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Asthmatic Kitty's recent decision to issue a b-sides compilation for Royal City was one of my favourite pieces of news this year. This Guelph, Ontario band (I don't get to say that very often) are one of Canada's all-time great indie groups, but due to the modesty, restraint and burnished gold of their folk-rock sound, they never received their due. (Let's put it this way - celebrating Arcade Fire just pre-Funeral, it's Royal City I compared them to.) I'm so glad to have a label like Asthmatic Kitty - American! critically acclaimed! Sufjan! - singing their praises, trying to teach a few more people about what we all took for granted.

Royal City folded after 2004's Little Heart's Ease, and their original label, Three Gut, packed it in the following year. That was the last time I wrote substantively about Royal City (I've just put those songs back online), and we had Guelph's own Tim Kingsbury, now of Arcade Fire, write an epitaph too. (By the way, I've changed my mind about Royal City's Alone at the Microphone, which I sneered at here. It's a great record.)

Okay okay, but even more hoorayingly, Asthmatic Kitty's Royal City comp is gorgeous. The most beautiful CD object I've seen in ages, weird & different, made with thick board and metallic ink, and utterly worth purchasing whether you're an old fan or new. Obviously, the music is great - you can stream the whole thing at MBV. But we're also celebrating the album's release in even greater style, with a Said the Gramophone give-away. (MBV and Chromewaves are doing them too.)

Up for grabs is one set of Royal City art-prints, part of a hand-numbered series of 30. These giclee prints are 6 1/2" x 6 1/2", archival ink on 310gsm German Etching stock. They are beautiful. Ryan Catbird made them with the help of Three Gut founders Lisa Moran and Tyler Clarke Burke, and used Tyler's original artwork from all three formal Royal City releases, 2000’s At Rush Hour The Cars, 2001’s Alone At The Microphone, and 2004’s Little Heart's Ease. Most of these sets went to the band and label, but one will go to our readers.

To win our set of prints, listen to the songs below and tell us (in the comments) what we should have put beside [at least] one of them, instead of that boring release info. The contest closes 11:59 pm on Sunday, June 28. Thanks to Ryan for organising all this.

Royal City - "I Called But You Were Sleeping" (b-side, reissued on 1999-2004)
Royal City - "Cabbage Rolls" (from Little Heart's Ease)

[Buy Royal City, 1999-2004.]

(ps: happy st-jean baptiste!)

Unknown artist - "Unknown song" [I call it "Say Yes (Fashionable Matador)"], from David Barclay's CD of found Taiwanese tunes.

The fashionable matador is the talk of Taiwan. He arrived on a sky-blue yacht, standing on the prow. He is tall, but not too tall; broad, but not too broad. He has dusky eyes and thick eyebrows. The fashionable matador walks as if parts of him are oaken - steadying, strong. Other parts instead seem made of rope, or soapstone, or man. His matador outfit is at once classic and modern, with velvet epaulets, sequins, sunglasses. He has a five o'clock shadow and it is only eleven in the morning. He sits eating scrambled eggs in a Taipei square and the girls gather around him, silent, hands clutched to chests, wondering how quickly he can kill a bull.

(photo origins unknown)

John Vanderslice - "C&O Canal". A comely, demure elixir. Elided flukes - lilting, rippling, fetching. A billet-doux to a former dalliance, to her vestiges (to the denouement, to the whole ineffable imbruglio). Vanderslice gambols, with tintinnabulous vibraphone and ebullient percussion, offers a mellifluous lagniappe to an erstwhile ingenue (now nemesis). They could have been dwelling in a riparian bungalow, by a burbling lagoon, aestivating under wafting skies - with glasses of susurrous, effervescent soda, luxuriant with languor and lassitude. But no: their romance is beleaguered, a desuetude. And so this song is an efflorescence, a sumptuous offing of the ephemeral a&d halcyon. An epiphany, maybe. Becoming, becoming, becoming (and still forebearing). [buy / these are 44 of the 100 most beautiful words in English]

From - "Maple Drive". From takes her pleasant little song and strikes it through with cacophony - a racket of synthetic horns. They are distracting as hell, but not in a bad way. They're like the montgolfiers that draw your eyes up from the street, a dozen wheezing & whirring & bulbous hot-air balloons, and when finally you lower your gaze to the pavement you're smitten with the wondrous surface world - the fruit-stands, trees, barbecues, mail-men, glass. [buy/MySpace]

