snailhouse (especially on "Springtime"), even Drive-By Truckers... The most righteous honkytonks are never demolished - they just fill with younger folks.

So download this record, dub it to a tape, throw it in the car stereo. Listen to the chug & strum of "Labourer" - the prairie worker's weariness and the urban striver's wry resignation. Listen to "Angry Birds"' leaping wheeze - a waggish lover's impatience, a sly lothario's paper airplane. Listen to the whole thing, it's great. This is thinking and alive, an ivory tower and a dirt-pile, a jukebox filled innocently with dissertations.

[free/PWYC album download / lots of Ontario/Quebec tour-dates]

(superb owl photo source)

St. Even - "Til Forever Starts All Over Again".

The philosopher's stone in a hopscotch game.

A lasso around a pretty girl.

Two uncool teens with a complicated choreography of handshake-highfives.

The first glass of rum is a simple thing.

The second glass of rum is a simple thing.

Baile funk at the local singer-songer coffee-shop.

A horn section has sneaked into a Peanuts cartoon.

A black Spanish bull meditates on its teleology.

One minute and fifty-three seconds in the swimming-pool in the mirror.

A watch that sometimes stops.

The time, at the party, when I helped fix the chandelier.

[buy]