Archives : all posts by Sean

Withered Hand - "Hard On". Withered Hand's debut LP, Good News, is not lo-fi. This is a change from the shambolic stuff that so struck me last year. When Dan Willson revisits those old songs - "Religious Songs", "New Dawn", "I Am Nothing" - the results aren't (sorry) very good. I don't know whether it's because of the nature of the songs or simply because the higher-fi adaptations are so-so. But they sound too careful, too choreographed; no one is going to get stung.

However this is all an unfair introduction to Good News. Because Withered Hand is great, and most of Good News is wonderful. The album's best songs feel fully born into this studio - sharp and fully realised. Listening, you get stung. "Hard On" is ultimately about erections, but mostly it's about the intersection between yearning and doing. And bless his heart, Withered Hand has realised the sound of yearning; it's this, simple and splendid and fierce. It's a chant that keeps changing, with words like flashpaper. Listen to the way he sings man, good, could, knife, car, go, FM radio, guitars, Thin Lizzy, pen, John Updike, hard-on. Each one, carelessly cast, could start a housefire.

Go buy Good News. [MySpace]

(Update ~6pm: Edited this post to remove an embarrassing mistake about who produced Good News. Apologies to all.)

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Earlier this year, I wrote about a Spirituals remix of Shelby Sifers' "Are You Devo". It's still one of the best things I've heard this year, and now Shelby has re-recorded the song (and added a different Spirituals remix) and loosed the whole thing onto the iTunes Music Store. I'm not offering it here because the whole thing is a grand charity project - a fundraiser for We Heart Arts. They're hoping to sell 2,500 downloads of "Are You Devo", boosting it into UK singles charts. It's a marvelous track - well worth that 99 cents. Go give them a hand.

Young Galaxy - "Queen Drum". Forest fires, earthquakes, electrical storms, tidal waves, meteor strikes, airplane crashes, solar flares, rising seas, iceberg smashes, building collapses, the day she picked up the phone and called.

Young Galaxy - "Light Years". And it's so late at night, so early at morning & you hold your lover in your arms, feel him sleeping. He has weight, he has breath. You are awake. You breathe together in the sheets. And what you think is this: At our edges, there is a line. There is a black line that separates me from you. We are not one. // There are faint sounds in the street, wind and alley-cats. The city lays on & on. /// You lie on your side with your lover in your arms. You think: There is an unencroachable distance between you and I. // One morning, you will brush his face; he will kiss your forehead; but still you are separate. You are trapped in your bodies, unable to remember each-other's yeses. You are unable to see into each-others' dreams. In the space between you, whole seasons pass by.

Young Galaxy's second album is a record of vastnesses and details, first glances and dying stars. It is astronomical. It is craning, adamant pop music. There are no jams: this is precise. Songs that can fill rooms utterly, shake them with big melody; but also these small & perfect gestures - the strings that appear at 4:20 in "Light Years", opening like a night garden. Produced by Tony Doogan (Mogwai), independently released. Buy it here.

[info/mp3/MySpace -- Young Galaxy play Ottawa, Toronto and Montreal on Sept 9, 10 and 11.]

The Antlers - "Two". Somewhere in the world, there is a sea full of salt. Somewhere in the world, there is a building full of gold bars. Somewhere, there is a clock that runs for ten thousand years. Somewhere, a berry that makes sour things sweet. There is a flower that looks like a crown, a crown that looks like a flower. Somewhere out there, a bee that was born before the first world war. There is wood that went into an ark. There is a saxophone played by John Coltrane and a guitar played by Neil Young. Somewhere, there is you. [buy]

jj - "ecstasy". James had always been strange. It took someone strange to do it. We were dancing at the Neon, like we always do. James was there, as he always is, standing in the shadows by the bar. He was drinking from a bottle. In all that bass we shook, we shaked. James went to the middle of the club, the place it was shiniest. He kneeled on the hard glitering enamel of the floor. He took his fist. He rapped on the dancefloor, like it was an egg. Like it was an egg, the dancefloor cracked. It cracked right open, the deep violet floor, jagged and yawning. Gold light pushed out like the death of a star. [buy]

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Dori Hoffman- "Never Will Marry". The leaves are changing colour. I'm not a naturalist, or a botanist, so I can't tell you why. I am not a poet either, but for some reason I have no qualms dealing in metaphor. As my husband you used to say, "Flowers are the flowers that grow right here." We are what we are. And so I always get sad when the leaves are changing colour, as if it's all our losses made material. The greenery can't last. I never thought I would marry. I thought I would die alone. And then I met Sam under a cypress tree, and he was holding a bicycle innertube and I was holding a dead rabbit. How many times have I told this story? And then one day he died. The leaves are changing colour. [thanks, Jeremy - download whole EP here]