(photo source)

Brave Radar - "Shimmer". Maybe one hundred million light years from here, there are scientists who have learned to find planets just by their light. The sun reflects on the earth, glazing it, and as they peer into their telescopes the alien scientists say: Look! A place! But not just that. The scientists watch in their ratty labcoats, gravel and grass stuck to the soles of their shoes, thinking about the movies they're going to rent this weekend, thinking about the extra-terrestrial equivalent of Denzel Washington, and they make further discoveries. They see that there is too much light coming from the planet Earth. The shimmer on our planet is not just the reflection of our star. No - we make light here. We make it with fire, with gunpowder, with incandescents, with fluorescents. We make it by turning the dimmer switches in our family rooms. The scientists watch this. They make tick-marks on their space-clipboards. By this time they are not merely daydreaming about the alien buddy-cop movie starring alien Denzel Washington and alien Daniel Craig. They are thinking about the girlfriend they had three years ago, the one who loved alien Denzel, who used to grinning make jokes with her friends about him. And the way the scientists used to squirm at this - were they supposed to feel threatened? Did they feel threatened? All this as they watch the glimmers on the planet Earth. They are still thinking about their ex-girlfriends as their instruments detect tiny interrupted flickers of light. The scientists stare at the readings. The chief scientist wonders why none of the scientists are female - was he sexist in the hiring process? did he reject female applicants due to his emotional baggage? He remembers the way tangled sheets are differently tangled when two people have laid there. The scientists chew on the ends of their space pencils and look at the interrupted flickers. These are matches, they deduce. Beings on this planet are standing in their driveways and passing their hands in front of the flames. Just as the scientists do, sometimes, at night. They do it and they don't know why. Back and forth, darkly lit. A hundred million light years away, someone may have been taking notes. [buy/MySpace/release party in Montreal this Friday!]

Blake Miller - "This Morning". When David Foster Wallace died, he was writing a book called The Pale King. This book will eventually be published. The Pale King is reportedly a book about boredom, about the mind-numbing boredom of work and taxes and days' daily cycles. And it is also a book about reaching the sublime, about touching the light, by way of the mundane. The book, I assume, is itself boring (by design), and Wallace will try to create the same effect: to bring the reader past monotony, past fatigue, and through through through - up close, ear-to-keyhole, to the Beautiful. In Blake Miller's "This Morning", he asks if This is what life is all about? These are stupid lyrics. But they are not stupid lyrics as they are applied here. They are repeated, over and over, amid thrum & shudder & drone: a mantra. The mantra becomes the apparatus of Miller's experiment. Is this what life is all about - this asking? Let's find out. Let's listen and see if in the song's asking hush and hum we find a pearl of truth. [buy/more songs]

(image by Brian Michael Roff)

Bombadil - "I Am".
Bombadil - "Pyramid".

Bombadil's giddy new album, Tarpits and Canyonlands, is sunburst and lime-wedge, is summer folk and afternoon pop - but it's also utterly weird. There are songs in English, in Spanish; a happy song about a sad birthday (which is wonderful, and still up at Fluxblog); a song called "Koala Lumpur" - whose main lyrics are that same "Kuala Lumpur". The album's aesthetic is very pop (and in a small way it's They Might Be Giants - wait! wait! i mean that actually in a good way), but oddly the thing it most reminds me of is a defunct webcomic called When I Am King. Sentimental, sandy, absurd, vulgar, narrative, shot through with smiles. Tarpits and Canyonlands opens with a song called "I Am" (which might as well be called "I Am ... Building You A Pyramid"), offering chanted vocals, heave-hos, and a sort of glib piano-line. That song is later answered with another, "Pyramid" - a track with drumsnaps, pan-pipes, crash cymbals ... and those same heave-hos. They make a bizarre pair, twins whose talents are considerable but undeclared. You wonder what these songs are for, what caves this band can unlock.

[Buy/MySpace/Get well soon, Daniel]

Thanks to the late-breaking generosity of Domino Records, one of my favourite songs of the year so far - originally taken down at the label's request - is now back online.

Go listen to the Dirty Projectors' "No Intention", read my mumblings, and then remember to buy Bitte Orca, since it's wonderful.

