Archives : all posts by Sean

Ryan Driver - "It's Tulip Season".

Ryan Driver cannot quite sing like Chet Baker, but he can listen to Chet Baker. He can study 16mm film and practice Chet Baker's walk, learn the way he shook hands, the way he shrugged on a coat. He can listen to wrong notes the way Chet Baker listened to wrong notes, nodding, feeling them go right. I have not been able to google the colour of Chet Baker's eyes, but let us imagine that they were blue. Blue eyes are a state of mind. Blue eyes is a nickname for the thing Driver is doing with his piano, here. "Play it blue-eyes," he tells Martin Arnold, on guitar. None of them have ever seen a man with blue eyes. They do not smoke. They are lovesick and it is springtime.

[Who's Breathing?, a stunning and excellent album, is out soon. Buy it, buy it, buy it.]

Daniel Romano - "Louise".

It is not easy, to sing a song for a departed loved one. The stakes are high. The song must stand for the whole of your heart. If it says too little, it is a lie - but it is also a lie which corrupts, which can slowly become true. A song is not a reflection of one's true feelings; it is an illustration. We gather these illustrations about us, take them with on anniversaries. As time goes by, the illustrations are the most certain things we have.

Daniel Romano's "Louise" is beautiful and slow, a remembrance on high cliffs.

[buy Sleep Beneath the Willow]

(photo is Tree #14 by Myoung Ho Lee/ source)

Miracle Fortress - "Raw Spectacle (Pantha du Prince remix)". Graham van Pelt's wish and longing overtaken by knock and clap. Pantha du Price's beats consist of huge structures, galleries bounded with bridge and cupola, an architecture of white marble and faded copper. The city becomes much bigger than the wanting at its centre; there are lone towers, canals which do not meet. I do not know how long a man has been standing on the wall, looking east. I only noticed him this morning. But lines are appearing, like cracks in the ice, upon his face. [Was I The Wave? is released tomorrow / He's celebrating by playing an in-store at Montreal's Phonopolis]

Sun In Sound - "Such A Let Down". Norway's Sun In Sound follow-up the outstanding "Up North", and like that song, "Such A Let Down" will make you feel either nauseous or smitten. It is like chewing too long on a raspberry, staring at a bee-sting, listening to the Flaming Lips too loud. If there are any lessons in this song, they are about avoiding nooses, slipping on mud. My sleeves are so tight I sometimes forget I have hands. [more]

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I think Dan's back this week, after two weeks away; but I wanted to extend thanks and admiration to Chandler Levack (1 2) and Emma Healey (1 2), who were filling-in in his absence. It was a pleasure reading their writing (and hearing their songs). I'm actually about to go on holiday too, but it's a more familiar face - Said the Gramophone's reclusive Jordan Himelfarb - who will be picking up the slack. Please leave feedback for our visiting scribes!

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Elsewhere:

Gizmodo republished my long investigative piece from Brick 85, concerning a secret society and the Paris catacombs.

Adam & the Amethysts have released a new video for "Prophecy", a song I posted here last month. A song that recalls Brian Wilson, the Unicorns, "Auld Lang Syne", Macbeth. Drumsticks and acoustic guitar, pinned by whoops, hooks like arrows fired at the clouds. The video's got good times, bad hair, skateboards and a VHS flicker.

(photo source)

Destroyer - "Farrar, Straus and Giroux".

The song fish-hooked me.

I'm walking, listening, and then suddenly each image is a chime; each sentiment familiar. We want this from music - to hear something so close that you feel it slip down your throat and catch in your chest. We talk of "hooks" in songs. Of being "grabbed" by a "catchy" song. We remember such moments: strolling and hearing a track that expresses all that rustles in your bones. The song at the concert, that time, when you felt like you were tearing in half. The song as you walked down the aisle. Something on the tape-deck as your headlights are white beaming. The last dance. Everything just yes.

"Farrar, Straus and Giroux" was destined for a mix CD I never made. For many weeks I kept the song aside. And when I took it out it had changed. Become a long line of familiar truths - of coincidences (eerie, splendid) reeled out slow. From smiles to stones to my "temporary age of 24"... Each time one of these things rings & stings, I feel the fish-hook tug.

"If there is such a thing as ill-timed August rain?" Bejar sings, and the way he asks it would almost break your heart were he not caring enough to shrug and pivot, to say "all right" and then play the piano runs generous and inevitable, Destroyer-typical, that will remind me always of the "Aria".

