February 28, 2011
TELL US WHAT YOU'RE WEARING
Timothy Bloom - "'Til the End of Time (ft V. Bozeman)".
Kirk Baxter, co-editor of David Fincher's 2010 film The Social Network, winner of the 83rd Academy Awards' Oscar for best film editing, arrives home at 3:03 am on Monday, February 28, 2011. He notices the time while he is pouring himself a glass of cold water from the cold water device on the front of his fridge. "Katie!" he calls. "Katie, it's 3:03!"
Katie is standing in the hall, taking off her earrings. "It's 3:03?" she says.
"It's another one," he says. He takes another sip of water. "Just like when it was 7:07. And 12:12. Remember?"
Katie is standing clutching her earrings in her palm and looking at herself in the mirror. She is glowing. Kirk tells her so. He appears beside her with a glass of cold water and he kisses the back of her neck.
"Lucky night," she says. There is still champagne in her voice.
"A lucky night, a lucky sight," he says, and laughs. He puts his mouth to her shoulder. "A lucky bite." Katie rolls her eyes at the mirror. She is blushing. She thinks she has been blushing for six or seven hours. It wasn't just when Kirk won: it was the way he dragged her along the red carpet, and the way he clutched her thigh during the opening overture, and the way Annette Bening told her she looked lovely as they were waiting to be seated at the Gallery. Later, standing with Dave Fincher and Mike De Luca near the bar, Angelina Jolie strode by; and it was her ear, not Mike's, not Dave's, that Kirk had leaned into to say, "I feel like I'm in Atlantis."
"Tonight was fun," she says.
"Yes?"
"Yes."
"For me, too."
"More fun than last time," she says.
"Because I won?"
"Because everything," she says.
"Because everything," he agrees. "Because everything, everything." Kirk touches her hip and she turns and she is wearing her gown and he is wearing his tux and he kisses her lips. She kisses him back. She strokes his hair with one hand and the other hand is closed at the nape of his neck. It is holding two earrings.
He breaks away, shaking his head happily. "We could have stayed up all night."
"Let's stay up all night," she says.
"Oh?"
They are both grinning now, even larger. "Oh," she says, slipping her fingers under his jacket and squeezing his cummerbund.
He leans his head back. "I just want to ride motorcycles and learn to surf and edit films and go to faraway places and love you for the rest of my life."
"Where do you want to go?"
"To China," he says.
"How about to the moon," she says.
"To the fucking moon."
She arches an eyebrow. "To the what?"
"The," he says. "Fucking. Moon."
She steps out of her first heel. Her foot is bare on the maple floor. "Oscar-winner Kirk Baxter, please lead the way."
[buy on iTunes / see the scorcher of a music video (contains mild nudity)]
February 25, 2011
Flagging
1A-8F is business, beige, and cowards. 9A is t-shirt, 9B is skirt. 9C looks to D, his leg in the aisle, strap of his bag. 9E is already nodding off, 9F has a part like a chasm, a scalp canyon. 10A is guided, 10B atoning with Koontz, 10C a garbage bag poncho sudden rain, still deciding whether to rip it off or try and save it. 10D is thinking about two twenties or one in the wallet, lists transactions like old lovers. The noodles, did I have to do the noodles. 10E Sudoku, 10F plus size. 11A Greek to the max, 11B flat-brimmed headphoned hooded, 11C and D couple touching with a look, 11E and F their children, eating the day's dessert before its meal. 12A model hot, 12B obsessed with Truth, 12C given to addictive behaviour. Solitaire, brooding, seeking approval. 12D a-mare-ican, 12E a-mare-ican girlfriend, 12F blackberry Harry, as no one has ever called him. 14A looks at the screw-cap jet, 14B too much coat, 14C is empty but paid. 14D is imagining herself from outside herself, 14E this makes it a million, 14F is tired in a brand new kind of way. The way a machine would be tired if it could be. The way a pier would be tired, no more waves, thank you, I'd really like to be a tree again. [Site]
15A-67F
[5$]
(photo of Buffins, the winner of the Cat With the Most Appealing Expression award, courtesy of Jez Burrows)
February 24, 2011
DEVASTATION MICHAELS
Shotgun Jimmie - "Bar's Closed". Dan wrote about "Late Last Year", from Shotgun Jimmie's Transistor Sister, about two weeks ago. But I am not convinced that everyone in all of the world has yet bought this album, Jimmie's third solo outing, and his first great triumph. Honestly friends, this record is generous and funny and it is possibly ludicrous how much I dig it. "Late Last Year" is the opener and "Bar's Closed" is the closer, and even though this is the record's denouement they do it in two verses and 1 minute 42. Throughout Transistor Sister, Jim channels all kinds of sloppy and beautiful rock'n'roll, words like lucky quarters and impromptu secret handshakes. It is 16 tracks in 30 minutes. It is a lake full of rainbow trout. "Bar's Closed" contains possibly my favourite lyric in years, silly & stupid & somehow encapsulating everything about a certain feeling. I wrote about it when I saw Jim play Sappyfest last year, when he played this song live with a bashful twinkle in his eyes:
Shotgun Jimmie plays songs about holding hands, running in packs, beers in pockets. He has an acoustic on his lap and a kick-drum at his feet. It is potato-chip-crisp guitar pop, and it is utterly outstanding. "They say that you are what you eat," he sings, "and I feel like I musta ate a king."Also, there's flute.
