Archives : all posts by Sean

Mount Eerie - "Between Two Mysteries" (removed at publicist's request). Mount Eerie's thrilling and exhausting new record, Wind's Poem, expands on the idea of "black wooden", from last year's Black Wooden Ceiling Opening. Black wooden is like black metal, but instead of roaring throaty death-voice, Phil Elvrum murmurs. The guitars distort, fuzz and howl but there is an inherent gentleness. This works for me: this kindly noise. It is how I feel on the days when I thunderstorm. And yet - yet - yet "Between Two Mysteries" is not this. It is not black wooden. Elverum explores other sounds on Wind's Poem, particularly marimba and synthesizer. Here he mixes this eerie, smiling bone sound with the theme from Twin Peaks (literally, explicitly). The first time those chords came wobbling out of my headphones I was chilled to the core, froze on the path I was walking, but knew not why. I recovered, mostly. But I still remember the feeling. This is what this song is about - always remembering the feeling. [Wind's Poem will be released August 18 by PW Elverum & Son]

Passion Pit - "The Reeling (Black Dominoes live wire remix)". There are more than 10,000 kinds of wood. Oak, pine, beech, chestnut, cherry, poplar, mahogany; basswood, parota, walnut, blue gum, desert ironwood; wenge, cyprus, camphor, chakte-kok. In tree time, wood was always recently alive. You can make a boat out of wood; you can make a sail. You make a crown, a jacket, a mirror. You can make a dancefloor, a chest, a heart. You cannot make a darkness out of wood. Wood is a presence. I say all this because this Black Dominoes remix of Passion Pit makes me imagine a dancefloor in silver and black, cold faces and short dresses, gleaming eyes and fingertips - but bbbut bbbbbbut made of wood. These things may look glossy, impenetrable, dead - but here in this song they were recently alive. They are present and good. No part of this song is soulless. Black Dominoes have put the heartbeat back into the heart, the mystery back into the swing, the longing into Michael Angelakos's sneering voice. [Black Dominoes MySpace / if you like this song, vote for Black Dominoes to send him to Lollapalooza]

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Elsewhere:

Particularly in the final months of Plan B magazine (RIP), the writer/editor known only as kicking_k was one of my favourite components. Here, kick reviews the last days of one of the world's best music magazines, with wit and verve.

In one of his Ill Doctrine videos, Jay Smooth inevitably offers one of the most thoughtful comments on Michael Jackson. I admire his empathy, but also his clear-eyed view to the future of us, out here, watching.

Montrealers - Montreal Improv is holding a contest to win tickets to an upcoming Upright Citizens' Brigade show. It will be very, very good - go enter.

[photo by Francisco Infante-Arana & Nonna Gorunova, via just three things]

Plastic Operator - "Folder".

Showing contents of folder:

[ebook] ee cummings - is 5 1926.pdf
[ebook] ee cummings - 73 poems .pdf
12_Mirah_Pollen.mp3
3716548401_1c71b7ab39.jpg
Automatically Recovered Word Docu.doc
Automatically Recovered Word Do 1.doc
beatles_hey_youve_got_to_hide_you.doc
Before.Sunrise.1995.DVD.XviD-aXXo.avi
Bookmark - facebook.com/profile.ph...
Bookmark - flickr.com/photos/flore...
dear.doc
DRAFT - Mail - hi. i decided i ne.doc
DRAFT - Mail - Last weekend was s.doc
DRAFT - Mail - This song says eve.doc
DRAFT - Mail - Wanted to send you.doc
Elliott Smith - Either-Or - say y.mp3
Herman_Dune_Various_Medicines_BBC.mp3
latenite poem stupid.doc
Liars-The Other Side of Mt. Heart.mp3
new years letter.doc
Sam Cooke - Cupid (live at the ha.mp3
two pals on a boat.jpg
When.Harry.Met.Sally[XviD][AC3][D.avi

[i heard this song at Fluxblog, five years ago/MySpace/buy]

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Scots and literary hounds - July 23 is the Edinburgh launch of We Are The Friction, an anthology of work by 12 pairs of international writers and illustrators. I'm one of them. There's a party and exhibition at Analogue Books, and the facebook event is here. I wish I could be there. Will update you when Sing Statistics are taking orders.

