Archives : all posts by Sean

Phosphorescent - "The Mermaid Parade". This song didn't ache until Ben told me some more about it, told me that Amanda is the name of Matthew Houck's ex-wife. And Matthew Houck is Phosphorescent, so when he sings that word, Amanda, he is singing to her. He sings it carefully and happily and sadly and brokenly. He sings it because he has lots of things to say. Too much, sometimes, to fit in a rhyme. I know all about your new man / your new older old man, he sings. Oh you be careful Amanda. But the clinching line is this: I found a new friend too / and yeah she's pretty and small / goddammit Amanda, goddammit all. A song which felt like the performance of country music suddenly becomes just country music, a torn heart sewn onto a sleeve. But not tearfully.

Update: Ben advises me that I misunderstood him. Amanda is probably not Matthew Houck's ex-wife, but rather the song's narrator's ex-wife. This is a hilarious mistake. I am trying to figure out if it makes the song better or worse.

[buy / thanks ben!]

Creep - "Days ft. Romy Madley Croft (Deadboy remix)". The xx's Romy Madley Croft sings her disquiet over Deadboy's ghost clatter. She is true, she promises; she longs for no one else. But whereas the original track seems sympathetic, with beats & buzzes rended by the same distress, Deadboy almost seems to doubt her. His remix gallops over Madley Croft's murmuring, pushes and chops at it. The synth-line is murder-mystery noir, there's whispering in the corners. Her sincerity is just catchy enough to be complicit. [more Deadboy/Creep/the xx]

(photo source)

Heists - "High Tide". There's a man somewhere who has robbed a thousand stars. A thief with small hands. He's got Mark E Smith's gold tooth, Woods' old moccasins, two mop tops. He sits in his cellar apartment, surrounded by artifacts, records on the turntable. He flicks David Bowie's silver dollars at candlesticks he filched from the National. He even steals his lunch. The thief knows he will come to nothing, but at least he had taste.

[Heists are from Montreal. They have no MySpace page. You probably know them. And they're probably reading this.]

BRAIDS - "Lemonade (Green Go remix)". If you are going to get famous, better justify it. Build a mansion encrusted in emeralds, a swimming-pool filled with heavy water. Loose piranhas, peacocks, white-breasted thrashers. Obtain the kindest, truest friends - seat them in your breakfast nook, with pancakes. They can be drunk or sober, so long as sometimes they are sober or drunk. Replace the lawn with rainclouds. Tie fires to shoelaces. Replace every great lake with a small, miner-filled, gold mine. Oh - and buy new music on CDs, determined young things from Montreal, and remix them with your VCR.

[BRAIDS are from Montreal. This is their MySpace page, this is their blog, their album is due out soon on Flemish Eye and Kanine. / This is Green Go.]

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Elsewhere:

I am still hopefully soliciting your best songs of the year, for Said the Gramophone's annual list. Please email me your favourite tunes. Send mp3 attachments or a link to download a zip file. (Please don't send me links to Youtube/MySpace/Bandcamp if possible - I have a lot to sort through.) I want everything: your pop glimmers and your dancefloor fillers, from Ted Leo to Jeremih. But honestly - only the very, very best. Imagine you could only listen to 5 songs this year. Send me those. Thank you very very much.

StG's Dan Beirne was heard on This American Life last Friday. Listen!

The extraordinary saxophonist Matana Roberts wrote a guestpost for Destination:Out.

Finally, did you see our special weekend post? "What if THE BEATLES never broke up?"

(image by Jaakko Pallasvuo)

This week, the Beatles' catalogue finally appeared for sale on iTunes. It's funny how this feels like the flood-gates finally opening: at last, we can buy those beautiful songs by John, Paul, George and Ringo! Not just because most of us already have Beatles mp3s, ripped from CDs or as illegal downloads. But because the songs of John, Paul, George and Ringo have been on iTunes for years. Just not their songs together. The Beatles' respective solo material wasn't caught up in the same licensing tangle: Imagine, All Things Must Pass the collective works of Wings - all have been listed on iTunes for years.

But who cares, right? Sure, everyone likes "My Sweet Lord", "Band on the Run" and "Oh Yoko!" - but after the Beatles broke up, "the Beatles sucked". Besides a tiny handful of exceptions, and a single here or there, the Fab Four's post-1970 output is scarcely worth paying attention to.

Or is it?

I'm reading a book that came out last month, self-published by Toronto writer Jeff Walker. Its title is as good a description as any: Let's Put the Beatles Back Together Again: How to Assemble & Appreciate the Second Half of the Beatles' Legacy. That's a 19-word way of saying, Not so fast, kid. Or, Maybe there's something worth saving on that Ringo Starr album.

