Archives : all posts by Sean

Usher - "Climax". [soundcloud]
Monica and Brandy - "It All Belongs to Me". [remember last time?]
Brianna Perry - "Marilyn Monroe". [facebook]

Three modern legends return, prove themselves relevant. One newcomer tosses her hair, rhymes, spits. Some weeks I just love music so much - hours that unspool little treasures, gemstone songs, like an automated mine. Not all of these jewels will last - some diamonds you lose, throw in the river. But I feel so rich, on weeks like these, when my chest is full.

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Happy to announce that I'll be part of Montreal's first Polaris Prize Record Salon. At Casa on Feb 25, 4-6pm, I'll join Erik Leijon, Emilie Côté and Polaris's Steve Jordan to talk about some of our favourite Canadian albums since last June. It's free, with earphone doorprizes or something, but mostly I'd just love some thoughtful music fans to heckle, provoke and prod. (Full details.)

(Ketchup Fountain by Britt Spencer [via])

Whitney Houston - "I Will Always Love You". Houston's version of "I Will Always Love You" was one of my favourite songs when I was 12 years old, because I would sing along, at bat mitzvahs and middle-school dances, warbling with a grin on my face, making friends laugh. These days, I am not so fond of it - I fell too hard for Viking Moses' rendition, and Dolly's original. But still that opening minute, before the shiny band shows up, give a tremulous thrill, butterflies. I wonder now what Houston was singing for, or whom. "I Will Always Love You" was recorded for a film that is only 38% good. In The Bodyguard, Houston plays Rachael Marron, a fictional pop singer, and this song is one of Marron's hits. Thus: "I Will Always Love You" is sung in character. If Houston were a good actress, "I Will Always Love You" would be a perfect sublimation of Marron's feelings - a message from the pop-star to Kevin Costner or whoever, informed by the finaglings of an imaginary producer, an imaginary record label, an imaginary buying audience. It would not be Houston's song - it would be Marron's.

And so, thank goodness, Houston was not such a good actress. And "I Will Always Love You" is thus a ballad of this reality, true in this world, for Ottawa 12-year-olds and Chicago 30-year-olds, for you and you and you, everyone with a breaking heart or a whole one, the day before Saint Valentine's Day, when you just wait for a legendary singer to hit the right high notes.

Rest in peace.

[buy]

DakhaBrakha - "Baby". I am still working out which sort of "baby" DakhaBrakha (from Kiev, Ukraine) are referring to. Is this a song about infants growing up, getting down? Or about swooning sweethearts? The plot thickens near the third minute, when witches come out, disrupt the funk - overlapping voices like le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. Despite its beginning, this song does not feel childish. It is not goo goo or ga ga. If the infants do grow up, if the sweethearts do swoon, then there is still the risk of fights, splits, widowings. There are stormclouds brewing, ten million miles away. They can coax an uneasy peace, but it must be coaxed. [website / discovered via Far From Moscow]

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This is a video about serendipity (it's more interesting than it may at first seem):

Miguel - "Adorn". He was a flinty lover, parts of him dusted in stone. Elbows, knees, soles of feet. They walked side by side, brushing shoulders, and his skimmed sides set off sparks. Little shiny sparks. It made her laugh. "There you go again." He never wanted to talk about the sparks, the flint: he was embarrassed, she thought at first, but then she realized he wasn't embarrassed at all. He just didn't want to talk about it. He looked at her with a look all full of tremors.

[Miguel's all exquisite rosy earthquake and maybe the best thing in R&B right now.]

Lisa Jaeggi - "I Had to Lie" A pretty little song, acoustic guitar and a trio of murmuring ghosts. Lisa Jaeggi has a thing that is worth so much: a singing voice. She uses it so well, here - singing the word "lie". Singing it as beautiful and seductive as that lie must have been, showing us the way we would have been fooled.

