Heroes and Villains - "Gene Clark"

What have Heroes and Villains done?! Something, befitting their name, as heroic as it is villainous. They have released a song into the late Montreal fall that captures the greyness of that time and place. In their Montreal, as in mine, the curtains are always drawn since the sun is always set. The planes overhead are there to remind us of Gene Clark, who was afraid of flying and worried himself to a premature death; the bicycles are for Nico, who crashed hers, the cars for Camus, James Dean, Jackson Pollock, the ships sail for Hart Crane. Everything in the dark, a sad, pretty symbol.

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Kaki King - "Second Brain"

When a solo guitar virtuoso decides to sing, one should generally decide not to listen. John Fahey and Leo Kottke have both used their vocal chords to garrote perfectly good guitar compositions. Kaki King's double-tracked voice is like how Joel Taylor and I recently described Dabney Coleman's hands: "Two plumes of indescribably rarefied gossamer mist." Which is to say, thin. But unlike Fahey and Kottke, King doesn't allow her guitar to become mere accompaniment to her vocals. Quite the opposite - her voice acts as just another texture, another sound that she can weave into the few empty spaces within her intricate guitar patterns. King knows to barely use what she doesn't have and use in abundance what she has in spades.

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