Archives : all posts by Sean

Jay-Z ft Biggie Smalls - "Brooklyn's Finest". Sometimes a right rhyme is like stealing a wallet. Sometimes it's like shooting a target, or lighting a fire, or slamming a dunk. Sometimes it's like parallel-parking a car, or arranging flowers, or beating an egg, stiff peaks. Sometimes it's lots of these things at the same time: like shooting a target, like arranging flowers. It's one of those things that's both bravado and finesse, process and result. Christopher Wallace turns words into brothers, sisters, traveling companions. One of his brilliances was in showing affinities - bringing apples toward oranges, making unlike things friends. Another brilliance was in making rhymes sound so good, these unexpected pivots of vowel & consonant & meaning. I just like hearing him pronounce things, frilling the fs and saying "bracelets" as if he's closing a clasp. [buy]

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I've been selected for the Grand Jury of this year's Polaris Prize - helping honour the best Canadian album released between June 1, 2012 and May 31, 2013. The ten finalists include some truly great records and some lousy ones. But some of my favourites didn't make it to the finals at all: Leif Vollebekk's North Americana, the Luyas' Animator, Suuns' Images du Futur, Carly Rae Jepsen's Kiss. The winner will be announced in September.

Kid Canaveral - "Good Morning". A song for fence-jumping, for completely clearing that thing, all the way over, past the border and down the hill, fields streaming, skies blueing, heart high in your chest. Glockenspiel is as much liability as asset these days, but a Scottish accent will never go out of fashion; nor charmed, short downstrokes of guitar, a refrain that's something we all ask ourselves, from time to time. Do you know something that I don't know? Clearly, you do.

[Scotland's Fence Records is splitting in two; Kid Canaveral will allegedly follow Pictish Trail to find whatever comes next / buy Shouting at Wildlife]

Colour Me Wednesday - "Shut". Throwback guitar-pop, galloping, sometimes chugging, like a lost single by the Lucksmiths or maybe Jale. Neat drums, ska-borrowed horns, but more important than anything is the sweetness of the chorus: fully-formed and bittersweet, the sort of five-second swoon you'd listen to any number of verses for the chance to hear again. Colour Me Wednesday say they make FEMINIST LEFT-WING ETC. DIY PUNK AND SKA AND POP FROM WEST LONDON. More important is that they make hooks, pull them up from the Thames like discoveries in silver fishes' mouths.

[buy/thanks Hamza]

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Elsewhere:

If you have been enjoying the slowed down version of Dolly Parton's "Jolene", may I suggest that you spend some time with the original version of Dolly Parton's "I Will Always Love You"?

If you love SappyFest, as I do, please donate to their fundraising campaign.

Ned Zimmerman, who created Said the Gramophone's jquery audio widget, has released the software as a Wordpress plugin.

(photo by Todd)

Bombadil - "Angeline". The first track from Bombadil's new indie-pop ziggurat - a tune that's spry, cheerful, sturdy as piano-ivory. There's the wink and echo of the Kinks, a mixture of baroque decorum and bluejean freedom that could only be American. A pastoral of overgrown alleys, concrete lakesides, beachballs from the WalMart. A Monty Python sketch in a suburban record store, a dog that's learned how to drive. I'm not sure I've ever heard Bombadil so stately, or so rosily, unselfconsciously fond. [stream Metrics of Affection/buy]

Donovan - "Get Thy Bearings". Choose your marbles wisely. Some situations call for glass ones, some for ceramic, some for ketchup or mustard or cat's-eye. Weigh the marble in your hand, evaluate its roll. Touch the ground: is it dusty? is it concrete? Click the marble against it. Sometimes you need a wandering marble, sometimes one that's obedient. Sometimes you need to know where everything is headed and other times you want the changes to be driven by reflex, context, instinctive new habits. [buy]

(painting by Tyson Anthony Roberts)

Fiver - "Rage of Plastics" (mp3 removed at Triple Crown Audio Recordings' request) A churnsome dirge, a grindish blues, distended swing from the woman who sings for One Hundred Dollars and the Highest Order. Simone Schmidt writes songs by manipulating smoke in the air, seeing where it falls and rises. But she sings in a plainer way, intoning the words, loosing them right and left, as though she's laying the groundwork for a more elaborate song. Canadian music that feels like American music - drier than Alberta, more haunted than Manitoba. Fiver is laying the foundation of a ghost town, and she doesn't even know if the damn spirits will move in. [buy - it's very great]

Elsewhere:

Pressur.es is a video project by Derrick Belcham and Ruby Kato Attwood; they aim to unite original dance choreographies and (mostly) original music, by artists like Little Scream, White Hinterland, Colin Stetson and Julianna Barwick. Belcham is best known for his video work with La Blogothèque and A Story Told Well. Attwood is the lead singer for Canada's best noh-wave band, Yamantaka//Sonic Titan (who released a bonkers, brilliant new track this week). Together they're making this fine thing and raising money for it. Using Indiegogo, the friendly-to-Canadians version of Kickstarter, Pressur.es hope to collect $10,000 for new music, new choreographies, new films. Essentially, I think, to pay people for their art. This is worthier than most of the seedy crap we waste our cents on. So please, please give them something.