Silly Kissers - "You Don't Love Me". There's a note in the log-book here: But for true inspiration, walk across the highway, through the woods to the cliff's edge, heave stones into the air and listen to them clatter all the way to the forest floor below. This sounds good. I tie my shoes, fasten my sleeves. I go out, across the highway, through the woods, to the cliff. Under the cliff there's a nightclub. I notice because I can hear it. I stick my head over the edge, stare underneath - see the glitter-lit cave. It is a complicated procedure, getting from the cliff-face to the nightclub directly below. But once I am inside I walk down the passage, filled with watery distant beats, faint music, into the vast, pyramidal interior of the mountain. The walls are shiny black. The underside of the peaks - where it's all snow & ice, outdoors - have been painted silver. There are disco-balls. The dance-floor isn't very busy. Some abstract painters, a couple of trombonists, a gaggle of 19-year-old ballerinas drinking fuzzy navels at the bar. The beats aren't any more forceful now that I'm here, in the centre of it. But I get them. I get their remove. My heart's somewhere else, after all. I move my feet, swivel on heels, try not to catch anyone's eye. I sing to the hearts of the mountains, in a silly voice, but truly. [MySpace / playing MEG Montreal on July 31]

Danny Kaye - "Bloop Bleep". When I downloaded this song I hoped that it was about robot language (the language I speak when I am talking like a robot, to the irritation of roommates). It is not. It is about a dripping tap. That is okay - Danny Kaye is probably my favourite actor in the world. Here he sings about a dripping tap, about the girl next door, about unrequited love and insomnia. He weeps. He mixes nonsense and jazz. Like Bill Cosby, like James Joyce, he's discovering a new way of saying the stuff that all of us have known. [buy]

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My favourite web-comic is Angry Octopus, created by a man named Mike and his 8-year-old-ish daughter, Zoe. There are only a few strips so far. The concept is: in every strip, the octopus ends up angry.

[photo is "Light Breakfast", by David Sykes]

HIGHLIFE - "F KENYA RIP". For the next two weeks I'm spending much of my time in a fishing boat. The boat is suspended on wooden beams, floating in a forest at the foot of the Rocky Mountains. I am trying to decide the Official Song for my time here. Many songs are in the running. I may fail in this quest. But I am trying. Last night I listened to fado; this morning I listen to HIGHLIFE's "F KENYA RIP" (every hat-tip to Dan and Chris). Sleepy Doug Shaw ramblingly joys as sun filters through the pine needles. Is he singing that the dams are low? If so, it is good that I am on a boat. These hot afrobeat riffs are not right for this mountainous, temperate zone; they are too summered, glittering and seashell. But I don't care, here in the Henriquez. I don't care that it's not-right, that HIGHLIFE have never serenaded an elk. Here in my craft I will open the windows and let the cool air in - let "F KENYA RIP" go dancing out to the crags and glacial lakes, to the perked ears of antlered beasts. [MySpace]

(photo source)

Faux Hoax - "Your Friends Will Carry You Home". Pastiche means many things. Okay so Faux Hoax's "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" sounds like a pastiche of the music of BARR. And Faux Hoax are themselves literally a pastiche - pasting together members of Gang of Four (Dave Allen), Menomena (Danny Seim), Tracker (John Askew) and in this case vocalist Adam Gnade. But life is a pastiche, an aggregation of moments, most of them arbitrary, disconnected. "You will get drunk / and you will get sad / and they will sit with you on grey curbs under yellow streetlights / and they'll let you talk / your friends will carry you home / your friends will sleep with you once and you'll think of it often." Nothing inherent connects the getting-drunk and the thinking-of-him-often - it's only in the throughline of consciousness, will, reflection, story (or of songwriting). "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" offers life as pastiche, yes, but also collage, bricolage, a loose and ragged line of drums. [MySpace/buy]

Slaraffenland - "Away". Forget "Meet and Greet", the lead leaky MP3 from Slaraffenland's upcoming We're On Your Side; it's this track, released on a Hometapes sampler, that makes the best case for pre-orders, for love-letters, for sending Slaraffenland postcards reading WHO ARE YOU?. Burnished, melancholy, optimistic and forsaken; like a roll of film running back and forth behind a projector's lens. Handclaps, clarinet, horns, drums, piano, noise - without the National's self-sabotraging ennui, without Broken Social Scene's grassy haze. Slaraffenland make that perfect music for when summer disappears, vanishing under a string of black clouds. [website/buy other releases]

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The winner of our Royal City contest was... Billy. Go to the entry to read the winning submissions and the very capable runners-up. Billy, we'll be in touch.

Michael Jackson - "Billie Jean (demo)".

I

After Michael Jackson died
the first thing he learned
was quiet.
His spirit slipped lightly from his body
It was as light as he had dreamed of being for
years
like diamonds, grass pollen,
the dust that sits on mirrored surfaces.

