Archives : all posts by Sean

Herman Düne - "The Wrong Button". Minus André, Herman Düne are a shade of their former selves - over-saccharine, too impulsive and eager to be liked. But "The Wrong Button", from their soundtrack to Mariage à Mendoza, hits the notes that made Herman Düne, for a time, my favourite band in the world. Clumsy and sweet, but more than anything else that loud, overdriven guitar solo, a solo too electric for the rest of the track, throwing everything off-balance, unsteady, like a leaning turntable or a crooked road, a lovesick swoon, a punch to the chin. [buy]

Luke Abbott - "Modern Driveway". Something so addicting in this weave of beats and clicks, these swells of notes, like ten million tiny lakes. When I have not been listening to jazz, or to new albums by Suuns and Young Galaxy (which I will share with you when I can), I have been listening, these past weeks, to Luke Abbott's song "Modern Driveway". These are not new sounds that he is using, or new ways of laying them next to each other, but something in the wistful heart of this track is just the right measure of lovely and confused, hopeful and frightened, trusting and lost, and I listen to it over and over again. [buy]

(photo by Thomas Barbèy)

Bradez ft Kwaw Kesse - "Wossop (remix)". Yet more Ghanaian hiplife - heavily hooray, fearsomely yay, yup, yip yip. Music like this, up-down right-left, it turns me into a muppet, a kind of ballsy Yip Yip, gonna trespass into a banquet. Cowbell and hiccups, shaker, woodwind, Kwaw Kesse and Bradez stating their business over Brundai's beat. HALLUCINANT. [twitter]

Christina Courtin - "All You Had To Do". Holy moly, etc, pow, like one of those guns with an unfurling sign. POW! Courtin has tossed out "Rainy"'s stately melancholy, shacking-up instead with whizz, bang, snap and crackle, glowing lightbulb harmonies, guitar solos, "yeah-yeah yeah yeah yeah." Having fun, basically. She has hit the ground running, skated the slope, caught air. She has gone into the studio and invented things. She has flashed the lights. "All You Had To Do" sounds like one hell of a week. [buy]

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Elsewhere, two very fine Kickstarter campaigns, by musicians I admire. (They are also the kind of musicians who genuinely need your help; for whom pre-ordered albums are probably economically transformational.) Please, please consider giving:

• Devon Sproule is raising money for Colours, her new record. The thank-yous include everything from LPs to Sproule's entire CD collection. I am discovering that I have never written about Sproule here, but 2011's I Love You, Go Easy (mp3) was a weird and exemplary collection of songs, wiry golden folk, close to perfect. Also, she covered Mary Margaret O'Hara.


• Meanwhile, We/Or/Me is looking for just a little help to finish mixing his new collection of quiet, deliberate songs. Eight years ago he wrote a track that sounded better to me than Nick Drake's "Pink Moon", one night. His new record was mixed by Brian Deck (The Moon and Antarctica) and features vocals by Vashti Bunyan. Indeed. Go help some art get made.

(photo source)

Eurythmics - "Never Gonna Cry Again". Here is the background:

"Never Gonna Cry Again" was the debut single release from Eurythmics, taken from their debut album In the Garden. Co-produced by respected krautrock producer Conny Plank, the recordings also featured two members of krautrock band Can. It achieved little commercial success, only #63 in UK.

One of the things I love about songs is that they exist outside their background. "Never Gonna Cry Again" exists in the world, exists as 3m05s of melody and rhythm, exists even for those who know nothing about In the Garden, Conny Plank, the UK charts. Whereas the Peloponnesian War can only be remembered in terms of its war-ness, its Peloponnesian-ness, "Never Gonna Cry" can be separated from its conception, its creation, its commercial reception. It can be separated from its singer, composer, and whichever session musician is playing the rinkydink trumpet. Forget everything you know and "Never Gonna Cry" is still a weird and splendid pop song, pulsing and wistful, fiercely determined and hopelessly daft. [buy]

(photo by sasha mademuaselle)

The Cyrillic Typewriter - "Dizzy and Blessed".
The Cyrillic Typewriter - "Sunlight Underground".

