Archives : all posts by Sean

Grizzly Bear - "Frolic". An unreleased song from the early days of Grizzly Bear; it's called "Frolic" but it doesn't sound like one, sounds like a dirge, sounds like a man being slowly buried in gold coins, baubles, false gifts. Look at Grizzly Bear today and then look back at the far horizon, where they came from. Not darkness but twilight, not sadness but decay, dwindling, breath through a harmonica, just breath. The acoustic guitar, speaking in rounds, sounds like the setting on an old Casio - clipped, mean. When I woke up this morning I rolled onto my side and spoke, spoke into the grey room, and my voice was like a ghost's. [from Richard Parks' CONTENT. Contact him for a copy. / Meanwhile, Grizzly Bear's Shields is out now.]

(plate by Chad Wys)

Karneef - "Got Money". Like Mozart's Sister or Pat Jordache (where he was a member), Karneef is an act from Montreal's new bedroom school: damaged, funky, full of appetite and desire. None of Grimes' childish hexes; this is more grown-up than that, nicked and mangy, wolftongue lapping. In Error is a simmering, sidling broil, with grooves that will inch over and burn. Karneef can sound like David Byrne or he can sound like Prince, he can sound like James Murphy or Jim Carrey circa The Mask. "We Found Money" is a resolute jam, skewed and self-satisfied. The singer found money. I do believe he found money. As you may imagine, he is happy about this. He celebrates like a man dancing alone on the dancefloor, like a man dancing alone in an alley, like a junkyard dog dancing alone at the top of the heap. But with the song's slow advance - woodblocks and backing sighs, a cellphone interruption, the sudden & unexpected, frisky, acoustic guitar - you can imagine everyone joining in. You can imagine the scales falling from everyone's eyes, realizing this dirtbag ain't. He found money. He's a millionaire. [buy]

Blue Hawaii - "In Two". New music from a duo that made one of my favourite songs of 2010; a band that's described as a Braids side-project but that's better than Braids, for my money; more pop, more constrained, water poured into a container. With Blue Hawaii I am always made to think of essences, concentrates. You reduce a thing to its purest part. Acid blotter, rosewater, petroleum - it shows itself in the first taste. Splendour unhidden. Either you look her in the eyes or you do not. Other bands are also messing with cut-up synths, sudden blooms, the layering of female voice - but most use these sounds as a screen, concealing that there is nothing inside, no interior. With Blue Hawaii the music is all thrown colours, inkblots, addings. At most it is a veil - something to conceal those eyes. To matter, a song does not need to be a shapeless trance. It does not need to be a room full of smoke. It can be many shivering, separate fires. [out January 22 / via Gorilla vs Bear / five gigs at CMJ]

(painting by Paul Jelinek)

Bob Dylan - "Narrow Way". My parents used to call me Bean. It started when I was in my mama's belly, teeny as anything. They looked at the ultrasound and said: "That there is a Bean." Now I'm not so teeny: I got myself a good truck, a little house, a girl in every port. I got myself a wife: heavy-stacked as hell. So it's hard when I go home to J------, WI, and I rap on my parents big brass knocker, and mama pulls the door open and says BEAN! I'm no bean, not any more. Mama drags me into the parlour and calls down my skinny pop and then they want to know how it's all going - how's the house and how's the truck and how's Stella. Stella, my wife. They don't ask me about the girls in every port because they pretend they don't know that I got a girl in every port. They pretend other things too: that I don't swear, that I still go to church, that I kept pop's Mississippi Sheiks records. But life's a long fackin road, you know? Sometimes you're on the highway and the sky's full of big separate clouds, tall clouds like ships, separated by curtains of sun, and you think to yourself: look at this goddam place I gotta do whatever I want. It's like one long thought, brought on by that wide sky. Look at this goddam place I gotta do whatever I want. [buy]

(photo is of the headquarters of Mussolini's Italian Fascist Party, ca 1934)

