Antarctica Takes It! - "I'm No Lover". Am I more inclined to listen to a band when my name is thanked in the liner-notes? I admit it: I am. Is that vain? It is. But oh, it feels great to have my plain 'sean michaels' attached to a song like this - like a ribbon bobby-pinned to the band's galloping heel. I've never even met these kids!

Did I say galloping? I did! Because this here is a cavalry. On their MySpace page they cite Belle & Sebastian, Otis Redding, the Penguin Cafe Orchestra - but forget that. It's Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Hannibal at their head. Listen to the exclamation of this song! The band earns the '!'. Listen to the cannonade of percussion, the charge of clap-clap, the hoarsening voices and the go-insane of the piano... the closing horn fanfare like a cavalry of rainbows that the general's added "just because we can! On, men! On on on!"

The CD's hand-painted, they're from Santa Cruz CA, they're the band I wish I invented at summer camp... oh and did I mention it costs only six dollars!?

[buy/info]

The Desks - "Stop!". This song, taken from The Desks' new free album, eschews slowness and sigh in favour of hesitating beats and fey soul (much more Robert Smith or The Robot Ate Me than Sam Cooke). The best parts are when the song creaks so hard it almost falls apart. For instance: a cracking voice, split with giddy feeling! a lyric so cute ("like maybe we could get some gelato?") that it breaks any spell! a raft of voices all echoing at each-other! Okay but I should lay off the exclamation points: the Desks are not Antarctica Takes It! There's a modesty here; my enthusiasm is earned with eccentric squeaks and instinctive performance. No army was trained: a man just sang it right, into his computer.

[download/obtain]

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two terrific blogs called it quits this week:

i didn't discover Vain, Selfish and Lazy that long ago, but I fell fast in love with fred's spurred, true and feeling writing. the archives are deep wells.

and Otherwise Unavailable goes out with a brrrrang, offering us a bunch of music by the author himself - as with most of what he's posted, they're mysterious, varied tracks, in places exceptional, like something brought in on the wind. I particularly like the songs by Cool, and the Trillion Dollar Trio.

godspeed to you both.

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Paper Thin Walls, meanwhile, is a new e-zine with music news and daily mp3blog-style writeups of rad songs. Contributors include um luminaries such as Frank Kogan and Chuck Eddie, formerly Village Voice music ed.

And TW Walsh has written up an extensive, very illuminating interview with STG-friend Brian Michael Roff.

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Finally - it's CONTEST time again! Spooky Swedish electropop duo The Knife have released one of my favourite albums of the year, Silent Shout. Said the Gramophone has three prize-packs to give away, courtesy of Mute Records. These include copies of the record, posters, masks, singles, etc - whatever the label throws in there.

There are two ways to win:

1) Email a photograph of a ghost to sean@saidthegramophone.com, with the subject-line "KNIFE CONTEST". Make of this what you will. Knife CD prize-packs will be given for my two favourite images.

2) Email a 55-word ghost story to sean@saidthegramophone.com, with the subject-line "KNIFE CONTEST". Stories should be excellent, and no more and no less than 55 words (excluding the title). A Knife LP (yes, vinyl) prize-pack will be given, label-willing, to the author of my favourite story.

Contest ends Midnight EST on Thursday, 17 August. Good luck! The contest is now closed.

The rest of you really ought to just go out there and buy the thing! It's fantastic.