But Shotgun Jimmie, what about us? How do we feel? Here's how: We feel like each of us just got high-fived so hard that our finger-bones shattered. We're all nursing our poor hands, & grinning.
Transistor Sister is released by the homegrown You've Changed Records. Buy it now. If you own a major American indie label, if you like Kurt Vile and Stephen Malkmus and Neil Young, you should send this man a suitcase of money and release it down south. See Shotgun Jimmie on tour throughout Canada this spring. Read about him at his blog or Herohill (and hear another song). I know I've been crowing about a lot of music in these early months of 2011, but oh things are wonderful.
Destroyer - "Poor In Love". Destroyer sings, "Apocalypse, oh", or maybe he sings, "Apocalypso", a neologism formed by apocalypse and calypso. This ambiguity alone is enough to persuade me that we should put Dan Bejar's face on all of our currency. [buy, on vinyl preferably, with its crazy extra song]
(photo is of Ali vs. Williams, 1966)
February 22, 2011
The Only Sounds
Unfair, she thought, running her fingers down the yellow piping of her skirt, his hair always looks marvelous when he comes in from the rain. Nolan shook off his coat, sniffed and smiled. "My darling, it's been ages," he stepped towards her, his golden coif glistening with rain, a curl falling near his eyes. She turned abruptly towards the crystal carafes of bourbon, and poured herself a drink, now a habit. "Damn your jaw," she said out loud, to the wall. Her back to him, she raised her eyebrows in surprise at herself in the mirror. It's true, damn his jaw, her mind was racing now, it's ugly the way a statue is ugly, nothing like that truly exists. "I beg pardon, my dear?" he stopped mid-stride, his shoes sopping a spot on the fine new rug. She spun around, "I don't think I want to see you right now. Or ever again, for that matter." He stood frozen, in that dumb pose, as if a photographer had yelled at him to hold steady, wonderfully powerful legs all bent and gangling, overcoat dripping, mouth slightly agape. "Surely you must be joking," his piercing blue eyes were now worn with age, no longer a boy but too beautiful to be a man, "I just travelled two days to get here." "Well, that was your decision, I didn't ask it of you," her bottom lip, the back of her shoulders, hell, her entire being quivered beneath his gaze, as she steeled herself for his reply. "Very well," he said, in his damn calm way, breathy and confident, "Seems I misunderstood the situation." And with that, he walked out the door. As quickly and dream-like as he had entered. She looked down at the wet footprint on the carpet. Unfair, she thought, of him to leave a goddamn mess on my carpet. Were it not for that, I might believe he was just like his jaw, too goddamn lovely to be real. [from Yeti 5]
Sisters are for stealing. If it's late and it's dark and you want a grape or two to help sleep come, send your sister to the fruit bowl. If your brothers have a comic book, with pictures of girls in shorts and ads for sugar cereals, send your sister to nab it while they're on the toilet. If you know where little Ricardo hides his garden snake, in a shoebox under the stairs of his house, covered in leaves and held fast with a rock, send your sister to sneak it away while he's having dinner. But tell her to watch out, it's angry. [from Yeti 4]
--
Both songs today are from old Yeti compilations. I highly recommend these compilations, they're full of extremely rare gems and also just wonderful music of all kinds. Hidden unreleased songs from Destroyer, personal donations from Jeff Mangum (of which "Unknown Title" is one) and tons of other great stuff.