His spirit slipped like steam from a kettle's spout.
Briefly he thought of his grandmother,
and he wondered if he would see her soon,
now that he was dead,
now that his spirit was being lifted
lightly;
and as he saw the doctor from Las Vegas leaning over his body, pushing at his old bones, at his chest, at the muscles he had earned this spring under silver machines, he saw himself as beautiful; strange but beautiful; in sunglasses.
It was so quiet.
Like the desert
Like honeymoon mornings
He was lifted up out of the bedroom and the house, and he could not hear the chattering televisions nor Frank's pleading shouts, nor the water lapping at the 50-foot swimming pool. He could not hear the sounds he had heard for the past forty years: cars starting, flashbulbs, photographers' patent leather voices; clink and praise from men in expensive suits, sipping from straws.

At the rehearsals
the music had been so loud,
so loud!
like monsters roaring
and the dancers strutting, leering,
Michael so old and so heavy
raising his feet and putting them down
on the floor.
Now Michael was lifted away from the house and the city and he learned quiet.
He re-learned quiet.
A lesson he had forgotten.
He thought of the leaf he had watched once in the window at Neverland
he had watched it do nothing
but be.

II

After Michael Jackson died
the second thing he learned
was remorse.

At the moment his spirit was lifted
lightly
through the veil of cloud and atom
that separates Los Angeles
from other realms,
God came to Michael.
He came like a season.
Michael saw signs, tremblings, promises in wind
and then God was there
raining through him
hailing
sun
and so inconceivably large.
God touched the bottom of Michael Jackson's heart
the place where it shivers
and God showed Michael Jackson
everything he found there.
Every shadow pellet and lie and dark marble of sin,
and every half-sin,
broken promises, professional betrayals, deliberate acts of neglect,
that time with the glass ashtray
& in 1989 with the little knife
someone had left out
because although nothing really happened
something small had happened
and God saw.
God showed these things to Michael Jackson.
God showed even the worst things, the things no one understood, not the tabloids nor the courts, the sugary tarry seconds with boys whose names reminded Michael Jackson
of baloney sandwiches.
God slipped these mistakes from Michael Jackson's shivering spirit heart
& he turned them in the dark
so Michael Jackson would see.

Michael Jackson's mistakes flickered and gleamed.

And for an instant that lasted ten thousand years he felt the exactly sufficient amount of remorse
because God is a capable mathematician
when it comes to remorse.

III

After Michael Jackson died
the third thing he learned
was everything he had never known.
He passed through the purgatory of justice & regret & forgiveness and passed into somewhere else
where he donned a fedora
and a glitter glove
and the world was presented to him in balletic montages
images painted on velvet
messages painted in green June leaves.
Every truth and mystery revealed.
He had lain in bed at night, alone or with others, with friends, with people he loved or strained to love,
and laying stilly his heart had bucked and leapt
had dreamed of answers:
Why did he feel so alone?
Why still did he feel so alone?
Why still still did he feel so alone?
Stilly he dreamed of answers.

Now, behatted, beglitter gloved, all these answers came streaming in hungry undeniable technicolour veracity. Michael Jackson relinquished himself to them. He understood why he had felt so alone, still & still still felt so alone. He understood why his father had hated him. He understood Tito's gift, and Janet's loss, and his own greatest mistake. He understood his willowy love, why Lisa Marie had said the things she said in precisely the way she said them. He understood why he had seen his father's face in the mirror. Michael Jackson understood what had made him so special, for a handful of years in the history of human beings; understood the magic of the moonwalk, of a wild, free "Woo!"; of grabbing your crotch and dancing like a switchblade, a salmon, a moonbeam. He understood that "Billie Jean" was not a song about paternity but instead about bassline, thrust, a certain neon yearning. He understood the liberated
sing
of his childhood songs, the worlds concealed in his boyhood choruses, wants he found words for, even then, before he knew what such wants could be, before he knew the meaning of "darling!", back in the days where he still thought he would find this, find "darling!", before he had given up, turned instead to monkeys and children, to dandelion joys; he understood that lust lasts, that it does not go away just by drinking cold water and eating apricots and chewing tiny white pills; nor by sleeping; and he understood who killed JFK, what killed Elvis, understood finally the stuff those engineers had told him about the "Smooth Criminal" shoe patent, exactly the way the mechanism worked, not just how to use it but how it worked! so simple and so genius!; and Michael Jackson learned how if he had not been a singer and dancer he could have been an award-winning zoologist, would have in this other life worked at Northwestern University, and been happy, but still lost, a little lost, and he would have died in a car accident at age 46, four years ago, in this other life, and never have been married; but Michael Jackson learned as well that it was no use to think What If.

He learned that Uri Geller was a scam artist, and Dr Tohme Tohme was a scam artist, and that Leonard Muhammad and Shmuley Boteach knew scarcely of God;
He learned that he had a true gift;
He learned that the best song he had ever recorded was "I Want You Back", and that his new album, the one with T-Pain and Will.I.Am, was not very good.
Michael Jackson learned everything, he learned the whole universe, became wise as a sage, as the wisest sage
looking upon a garden
knowing the name of every flower

and then he ascended to Paradise.