Yesterday my friend Darek, whose first language is not English, asked me the difference between the words coincidence and synchronicity. I said that synchronicity was Jung. That it was a "system of coincidences". This system might spell the name of God, or humanity, or truth. Or love. Or nothing at all.

But I regret speaking of systems. Let "synchronicity" be instead the collective noun for coincidences. A flight of swallows, an anthology of flowers, a synchronicity of coincidences. A synchronicity. Who's with me? (Who's even still reading this?)

It's such a shiny word, synchronicity. Shiny as a new Farrar, Straus & Giroux paperback. Shiny as Destroyer's electric guitar.

Shiny, friends, as fish-hook.

[buy / this post first appeared in 2006]

Sleeping Bag - "Beside". Two jewelled saddles, resplendent. The cowboys ride, with underarm cereal boxes. Crunch, crunch. Two crunches, like a Japanese poem. The first cowboy squints at the horizon. These are the richest cowboys in the West. They got rich on friendship. They look at each-other now, putting simultaneous toothpicks between simultaneous canines. The cowboys have never high-fived. They have never shaken hands. They have exchanged glances and these glances have stood for embraces. Their saddles are made of onyx and emerald. Their horses were raised in Delaware. When they are ready, the cowboys will gallop through the scrub the way that birds move through Spring. They will gallop all the way to the lake.

[I last wrote about Sleeping Bag's 90s nostalgia in January. It's like a blunt instrument, I wrote, a cotton-gloved fist, pounding the sleepy smile into your face. The band's entire album is now streaming at Bandcamp and, they say, it desires vinyl pressing. I hope it gets its wish.]

Digits - "Desire". [download EP]
Jamie Woon - "Echoes". [buy]

It was dark when the Israelites traipsed away from Giza, crackers fastened to their backs. The only sound was the murmuring of mothers to their infants, the squeak & creak of leather straps. Sand swished. Mules exhaled. Lanterns glowed in the darkness and this light accorded the procession an appropriate atmosphere: deliberate, steady, secret. These families were leaving the tent-city for the desert, for whatever comes next. Some of their hands still smelled of lambs' blood. All of them dreamed of whips.

Gil strolled somewhere in the middle of the throng. He strolled alone. He led Lucy by her harness and sipped intermittently from his water-skin. He looked out over the black of the dunes and remembered the nights when the full moon had loomed, larger than the pyramids, larger than anything, and he had leaned under a palm kissing girls with black hair.

The Nile did not glitter. It was still.

Gil had had many lovers. Some were Israelites, and these women now marched nearby, huddled with their parents, with their siblings. Many were Egyptians. Gil wondered if he would ever see them again. He sipped from his water-skin. He would go with his tribe to wherever they were going, to wherever God was leading them; they'd set up and live their lives. And then maybe one day Gil would come home and go dancing again with Rena or Shariti, would lie by the wall with Nefila. He looked at the way his sandals pressed into the dirt. He wondered if they would reach their destination and he would fall in love. With Leah or Shoshana. Would he wake up one morning and look into the sun and want nothing more than to hold Leah's hand? Forever? Would he never come back to Egypt? He looked back over his shoulder. You could see nothing of Giza. It was as if Giza had never existed. In the part of Gil's chest where hIs heart lightly rested, he felt a soft, terrible sadness.

[Digits' Lost Dream EP, released today, is a free download. It is slow, sensuous electro - from Toronto. Alt does beautiful things with pastels, flickers, coloured shapes, and we look forward to hearing more.]

(image source unknown)

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Elsewhere:

Artists have about a month to apply to one of the sweetest deals in Canadian arts funding: the Banff Indie Band Residency. Visit one of the most beautiful places in the country and spend two weeks meeting other acts, working on your music, and finally recording in studio with engineers like Tony Berg and my friend Howard Bilerman. Previous participants include Basia Bulat, the Witchies, Woodpigeon and Ohbijou. (For bands that have fewer than five members, the only cost for the program is transportation to Banff.) In 2009, I spent a month in Banff writing about the Paris catacombs; it was a joy and a privilege.

Pacific! - "Unspoken ft. El Perro Del Mar". Ringing, ringing, siren & dulcimer & dancefloor. It's gorgeous electro-pop, threaded with gold, but there's also a quirkiness to what these Swedes have done. El Perro Del Mar sings solemn, sultry, above click & ring & echo, yet for the chorus she's joined by another voice, one of Pacific's boys; and he is more Ringo than Nico, like he was hauled in from a telephone booth. It's a peculiar combination, but everything comes down to the beauty of the sound, the whorls and slips, the different metals of the disco-ball.