Drake ft. R. Kelly - "Best I Ever Had (Skeemix)". Ralph heard the song in the car. Clouds were skating across the blue sky and he was switching between stations, search, search, and as he went into a left turn -- this. "You the fucking best. You the fucking best. You the fucking best. You the fucking best." His foot eased off the gas. He thought of Lucy in a summer dress. Lucy was twirling under a willow-tree in a blue & white summer dress. "You the fucking best. You the fucking best. You the fucking best. You the fucking best." He listened to the sunsoaked beat and he began to nod his head with it, tap his steering wheel. He thought about how he had thought of Lucy, thought of Lucy immediately; as soon as those lyrics had come crooning - he had thought of Lucy. He smiled at the irrefutability, the unassailability of this. Of how much he was in love!

He had thought of Lucy!

As he breezed down Constance Boulevard, the song sounded like glints, like glints on locks, a hundred different locks, a heart strung with a thousand different glinting locks, ten thousand gleaming certainties. He said "Woo," gently, into the air. He shook his head and nodded his head and drew a few little circles with the tip of his finger. He accelerated and braked and changed gears as he made his way to Lucy, to where she was standing on the corner of the street, purse slung over her shoulder.

That night after dinner, Ralph called Lucy into the living-room, asked her to sit down beside him on the couch. He had found the song on YouTube. He loaded it up. "Listen to this," he said. At the beginning it didn't sound as he remembered - but then the rhythm started, the beat, the hook, that sunsoaked sound. Ralph remembered the blue sky and the straight streets and the way he had thought of Lucy. He thought of Lucy again. Her face was scrunched up as she listened to the laptop speakers. He loved her. "I love you," he said to her.

"What is this?" Lucy asked.

"A song I heard," said Ralph.

She listened some more. "It's filthy," she said.

"No no," he said. "It's in love. You're the fucking best, you're the f--"

"I get it," she said.

"As soon as I heard it, I thought of you," Ralph said. "As soon as. Immediately." He tried to communicate the irrefutability, the unassailability. "Without trying," he said.

"'I can make your pussy whistle / like the Andy Griffith theme-song?'" she said.

"That doesn't matter," he said. "I thought of you."

[Drake's MySpace]

---

Elsewhere:

Sing Statistics has launched a mailing-list surrounding a particularly mysterious and ahem wonderful book project, I Am We Are The Friction.

John Darnielle (of the Montain Goats) with a wonderful analysis of (and repping for) Blackout Beach's Skin of Evil, one of my favourite albums of the year. I like the way he takes it to task. See also Carey Mercer's (aka Mr Blackout Beach's) recent blog-post about assisting at a Wolf Parade music video shoot. Hilarious.

Tickets are now on sale for Sappyfest. Sappyfest is a remarkable music & art festival in Sackville, New Brunswick. I will be attending for the first time this year, doing a writing project with them. (To be announced shortly.) The music line-up so far includes Calvin Johnson, Clues, Destroyer, Eric's Trip, Eric Chenaux, Feuermusik, Jon-Rae Fletcher, Julie Doiron, Ladyhawk, the Luyas, Mount Eerie, Shapes & Sizes, Snailhouse and Women.

I also recently wrote about Buraka Som Sistema for McSweeney's. "...when they play it's as if there is another member perched on a black corner speaker, hurling plums and diamonds onto the dance floor."

Someone started a Said the Gramophone Wikipedia entry - but it could use some sprucing up.

And as for our Monks contest, looking for a description of the best tattoo ever... So many amazing entries. Go look! From the Petit Prince to freckles to EAT SHIT. But the winner is weeghiz, with this entry: There's a bus and god is on the bus with a crowd of normal humans. god is dressed and shaped like any of his people. Joan Osborne is also on the bus. Joan doesn't know god is on the bus. No one but the owner can tell that god and Joan Osborne are on the bus because god is blending in and Joan Osborne is pretty generic looking; also her nose ring is facing away, towards the windows opposite the ones we are looking through. Because it is too annoying to always have to explain that he has a tattoo of a memorable image from the 1995 top 40 hit "One of Us" on his back and then point out the characters, he always just calls it "people on a bus" when he is forced to respond to inquisitors, like at water parks. We'll be in touch.