Archives : all posts by Sean

Mikal Cronin - "Am I Wrong". He goes in with the bumblebee washed off him. No more, no more, he says to himself. This time he is hornet. This time he is wasp. He weaves through the crowd with his stinger cocked, scanning each fabric and face, each glinting eye, for the one he wants. No, she's not here yet. No, she's not here yet. No, she's not-- yes there oh shit hold up. There is still some pollen on his sleeve. He is bumblebee yet. [buy]

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Three recent honours:

- I won a (second) National Magazine Award last week, for a Walrus piece about Montreal's circus scene.

- I was so flattered by Anis Mojgani's reply to our recent We/Or/Me post. Let's form a gang together.

- Finally, belatedly, Jordan White used Said the Gramophone's dumb style to wrote about a basketball play. What an absurd & lovely thing to do. Thank you.

(photo source unknown)

We/Or/Me (with Anis Mojgani) - "From the Top of This Thing".

Rolling up your sleeve, tying your shoe, polishing your glasses, priming your pan, tightening your knots, cleaning your gun, boarding your ship, raising your sail, sailing your sea, glimpsing your shore, baring your heart, baring your heart, baring your heart.

Baring your heart, unburying your heart. Lifting heavy things off. Lifting light things off. Sitting down for a spell, and eating popsicles, and lifting light things off.

We/Or/Me's new album, funded with Kickstarter, is confident and handsome. There is a song with Anis Mojgani. There is a song with Vashti Bunyan. There is a song about listening to Bert Jansch and the Incredible String Band. I've been writing about We/Or/Me for eight years.

Buy The Walking Hour at bandcamp.

(photo by Neale)

Balacade - "Marigold (demo)". There's another "Marigold" too, a final studio version, but I prefer this drowsy one, waking, rousing itself from listlessness. A guitar solo like déjà vu, like fine gold thread, like the last strands of a dream. Andrew Reynolds revisits and remembers, traces out the year's silver lining. He is full of quiet confidence. He is full of modest hope. All day he carried a cymbal under his arm, and now he has put it on a stand, now he is hitting it with a the tip of a drumstick. [buy this on bandcamp]

Rah Rah - "Art and a Wife". Rah Rah carve out an indie-rocker anthem - a Users Guide, an instruction manual, a Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for bedroom songwriters and bands in vans, for starry-eyed artists and hermits clutching notebooks. "Now I just want a life full of art, / and a wife. Full of heart, just a life / full of art, and a wife." Rare that such a useful song^*, packed with good advice, is also a potential hit, a ringing single, a tune to hear on repeat and repeat. Let this tune explode from a thousand college radio towers, singing its wisdom, sharing its lessons, sharpening the pens & picks & ears & plans of a million gutsy drooping spirits. [buy]

* - See also Okkervil River's "Unless It's Kicks".

(image by Brandon Schaefer)

Jai Nitai Lotus - "Mingus Clap".
The Streets - "Turn the Page".

I have a thing for the opening tracks on hip-hop tapes. Intros, overtures, songs like the Streets' "Turn the Page", or "Mingus Clap", by Montreal MC Jai Nitai Lotus. It is even better if these tracks have strings, the feeling of an advancing something. An army, a chain gang, a golem in clay boots. Mike Skinner's song is grim - steady glare, clenched fists. Lotus' has more give to it, much more swing. If they faced each other in battle, I'd give it to Lotus: he's more limber, loose. Different in a boat race: Skinner wants it more. Both these songs make you root for the MC, applauding like a gathered crowd. Aerial tricks, twists and ollies - you want them to land each rhyme, nail the punchline. You want the lyrics to be as worthy as medals. You want the promise of these intros to play out over 70 minutes: foreshadowing, a diver poised over the pool, Chekhov's gun mounted on the wall.

[buy Jai Nitai Lotus' Something You Feel / buy the Streets' Original Pirate Material]

(photo source)

Look Vibrant - "Plateau". Face-melting. Face-melting like drooping popsicle face. Like aging willow-tree face. Like Ark of the Covenant dance party. Face-melting like when the sun came out last night, across Montreal's Plateau Mont-Royal, just before dusk. Face-melting like the sour happy terror of remembering your love for a friend, your love for a kitty-cat, your love of clamouring city-soaked daylight. If you fall off your bike your head could crack open. Why do you live in a noisy place like this? Why do you live amid all these roaring cars? Why not move to the country, to the placid brookside easy-life? Why do you sit here and let your face melt, over and over again? What's the allure of the crucible, the metro station, the intersection, the concert-hall, the crowd? Do you see more colours, here? Do you really see more colours? Hello? Can you hear me? Can you even hear me? HELLO CAN YOU EVEN

[Look Vibrant released a cassingle.]

Pain-Noir - "L'Arme". I am a wallet of a thousand possibilities, shimmying in your pocket. I have coins and cards and notes and I want to send them flowering out onto counters, into palms, turning the stuff of me into new things, big and small and shiny things. I dream big. I want to slowly spin in the darkness of your pocket, envisioning fortunes, imagining riches, and then in starlight I want to buy the world. Take this, take this; give me that, and that. Trade me whatever you've got for whatever I have here. No - not bus tickets. Not dry biscuits. Give me the good stuff. I can afford it.

[For fans of Bertrand Belin, Islands, Timber Timbre / Pain-Noir is François-Régis Croisier, formerly of St. Augustine / Merci à Vincent Théval et Label Pop]

(photo by Carly Waito)

Sandy Denny - "It'll Take A Long Time". A downpour of a song - a thousand thunder and rain storms, a hundred calamities, dashed hopes, spills, a rainbow as wide as until. That's the trick of it, the bend in the river: here is such terrible sadness, such waiting, so many shades of blue; and also limitless colour, every splendid gorgeous shearing shade. The guitars and keyboards are throwing prisms in the air, pushing wind through chimes. Sandy Denny doesn't seem remotely forlorn - maybe she's drunk on love, or dazed from a sunny day. Maybe she's trying to take us to church. But this song is about the awfulest lonely stirring in all of our chests, and then about holding on. [buy]