Also: I greatly enjoyed the ten minutes it took to play The Great Gatsby NES game.
February 21, 2011
RESTER
Little Wings - "Mr Natural". Take it easy and then take it easier. Take it easier and then take it even easier. Gliding through the streets, coasting, downhill all the way; breeze and fireflies. Loose stars. Falling into lawns. Later, stretching in bed, a cracked egg on the stove, and the rooms are warm. Long eyelashes, the curve of your ear. Tilt, turn. The tarnished knives turning silver. And all those seashells at the bottom of the seas. [buy Black Grass, the new album by Little Wings]
Radiohead - "Give Up The Ghost". The carriage rolls through the streets, bumping over cobblestones. The carriage is gold and eggshell blue. The curtains are drawn. The people stare from the sidewalks, from doorways, from over their windowsill gardens. They wonder who is inside the carriage, drawn by its lone black horse. They wonder if it is one person or several. They wonder if the carriage is lined with velvets or silks or jerseys, and where it is going. They wonder what the light looks like, the light of sunbeams and gas lamps, as it passes into that secret roaming room. They cannot ask: the carriage is closed. They cannot eavesdrop. They cannot send a letter. They wait with their dry hearts and see the secret rattle past. [buy The King of Limbs]
February 17, 2011
OUR OFFICIAL CREST
The Luyas - "Cold Canada". In a week that saw successes by other precocious Canadians, I can only hope that the Luyas one day get their chance to climb up on a rooftop and play "Cold Canada" to their whole wild neighbourhood. It's a song that belongs to a rooftop,
that deserves to be there, noisy and triumphant and redemptively defeatist. The trumpet calls out to Mount Royal, the drums skim the skyline, and Jessie Stein sings her cheerful truth: WE'RE GONNA LOSE / WE'RE GONNA LOSE / WE'RE GONNA LOSE. Also, she sings, SNOW WILL ALWAYS WIN. You can imagine the cats and dogs in the streets, the businesswomen with attaché cases, the young men with toques and hockey-sticks. They'd squint at the rock band on the roof, pure and scattered, wondering if the organ sound is burbling up from the storm drains.
The Luyas' Too Beautiful To Work is burrs and gleams and ragged wishing. It is their second album, their first for Idée Fixe (CAN) and Dead Oceans (USA). They are one of Montreal's greatest acts, and I wrote about them most recently for McSweeney's. They launch the album in Montreal on Feb 24, and begin a major US tour. You can stream the entire album by clicking on Releases over here. OH BUY THE ALBUM YOU DAMN FOOL.
(photo from National Geographic)
February 16, 2011
False Collapse
Let me lead you to a secret.
Put down your paper crafts or whatever you think is cute right now, shake off whatever creaky cobwebs or skinny dust that lines your pillows or your sheets and put clothes on that'll take the weather and let's go. Hit the sidewalk and walk hunkered to the corner on the hill. See the park, go into the park, with the beaver crest and the frost fencing covered in ratty hedges. Step on white mounded puddles to the pines, where the pines gather, short and silent, grey sky waiting, breathless. In amongst the pines is a passageway downwards. It's the foot path to the underground train. It used to be used by nobles but now for maintenance. See the old plaques, names and dates, deeds done, days and weeks spent over this thing that just sits there. Stuff always just sits there, and people notice or they don't. Now head to the train, take the train as far north as it will go. Get off and follow the plaques to a passageway up. You'll come up in a kitchen, warm and brown, bread will be baking. Have a piece, you'll be hungry. Look out the window, see that car. It's broken. But this house is by a cliff, and the wind kicks up like a horse so watch your footing. Walk to the edge of the cliff and lie on your stomach where the grass is parted, so your chin hangs over the ledge. Crane your neck as far as it will go, and you should be able to see just under the lip of a rock. See? The writing? Written upside-down, so you can read it just right? It's the secret. "HS+TT=♥ LET'S GET FUKKIN BLAZED"
What's that? It's not of interest to you? Well, perhaps secrets are of relative value. To me, it's an absolute truth. Aitch ess plus tee tee does equal heart shape, and indeed let's get fukkin blazed, that rings true in my heart. It resonates like rolling thunder, it laps against me like waves. I am full and happy and pianos burst and jangle in my ears.
