Archives : all posts by Sean

Sharon Van Etten - "One Day". A woman sits at her writing desk. There is a peregrine falcon stuffed on the wall above her. She lives beside the train station and the train roars in several times a day, fluffing the falcon's feathers. Her rooms smell of coal-smoke and imported oranges. The woman has written two sentences on her writing-paper and she sits staring at them. Dear ----, it begins, My heart is a crooked thing. Her mouth is a trim line. She has already set aside the thought that she wishes she could begin the letter, Dearest ----. That thought is locked in a wood cupboard. Now she is looking at the next line, the one about her heart. She worries that it sounds needy, or strange. When she chose the image she meant "crooked" in the way that keys are crooked, at the place where they meet a lock. She meant "crooked" in the way that a ship is crooked, asymmetical if seen in profile. She is proud of her crooked heart. She thinks it is something to fall in love with. She wonders if ---- will ever see this; if ---- will ever in fact be dear.

[Sharon Van Etten's beautiful new album, Epic, is streaming at NPR, and please, please pre-order it.]

Sun Kil Moon - "Natural Light". Mark Kozelek revisits the song by Casiotone for the Painfully Alone. It is such a light thing, insubstantial, less than two minutes long. It is the letter from far away, the short email, the Facebook message. No matter how many details, it feels scant. There is no cut of voice, no touch of eyes. You hear these words and realise you are holding on to something else & distant.

[the I'll Be There EP, with covers of Stereolab and the Jackson Five, is free with purchases of Sun Kil Moon's new album, Admiral Fell Promises]

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Elsewhere:

One last reminder that I'm giving a reading tomorrow (Tuesday) at Drawn & Quarterly.

Tonight, the winner of the 2010 Polaris prize will be decided. Best of luck to Owen Pallett, Caribou, and particularly Radio Radio.

If you've not seen it, Mike W points me to this exquisite music video with DIY recreations of great artworks. Which doesn't really give the full impression. It's for the French band Hold Your Horses.

(photo by Dusdin Condren)

Land of Talk - "Quarry Hymns". It doesn't take much to make me fall in love. Turn your head there, there, and I'm inviting you down to the canal. But I do not fall out. I try to. I drag my feet across miles. I press my forehead to window-glass and burn everything I own. I am now 41 years old and there are 26 trails behind me, grey trails like single threads; each trail leads to a person and a pair of hands I long to hold. These threads are thin enough to break, but I have not broken them. I haul them. I feel them behind me, passing through fields, forests, shallows. One of you lives in a skyscraper now, one by a crack in the earth. Many of you are married. I do not know why I have not stopped. Or, I do; it is like trying to discard one's shadow. I look at myself in the mirror and I do not see shadings there. I see my own face. It is yesterday's face that is edged by every you.

[Tonight I realized, abruptly, that I had not written about Land of Talk's Cloak and Cipher, a record I have been listening to for many months. It is beautiful and secret. I wrote an album bio for Lizzie this spring (I can only find it here), and it was a privilege. Look at these lyrics. Please buy the album, and see them on tour now across North America (including tonight in Toronto).]

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Elsewhere, longly:

If you live in Montreal, did you see that there is a 29-hour Twin Peaks marathon this weekend? With Lucy herself in attendance?

Did you see that Owen Pallett released a free new song? And Warpaint? And this act called Blue Water White Death, who are Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg and Xiu Xiu's Jamie Stewart? And all of these free new songs are very good? (In the case of BWWD, it is their best.)

For Back To The World, Carl Wilson has written about going to see Roscoe Mitchell, Muhal Richard Abrams and George Lewis at the Guelph Jazz Festival. This is an important article whether or not you listen to jazz music. Because what Carl did is he went to this show and he struggled with it, and he wrote about that struggling. He is a man who does listen to jazz, free jazz, and lots of "out" music, and yet, here's the thing: that doesn't make difficult music easy. It gives you signposts, context, familiarity. Carl struggled with Roscoe/Abrams/Lewis, he enjoyed it and he didn't, and his essay on these feelings is meticulous, honest, human.

Ahead of their issue launch next week, where I'll be reading, I did an interview with Maisonneuve magazine. Gawk at my mug circa 2006. I am much more handsome now. I talked about grand gestures, breakups, Griffintown and growing up.

[drawing by Jaakko Pallasvuo]

Fulton Lights - "Staring Out The Window". Fulton Lights' song of a million launchings and crisscrossings, motors revving on dreams. "Staring out the window / I'm thinking about my days," it begins, like the worst kind of dull song; yet the banality is up-ended, shown to be banal, at least next to the song's riotous chug and booming horns. A man sits in the passenger seat, head leaning on the window, trading talk of tomorrows; but in his heart is the meteoric Next next next next next next, like the snick of white lines under tires. ["Staring Out The Window" is from Fulton Lights' great new digital EP, 3 Songs. Stream it at MBV. Buy it at iTunes.]

Kanye West - "Good Friday (ft. Common, Pusha T, Kid Cudi, Big Sean & Charlie Wilson)". Setting aside Nicki Minaj's deafening verse on "Monster", this is the first contender from among Kanye's new songs. He's got several signature sounds, but this one's got the stuff that got me excited about Kanye in the first place: he's in the nostalgic, melancholic mode, the realm of "Hey Mama" and "Family Business". (And which I often associate with the Streets.) It's not that hard to throw some whoops and la la las over a wistful piano line, but what's most lovely here is the quiet party in "Good Friday". At the Guardian, I've spilled too many words on Kanye's team-ups and trysts, his 24/7 Hawaiian studio jams, and often these collaborations feel like 50 cooks shoved into a single kitchen. Here, it works. Here, there's someone in every room, lamps lit, wine spilling, cracking wise. Everyone sounds happy and tired. Big Sean's squeaking verse seems born out of a late-night gag. I'm so weary, even Kanye's rapping is bearable. Only one suggestion: next time, get Elbow's Guy Garvey to sing the Charlie Wilson & Kid Cudi hooks. [Kanye West is releasing a new song every week.]