Jeff argues that the Beatles kept making good music after 1970 - they just didn't make it consistently. The gems are hidden amid the dross, he explains, but today such dross can simply be ignored or consigned to oblivion. Imagine if the Beatles kept making music, just not all together. Alone, or in twos and threes, they went into studio - and then released the best and most Beatlesesque of this solo material as, er, the Beatles Releasing Collective.

This is Jeff's alternate-universe conceit. Allen Klein and Yoko Ono don't wedge the boys apart. A mysterious manager called Albert Zonn (aka "Cap'n Arn'") swoops in and consoles their roiling hearts. Zonn had the psychological acumen to persuade [the Beatles] ... to carry on, in a new form that would address all their separate aspirations.. And suddenly there's room for not just one or two or more Beatles albums - but for 40 years' worth.

Over 500 pages, Jeff creates, curates and defends six "core" albums, 16 bonus CDs, and various LP revisions overseen by the 'Beatles Releasing Collective'. All, in a sense, are imaginary. There's 1982's Moondogs, a kind of Lennon memorial, with songs like Paul's "Beware My Love" and John's "(Just Like) Staring Over". There's 2000's 45, a three-disc set with Anthology's "Real Love" and "Free As A Bird" at its heart. And, um, lots & lots more. Each has been meticulously assembled, sequenced and refined - these are not crude collections of the mop-tops' solo hits. Jeff writes with passion and precision and all the half-crazy focus of a serious Beatles fan.

But is he right? By carefully culling the best of the after-Beatles Beatles, assembling these songs into albums, can you make something that lives up to the legacy? Something worth paying for, one track at a time?

Judge for yourself.

On "Run Devil Run"...
Writes Blaney, "Combining the Poetics of Chuck Berry with the voodooism of Screaming Jay Hawkins, he fashioned a blistering rocker ... Rarely has [Paul] sounded so aggressive on record." For a Beatles original (rather than a cover like "Long Tall Sally"), you'd have to go back to "I'm Down".

On "I'm Losing You"...
[John] began to seriously worry about [Yoko's] dalliances in New York ... "It drove me crackers," [he] remembered, "just long enough to write a song."

On "Looking For My Life"...
You might assume that George was reacting to being stabbed almost to death or to being diagnosed with terminal cancer, but apparently the song recounts an earlier dark night of the soul ... Distress relieved by its very expression.

On "Choose Love (live)"...
Here is Ringo, still rockin' live at the two-thirds-of-a-century mark and still touting the power of love ... This is the only version of the song in the BRC collection.

On "That Was Me"...
The name Iris has two significant meanings for Paul. Cited in this song, the Royal Iris was the Liverpool ferry and showboat on which the Beatles played four times in the early days. And Iris Caldwell was Paul's first steady girlfriend ... Iris recalls one night in a coffee shop with friends when Paul did such a tasteless Lennonesque impersonation of Quasimodo that she dumped an entire bowl of sugar on his head and then bolted. Assuming it was all over with Paul, she arranged a date the next night with George.

On "Jealous Guy"...
John's last public performance outside the US of any song was of this one. He played it while sitting in his suite at a Japanese hotel and was overheard by an elderly Japanese couple. They had wandered in, having inadvertently taken the presidential suite's private elevator. They presumably thought it was some kind of rooftop lounge, perhaps featuring entertainment ... They settled in chairs and waited for some service. John picked up a guitar and softly sang "Jealous Guy" for them. Without a word, they got up and left.

On "Wah Wah"...
Eric Clapton played the wah-wah guitar on the track. (Later he was to give George a real headache by walking off with George's wife Pattie.) With Ringo on drums, the song has a massive reverb-saturated sound, care of Phil Spector, for a massive, reverberating headache ... During the Twickenham sessions, George was getting it on with Eric Clapton's French erstwhile-girlfriend, model Charlotte Martin ... [Pattie] befriended the girl and naively invited her to stay at Kinfauns. Poorly concealed hanky-panky followed, and Pattie left for London to stay with friends. George took full advantage of her six-day absence to see the affair through. He was left with wah-wah headaches in both his marriages, with the Beatles and with Pattie.

Before we begin... What are the best songs of 2010? As usual, I am assembling my list of the year's very best - and as ever, I need your help. Please email me your favourite songs. Send mp3 attachments or a link to download a zip file. (Please don't send me links to Youtube/MySpace/Bandcamp if possible - I have a lot to sort through.) I want everything: your folk ballads and your club bangers, from Fabolous to White Hinterland. But honestly - only the very, very best. Imagine you could only listen to 5 songs this year. Send me those. Thank you very very much.

