Archives : all posts by Sean

PJ Harvey - "On Battleship Hill". From PJ Harvey's gorgeous, spectral Let England Shake, an album that is deeply weird, pretty & eerie, new. Songs of thorn and death, distant war and Polly Jean's beloved England - but grooving, beautiful. It's almost a chillwave album - a secret, coincidental, chillwave album; chillwave made useful, productive; all that seaweed reverb, analog wobble, even the saxophone and reggae samples, braided with English folk and Cat Power's "Cross Bones Style" to say something, secret and ambivalent, about a people's present. "On Battleship Hill" speaks less to this than other tracks do - it carries more of Let England Shake's other chromosome. This is darkly beautiful, lush & skeletal, indebted to "Tam Lin" and Anne Briggs. But it's the singing that sets it apart, PJ Harvey's thin falsetto singing, like a river over rocks or - at 3:44, the greatest moment on the record, - a single wild rose that suddenly blooms. [buy]

Low - "Immune". You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes. [Happy St Valentine's Day / buy]

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Elsewhere:

Radiohead are releasing an album, The King of Limbs, on Saturday.

Arcade Fire won a Grammy award for album of the year. This band is a lot of things. They are inspiration, role-models, they were once good friends. There are one of the reasons Dan and I became friends. It has been almost a decade since I first heard Win's voice, plaintive & twanging, at a Battle of the Bands. They have come a very, very long way, mostly just by playing their hearts out. Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations, to Win and Régine, Jeremy and Tim, Richie and Sarah and Will, and Marika too. I hope you have some celebrations planned. And I hope that everyone else out there is rewarded, sooner or later, for playing their own hearts out.

James Litherland - "Where to Turn".
James Blake - "The Wilhelm Scream".

These songs are the same song.

They are actually the same song.

So you listen to James Litherland's "Where to Turn", a work of grooving yacht-rock, and then you listen to his son's^* decelerated cover, this melancholy blubstep, sort-of dubstep, and you think some things:

1. James and James have the same name. Does James sr sound like the kind of man who would name his son James? Does James jr sound like the kind of man who lives in his father's shadow? Is James sr proud that his son has become a musician? Does James jr seek James sr's approval? When James jr told James sr that he would be covering "Where to Turn", did the father feel flattered or threatened?


2. And so how much of "Wilhelm Scream" is directed at the father? It is a song of melancholy, alienation, heartache - but how much of Blake's mind, as he sings, is thinking of the way his father will receive it? How would this song be different if it were not, in some tiny way, a tribute?


3. In this age of 80s revivalism, the electric violin, which features around "Where to Turn"'s 2:00 mark, is the coolest & cheesiest instrument to have not yet been resurrected.


4. Did James Blake ever include his father's "Where to Turn" on a mixtape for a friend? For a lover?


5. The lyric at the centre of James jr's song is, Might as well love you. This is not so, for James sr. For him, the feeling seems strongest in lyrics which James jr did not adapt: Where to turn, he asks, when the joys of all creation begin to burn? "Where to Turn" was released in 2006, when James jr was about 17. I do not know when it was written.


6. I like James jr's music very much, but on his debut LP, the pop songwriting is a little, um, slack. This was a problem for his father as well.


7. When the synths rise up at last on "Wilhelm Scream", around 2:30, there is nothing of James sr in them. They are blind, unsympathetic, almost unmelodic. They are a wall of tomorrow, of passing time. James jr is drowned out. Things happen, life will change. Somewhere, a father is hearing his son sing his song.

*Probably his son's. See comments.

[buy James Blake's James Blake / buy James Litherland's 4th Estate]

Anne Briggs - "Blackwater Side". They meet on the evening that the power goes out, when the lights on the pier clink off and she is standing in her little booth and there is a boy walking past, and he says, "And suddenly it's night"; she smiles and she tries to sell him a ticket to the boat-tour. Much later, when they are tied up together in the sheets, he asks her, "How did I find you?" and she says, "The lights went off." But anyway, but anyway, their song is a song of betrayal. They hear it as they are getting up one morning, and it is so beautiful; she decides it is their song without hearing all the words, without hearing that it is a song of betrayal. In time, this becomes a joke - that their lovers' song is a song of deceit. "Your lying tongue," he says to her, their heads on pillows. Sometimes, when they part, she clicks through to hear it on her iPod; when he goes west at Christmas, to see his family, he slips his headphones over his ears; they put it on mixes for each-other, seek different versions. "Your lying tongue," she says to him, her lips at his ear. // Until the day he lies to her. On this day, the song changes. Her life seizes around her; it is as if the summer is tearing; their song turns to ice. They still walk together, and eat together, and on one night they are tied up together in the sheets. But it is blighted and sick. She turns and watches him and sees that he is almost evil, with his curls at his ears. After they end it, she cannot listen to the song of deceit. She listens only to love-songs. Her heart is broken in a particular and terrible way. [buy]