(pic)
--
A very nerdy but fascinating clip from There Will Be Blood, run through a filter that tracks people's eye movements. After I marveled at how magnetic Daniel Day-Lewis' face is, I realized this is a tribute to Jack Fisk, one of the best production designers I've ever seen. Watch that wrench/weight on the map, and then see his talents explode like fireworks in that travelling shot with the car. (thanks, Vinny!)
--
And today is your last chance to vote for us over at the CBC Radio 3 poll. wouldn't it be great?
February 14, 2011
SAINT VOLENTINE'S DAY
PJ Harvey - "On Battleship Hill". From PJ Harvey's gorgeous, spectral Let England Shake, an album that is deeply weird, pretty & eerie, new. Songs of thorn and death, distant war and Polly Jean's beloved England - but grooving, beautiful. It's almost a chillwave album - a secret, coincidental, chillwave album; chillwave made useful, productive; all that seaweed reverb, analog wobble, even the saxophone and reggae samples, braided with English folk and Cat Power's "Cross Bones Style" to say something, secret and ambivalent, about a people's present. "On Battleship Hill" speaks less to this than other tracks do - it carries more of Let England Shake's other chromosome. This is darkly beautiful, lush & skeletal, indebted to "Tam Lin" and Anne Briggs. But it's the singing that sets it apart, PJ Harvey's thin falsetto singing, like a river over rocks or - at 3:44, the greatest moment on the record, - a single wild rose that suddenly blooms. [buy]
Low - "Immune". You could tend a garden at night, only at night, pouring dark water onto leaves, and into the earth, like pouring midnight onto midnight. You could hold your soil-stained hands up to the moon. The stars would gleam on the bottom of the shovel. It would smell the same as a daytime garden - it would smell green, violet, red, white. But come back, in daylight. Come back, to see the colours without closing your eyes. [Happy St Valentine's Day / buy]
---
Elsewhere:
Radiohead are releasing an album, The King of Limbs, on Saturday.
Arcade Fire won a Grammy award for album of the year. This band is a lot of things. They are inspiration, role-models, they were once good friends. There are one of the reasons Dan and I became friends. It has been almost a decade since I first heard Win's voice, plaintive & twanging, at a Battle of the Bands. They have come a very, very long way, mostly just by playing their hearts out. Congratulations, congratulations, congratulations, to Win and Régine, Jeremy and Tim, Richie and Sarah and Will, and Marika too. I hope you have some celebrations planned. And I hope that everyone else out there is rewarded, sooner or later, for playing their own hearts out.
February 11, 2011
The Doge's Explodeth Erroneously
Shotgun Jimmie - "Late Last Year"
Short short long, that's the signature buzz. Get inside, take off scarf, take off toque, take off mittens and boots, switch to slippers. Take off heavy coat, stuff the pockets with the rest and hang it in the closet. Sit down, crackers and aged cheese (cheddar fort, like snow fort but with cheddar) and do a jumble together. TRIPE. BUFFET. HEALED. GRUNT. (where the billiard champ left his keys = corner pocket) Do a coupla clues of the cryptic together, while tapping fingers and letting the clock tick loudly. Fresh weight for Isaac (6). "Hey, I figured something out last night when I was walking home." The bananas in the bowl are starting to waft, they want attention, they're growing spots. "I figured it out," slippers pap on the floor, juice sits limitless in the glass, meniscus whisping to infinity, "I love you." "Newton." [coming soon from You've Changed Records]
Andre Afram Asmar - "U Too Can Syn"
Tagline for Club Night, Ice Cream Commercial, Post-Edge-Murders-Bono Headline, or Text Messsage from God? [Buy]
February 10, 2011
BLAKE vs BLAKE
James Litherland - "Where to Turn".