AIDS Wolf - "Teaching to Suffer".

     "It's like I've spent the past two years in a room with petroleum poured over the floor, brown sludge, and I can't stand up without falling down, slipping and skidding and smearing into the ground. And, like, I got used to this. I got so brainwashed and used to this that I treat it as normal, now. My tongue lolls out of my mouth and I plunge all over the place. One of these days Francis is going to break up with me and it's like I'll have an exit and I'll be staggering all over the open city with the same heaving shit-stained lurch."
     "Is it really like that?"
     "I don't know. I'm still figuring it out. I'm meeting him for dinner."

[Montreal's AIDS Wolf release two albums this month. "Teaching to Suffer" is taken from March to the Sea, the band's final studio release as a quartet. Buy it here. They will also be releasing a 12" with remixes of their cover of Throbbing Gristle's "Very Friendly". Pick that up here. On Saturday, AIDS Wolf will be playing a lunatic noise-ridden show at L'Envers, with Black Feelings and Pink Noise. $8.]

The Wilderness of Manitoba - "Manitoba".

     "I'm trying to work up the nerve."
     "What nerve?"
     "The nerve to ask."
     "The nerve to ask what, Francis?"
     "To ask her uh. To uh. To ask her to marry me."
     "Really?"
     "Really."
     "You're going legit."
     (laughing) "I guess I am. It's been two years, you know? And things are sorta great."
     "Sorta?"
     "No, they're great. They're great. She really gets me. It's beautiful. We're like two hearts holding hands."
     "Two hearts holding hands?"
     "I just need to get out of debt first."

[buy]

Sarah Harmer - "Captive". If you turn on the radio and hear a pop-rock song, pop-rock with that hyphen glinting, then the only thing you want is for the pop-rock song to be exquisite, exceptional, obvious and extraordinary at the same time. Sarah Harmer has made a perfect 2 minutes 33, smally special. The country's radios are ready; quick, while it's still summer. [buy]

Count & Sinden - "Hold Me (ft Katy B)". Wobbling dumb, head over heels, grasping at coattails, glad. [buy]

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This essay at FourFour introduced me to, and sold me on, Katy B.

Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All have been gobsmacking me, this weekend.

I'm doing a reading at D+Q on Sept 21, as part of the fall launch for Maisonneuve magazine. See you there?

(photo source)

Abner Jay - "Depression". The way the blues can be a power, a force, a lodestone in your chest that sends you plunging through space. Imagine a ship that has no cannonballs, only heavy hearts; the black powder booms and they sing away over the waves, crack timber, splinter bone. My heavy hearts have sunk a thousand ships. Whole navies foundered, sit now at the bottom of the sea. And I am on my flagship, my lonesome flagship, with every sail unfurled.

[Abner Jay recorded another version of this song, visited here / buy]

Camilo Diaz Pino - "Scott Pilgrim (Plumtree) - 16-bit cover". I enjoyed the movie, but this is better. And it's better than Plumtree's original. It takes the chugging angst and just lets it go. It forgets every detail, forgets the clutched hopes and back-story. It is what it is, fragile and bittersweet, nostalgia without irony. It accomplishes the same thing, maybe, that Bert Jansch used to do; only today an acoustic guitar has different valences. And this cover sounds different, now, than it would have in 1995. And I'm a different person, now, than I was when I was young.

[this comes via YouTube / with every thanks to Matthew Perpetua]

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For those who don't follow me on Twitter, I made a mix for the end of August. It is now September, but you can probably still enjoy it. Download here (1h14, 107.5mb), and track-list (spoilers! wait 'til after yr first listen!) here.

[photo source, taken about a century ago]

The Good Ones - "Sara". Sara, look here. Look this way. Yes, you with the clear eyes. I call you Sara. I will hold up this twig, this maple stick, and make it a wand. Swish, swish, be mine. I will go to the sea and draw shapes in the sand. I will call my cousin, the astronaut, have him etch your initials into the hull of a satellite. Also he will etch my initials, and a crude heart. I will hope and pray. I will corrupt the soothsayer and bribe the fortune-teller; I will scheme and I will cheat, Sara, I will do whatever I have to do, to make you look here. This is how we have always done it, heroes like me. It is not always enough to be a champion. You have not looked at my medals.

[The Good Ones are from Rwanda / Kigali Y' Izahabu is out November 9 / more information]

Ô Paon - "Masks". A man lives in the west wing of his house. In the east wing is the library. The man spent the first third of his life becoming rich. He spent the second third of his life building his library. He travelled the world in search of philosophy, allegory, picture-books. He met collectors and archivists. He traded gold coins for thick tomes. He spent it all. Now he lives in the west wing of his house and in the east wing is the library. He does not leave the west wing. He is too frightened. The last time the man stood in his library he looked at his books, every one of which he had read, and he found himself faintly realising something. He was faintly realising something about himself. Some wisdom these books had taught him - he felt this wisdom turning and shining over his own shadow. It was ugly. The man fled. He hides. He walks the rooms of the west wing and tries not to remember the thing he faintly realised. He is not sure what judgment he almost reached. He suspects he is a monster, or a pervert. He is not sure. He does not think about it. He does not think about what he faintly knows.

[buy the A)B)C)D)E) EP / I haven't yet heard the new Courses LP]

(photo via Horses Think)