Gucci Mane - "Dollar Sign (These New Puritans remix)". Perhaps you have already heard Gucci's brags - I'm so fucking paid, he rasps, I just bought the dollar-sign. These New Puritans strip the joy from the song, replace it with a melancholy, almost sinister, ache. It recalls early-00s Radiohead, UNKLE, Clint Mansell, but in 2011 these signifiers are not free, unburdened: whereas once they evoked just moodiness, "alienation", now they summon these things while also summoning the past itself, the decade-ago, those early-00s. Gucci is swaggering, glinting, and These New Puritans are flashing our regrets in our eyes, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, draping a rapper's shoulders with the doom he has not yet noticed, the nostalgia he will yet uncover. It's almost unkind. [download the free mixtape, Free Gucci 2: The Burrrtish Edition]

(photo by celia perrin sidarous)

Young Galaxy - "The Angels Are Surely Weeping (ft Hanna)".

Young Galaxy are changers. What do you do, after a wreck of a year? You lean your head against your lover's, one of you with closed eyes and the other wide open. You breathe. In the silence, you write lines about bringing an axe to the winter; you write about loss and going on. You go into a room and you sing songs into a machine.

It must be strange, to write such words, to murmur such verses, and then to send them across the sea. Yet Young Galaxy had lived their wreck of a year; they knew their hearts. They wanted not guitars' blaze, cresting drums - but space, curve, the indirect path. They had lost their taste for certainty. So they sent their night sketches, their sung questions, to a man they knew only as a dashed & flickering face, as a voice down the wire. Sweden's Dan Lissvik, one half of Studio, a producer who creates springs & summers but who cannot invent want. Young Galaxy sent him their want. They sent him their doubt and dream and steely need.

Over nine months, Lissvik made Shapeshifting out of their shapeshifting.

I say all this because "The Angels Are Surely Weeping" was made by men and women from Montreal and Gothenburg, by artists with fingers on keyboards and folded corners in books, who raise fur-lined hoods to go out into the snow. But it sounds like bending, seeking jetplumes; it sounds like a coral reef. This song is neon and radiant, lithe, volatile. If I were feeling cheeky I would tell the story of a great aquatic civilization, thousands of years hence, whales with slow & giant hearts, jeweled headdresses, with pearly lanterns, and the way they would hear this song, sing in time, mournful. Yes, I'd go on a long riff about whales. But I am not feeling cheeky. I hear this song's meditations and I think of tomorrow, and yesterday; the way the light changes, inside our chests, as easily as a dance-step.

[buy / available right now on iTunes / previously / stream Shapeshifting in full]

Sinbad Richardson's delicious music-video for another new YG song, "We Have Everything":

(photo source)

Colin Stetson - "The Stars In His Head (Dark Lights Remix)". On February 22, Constellation Records will release the second album by saxophonist Colin Stetson. It was recorded at Montreal's Hotel 2 Tango in single takes, no overdubs, by Stetson, Shahzad Ismaily and Silver Mt Zion's Efrim Menuck. It features appearances by Laurie Anderson and My Brightest Diamond's Shara Worden. It is the most exciting and devastating record that I have heard in seasons; it is a roaring, terrible sadness. Some have heard Stetson's strong debut, New History Warfare Vol 1. Some have seen the faintest flicker of his talent, playing back-up with Arcade Fire or Beirut. But for those who have not yet heard Stetson's new LP, the only true harbinger has been his solo live shows, on tour with Godspeed You Black Emperor, the National, or at Pop Montreal in 2008. Stetson plays saxophones, I wrote. This is kind of like saying whalers ride boats. Stetson plays cascades of notes, soft and overlapping, the stuff of looper pedals and sequencers. Only he's not using looper pedals or sequencers: just his lips and tongue. He circular-breathes and so the songs never stop. He adds clicks and thumps and what sound like drumbeats, only it's just his tongue on the reed. Noises come from nowhere as he takes deep, deep breaths, finishing each piece covered with the sweat of a marathon runner. Later, he plays a bass saxophone, a sax as big as he is, and I think of Fitzcarraldo pulling a steamship over a mountain.