Marlaw - "Pipi". My sister tells me this is Tanzania's summer jam of 2009. This is the song buzzing from rickshaws, shanties, houses, transistor radios. It's the song you hear as you wolf down goat in Stone Town, as you surf the web in Arusha's internet cafe. I can't help but generalize, vaguely stereotype; I have never been to Tanzania, never crossed the Gibraltar (except crisscrossing, in Istanbul). I imagine Zanzibar in kodachrome and pixels, in the smell of cinnamon and nutmeg. And, now, I imagine people doing as I do - pointing into the air and mouthing "pi, pi" every time the chorus comes around. [can't find a shop]

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Friends at Pop Montreal are building a gigantic room-size theremin - but they need your help. Donate to Art Pop's cause and receive jokes, DVDs, a custom musical, DIY theremin kits, festival passes, exclusive songs by Gentleman Reg & Dishwasher, or even your own theremin suit. Pass the word!

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The Luyas - "Spherical Mattress". I considered apologising. She had gone into the other room already, had put on a record she knows I don't like. I stood in the hallway hearing it, piano-notes like a dripping tap. No, I thought, I won't. I started putting on my sneakers but then stopped, untied them. I slipped into my rainboots. The door slammed behind me. Outside, the sky was heavy. Cars snarled past me. I could feel the rubber soles of the boots and the lines in the asphalt. My heart was pounding. I wondered if she was still listening to that record, or whether she had turned it off now that I had gone. I imagined her alone at the table, eating an apple, baring her canines. I imagined me sitting at the other end of the room, leaning on the fridge, eating an ice-cream cone. Eating an ice-cream cone and grinning, maple ripple rolling down my arm. (MySpace/from the Luyas' forthcoming new album, and a 7" to be released on You've Changed)

Ast0r - "So What" (Miles Davis). The moon floated like a bored Podoboo. It was hot. Too hot. I know something was up in Mushroom Kingdom and I wasn't going to wait for that peachy minx to tell me. I patrolled the tubes, visited the usual Shy Guy haunts. No sign of the Hammer brothers or even the Phanto from the other night at the castle. Sweat dripped off my moustache like the trailing fizz of an invincibility star. I stopped in at the Toad House and got the usual runaround from Lemmy Koopa. I told him to go flip on his back. I knew Bowser had been there, even if Lemmy wouldn't say so. I was on my way out when who should I see but Yoshi, lurking behind a pillar like a goomba on a bad day. His day had just got worse. I scurried over there like a Bob-omb that was about to go, swallowed my fire-flower and then jumped on his head a couple times. I wasn't going to let this be a repeat of World 3-4. Listen you salamander, I said; tell me what happened to the raccoon-tail. I was bigger than he remembered. I dared him to stick out his tongue. [buy the chiptune take on Kind of Blue, Kind of Bloop]

Ne-Yo - "I Don't Care". In the future, it'll flood. Our streets will fill with seas and the tides will rise and soon we will be living on our roofs. We will have parasols plugged into chimneys, stereo-systems balanced on the tile. We will ride gondolas to our neighbours' cupolas, bring them iced tea and water-lilies. We will sail yachts to visit our parents, to high-school reunions; moor at the side of the family home, at the old high-school's flat roof. Kids will ride sea-dos. But lovers... Lovers! No, for lovers - the most remarkable thing. After the tides all rise, lovers will run on water. They will skim the surface grinning, like Jesus, like Usain Bolt. They will feel the kisses on their soles as they arrive exactly where they wish to be.

Freelove Fenner - "New Direction". Complicated and simple and beautiful, like a Matisse. Or like a chocolate bar, wrapped in silver foil. Or a sun, just a red circle, above the horizon. Or like the ticktock yes yes of wanting you. [MySpace/buy for a delicious & perfect $7 CDN]

Charles Spearin - "Mrs Morris (Reprise)". Maybe it doesn't do as much if you haven't heard the first one, the -prise this is re-ing. But maybe it does more. Maybe this is a more perfect dream. Sometimes you want a perfect song, a perfect solo - something you can slip into a pocket and take with you, and never be scared that it will crack. There are no flaws in this - it is beautiful, shiny, you could set it on a ring. [buy the Happiness Project]

Luxury Pond - "I Don't Believe You". A submerged song, a song without the Owen Pallett-arranged strings that mark most of Luxury Pond, but a song that sinks into the afternoon like salt into water. These are glimpses of loss, doubt, deception and eerie peace. A song for when you are sitting alone in a room, and you get up, and you close a window. [buy]