Archives : all posts by Sean

Method Man, Freddie Gibbs & StreetLife - "Built for This". Later this year, the RZA will use this song to soundtrack kung-fu. I can already imagine the sword glints. I can already imagine the fists smashing brick into dust. I can imagine everything: just from this sharp, mean bassline; from the organ glitter; from the rappers' rough-house rhymes. As you know, I like a song that will march right through a building. I like a song that will level a grass hut. I like a song that doesn't hesitate before it grabs for the pouch of rubies. [bandcamp]

Isaac Delusion - "Early Morning". It is not easy to stop a moving vehicle. You have to sustain the impact, accept it, without losing your footing on the road. You have to say yes while also saying no. It is the same thing with a day: it will not stop unless you can let it wash right over you, all twenty-four hours. It takes practice to do this: not to flinch at dawn, at dusk, at meal-times. Stand in an open space - a dance studio, a clearing, a parking lot - and practice letting time come in. Practice sustaining the impact of each minute. Accept each tiny second. And then at a certain point the day will come to a stop. It will come to rest - like a car, like a truck, like a sled. Like no thunderstorm ever does. [out soon on Cracki Records]

Jessie Ware - "Wildest Moments". This is the song I keep listening to this week. And in a certain sense that is what this song is itself about: returning to something, again and again. The drums repeat and revisit; the chiming piano chords; the answer and reverb. Ware asks questions and lets her song pause just before the answer - before the reckoning or consequence, before the regret, before we have to decide whether to stop. Or whether to repeat. [buy]

(Photo is Lee Miller's From the Top of the Great Pyramid, 1937)

Arlo Guthrie - "I'm Going Home". Every so often I am getting ready to bicycle down to a concert and I bump into a friend. "What are you going to see?" they say. And I tell them it's a singer-songwriter, a girl with a guitar, or a guy with a guitar, and they say, "Oh, ok, cool," and we part ways, and part of me is embarrassed. And then when I'm on my bicycle I ask myself why I'm biking downtown to hear some dumb sappy songs on acoustic or electric guitars, with a lap steel or two, why I'm not going to a loft to hear strange future music, like sea creatures turning somersaults.

And then finally I arrive, every so often. And I go into a long room. And a song like this one is coming over the P.A., acoustic guitars and shaker, voice, vibraphone, and it's the most beautiful thing in the world, unassailable, and why would I ever want to be in a room where this song is not playing? [buy]

SappyFest 7 happened at the beginning of August. Sackville, New Brunswick's music and art festival is one of the greatest little things in the world: a tiny village assembled just once a year, filled with racket and song. It is a place to make friends and cherish them, to fall down and get back up. Tiny stages filled with the world's greatest noisemakers, heartbreakers and pals, where nobody wants anything more than for the moments to be special.

At SappyFest I write SAPPY TIMES, a daily newspaper of the things I hear. SAPPY TIMES is proudly printed, on real paper (!), and distributed for reading throughout Sackville, NB. But paper gets wet, or gets lost, or maybe you weren't at Sappy at all, you poor daft sorry fool. So as in 2009, 2010 and 2011, for archival purposes, and for the interest of Said the Gramophone readers, I offer the digitized SAPPY TIMES right here:

This year's festival highlights include: Metz, YAMANTAKA//SONIC TITAN, Canailles and Man Forever's hullabaloo, as documented in Saturday; Fucked Up, Christine Fellows, Eternal Summers, and the Talking Exploding Diamond Talk Show, which did feature an exploding diamond, as remembered in Sunday; and Bry Webb, the Mouthbreathers, Silver Mount Zion and BA Johnston, as documented in Monday.

If you've never been to Sappy, I'll say it again: it's so special and small and of exceptional quality. 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. This is my email address.