On New History Warfare Vol. 2: Judges, Stetson applies the same techniques. Twenty microphones, planted like roses around a room - capturing the ripple of notes, the wails of resonance, the violent clack of fingers on keys and the shriek of Stetson's own voice, sounding through the horn; like Stetson has two hearts, four lungs, can sing two different sorrows at once. While several of the album's songs have vocals - precise, supple poetry by Anderson, a ghostlier presence by Worden - the power is in the push of breath through brass, the dive and heave and buck of Stetson's playing. Writing breathlessly in early January (I had been forbidden from posting a song here), I cited Nat Baldwin, Mark Hollis, Mogwai, Mt Eerie, Alexander Tucker, Phosphorescent's Pride, Born Heller, Alèmu Aga, Richard Youngs, Peter Brötzmann and James Blake. This scarcely gives Stetson his due. Judges sounds like nothing else. It is like being struck by a comet.

Would you like to listen? Due to the vagaries of Stetson's PR campaign, I can offer only this song, a re-imagining of Bell Orchestre's "The Stars In His Head", a song which you may have already heard (I had), on a 2009 Bell Orchestre remix album. Two more tracks, "Judges" and "The righteous wrath of an honorable man" are streaming at NPR and Constellation respectively.

But really you simply need to order this disc, $12 on CD and $17 on vinyl and $8 as an MP3; or go see Stetson and Tim Hecker in New York, Montreal or Quebec City; the Montreal launch is at La Sala Rossa on February 10.

Because Judges sounds like an ember, a hope, a wasteland's light. It is pain and loss and dumb death; groans and summons from the night. It has been years since so dark a thing has touched me. Like Arvo Pärt's Für Alina, like Shostakovich's 8th String Quartet, this is a work for bare heart and dawn.

It is only January but there is an album of the year.

(image source, of the Western Front, 1916, unknown)

Mavo - "Pay As You Go". Two blizzards get in a fight. They toss snowballs, lightning bolts, clouds like dumb gloves' push. But the one which wins is the one that sloughs away, eye-rollin'. That says Fuck you with an ambivalent stride. Bruised, feeling its jacket at its collar, this blizzard waits for a bus. It is raining. Blizzards hate rain. The blizzard checks its phone. There has been a message from its lover. The blizzard cannot decide if it wants to answer, or if it will try the same dumb shit it used in the fight. Will the blizzard's lover love it more if it ignores their text? The blizzard doesn't know; the blizzard's moral instincts have been trained on Judd Apatow movies. The blizzard is tired and horny. As the blizzard is rained on, it remembers for a moment the sunshine of July 1, Canada day. The blizzard's secret is that it is deeply patriotic, that it loves Canada Day. But right now it is the middle of the winter and the blizzard is oscillating between giving a shit and giving none. It cannot decide if it wants to snow or to wait til later, to wait til the end of the night after something important has happened. The blizzard is not sure if something important will ever happen. The important things seem to happen to other blizzards, angrier ones. The blizzard looks at its skinned knuckle; it wishes it had a chipped tooth. The bus will never come. [Mavo are from Montreal. They have a MySpace page. This song includes whistling. They are unsigned.]

Reiko Kudo - "Hito No Ko". He says, Come closer, and she says, Come closer, and finally they reach the point where you can come no closer. There are fears here, and uglinesses. There are lines at the corners of eyes, raised breath. But there is also a celebration, so quiet that it can scarcely be seen, not even on a street-corner. Hearts dart into the cold, glancing a look, dropping no footprints at the night. [buy]

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Elsewhere:

I wrote about Braids' Montreal debut in a column for Heineken Music Ireland. I write briefly about hype, expectations, Montreal's perilous hunger. Even more rewarding is Brendan Reed's new project, Black Light Times, where he shoots bewildering interviews with artists, under a black light. He began with Braids.

(photo via The White Hotel)

Vokal Ansembl Gordela - "Zinskaro". Somewhere, there is a thing, and it is the answer to everything you have ever asked. It is the fulfillment of everything you have ever wanted. It is beauty, shadow, courage. Perhaps you will find this thing. I hope you will. I will not tell you where it is. [out of print, from Herzog's Nosferatu]

Shugo Tokumaru - "Rum Hee". Two people exchange messages with birds. They leave them, nested, on welcome-mats. One day, a sparrow - this means Hello. The next day, a bluejay - this means Yes. They continue like this, cardinal & stork & toucan & swan, until one day the pair have almost run out of birds. What Shall We Do Now? one asks, in the form of a pheasant. The other replies with a letter, a printed page, typewritten, which details every aspect of their exchange, spells out, literally, every impulse and intention, every subtext. And this is the end of their correspondence. [buy]

(comic by Paul Noth)