James Blake - "The Wilhelm Scream".
These songs are the same song.
They are actually the same song.
So you listen to James Litherland's "Where to Turn", a work of grooving yacht-rock, and then you listen to his son's* decelerated cover, this melancholy blubstep, sort-of dubstep, and you think some things:
- James and James have the same name. Does James sr sound like the kind of man who would name his son James? Does James jr sound like the kind of man who lives in his father's shadow? Is James sr proud that his son has become a musician? Does James jr seek James sr's approval? When James jr told James sr that he would be covering "Where to Turn", did the father feel flattered or threatened?
- And so how much of "Wilhelm Scream" is directed at the father? It is a song of melancholy, alienation, heartache - but how much of Blake's mind, as he sings, is thinking of the way his father will receive it? How would this song be different if it were not, in some tiny way, a tribute?
- In this age of 80s revivalism, the electric violin, which features around "Where to Turn"'s 2:00 mark, is the coolest & cheesiest instrument to have not yet been resurrected.
- Did James Blake ever include his father's "Where to Turn" on a mixtape for a friend? For a lover?
- The lyric at the centre of James jr's song is, Might as well love you. This is not so, for James sr. For him, the feeling seems strongest in lyrics which James jr did not adapt: Where to turn, he asks, when the joys of all creation begin to burn? "Where to Turn" was released in 2006, when James jr was about 17. I do not know when it was written.
- I like James jr's music very much, but on his debut LP, the pop songwriting is a little, um, slack. This was a problem for his father as well.
- When the synths rise up at last on "Wilhelm Scream", around 2:30, there is nothing of James sr in them. They are blind, unsympathetic, almost unmelodic. They are a wall of tomorrow, of passing time. James jr is drowned out. Things happen, life will change. Somewhere, a father is hearing his son sing his song.
*Probably his son's. See comments.
[buy James Blake's James Blake / buy James Litherland's 4th Estate]
February 8, 2011
EXCLUSIVE WEAKNESS, UNDISCOVERED STRENGTH
Freddie Mercury - "Isolated Vox" (let it play)
Although we do not know what the world's hero looked like, we can make plenty of inferences from his clothes and personal effects. An oversized comb and loose hat, perhaps he had an enormous head, bigger than any of us have seen. Long pants with a widened flare, he clearly had vastly swollen ankles, from much running and climbing. A pill bottle, he took his daily medicines as we all. Empty money clip, poor until the end. Shirt made of silk, pretended to be rich, but how ubiquitous is silk to us now. Rings, many wives, chains, many slaves, shoes, uncomfortable on purpose, perhaps a type of religious self-punishment. Holy, holy chrome spear, held tenderly and three-pronged, wielded electrically, used to shock his voice into notes so high and pure that no one will ever hear. [ Listen to "lost retake" of "Keep Yourself Alive"]
February 7, 2011
TWO DREADS
Anne Briggs - "Blackwater Side". They meet on the evening that the power goes out, when the lights on the pier clink off and she is standing in her little booth and there is a boy walking past, and he says, "And suddenly it's night"; she smiles and she tries to sell him a ticket to the boat-tour. Much later, when they are tied up together in the sheets, he asks her, "How did I find you?" and she says, "The lights went off." But anyway, but anyway, their song is a song of betrayal. They hear it as they are getting up one morning, and it is so beautiful; she decides it is their song without hearing all the words, without hearing that it is a song of betrayal. In time, this becomes a joke - that their lovers' song is a song of deceit. "Your lying tongue," he says to her, their heads on pillows. Sometimes, when they part, she clicks through to hear it on her iPod; when he goes west at Christmas, to see his family, he slips his headphones over his ears; they put it on mixes for each-other, seek different versions. "Your lying tongue," she says to him, her lips at his ear. // Until the day he lies to her. On this day, the song changes. Her life seizes around her; it is as if the summer is tearing; their song turns to ice. They still walk together, and eat together, and on one night they are tied up together in the sheets. But it is blighted and sick. She turns and watches him and sees that he is almost evil, with his curls at his ears. After they end it, she cannot listen to the song of deceit. She listens only to love-songs. Her heart is broken in a particular and terrible way. [buy]
Gucci Mane - "Dollar Sign (These New Puritans remix)". Perhaps you have already heard Gucci's brags - I'm so fucking paid, he rasps, I just bought the dollar-sign. These New Puritans strip the joy from the song, replace it with a melancholy, almost sinister, ache. It recalls early-00s Radiohead, UNKLE, Clint Mansell, but in 2011 these signifiers are not free, unburdened: whereas once they evoked just moodiness, "alienation", now they summon these things while also summoning the past itself, the decade-ago, those early-00s. Gucci is swaggering, glinting, and These New Puritans are flashing our regrets in our eyes, like the Ghost of Christmas Past, draping a rapper's shoulders with the doom he has not yet noticed, the nostalgia he will yet uncover. It's almost unkind. [download the free mixtape, Free Gucci 2: The Burrrtish Edition]
(photo by celia perrin sidarous)
February 5, 2011
Put A Ring On It, Saturn, A Big Ol' Rock
I used to be a bad kid. I used to fight and scratch, I used to smoke. I used to run races and cheat, put sugar in people's eggs, put kool-aid in their gas tanks, flip birds the bird. Y'know? A real shit kid. But now I found the thing that makes me happy and all the shitty stuff just stopped. Poof. Like a disappearing act.
