Shearwater - "Leviathan, Bound". The new record by Shearwater, Rook, is one of the best albums of the year. It takes their last LP's great leap forward and adds patience, confidence, daring. They are a band who recall Mark Hollis/late Talk Talk, Final Fantasy, Silver Mt. Zion and Radiohead's Amnesiac. Since Rook arrived in the mail a week ago, I've scarcely listened to anything else. "Leviathan, Bound" is a song with dulcimer instead of drums, glockenspiel instead of rainfall, strings instead of thunder. It's beautiful and terrifying. Like when the waters begin to rise; like when the ground begins to shake; like then the clouds come barrelling & black; like when the trees begin to weep; like when the light flashes in her eyes; like when a shout comes from her chest; like when you're at your piano, scared, and every key turns to grey. The apocalypses Shearwater sing are the kinds we already dream of, the ones we already hold in our hands. [buy]
Calico Horse - "Idioteque". A song can have the heart taken out of it, singing it slow & strange. But not here. Calico Horse keep Radiohead's disquiet, sip the same cups of nightshade. There's something even more sinister in "Idioteque" turned lullaby - what are you doing to me, as I fall asleep? what promises are you weaving into my lashes? [info]
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My May column in the National Post features songs by Sister Suvi, Au, Frightened Rabbit, Colourbook, Wolf Parade and Snailhouse.
What's the difference between Hayden and Haydn other than an 'e' and two centuries? Both men are men (as all men are), both composers, both keyboardists. The sound of synthesizers, like the momentum of life, can sometimes seem backwards when in fact it is forwards. Mopey indie rock can be soul music, too.
[Buy]
(wait until the finger-picking is over)
Given six minutes to pack up my entire life
Stupidly, I went right for the kitchen
I just packed up food and soap and liquor
I even forgot your picture, my wallet
My shoes, a change of clothes
A blanket, believe me
I panicked, pissed in the plant
brushed my hair 28 strokes
and tripped out the door
I've already forgiven myself and lost the key in the grass
[Buy] (thanks John B. C)
--
Allegedly, illegibly, ineligible to join for dinner
hand claps on the door, I lost the damn key
The rain ruined your note
I can't read what you wrote
There is an enormous child out here
Giving me the beating of his life
It takes as much effort to let me in
as it does to keep me out
I ate garbage
I'm not blaming you
[Site]
Frightened Rabbit - "Keep Yourself Warm". Frightened Rabbit's new one, The Midnight Organ Fight, is terrific and absolutely unrevelatory. The band aren't doing anything new - this is just same-old melancholy indie-rock, folk-inflected, full of wistful harmonies, booming choruses and bombastic dynamics, - but Frightened Rabbit do it so. very. well. Even Scott Hutchison's (pretty terrible) lyrics aren't an obstacle: his singing is still the band's greatest strength, turning turgid poetry into heartache, want, will. In my National Post column tomorrow I compare the band to the Constantines, Okkervil River and the Foo Fighters, and I like that there's a band somewhere integrating those three sounds into a single, simple pleasure. A song with the stupid-euphemistic lyrics "you won't find love in a hole" is nevertheless one of my favourites of the year. [buy]
Mr Gnome - "Pirates". On the night at the loft party, five stories up the concrete block, you spun and shook to dance music, and then the vodka you had drunk began to sour, and your friends were just blurs, and so you decided to go, brushed by everyone, slipped on your coat and ran a hand over your face. And you put on yr ipod (this song), closed yr eyes as you washed away the before and dove headfirst into the after; you pretended like the night had a crescendo all the same, listened to yr one night stand in your earbuds; yeah, yeah, yeahs; and when you fell down the concrete, heels over head, smashed and bloody, you didn't open your eyes or stop listening, you just fell, and heard the sound of your falling. [album out tomorrow]
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Saw Robyn last night. Had a really, really, really wonderful time.
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I've made a few muxtapes lately: 1 2 3
[sharkmeat photo by John Isaacs]
The paranoid wanderer narcissist believes that cities are just government conspiracies to put as many people and obstacles in the way to their destination as possible. The newlywed solipsist wonders to himself, while making love, whether he has masturbated to the point of breaking skin. The pathetic sympathetic pet store owner imagines every time she flips the closed sign that these are actually her pets for the night. The self-inflated and widely hated culinary teacher's assistant believes that cooking for anyone but yourself is worse than prison. Tapes 'n Tapes are convinced unconditionally of their cause, they've made plans, they've written letters and drafted schematics. T-squares, ledgers, levels and chalk, "Lines" is nose-to-the-grindstone homework music. I'm impressed. [Buy]
Sloan, I only have room for so many bands in my life. I can't give myself to every single one, there'd be no me left. There are a ton of unlistenable bands in the world, and there's even more mildly listenable bands. There's a bit less listenable bands, and the smallest group is very listenable, or great, bands. But even though it's the smallest group, it's still a very big number. Too much for me to hold them all in my heart. So you and me, Sloan, we never got together. But whenever I see you, and I see you, around or whatever, I always know that if I'd lived my life differently, we might have been something. Canada's Queen? [Pre-Order]
Minus Story - "Battle Of Our Lives". This song isn't about the beginning of love. It is, I think, a goodbye. It is a whisper through a windowpane, a hand on your own heart. It is sharp and rough and noisy and full. But a goodbye can still be a love-song, and a love-letter can still be a goodbye. I love you but... And later, when the words no longer contain all those evers, when the full-stops are just dots of ink, when the skies have fallen & risen, aglow, sundrenched, highing & oh, well then melt down those old love-letters, lose the old goodbyes, take the wood dust, nickel shavings, chips of ruby, and make yrself a new song. One that begins Dear, and means that word, fully; one that says darling, and knows that heat, hotly. [buy]
Fleetwood Mac/Gwen Stefani - "Everywhere (Paul Devro blend)". It's not that Gwen Stefani has anything to teach Stevie Nicks about love. It's that her band has something to say about boom boom boom. About-- what? About-- boom boom boom i'm boom sorry my heart is boom boom beating too hard boom to tell yoboom boom the full extent of my boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom boom feelings' flush.