IV

After Michael Jackson died
the fourth thing
he learned
was

peace.

He arrived at the place
where the dead go
when they are ready.

By the time Michael Jackson
arrived
he knew everything
and so he did not hesitate;
he came in
where it is safe &
good
and he felt the things you feel
in paradise.

He looked down upon the Earth and saw his sons, his daughter, his friends;
all of his friends. He
did not want them to be
crying.
(Okay
maybe a little bit; but
just a little bit.)
But when they were done their mourning
he wanted his beloveds to
be so
happy, so
cherished
& he knew now that they would be
probably
and that the probably is all right.
He saw his mother weeping and
he dispatched angels to
let her stop.
He did not think of his father.
Not in paradise.

Michael Jackson saw a million people playing "Bad" and "ABC" and "The Way You Make Me Feel", all over the world, in river towns and desert towns, skyscrapers and huts
and he saw them moonwalking and
doing the robot
under the stars.
John Lennon came out to see Michael Jackson.
"Hello," he said;
Michael Jackson had always liked English accents.
John Lennon was not angry about all that publishing rights stuff because he was dead and Michael Jackson was dead and both of them understood everything now.
They watched the people of the world doing the robot.
"Nice one," said John Lennon.
James Brown came out too. And Sammy Davis Jr. And even Louis Armstrong
for some reason
and they hung out for a while
watching humankind
sing lyrics like, "the doggone girl is mine",
or "darling!"
all of these late entertainers understanding how much these elegies matter
and how little.
In time he broke away from the famous men
and went in among the others
in paradise
to dwell. And at this point Michael Jackson was
no longer
who he was
(nor was he a child:
he was something freely
in-between;
released from certain shapes & sizes
to live
forever
as he is)

also he could fly
and turn into a switchblade
or a salmon
or a moonbeam;
or into a whole season
a whole summer of sidewalk glitz and starlit yes
for the world to inhabit
all of us loving and singing and dancing
and not knowing that this is Michael Jackson
in whom we are thriving
and making out
and inhaling the smell of mock orange blossoms.

(Michael Jackson is here
and he can still move
like he has figured out
the secret
of it.)

(photo source)

Discovery - "It's Not My Fault (It's My Fault)". Discovery's debut album, LP, initially appears to be a masterpiece. Its surges, snaps and blips press all my juicy summer buttons, recalling Len, Miracle Fortress and (inevitably) Daft Punk's Discovery. But this enchanted team-up between Vampire Weekend's secret genius Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles is utterly undone by Miles's vocals. Many songs wither under repeated listens, or in some cases even under first listens - because while Miles at different times recalls everyone from Harry Nilsson to Antony to to Kevin Barnes (Of Montreal) to Ben Gibbard (Death Cab For Cutie), he always sounds like a twerp. A song like "I Wanna Be Your Boyfriend" is an R&B pop marvel - that loses every bit of sizzle in its anemic verses. I'm certain this is an issue of choice, not of talent, but it's a fatal misstep. Irony does not trump sincerity, here. (See: R. Kelly.) Discovery's delicious, AutoTune-strewn cover of the Jackson Five's "I Want You Back" becomes nearly unlistenable as MJ's liberated sing is replaced with Miles's nerd croon. I become physically sad when I imagine what these jubilant chemical productions could be, with someone else's voice on top - imagine Jay-Z, Bjork, Sam Cooke, Jay Reatard surfing these songs' lead edges, all strut and bling. (And as much as I like Ezra Koenig within the context of Vampire Weekend, he is not the answer.)

Nevertheless, rejoice!, rejoice!, on "It's Not My Fault", the song works, the whole song works - dancefloor-smooved, with kevlar snaps and testtube bells. Miles (allegedly sharing vocals with Batmanglij) sand your edges, clear your heart for debris, leave you soapstone-smooth and ready for the June-time glitter. The song's wry, faux-frustration reminds me of a series of cold drinks on a hot terrasse, julep after julep, and every time my girlfriend brings me another I just spill it out on the sidewalk, watch the caterpillars crawl across the icecubes.

[website/MySpace - write and hire them for your mega-major-label hip-hop/pop/r&b project, to make me happy]
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The Lifted Brow's Ronnie Scott has interviewed Carey Mercer (Frog Eyes) for MBV. It's a great, funny conversation, fuel for Mercer-crushes, yes. "My wife loves Devin the Dude. My father made her a mixed CD of his greatest hits for her birthday. Whatever bauble I had purchased her paled in comparison to this sonic gift."

You have until Sunday to enter our Royal City contest!

(A note on the optical illusion above: what look like blue and green spirals are in fact spirals of the same colour! Yes! Believe it! I checked!)