Young Galaxy - "Peripheral Visionaries". There is a capsule that is going to reach the sun, one day. It contains a garden. When the capsule reaches the sun its silver exterior will blister and come apart, and the leaves will scorch, and the flowers will be lit for the briefest instant by the sun's red corona. When J woke from this dream, she could still see the garden's colours on the backs of her eyes. She still felt the capsule's descent in present tense. She did not know what it meant, to dream of the end of a garden. O was asleep beside her and she touched his arm, but almost immediately she regretted this. She was afraid that she should not touch his arm. She was afraid of the omen. More afraid of the omen than of the chance that it meant nothing. She got up and opened the door to the bedroom.

[Young Galaxy's Shapeshifting, which will be released early next year, is an LP of rays, shimmer and ash. It's open, beautiful, strange and lithe. It was produced by Studio's Dan Lissvik. I wrote the press release.]

Bear In Heaven - "Fake Out (Glass Ghost remix)". Rob Brydon does a bit about a small man trapped in a box. The small man always seems frantic, insignificant, confused. But what if this man is perfectly happy. What if the small man has a marvelous private world, there in the box. There are control panels and switchboxes, screens and dials; and he knows the significance of every lever, every light. The small man in the box watches Bear In Heaven webcasts. He orders in thai food. He listens to Ornette Coleman records, gets stoned and lies on his small couch. The small man in the box has no complaints. He doesn't even long for a partner. He has a partner, a friend he talks with over Skype. She is beautiful and sometimes she takes off her top.

[buy Bear In Heaven's excellent Beast Rest Forth Mouth / more Glass Ghost]

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Elsewhere: The first official Twin Sister music video, for "All Around and Away We Go". All those colours!

(photo installation from Cayetano Ferrer's Western Imports series)

Austra - "Beat and the Pulse". I'd seen Toronto's Katie Stelmanis a couple of times. Didn't like her at all. Wailings without songs, atmosphere without substance. I felt bad thinking this, because Katie is a friend of friends; but sometimes you think what you think. When I heard she had changed her name to Austra, I rolled my eyes at least twice. An artist chasing the aesthetic of the instant, spraypainting CHILLWAVE on the side of her tour-van. But then I downloaded the MP3 and listened to "Beat and the Pulse", and it's excellent, and I feel guilty for having had such mean thoughts. This is propulsive, quietly thrilling, with arpeggiated beats and background ah-ah-ahs, and a singer who can really sing. It reminds me of the second half of that Tron 2 trailer (with music by Daft Punk), and of Zola Jesus, but I don't like Zola Jesus very much, so really the pull-quotes are: better than Zola Jesus and propulsive ... thrilling ... Daft Punk.

[buy / MySpace / Austra plays New York in December]

Junip - "Don't Let It Pass". Saw this band in Montreal about a week ago. Their new album, Fields, is very different from their first EP, 2005's exceptional Black Refuge. It's not as good. This is a band led by José González, the Swedish singer-songwriter most famous for his cover of the Knife's "Heartbeats". What I've always liked best about González is the heaviness of his soft, pretty music; his gentle folk-songs are also ominous. This was true of Black Refuge, too: folk-rock bathed in organ, fast forlorn strums, something almost drone-like in its spirit. Doom-folk, I guess - but cryptic, opaque, without the histrionics of Woven Hand. Fields is, well, a lot more stoned. The songs are jammy. They feel relaxed, instead of tense. "Don't Let It Pass" isn't really an exception, but it's great - there's the thrum of the bass string, the stacking of uneasy chords. There's a crispness to its melancholy - like ambiguities can be contained.

Anyhow, live, Junip were an amazing surprise. They were precise, uneasy, really tight. The drummer played so quietly while the rest of the band rose up. It was oddly exciting music, little twists of harmony and beat, repetition and change. The audience demanded an encore, and it was the most genuine demand-for-an-encore that I've heard all year. I was clapping too.

I had set Fields aside, but brought it back out after the show. It is what it is. Out of a good sound-system, it'll warm an afternoon.

[Junip are still on tour / buy]

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I went to see Junip because they were - and still are - touring with Sharon Van Etten. Remember her? The one who sang the best song of 2009?

Charles Aznavour - "Yesterday When I Was Young"

Dear Café Olimpico,

I am writing this letter from under your roof. Every morning I come and sit here, and I sip a coffee like this one, and I ease into my day of triumphs, backflips, heartbreaks. You are my first stop, Olimpico. You are my social club. You are my home away from home. But there is a very serious problem.

The problem is this:

They seem like nothing, these four pretty arcs. Upside-down bowls, an inverted Christmas tree, stream rising from the espresso machine. But these curved lines mean much more than that. They mean: the internet. They mean: email, twitter, craigslist. Ten billion gigabytes of webpages, plus YouTube. We open our laptops, swipe our phones, and suddenly there is a paradise at our fingertips.