Freelove Fenner - "Workshop". Marty showed up with a guitar he had turned inside-out. Trudy put down her cherry coke. "How did you do that?" she said. She went over and touched the inside-out guitar. "It's inside-out, right?" Marty said yeah. He tightened one of the tuning knobs. "What does it sound like?" Trudy asked. Now Sam had come over. He plinked one of the guitar strings. It made a sound like this: wingggg Marty said that he had found the instructions in an old book, from the library's one-dollar sale. He said he had ordered a modulator on eBay. The inside-out guitar was seafoam green. It looked a little like a guitar and a little like a seahorse and a little like the facade of a hardware shop. Marty plugged it in to an amp. He asked Sam for a pick. He flicked on the switch and ran the pick over the guitari's looped strings. The sound was crystalline, bittersweet, medicinal, like an elixir. It wasn't a sound for love-songs or rockers but you could make a sound like that into a tiny little universe, a sequence of oribiting planets, supporting life. You could make a sound like that into a psychedelic mission-statement, a reason to keep looking at leaves through your pair of prismatic glasses. [buy]

Like a string of inhalations, half-breaths, the phrases that come before and then. Gifts, splendours, endlessly unconsummated. [Dishwasher's Peace Signs is out October 15]

Peter Peter - "Une version améliorée de la tristesse". Rain wash white out. You are driving and the world is suddenly wiped away, dissolved in a thunderstorm. You panic at first but then your fingers tighten around the wheel and you snap on your hazards and you are still driving, driving slowly, in a column of cars. In the aftermath you have the time & space to recall the feeling, the feeling that the feeling recalled. That rain wash white out, rain-wash-white-out, it reminded you of another time, on the street, when the whole world seemed to melt away. You were walking. There were solemn streetlights and strafing headlights, and you were putting one foot in front of the other, and your whole life was skidding out under the soles of your busted wellington boots. [buy / credit Adam Kinner for that extraordinary life-giving saxophone]

The Finks - "Emma Again". A book of short stories, sitting on the bench at a bus stop. It is just a little paperback, bright yellow cover, and after a while you pick it up because the bus is late. The book feels good in your hand; feels just right. The sky is clear as a perfume bottle, blue, you think to yourself wanly, as the Librarian's eyes. Lately you have been obsessing about the Librarian and you have been quietly enjoying this obsession - you are not sure how much you are being ironic when you type and delete and re-type the Librarian's name in the Facebook status update box. You just know that you always close the window.

Now you are at the bus stop with the little yellow paperback. It feels good in your hand so you flip open the cover. A story called "Emma Again". You squint at that title. "Emma Again". Someone has taken a ballpoint pen and crossed out the word Again. You shift on the bench and cross your legs. You start reading the story. It is a story about new love. It is written in a fumbling, bumbling style, like the author does not have a full command of the English language. You flip back to the cover. "by Emma D----". Is Emma writing about herself? Is the narrator deliberately clumsy? Is this meta-fiction or whatever? The back of the paperback doesn't have any information, just a publisher. You wonder what the Librarian would say about this book. Would they know all about it, just from the author's name, the publication date? Would the Librarian be able to quote back the opening line?

You keep reading and on the third page you find another word has been crossed out. In fact it is the same word. After a while she said I'll go home again. You pore over the rest of the pages. Throughout all of "Emma Again", every instance of the word again has been crossed through, in a wobbly blue line. Why? It is a mystery. You look up - the bus is coming. Its orange lights shine through the morning mist. This little paperback is a mystery, a mystery, and you clutch it happily. You're so happy to have found a little mystery. You rummage in your pocket for a bus token. Later you will see the Librarian again and you will have this book in your raincoat pocket and the mystery will give you something to talk about. A loose thrill rolls around in your chest. You are a bit embarrassed by the somersaulting thrill, the fuzzy heat of it - you don't even know if you even really like the Librarian; but you try not to overthink it. You squeeze into the bus and try to find a place where there's room to stand and also room to hold the yellow paperback in your left hand, thumb wedged in the spine, to read. You will read the whole story, while the bus rolls and shudders, again and again and again.

[The Finks on Soundcloud]

(photo source)

Adam Torres - "Mountain River". The man sets up his easel near the green river, by the wagging willows, under the blue sky, and he gets to painting. It is difficult work. His plan is not to capture the scenery, the sunlight, the lazy breeze: just to paint a square of water, running river water, as it passes by. He spends the first hour smearing colours on his palette, blending them, choosing a hundred hues. Then he stares hard at the water, and begins to paint, and stares hard again, and he can't get over the small thin fear that if he stares too hard at the river he is going to tumble all the way in. [bandcamp]

YELLOWTEETH - "Temporary Father". Mint, vodka, responsibility, nostalgia, fatherhood, hockey cards, Sandy Denny, cranberries, back-hoes, challah, roof-slate, moxy, the downtown core: just throw it in the blender. [buy]

(image source)