Alana Johnston is an enormous personality, squeezed into an album of 30-second songs. Hyper-condensed, concentrated, spastic, funny, the Self-Esteem Party is mixtape gold.
February 3, 2011
DIVING
Young Galaxy - "The Angels Are Surely Weeping (ft Hanna)".
Young Galaxy are changers. What do you do, after a wreck of a year? You lean your head against your lover's, one of you with closed eyes and the other wide open. You breathe. In the silence, you write lines about bringing an axe to the winter; you write about loss and going on. You go into a room and you sing songs into a machine.
It must be strange, to write such words, to murmur such verses, and then to send them across the sea. Yet Young Galaxy had lived their wreck of a year; they knew their hearts. They wanted not guitars' blaze, cresting drums - but space, curve, the indirect path. They had lost their taste for certainty. So they sent their night sketches, their sung questions, to a man they knew only as a dashed & flickering face, as a voice down the wire. Sweden's Dan Lissvik, one half of Studio, a producer who creates springs & summers but who cannot invent want. Young Galaxy sent him their want. They sent him their doubt and dream and steely need.
Over nine months, Lissvik made Shapeshifting out of their shapeshifting.
I say all this because "The Angels Are Surely Weeping" was made by men and women from Montreal and Gothenburg, by artists with fingers on keyboards and folded corners in books, who raise fur-lined hoods to go out into the snow. But it sounds like bending, seeking jetplumes; it sounds like a coral reef. This song is neon and radiant, lithe, volatile. If I were feeling cheeky I would tell the story of a great aquatic civilization, thousands of years hence, whales with slow & giant hearts, jeweled headdresses, with pearly lanterns, and the way they would hear this song, sing in time, mournful. Yes, I'd go on a long riff about whales. But I am not feeling cheeky. I hear this song's meditations and I think of tomorrow, and yesterday; the way the light changes, inside our chests, as easily as a dance-step.
[buy / available right now on iTunes / previously / stream Shapeshifting in full]
Sinbad Richardson's delicious music-video for another new YG song, "We Have Everything":
February 1, 2011
Love To The Fullest
Ted Hawkins - "Sorry You're Sick"
This song is a man. If it is anything, this song is a man. It wants to solve problems, invented or real. It wants to work, to be useful, to try and be tried. It is a full man and not young. It is through with the lies of youth, the games that youth play. It is tired of praying, for God is umpteen times useless. It lives heavily, with heavy joy, and with a sincere and earnest approach. It works every day and hard for a love that lives inside it the way a woman carries a child. This song is not a woman and cannot carry both a child and love, it is a man and can carry only love. It toils each day in the closeness where love is born. It works through the din of the world, the voices and eyes of the choices unmade. It smiles in the face of sickness, time, and death. This song is a real and honest man, it makes mistakes, does wrong, and asks forgiveness. I want to be this song. One day I will. [Buy]
(thanks, PJC)
(photo of Ted Hawkins by Dave Peabody)