Fuck paradise! Fuck that damn paradise! Olimpico was an oasis. In the heart of hipster Mile End, a café without wi-fi, a room without facebook, a place where people sat with allongés and talked. Warm, convivial, filled with the sounds of clinking spoons, new friends, maybe sometimes a Madonna song. You think I am exaggerating? I am not exaggerating! You know I am not exaggerating!

A little while ago, it changed. One day, ping!, free wireless, wafting through the room. At first it didn't seem to matter. But slowly, slowly, like the ticking temperature of global warming...

The rare computer was always okay - some sad soul hermitted in the corner, revising a novel; a student, three lattés, and a marinating thesis. But laptops are not merely common, now - they are inevitable. They are multiplying, like LCD-lit rabbits, and with them the arrival of Arts Café refugees, Cagibi ex-pats, even tourists on day-trips from Starbucks. Getting to Olimpico at 10am, the tables are filled with silent, dead-eyed double-clickers. As it gets colder and the terrasse empties out, the problem of space becomes worse. There is nowhere to sit. There is nowhere to sit, and talk, and just do regular shit, Olimpico, and the tiny laptops' fans are sucking the life from the room.

It is not your fault. I know it's not. It's there in the name of the wireless network: B&M, your next-door neighbours, your damned neighbours, shillers of overpriced breakfast. But surely you can do something. Surely you can go over to B&M, lean on their shiny counter, and ask that they add a firewall, a customers-only password, a something. Men of Olimpico, you make a delicious cup of coffee, and you have also been such fine stewards of your space. Unlike your neighbours a block away, you know the ones, you never installed an open network. You forbade people from even plugging their laptops in! Dictatorial, philistine, almost fascist? Sure! But in this way, you kept the pixel-toting barbarians from the gates. And we were grateful.

Now, listen: I realise that I am a hypocrite. I am, after all, an emblem of all that I rail against. For three years, I have been coming to your café every day, my laptop on my back, to sit and click and clack. I am that sad soul in the corner, with headphones over ears. But I came to Olimpico because it was not filled with nerds like me. I came for my friends, who strolled in, smiling, and interrupted me, who metaphorically smashed my computer across their knees. And I came because there was no internet: no flashing distractions, just my work. Yes, I am a hypocrite; I am pleading - save me from myself.

Rescue us, champions of Café Olimpico. Before it is too late.

I am writing this letter from under your roof, and posting it, but I dream of the day when I cannot.

Sincerely,

Sean Michaels

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Elsewhere: Brendan's hosting a wonderful house show on Saturday night, for just $5: Zsofia Zambo, Zombé Mugambe, Becky Foon, Space Ghost Cowboys, and Ramona Córdova. That last one is a very rare event.

Buckhingham Nicks - "Races Are Run". Tusk, Rumours and Buckingham Nicks were produced by different people. This fact is astonishing to me, almost incomprehensible. Because I swear that the magic of a song like this, its gentle heat, the timbre and harmony - these things seem more complicated & subtle than just the woodgrain of Stevie's voice, the way Lindsey's brings out new colours in it. The beauty of Fleetwood Mac's most beautiful songs, and this lost track included, is in the way the tape interprets the sounds; the way their sweetness is heard, remembered, recorded just so. Engineers are magicians, and apparently mimics. [Buckingham Nicks is out of print.]

Motorifik - "Secret Things". So as I understand it, certain rhythms were actually invented in the 20th century. See: the Bo Diddley beat. See: this one right here, a Phil Spector boom, boomboom. When I think about this, I explode with wonder. I get actual goosebumps. I've brought it up with friends, but no one has ever matched my enthusiasm. These simple things, so simple they seem self-evident - boom, boomboom / badda da da, da da - some of them were dreamed up in bedrooms, basements and porches within my grandparents' lifetimes. It's as if a new colour were discovered in 1958, and added to the spectrum. As if a Beat poet found a new integer, located between five and six. (There may have been precedents, Bo Diddley hidden in Brahms, but these are irrelevant: what's important is not who first used these rhythms, but when they - suddenly! so recently! - felt & sounded obvious.) If these new rhythms - thrilling, timeless, a priori awesome - were waiting in the ether for Bo Diddley and Phil Spector, then imagine what other rhythms might yet lie in wait. Treasures hidden between the measures. Undiscovered beats. [buy]

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Elsewhere:

One of our favourite new Canadian bands, PS I Love You, recorded a series of videos around their hometown of Kingston, ON. They asked us to tell you about one of them. "Exclusive!" they said. It doesn't matter that it's exclusive - it matters that it's good. Exciting, stifled, secretly brash. And I love that they don't have video of a new vocals track: "no, we're just gonna shred and play drums by the water." It's the title tune from their debut album, Meet Me At The Muster Station, and we think it's kinda killer.

(photo source unknown - found uncredited on a tumblr)