Archives : all posts by Sean

Portland Cello Project ft. Thao - "Beat (Health, Life and Fire)".
Portland Cello Project ft. Justin Power - "Hungry Liars".

What I did was I put five new CD submissions in my five-CD changer and I hit "shuffle". And about ten minutes later I was grinning ear to ear. There were at least two albums in there that sounded great! This is a much higher proportion than average. Then I checked the artists - one of the great bands is... CD 4. The other great band is... also CD 4. And CD 4 is... the Portland Cello Project's Thao and Justin Power Sessions. The two great bands are the same band, and they are not even a band. They are Thao (from the Get Down) and Justin, hanging out with a batch of Oregon cellists (including at least one from Horse Feathers).

Now - I understand why the Portland Cello Project is a good idea. After all, if you are a cellist and an indie rocker it must be fun to hang out with other cellist/indie-rockers and play goose-stepping chamber music. But as one of the few (?) people who heard the first Portland Cello Project album, and also this album, more than half of which includes vocals from Thao or Justin, I have to say: please make a band that is not called the Portland Cello Project and which is not the Portland Cello Project but that is you guys playing cello while Justin and Thao sing. In fact, please make a band that is like most of this album - because whereas the instrumentals are nice enough, the songs with vocals are wonderful, wildflower pop and cockleshell folk, like Nina Nastasia with a twist of the Shins, but not snoozy.

Take a listen! Do. Do not be put off by the name "Portland Cello Project", or by the name "Beat (Health, Life and Fire)" either. As soon as Thao Nguyen begins to sing, I promise you will go: "Hey!" You will do as I did and sit up where you are sitting, and put down your book, and wonder who is this who is singing so limber and loose, but also constrained, like a girl wrapped in tangle and extruding herself, knot by knot, singing "oooh". (It is Thao.)

"Hungry Liars" is different (it is a ballad), yet it is also great. The timbre of Justin's voice recalls Sufjan Stevens but this is not homage; these are two men with similar gentle voices. Justin is much more single-minded in his melodicism; he sings the pretty song like a man walking along train-tracks, undistracted by passing clouds, undeterred by nettles. He will walk until he has arrived where he is going and he is not afraid to walk all night.

[in June, buy The Thao and Justin Power Sessions, which includes three more songs with Thao and three more songs with Justin / Portland Cello Project myspac / Thao myspace / Justin Power myspace]

---

This week sees the beta launch of The Mark - a tenacious, illuminating and essential (Canadian) news website. One of its editors is Jordan Himelfarb (of this blog), and another is Claire (who makes a terrific cranberry loaf), and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Last week I visited Louisiana, invited by the lieutenant governor's office and the state's tourist board. I rode a golden mini-van from Lafayette to Baton Rouge to New Orleans. It is a remarkable part of the world, rich and singular, with enough music, food and conversation in which to spend a lifetime. But I spent five nights. I am going to try to document the visit in a piece for McSweeney's, but there are some things which are right for here as well.

Percy Sledge - "When A Man Loves A Woman".

Nowadays Percy Sledge appears in Baton Rouge car dealership commercials.

This is what I hear as we coast into town. Looking onto Louisiana's hot green fields, I struggle to imagine this. The Percy Sledge in my mind, the one who sings "When A Man Loves A Woman", is too distracted by love to ever do something so commercial. The Percy Sledge in my mind has never been able to keep a steady job. He is always staring out the window, or across the street, or over the butcher counter at a pretty girl. He stumbles on the sidewalk, neglects his chores, forgets to call his mum - all because of a passing woman's perfume, her smile, her lovely knees.

But I am told that Percy Sledge appears in Baton Rouge car dealership commercials, and when he takes the stage at the Baton Rouge Blues Festival, I believe it. The festival is modest and sincere - a dinky stage downtown, wedged beside fountains, with free entry and room for picnic blankets. My tour group is introduced to the festival organiser, to the publisher of the Advocate, to the mayor. We are handed Bud Lights. Then I duck through the photographers' pit and down in front of the fence, joining the crowd of couples and families and publishers and mayors and pretty girls, and Percy Sledge comes onto the stage in a royal blue suit, sunglasses, and Hawaiian shirt.