Taylor Swift - "We Are Never Ever Getting Back Together (country mix)". I like the tiny things that make this a "country" mix. The angles to Taylor's voice, leading up to the chorus. The twanging steel as the chorus opens up. The fiddle breakdown. The mandolin, buried in the mix. But there is no genre to the winning, wordless, "ooh-oo-oo oo-oo", and Taylor's collaborators - Max Martin, Shellback - will pretend that there is no genre to that robotic bass-drum thump, to the shouted punk-pop refrain. Oh but there are so many gorgeous inventions to this silly, joyous kiss-off song, whether it's the country mix or the original. I love the way Taylor's "we" - the we that represents the former couple, the failed relationship, the doomed love - is sublimated as "Weeeee!". I love the grin and eyeroll as her boyf consoles himself with a "cool ... indie record"; as if Taylor is admitting she likes it a bit too, but seriously boy-o come on. And I love the way the title doesn't give away the choruses' secret: we, in fact, are never ever ever getting back together. Because it's 2012, I hear a little "Call Me Maybe". Because it's victorious & rocking, I hear "Since U Been Gone". Because this is Said the Gramophone, I hear defunct sparklers, tumbling magnolia blossoms, matches. [Red is out October 22]

Pale Eyes - "This Coward's Theory of Beauty". A two-minute ghost story: a figure rises from the cinders and he has seen the day after tomorrow, when the sun hides in a warehouse, when the cars are soundless, when she has cut off all her hair. The ghost's voice is like a tape run backwards, a drowning, a hollow log. A thing can be ruining even as it is admired. A beautiful song lies rotting on the ground. ["This Coward's Theory of Beauty" samples Colin Stetson. Toronto's Pale Eyes includes former members of Archivist. Video / Soundcloud / Website.]

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Elsewhere:

Fulton Lights' gorgeous, furious, funky album Am I Right Or Am I Right is finally available, in full, at Bandcamp. Go get it. (Previously.)

Jessie Ware's Devotion, one of my most anticipated albums of the year, is streaming now at the Guardian. (Previously.)

Bry Webb, former frontman of Constantines, whose album Provider I adore, has created a weird cassette of midnight-black, bending, psychedelic saxophone music. The music samples Feuermusik and StG's beloved Best Show on WFMU. It is called Sax Tape, it is available here, with all proceeds to charity. Bry is also on a short Canadian tour; he plays Montreal's Theatre Ste-Catherine next Wednesday.

(Image is Jean-Léon Gérôme's Truth Coming Out of Her Well to Shame Mankind, 1896.)

Frank Ocean - "Thinkin Bout You (Ryan Hemsworth bootleg)". The way the light changes at rain. Peter needed onions and he decided to walk all the way up to the market, forty-five minutes each way, through the broiling heat. He watched his feet land in front of each other, one after another, and the skid & cough of the city buses. He watched sad men sitting on their verandas, radios playing, with paper dogs that scampered to the gate and then lay down. He was aware at every moment of the sun's vibrating yellow disc. It was so hot, and Peter was so stuck on Jude, and it felt so hopeless and tragic, so squandered, like a house never lived in.

Then quietly it began to rain, and then loudly it began to rain, and it was as if the whole grey city was getting washed and anointed by tiny clear pinpricks. The road disappeared. The pavement's clear lines went wavy. Cars lifted like lakes. Peter blinked in the mist, vision swimming, with a sun that showed and vanished, showed and vanished. There were pinks and golds but especially blues, running blues. Peter thought of Jude, he was so stuck on Jude, but he could no longer find the heartbreak in it, the loss; while the rain ran, he remembered only the way that a touch feels, touching, and the way it feels, so gently soft, as it is coming apart. [Ryan is from Halifax / buy Channel Orange]

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My friend Richard Parks (Music Man Murray) is making short films for the reissues of his dad's albums. They are short, skewed, impulsive portraits - beautiful works of whimsy and pop. Much, much more than advertisements.

Jhené Aiko - "3:16 am". With every passing year, Joanie grew more and more certain that she would break up with Mac. She would go up to him while he was untangling his fishing-line, standing just in the corner of his view. She would say, "Mac, we need to talk." They would talk. But it was at this point that her imagination failed. She could not imagine the conversation with Mac. All of her complaints seemed so trivial: he was often a little late, he never tried new foods, he never complimented her manicures. Their relationship was five years old and there had been no crisis or scandal. They were OK. And it crushed her heart to imagine trying to explain this to him, as he blinked his eyes, Mac her teddy-bear and puppy and all-star. She put on "3:16 am" and listened to its thundering drums, detonation after detonation, and wished that she could see the signs of drama in her own life: fractures in the walls, dust falling, flashes of orange light as the building shivers and prepares to collapse. [forthcoming]