[this is an old song by Lisa Jaeggi / listen to more]

(photo is of Utah's Newspaper Rock)

BJ the Chicago Kid - "His Pain (ft Kendrick Lamar)". A treasure and devotional. Soundwave reinvents a sample from Black El's "The Ride", and Lamar finds the bassline, the feeling at its heart. He elevates his three minutes, earns them, telling his story in the blue-goldish glow of stained glass. Questions of God and fortune are not easy: anyone who skips and gallops with this stuff is not thinking hard. Note the care of Lamar's revelation, the melancholy shiver of his doubt. [Pineapple Now & Laters is out on Feb 14]

Damien Jurado - "Museum of Flight". When I did the math, I'm pretty sure Jurado was the artist by whom I own the most records - and so he is quantitatively my favourite songwriter. This raises the stakes. After the disappointment of Maraqopa's lead single, "Museum of Flight" is much more like it: an airy, darting beauty. In years of great, rough folk music, Jurado has often tried to mix things up with electric guitars. Here, he changes everything, just everything, in a much simpler way: falsetto, organ. It's as if he's moved from the woods to the plateau - through the telescope there's just cliffs, surf, open sky. [Maraqopa is out on Feb 21]

(photo of Oscar Pistorius and girl by Andy Hooper)

Hooray for Earth - "True Loves". The notion with the laser-guns is that you'd get this device, point it at someone, and make that someone disappear. They'd be detonated, demolished, turned into spray. The first laser-guns were gigantic, big as rooms, but the scientists were certain that they'd improve. The laser-guns would get smaller, small as guns, and space-cowboys'd be able to carry them in holsters, swaggery. Unfortunately the laser-guns never got smaller. The technology just didn't scale down. So we haul our laser-guns, big as rooms. in wagons the size of dance-floors. They are heavy and cumbersome. They are impossible to get into position. Instead of shooting people, we usually spend our time orienting and aiming our room-size weapons. We chat and mingle. We fall in love with each other, we laser-gun operators. We are incorrigible, we're like a village, and we're very happy. [buy]

Waters - "For The One".

1. WORK OUT THE RULES.
2. THROW YOUR ANVILS.
3. CATCH ANVILS (if appropriate).
4. DECLARE WINNER(S).

[buy]

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Both of these songs come to me via the blog Hunt & Gather, whose Some of the Best Songs of 2011 That You May Not Have Heard Yet is the best such list that I've encountered. Not just because of the little unspoolings prose, but because the songs are great! And many of them I hadn't heard! Andrew likes the sorts of songs that I like, and if you're like us you'll like them too. Besides Waters and Hooray for Earth, my highlights are Nomadic Firs, One Room, Mr Little Jeans, Gross Magic, the War on Drugs, Dirty Beaches, Quilt, Purity Ring and Yohuna & Adelyn Rose. Go forth and enjoy.

Actual Water - "La Violence sur les Champs-Élysées". At first it seemed like a regular charge, an army with pikes and muskets marching down the boulevard. But as they passed through the tulip gardens, the soldiers began to change. Musketmen blurred into pikemen. Generals became their uniforms. Greens, blacks and pinks seemed to smear together. There was still violence in the crowd, still gunsmoke and pride. But this wasn't a gang of gathered patriots. This was a hideous, splendid, multi-limbed thing, galloping through broken petals.

[Actual Water are from Toronto. They make lo-fi paisley pop, like a beautiful broken 45. Their new LP is out today / bandcamp / video / album release party at Toronto's Sneaky Dees, tonight!]

Augustine Enebeli Olisa & The Black Arrows - "Isiche". In a week of many beauties, this is the most beautiful thing I have heard. Shadows, starlings, looks in lamplight. The tenderness of the horns, the kindness of the guitars, the sureness of Olisa's voice. Fumbling and happy, I resort to old metaphors. ...the rosegardens and the jessamine and geraniums and cactuses and Gibraltar as a girl where I was a Flower of the mountain yes when I put the rose in my hair like the Andalusian girls used or shall I wear a red yes and how he kissed me under the Moorish wall and I thought well as well him as another and then I asked him with my eyes to ask again yes and then he asked me would I yes to say yes my mountain flower and first I put my arms around him yes and drew him down Jo me so he could feel my breasts all perfume yes and his heart was going like mad and yes I said yes I will Yes. [out of print]

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Unlikely solicitation: Do you live in Russia? I am hoping to make the journey this summer, to research my book. I'd love to connect with readers - please get in touch! The only for-sures on the itinerary are St Petersburg and Magadan, Siberia, which brings me to my second question. Magadan. That is a very faraway place - for me, at the edge of the known world. And so I'm working very hard to try to find contacts there - would-be friends, friends-of-friends, friends-of-friends-of-friends. Do you live near Magadan? Do you know someone near Magadan? Do you know someone who might know someone near Magadan? Family, friends, former research assistants? If so, I would be very grateful if you'd email me.

(image source)