(thanks, doug.)
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I was a guest this week at Nothing But Green Lights (whose lovely redesign underlines how they're one of the best musicblogs out there, yes.)
Don't miss Jordan's 10pm post from yesterday; it's lovely.
[photo is of Edinburgh ca. 1920 - source]
I spoke to the bell tower master at the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity Anglican diocese in Quebec City recently. In a few weeks, with the help of a team of expert bell ringers from the UK and the US, he will attempt the second full peal of his bell-ringing career. (Ringers will never promise a full peal, only an attempt.) If successful, the peal will last three hours; all of the eight bells, which were built in London in the 1830s, will be rung 5,030 times, one at a time, without repeating any sequence twice. With enthusiasm, the man described the peal's complexity of sound and execution, the ringers' "three mesmerizing hours of total concentration." While he seemed reluctant to speak about the musical element of the peal, preferring to treat ringing from the practical hobbyist's perspective, his portrayal of the process and its effect on listeners reminded me of the power of the particularly dense finger-picking part or, especially, the musical math of a well played mbira/kalimba, to coax a listener astray, into the maze of its patterns and permutations - like a stargazer lost in the night sky - looking ever closer, seeing ever less.
Laura Barrett - "Deception Island Optimists Club"
Of Montreal - "Feminine Effects"
I don't have the photograph that goes with this song. The one of a woman of 29, with passable posture, sitting at her dinner table in the afternoon, smiling nervously just off to the left, probably at the photographer, a stranger in her apartment. Her wall is wood-panelled, and there's a poster for a Proclaimers show, and some framed pictures of her cousins and parents. Behind is the yellow floor of her kitchen coming through the side of the frame, the grey carpeting in the mirror leads to the window, with a vase of cloudy water. Her hair is in a bun, with a bit coming out the middle. Her chestnut cardigan and pink blouse are the bishop and the rook in a ready line of white. Her hand, the veins on top catching white sunlight, the king.
posted perfectly already on Fluxblog
[from a Green Owl compilation]
Ponytail - "Beg Waves". Ponytail get it exactly right in the opening track to Ice Cream Spiritual: electrically live and still marvellously composed, like a Duke Ellington suite for hoarse throats, scraped knees, joy. It's The Fall, not Deerhoof, I hear clearest in their song - but with fewer regrets, fewer chips-on-shoulder, just thrills & fears & squawk. Let's say you were arriving overnight from California, muscle-tired and underslept, but you have a whole day in front of you; let's imagine there's a million reasons to fall asleep but one big one to stay awake; let's imagine you have to go on and on and on; let's imagine you need a new reason to pump yr fist in the air. Well: here. Beautiful and squalid.
[Ponytail's Ice Cream Spiritual is out June 17. Get as excited as you like: album teaser here. From the ears that brought you Yeasayer.]
The Orchards - "Gemini". I remember we were in the basement. I had drunk a beer or two. I was in my late teens, unaccustomed to booze. My friends were talking beside me, two of them playing ping-pong. I had been sitting for a while, and then I stood up. And suddenly ALL AROUND ME the world was SPARKLING, was effervescent and fizzing, lights and glints and shines. And I was terrified and excited and panicked, thought maybe I was dying (though it was just oxygen & brain &c). Anyway, this is what is great about The Orchards' "Gemini" - the way at 1 minute 40 his strum & melancholy gets all streaked in zing, cobwebbed with shock, something splintering out- and in-side him in the brittle way that small epiphanies do.
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You are a damn fool if you live in Montreal and do not go to see Stars Of The Lid on Tuesday night at the Masonic Temple. Just sayin'. (Bonus tip: Clues on Saturday, Robyn on Sunday. Yes it's a busy week.)
[photo source unknown - from the Leuven mentos + coke world record attempt]
Constantines - "Time Can Be Overcome". Somewhere on the 33rd floor of a 51-storey apartment bloc in South Korea there is a man called Yes. He has dwelled on the 33rd floor for the past fourteen years, since he left his parents' home and went to work at the software company. Every day he has the Korean equivalent of a tuna sandwich for lunch, the Korean equivalent of chicken soup for dinner. Every night he looks out over the entire city, a city turned the colour of oyster-shell, and imagines how one day it will be nothing but dust. Yes has one friend, a violinist called Fei. Sometimes they go together to watch concerts. The best-ever concert was one on the beach, a viola-player standing on the sand and playing so hard that the strings fell out of its neck. At any second it looked like a wave could come and swallow the viola-player, take him away in a blink. The wave didn't come but at any moment it could have come. Yes bought an electric guitar thirteen years ago and every night since then he has spent learning a single song. He does not feel this is slow or fast; it is just right. One day he will play the song, play the whole thing. Meteorites will hammer the city and tsunamis will rise and his heart will come to life in his chest. [buy]
Withered Hand - "I Am Nothing". You know how some people, especially old-fashioned people, hang their carpets on clotheslines and then beat all the dust out of them? Or how some people knock their snowy boots against the side of the car before getting in? Here's Edinburgh's Withered Hand using mandolin, guitar, cello and his voice to shake all the dust from him, all the stray feelings, all the loose longings; so that at end of song he'll be just a body and the light in his eyes. It's a song beautiful and full. [buy for a song]
[photo by AFP, of the Congolese plane crash in October 08 07]
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