Two weeks ago, the New York Times debuted the first film in the Pressur.es series: "Forcelessness", with music by Sarah Neufeld, choreography by Emery LeCrone and dancers Kaitlyn Gilliland & Pierre Guilbault.

Here we debut another film from the series: "In The Dark", with choreographer/dancer Mary Cavett, and music performed by Fiver's Simone Schmidt. (It's a Mills Brothers cover.)

Whereas most of the first five Pressur.es films are abstract, emotional works, "In The Dark" is conceptual. Cavett waits alone and blindfolded in New York's Central Park, slow-dancing with anyone who will take her. "Will take her" or, really, give themselves over to her. There are men and women, children and business-types, dudes passing through. Sometimes Cavett dances alone, in her polkadot dress. Maybe it's a piece about loneliness, maybe it's about bravery, maybe hope or vulnerability or the extra-ordinary. But throughout it all, Belcham's camera tracks the scene; Schmidt sings her messy rosy waltz, and anything could happen. In a way, anything does. Maybe Cavett's still out there, twirling.

Donate to Pressur.es and help them keep making these things.

J. FLA - "Story (Stupid Story)".

A pop song cannot heal the world. It cannot repair what's torn, disappear what's scarred. But this video from Seoul's J. Fla, this soaring polished pop song, makes the idea seem possible. South and North Koreas, reunited by drumroll, plaintive piano, a bursting chorus. Reconciliation through a bilingual refrain: "Please can you tell me / I love you my darling / 사랑한다고 듣고 싶어도 / 바보 같은 story." Finally - finally! - Kim John-un and Park Geun-hye, dancing side by side on a firework-studded square.

But like I said, a pop song can't hear the world. Nor can any other song, from to John Coltrane to Sam Cooke to Godspeed You! Black Emperor. The machines of war and hatred are too sophisticated for an undoing by quarter-note, by rest. I think the trick of political music, however dilute or intense, is the courage it instills in its listeners. The courage and, hopefully, the action. A chorus can't remedy the real forces of inequality and strife, but maybe it can send a few people into the streets, dancing and resolute.

[J. FLA's debut mini-album, Foolish Story, is out now]

I'm bleary and uncontainable after spending the weekend at SappyFest 8. The treasure of Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada and my favourite music festival in the world. My fifth Sappy was another cozy, splendid celebration. A temporary colony dedicated to art, friendship, transformation, and a million deliberate details.

For the fifth time, I penned Sappy's Sappy Times, a daily journal that is proudly printed on real paper, and distributed across the festival site. Every night, I looked back at the previous day's activities. The Times were penned between the hours of 1am and 7:45am. I am, yes, pretty pooped. Concert highlights included Colin Stetson, Sarah Neufeld, Alvvays, Eucalyptus, Naomi Shelton & the Gospel Queens, Coach Longlegs, Underachievers, AroarA and Pictish Trail.

As in 2009, 2010, 2011, and 2012, for archival purposes, and for the interest of Said the Gramophone readers, I offer the digitized Sappy Times right here:

If you've never been to Sappy, I'll say it again: it's so special and small and remarkable. If you enjoy the kind of music I do, and the songs we do, you owe it to yourself to book a trip to the Canadian maritime provinces. See some swans, some beautiful songs, then drive to the coast and swim in the sea.

And finally, a little awkwardly, if you run a festival or an event or a zeppelin race or anything like that, and you would like to bring me to where you are, to write something like the Sappy Times, I would always love to talk to you. Email me here.

Nanimal - "Muffin". Is it breakfast? Is it a pet? It it bran or cockapoo, living or baked? Muffin. Why are we driving down the sun-slashed highway at 150mph, teeth clenched, fists balled, a trunk full of picnic supplies? Why are we so furiously cavorting? Why can't we let go? This "Muffin": will it teach us where we're coming from, or where we're headed?

[Montreal's Nanimal make a racket, make my head hurt, make belligerent & stern good times. / They incorporate half of Parlovr [RIP] / bandcamp]

X Priest X - "Samurai". Wearing privilege like a light cape. Ridged & gilded, a small wealth, a small fortune. I am not so rich, just rich enough. Rich enough for vineyards, for long boats, for buying every stripe upon the roads. Song like a silk slip, like an indulgence from the queen. You don't own your house, but you own Los Angeles.

[website/soundcloud]

(photo source)