Percy Sledge, I realise, has always been a salesman. A salesman of LOVE. He is grinning wider than I have ever grinned in my life. He is grinning so wide that his grin cannot possibly be fake. "Ladies and gentlemens..." he says, and I imagine Percy Sledge in his living-room, feet up on a leather ottoman, watching a younger version of himself on VH1 and grinning so wide that he knocks over a porcelain bust.

Percy Sledge does not have the same calibre of voice that he once did. He sings thinly, sharps and flats, and it is his expert 9-piece backing band that makes the songs sound right. (Listening to this song now, later, I can hear the older Percy's voice hidden inside the younger Percy's voice; can hear the thinness and flats in the 1966 recording. And I realise it's what makes the song sound so urgent, human and endearing.) But Percy has brought something else to the stage - the self-confidence of a man who was once at the top of the world, and who has decided to never leave. Like all the best soul singers, Percy Sledge's greatest talent is the vitality of his mind's eye. The gap-toothed singer glows.

"Thank you for coming out to see ol' Perce," he says. He grins as wide as a number one record.

[buy]

Matt Harding - "Stay Always". You know something is going to happen. You're not sure what it is but you're sure it's going to happen. Certain. You see its signals in the white of clouds, in the red glare of sunsets. You see it in the ripple in the flags. Every glance is a harbinger. Something is going to happen and you are going to have to seize it at that moment, wrap hands around it, make it stay forever. Something is going to happen; prepare your traps. [blog/myspace/buy

Tom Zé - "Defeito 2: Curiosidade". Carlos unlocked the recording studio's red steel door, just as he had done ten or fifteen times a week for the past sixteen years. He pressed the code on the security pad, flicked on the three light-switches. He booted up the machines. He was a precise sitter. He sat down precisely, on the rolling chair behind the mixing desk. He stared through the studio glass at the empty stage. His client would not arrive for 22 minutes. Really, the client would not arrive for 52 minutes. Bands are always late.

Once the musicians had arrived, Carlos helped them to set up. It was always different and yet always the same. He made a note that he needed to vacuum the studio's carpet. Carlos undid his top shirt button and nodded to the percussionist to begin. He watched the red and green LEDs, the flickering needles. His fingertips rested on black sliders. He watched the musicians with calm, blackbird eyes.

Later, he spooled back the session and pressed play. The song came out on tiptoes.

"What is that?" said Manuel, who plays the bass guitar.

"What is what?" said Carlos.

"What is that voice?" said Suzi, who plays rhythm guitar.

"It is the singer," said Carlos. "You."

"Not that voice," said the singer. "The other voice. The little voice."

Carlos started the song again. This time he heard it immediately, of course he heard it, the gibbering little voice that had snuck into his microphones. Carlos stared at his flickering needles. "I do not know," he said. "Was it one of you?"

"No," said the band-members, jumbling and together.

"Hmm," said Carlos. He slid sliders, pressed buttons, turned knobs. He tried to isolate the voice and eliminate it. He could not.

"What is it?" said Manuel.

"I do not know," said Carlos.

"It sounds like a gremlin," said the singer. "Your studio has gremlins."

"It did not have gremlins before," said Carlos.