[buy]

Gardens & Villa - "Black Hills". Sometimes good songs seem like such simple things: it takes just a panel, a doorknob, a hinge.

[LP is due on Secretly Canadian on July 5 / bandcamp]

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Elsewhere:

+ I profiled (and interviewed) Pat Jordache for Hour.

+ Lovely new video for Little Scream's "The Lamb", all lamplight and shadow and headdress and snow. Made by friends and acquaintances. Buy The Golden Record now. (I'm going to write about another of her songs soon.)

+ Ryan Mills (available for mastering jobs!), has uploaded a video of Arcade Fire playing "My Heart Is An Apple" in March 2002, at a loft on St-Laurent. I think it was an afternoon all-ages gig, organised by Chloe Lum and David Barclay, with the Unicorns opening. This is perhaps my favourite era of the band, playing perhaps my favourite song, at a show that meant a great deal, in the end, to my friendship with Dan Beirne. Watching it, I feel a whole lot of things.

(photo is of Yellowstone's Morning Glory Pool / source)

Low - "Nothing But Heart". More than a decade ago, this band helped invent the thing called slowcore. Since then, Low have walked a crooked path away from that notoriety, made songs that groove and shimmer. Not here. Here, they cloak themselves in their old cloaks. They slip their old strings into their new guitars. Secretly, they murmur a mantra they learned from Neil Young. Then they flick the switches on their amps and begin to play, slow and hardcore, beautiful and roaring, standing under studio lights and showing all the ways they're different from, all the ways they're the same as, the Minnesota couple that clasped hands in 1990. "Nothing But Heart" is a flag that unfurls over eight minutes; not just bands of blue, black, indigo, but swathes of gold and silver, illuminated stars. It is deafening heraldry, howling guitar and banded voices, building shapes in the air. [C'mon is released tomorrow / LP is just $12 at Sub Pop]

Trey Songz - "On Top". The topic of Trey Songz' ballad is unambiguous. Also, its purpose. In fact, almost everything about this track is crystal clear - Trey's feelings, his tactics, his preferred sexual position. And yet this song is hot, hazy, torrid; it is indirect and fragile. On paper, Trey's ministrations are transparent & crude. On wax, they are soft as butterfly-wings. It is not just the clap and shuffle of the beat, but that melancholy piano-line, more Satie than Neptunes, made of moonlight. [download 2009's Anticipation]

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Elsewhere:

Emperor X, a Said the Gramophone favourite, has a new and extremely limited cassette for sale. Comes with digital versions. Songs and then backwards songs. Go get it. (Via Tyler, who shares one of the tape's sad, angry, racketing songs at Wattled Smoky Honeyeater.)

The Guardian is streaming all of w h o k i l l, the new album by Tune-Yards. It is an extraordinary fucking record, and we're head over heels for it. Merrill Garbus is an old friend, and she's gnashing teeth in every new way. Also don't miss her new video, which we linked to last week, and this weekend profile from the paper.

Speaking of excellences, Southern Souls have posted a great video of Pat Jordache, performing at Toronto's legendary Honest Ed's store. We've written copiously about Jordache, one of Montreal's best acts (and Merrill Tune-Yards' former bandmate in Sister Suvi). Future Songs - a favourite from our end-of-year list - is getting reissued by Constellation later this month. It's a gorgeous (improbable) re-master.

(image is Yuri Masnyj's Tied in a knot / source)

Efrim Manuel Menuck - "chickadees' roar pt 2". This is the smallest and in some ways the largest song on the debut solo album by Efrim Menuck, co-founder of Silver Mt Zion and Godspeed You! Black Emperor. It is not the shortest song, but it is the lightest, the dawnest. It leads into the album's fanfare closer, its song of rousing & outright triumph, "i am no longer a motherless child". But before we get there, these roaring chickadees, this song without words, this blush of sounds - birdcalls, strings, kindly ghosts, summoned without computers, from strings & wire. High Gospel is a record of strife and surmounting, of findings, and on "chickadees' roar" the epiphanies come most easily. Like fireflies rising in the fields. Or maybe a more humble metaphor: like a train coming in.

It's beautiful. It reminds me of Stars of the Lid, Philip Jeck, but mostly of night rides, screened windows, the change of light on the inside of an arm, of a highway barrier, of a tentsheet. Yet this isn't a stodgy, countryside, Walden dream: the chickadees fly up over fluorescents, lost credit cards, heavy phone-calls. This music, I think, was imagined in a city. Our backs to concrete, we could use its help.

[Efrim Manuel Menuck's plays "High Gospel" is released May 24 / pre-order available soon]