The first and last songs on the Cyrillic Typewriter's second album, the work of Jason Zumpano with friends like Dan Bejar, Loscil, and especially Nathaniel Senff, whose bari sax cuts like a hot knife through tulip-stalks. This is stumbling morning music, before your body can hit the right notes, when sunlight's still coming out wrong. Lo-fi and orchestrated, like a dish-rack symphony, dustbin concerto. All the psychedelia of friendship and chamomile tea, loss and ambition. Pop music with the varnish sanded off, wood-grain exposed, the seams front and centre.

[buy / listen to more]

(Photo: Radio Pictures, "Chorus Girls", 1938)

Unknown Mortal Orchestra - "So Good At Being In Trouble". So much space in this lovely song. Whole acreages, counties, provinces of space. Valleys and plains, scrubland and woods, clusters of quasars. You could go swimming in this song and never see another person, except the person you're holding in yr heart, carrying with you, like a melody, like a hope or a promise, like a wish. [buy]

Foxygen - "San Francisco". One of those songs that seems guileless, unpremeditated, and then about half-way through you realize, "Oh, these bozos are experts." A little golden hook, hooked to other hooks, copper and silver hooks, or hooked to itself, golden hook-golden hook, sounding as easy as a Kinks record, a simple as reverb-y strum, that most wondrous magic which looks like nothing at all. Cue up the applause. [listen to the rest/buy/video]

(photo source)

Drew Danburry - "Jennifer Connelly, or Fools Mock but they Shall Mourn". A song that's part-beach, part-jungle, sunny and shaded, bleached and verdant, with toucans and shipwrecks, flotsam and beetles, a moony sweetheart strolling at the borderline, shooting a yo-yo, wistful, resigned, checking his phone for messages, changing the ringtone so instead of a laser beep it'll just creak, a weathered groan, like an old house.

[The First Pillar EP, Drew Danburry's gazillionth pocket record, is free right here]

Isaac Delusion - "Transistors". A song with slides in suitcases, little slides. Click open the suitcase latches and slide the slide to wherever, Marseilles or the Bahamas, heartbreak or the dancefloor. Isaac Delusion is a little like Antony with Hot Chip. Less inventive, maybe, but more directly nice. A finger to your chest, turning your heart bright blue.

[buy]

(drawing of Jennifer Connelly by Adrian Tomine)

Reversing Falls - "Curse This Place". I posted this song almost a year ago, in an entry titled DEAFLY CRY. Montreal's Reversing Falls had made a riffwave anthem and I liked it a lot:

Reversing Falls grit their teeth, charge their guitars, but they know they cannot unmake the place, the town, that they are cursing. It is bigger than they are, crueller, fiercer and louder. That is what makes it worthy of cursing. As a band cowers in a basement rehearsal space, chugging, singing, spending one guitar-pick after another, the city stands permanent and beautiful around them. Its skyline is ambivalent, and its snowplows, and its nighttime spotlights, skimming the clouds. Curse the shine on this diamond, curse the love in these clutching hands.

I posted "Curse This Place", because it had been sent to me, but then the band wrote and said "actually, please take that down, we're still working on it". Now 12 months later, a different winter, and indeed a different "Curse This Place". Reversing Falls worked with Mark Lawson, they worked with Howard Bilerman, they worked with Unicorns' Jamie Thompson and a rinky-dink piano. They took four seasons to make "Curse This Place" better and they really did make it better. This charged electric enthem gained new backup vox, battery acid, a "Creep"-like stutter. It won itself some torque, a low-end to the high electric guitars, something close to conviction. They are still cursing the same damn place, the same draining town, but there's the sense they could indeed ram a chink into it. Someone will hear their unhappy, winning racket. Bravo.

[debut out April 19 / bandcamp]

(photograph from the Otto Bettmann collection)