[buy]

(photo source)

Mirah - "Generosity". Mirah has again learned to prowl. (A)Spera is a great album, years late. Elsewhere there's kora and mbira, vocal twists that recall the Cocteau Twins, but on "Generosity" it's simple building blocks: drums, strings, electric guitar, cloud voices. Acknowledgement and refusal. Trees growing leaves and losing them, levees filling and breaking and being re-laid, faces cracking open into tears & smiles. [buy]

Roxy Music "Pyjamarama". A long-distance love-song that doesn't sound like one, that sounds like running down a spiral staircase together, your pockets full of peaches. And peaches don't fit very well in pockets, so there'd be lots of laughs and trips and falls. Oh if only more music like this came in tins, flatpacks like sardines, no expiry date, easy to throw into your luggage and crack open at lonely times - sitting by the hotel-room window with sun streaming in, no one to trip down a fire-escape with. [buy]

(photo by David Stewart)

Professor Longhair - "Go to the Mardi Gras". Headed to Louisiana today. No joke. Imagining bayou, white clouds, tufted cotton fields. I don't think there are cotton fields in Louisiana but I can't help my brain. Women will bring me big plates of food, steaming plates of sea creatures, shells glowing like freshly cut flowers. There are rainswept streets, palm trees leaning over, tramcars painted firetruck-red. In Louisiana they sometimes dance in the streets, I am certain. The picnic tables are frequently dusty. The music is purple, silver, grass-green, scarlet. The trumpets are tarnished. The whistlers are well-practised. And my sneakers are going to come home sparkling with another place's dirt. (previously)

---

Please do vote for us as Best Blog at the Best of Montreal poll - it closes really soon!

The Streets - "Trust Me". Everyone thought Mike Skinner had spent the past three years lazy, stoned, reading books of Descartes quotes while sipping white beers. But - no. Yes, he answers texts as soon as he gets them. Yes, he's posting new songs via Twitter. Yes, he has a swimming pool. But every night The Streets spends three hours with the Complete Oxford Dictionary, going through the volumes line by line, magnifying-glass hoisted, learning every single word and figuring out the different ways they rhyme. [Twitter]

Baxter Dury - "Cocaine Man". The Streets and Baxter Dury could pull some Prince and the Pauper stuff, sloughing off their leather and denim jackets, switching places. In my fantasy-land, they both wear the same size of shoes, both like to paint with watercolours. But Baxter's the only one who ever killed a man. Also: "CUP OF COFFEEEEEEEE...." [buy]

(image source)

Patrick Watson - "Fireweed". Patrick Watson's Wooden Arms is leaps & bounds better than his debut and it is an album full of leaps and bounds. He is a pretty singer, and his lyrics lilt, yet it's the instrumental landscape that thrums, hums, brings the record shuddering to life. Tracks like "Big Bird in a Small Cage" are as lovely as bowls full of fruit, but the bounding-er, leaping-er tracks - "Tracy's Waters", "Beijing", "Where the Wild Things Are" - are the ones that carry this across a ravine from Cibelle, Tom Waits, Andrew Bird. I like Patrick Watson best on the threshold between chanson and Sigur Ros.

And "Fireweed" is bigger than the melody that Patrick Watson is singing. It is a song with geothermal wells, old crows, creaking schist. Watson dwells in it, rents a room, brings his friends to sit by the window and hum. But "Fireweed" has a sea that's separate from the Montrealer's croon; has crevasses and groves. There are forces tunneling under his feet, and travelling between the stars. There's stuff in the steam. [pre-order Wooden Arms from Secret City/or from iTunes]

Elfin Saddle - "The Bringer". Ramshackle and kind, Elfin Saddle might be the eeriest band in Montreal. They play a secret music, something from the underside of gardens, the bellies of hills. Ringing For The Begin Again, on Constellation, is twinned with Clues' debut - but it is a vastly different creature, painted in verdant greens and new shades of black. Hear it all in "The Bringer"'s grim, sorcerous crescendo: slow promises, Appalachian groans, memories of old, weird Japan. There's none of night's comfort, here. There's nowhere to hide. This is the fearsome creep of daylight. [buy]

---

I asked about Lafayette a little while ago (sorry I didn't get back to you), but after getting a clearer itinerary it seems that it's New Orleans where I'm going to have some time to myself on an upcoming trip... Are there any New Orleans readers? I'd love to find someone to go see some jazz with. Please email me!

(photo of Riyadh sandstorm is a wire image)