Archives : all posts by Sean

Atakora Manu's Band - "Palm Wine Seller". Frequently, when I am listening to palm wine guitar music, I think to myself: This is the best sound in the world. It is beautiful and hapless. It is dizzy. It reminds me of my greatest joys and my most witless blues. Imperfect, expert, lo-fi, hi-fi, distorted and clear, oh how many reversing right yeses. I have never drunk palm wine but I have been drunk on it. I have lolled and then shot like an arrow into the heart of the waning day. [out of print]

Shotgun Jimmie - "Big Sur".
Shotgun Jimmie - "Growing Like a Garden".

Two songs that add up to 2 minutes 45 seconds. Certain songs are like telegrams; no room for pussyfooting. THEY SAY IT RIGHT STRAIGHT STOP. Jimmie's best songs are like hunks of amethyst lobbed at your head. <clunk> The lyrics are handsome straight-shooters - yeah, telegrams, I already said that. He is less muddled than me. He is of purer vision, more suited to: sunsets, riding into. Better at knock-knock jokes and ping-pong. While the lyrics come across the wire, in the hands of a delivery-man, the surrounding music is a conduit, a superconductor, a delivery system. Sugar for the medicine, decorated with rosettes and winks. [Buy]

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Elsewhere: Stream Young Galaxy's splendid fourth album, Ultramarine.

The Knife - "Wrap Your Arms Around Me". I was wearing a gold link bracelet as I whipped around the corner. It caught. And I didn't feel it. I was two steps in when I felt the tug at my wrist; looked down; there this long fine sag. One gold link, caught on a nail, and the whole bracelet stretched out behind me, distended, pulled long like taffy. I gathered the bracelet in my other hand. I felt like I was carrying some mythic material - finest spidersilk, elvish mithril. Later I wondered how far I could have gone. How finely could the gold have been pulled? Could I run around the world? Could I pull this metal into a slender thread, one atom thick? How supple was this hard, mined material, plundered from the earth.

Some metals are softer than they look. Some crashing banging clanging feelings - they can be folded into tiny little packets, so small they almost disappear. A teardrop weighs nothing at all.

[buy]

Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba - "Mali Koori". I can tell you what I know about this record, Jama Ko. Mainly that my friend the producer Howard Bilerman (Arcade Fire, Silver Mt Zion, Wolf Parade) flew from Montreal to Mali to record it. He was so nervous before he visited; he is sometimes a nervous guy. It was March 2012. He landed and they started recording and then a war broke out. Bassekou Kouyate is a super-star in Mali, a kind of Michael Jackson, the world's best n'goni player. The war began when Amadou Toumani Touré, Mali's president, was deposed on 22 March 2012. Touré and Kouyaté are friends. So, listen: this isn't safe music. I don't understand the words, and you probably don't, but this isn't safe. This is frightened music. This is angry music. This is steadfast and ferocious music. These are real microphones in a real room and some musicians are singing and playing. They are in Bamako. Outside the window there are birds, and people, and further away there is smoke, and there is gunfire, and there is a bare sky. The night they recorded "Mali Koori", these musicians went home and maybe they kept on hearing the music, the song's dry hook, while they wondered about their country. While they wondered and worried about their country, their family, their friends, this terrible and arbitrary planet. This track is a document - a recording of events, of movements, that took place. And it is also a song, a piece of art. It is vivacious and beautiful. It is free and flying. It is an unconceding blues. [buy]

Devendra Banhart - "Daniel". In the new episode of The Organist, Banhart says that this song is not about him. Two tenderhearts who fall in love at the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus. A relationship that fades away. Then a reunion one night, unexpected, in the queue for a concert. Banhart is wordless for this meeting: he tells it only with music, a glimmering California sound. Bars count out, the drums shuffle, and we leave the scene behind. "Daniel" is a short film, not a short story. There are cuts, steadycam, a long zoom out. There are no metaphors or similes. Fitting, then, that the song sounds so much like the music of a real filmmaker - Vincent Gallo. I have spent many hours with Gallo's When; strangely, this tribute feels like a homecoming. One song, one film, in a series that was started by another. [buy Mala, which is really good]

The-Dream ft Fabolous - "Slow It Down". After a slew of singles that made me think, "That's it! Terius Nash has lost it!", finally something that makes my heart happily fizz. Yes, this is bare throwback - the-Dream doing what he did years ago, when he was the Love King. But I love a tune that feels like it's counting treasures, that feels like looped sunsets, that patiently looks its lover in the eyes & then looks again. (NB: The-Dream is interested in other bodyparts in addition to his lover's face.) [video]

Luluc - "Fly". Nick Drake's song from 1970, performed by newcomers in 2011. By the end it is over-arranged, but at the beginning it is close to perfect: an old tune just so slightly changed, sung in a room with different light. Luluc has a heavy heart, beginning this song; Drake did too. Each syllable seems to falls away. She finds strength as she goes on - but not too much, not too much. Despite all her companions on shaker, accordion and strings, despite music-making's small pleasure, "Fly" is still heavy-hearted. It needs to be, if rightly performed. It needs to be heavy-hearted, aspiring. [buy Joe Boyd presents: Way To Blue: The Songs of Nick Drake]

Mice Parade - "Do Your Eyes See Sparks". Whenever I think of Mice Parade, I think of the story I heard about the band Wolf Parade: that they chose their band-name when they were opening for Mice Parade, as a way to kind of bully them. This band, Mice Parade, bullied by their openers. Mice Parade, bullied by a gang of moody fellow art students. It makes me like Mice Parade more: that this is what they must weather, and that this is the music they make. Mice Parade will not lie down. They will hit their snares and toms and sing with soft voices loudly. They will will themselves into other seasons. They will tour till they can't. THey will outlive their enemies. [bandcamp]

Robin Thicke ft Pharrell and TI - "Blurred Lines". I was turned onto Thicke's new single a few days before a panoply of bare breasts helped its video go gamboling across the blogosphere. Even then, its cheekiness verged on tacky: "You wanna hug me?" Thicke scooby-doos, "What rhymes with 'hug me'?" But I am extremely forgiving when it comes to good tunes, and this is a very, very good one. In a sense, my mixed feelings are part of the gist of this song: it is, after all, called "Blurred Lines". Just as the track seduces me, in spite of my reservations, Thicke and his hounddog friends are contriving to slip inside a "good girl"'s' trousers. When they croon, "I know you want it," there isn't any of rock or hip-hop's customary threat; they mean it as an invitation, a provocation, a dare. One of my favourite moments in the song is actually kinda horrible - "YOU / THE / HOTTEST / BITCH / IN / THIS / PLACE," the wing-men shout, giving their mark power and taking it away. Still, it sounds good, and almost sincere; maybe I'm giving the boys too much credit, but unlike so many sleazy songs about hustling sex-objects, I feel like the singers are overtly role-playing, and asking these women to do the same. Do you want to accept that compliment? Do you want to be "the hottest bitch in this place"? All of us know that ultimately it's up to you. Blurred lines.

None of this would matter if "Blurred Lines" wasn't such a pleasure to listen to. Pop-bottle percussion, basso and falsetto, gang vocals, distant whoops, loping bassline, stupid asides. With so much pop that's insistently banging or darkly brooding, it's a tiny revelation to hear something this airy and unforced; music for an afternoon party, not a late-night coke binge. Something to send out clattering round the house while you sweep away the last winter trash.

(image from the painted panel of a Slovenian beehive, from the Honey Talks collection)