Richard Thompson - "Foxes" [buy]

I saw a clutch of wild baby foxes in a secret location last week. Four of them. They were lying together in a pile in the sun by the entryway to their den. Taking pleasure in each other's closeness and the warm weather. They were probably born on a cold day, when the sky was slate and pouring down rain. Young kits, life has only improved in their short time here. While the world comes alive all around them there is time to lie, drowsy in the afternoon sun.

I wondered where they came from. How did they get there? But they might have asked me the same question, and I certainly wouldn't have had an answer for them. Instead we just looked at each other. Them only a second at me, me a long stretch of time at them. All we could do was acknowledge that here we were, breathing the same air, a brief encounter on our respective adventures.
--
I've loved Richard Thompson's soundtrack to Grizzly Man since it came out years ago and couldn't resist this opportunity to post the fox theme. The whole album is full of Thompson's inimitable folky guitar and the songs shimmer with light.

(photo by Spike)

Comments:

Perfect image/word/music combo to remedy my Sunday grumps!

by Michelle, May 7, 2017

Thanks for looking/reading/listening Michelle!

by Jeff, May 10, 2017

Been a RT fan since...Shoot Out the Lights and dug into their back catalog and followed his solo work since. Was very cool to see him lead a workshop for a small outdoor crowd at the Vancouver Folk Music Festival last summer. Now I need to find the soundtrack...Play on Richard!

by Kris O., May 17, 2017

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Couleur Dessin - "Find Me Easily" [Pre-Order]

I made T.B.A(Tomato Bacon Avocado) sandwich. Recipe to be announced soon.

Milk Music - "Crying Wand" [buy]

The Dinosaur Jr-shaken-with-Pop-Rocks sound of Milk Music's hugely-fun debut EP is gone, but the fuzzy riffs and lyrical guitar solos that replace them on their new LP, Mystic 100's, are hypnotic. The band have stretched out, writing longer songs about environmental despoliation and the psychic warfare of late capitalism, melding the dark heart of punk and sage cowboy philosophers with the tie-dyed spirit of psychedelia.

"Crying Wand" evokes a dried-out desert viewed from the window of an old school bus full of hippies, and throughout, Mystic 100's brings to mind a series of landscapes. Over the album's runtime the band sonically describe the majesty and desolation of their world. It's a spaced-out land bordering on the Meat Puppets' arid realm, the old west of Neil Young's Dead Man soundtrack, and the liminal space Homer ventures through after eating the insanity pepper.

Comments:

The link to Milk Music's debut EP is missing the colon that should follow http. It should be http://www.perennialdeath.com/discography/prnl010/

by echawkes, Apr 27, 2017

Thanks for the catch! I just fixed the link in the post.

by Jeff, Apr 28, 2017

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GoldLink - "Meditation"

Smooth as a sweet springtime panic attack, fresh as a first bike ride on old pumped-up tires, free as it feels to pass an open window, be passed in turn by last year's favourite song, half-measures. Slick as a breath in played backwards, dark as a club dark, sound as a house party, sweet as a party you're leaving but not yet, not quite.

[Buy At What Cost]

Sylvain Sylvain - "Cant Forget Tomorrow" [Buy]

Almost ice cream season! my favorite ice cream place in Montreal, Kem Coba is opening soon!(Im not sponsored by them nor by Blue Apron) I just love that place.

Can't wait for summmer!

(Young) Pioneers - "Great White Hope"
(Young) Pioneers - "Love Song from the International Section"
(Young) Pioneers - "Fuck the Labor Pool"
(Young) Pioneers - "Joy Kills Sorrow"

Three men in hoodies and nylon jackets standing amidst a pile of construction waste in front of a dilapidated house, looking utterly serious. This photo, on the cover of the (Young) Pioneers's Crimewave ten inch, was like a compass for me when I was eighteen. This was the life for me - standing in a semi-desolate urban waste space, surrounded by decaying brick buildings. Why??

It might have something to do with buying that record after seeing the Marxist rockabilly DIY punk band play at a hardcore fest in a VFW hall on the outskirts of Detroit near the end of the twentieth century. On stage they wore matching red button-up shirts and black jeans and performed in front of four flags that they'd hung on the wall. What were those flags? I don't know - likely they belonged to collapsed people's republics. As every other band at the fest was veering towards some shade of emo, the (Young) Pioneers, featuring half the final line-up of Born Against, were headed straight in the opposite direction. They were drawing from the Minutemen playbook and rockabilly and the ghosts of Appalachian country music but filtered through the distortion and grit of their hardcore lineage.

Their lyrics offer up a whole world in miniature, where scarce employment and bad choices lead to narrow possibilities. Their songs map a geography of freeways, prison cells, blood banks, empty buildings, and the oppressive tools of capital, the labour pool, the employer's blacklist. But there are glimpses of life behind the Marxist front. Broken relationships are dissected, dead dogs memorialized, letters are written to loved ones.

As re-issue fever reaches the late 1990s some label could do a lot worse than releasing the eighty-plus songs records by the (Young) Pioneers in a box set, complete with a 20,000 word essay re-evaluating the band and the times they were part of, but it's unlikely it will happen. This was a band that proudly never fit. They were a band out of time - die-hard socialists in Bill Clinton's post-history America, singing spiky short songs about class and brushes with the law when anthems about feelings with massively earnest rock leads were the order of the day. But their songs still sound as alive as they did at the beginning of the Internet, a band that knew they were swimming against the tide of history at every turn, but gave it their all.

Jon McKiel - "Turf War". A sickly daymare of a song, a vampire asking favours or a band on the road, desperate for kindness, lost at an existential halfway-house. Are there any scarier words than, "I guess we're crashing here tonight?" Are their creepier syllables than "ha-ha-ha-ha-ha"? "Turf War"'s guitar part is not nauseating; its bass part is not nauseating; its drums are not nauseating. And yet, in sum, they nauseate. The whole is sicklier than the sum of its parts. They're a yellow sky and green clouds, blue gasoline; and you hope it all presages rainstorm, thunderclap, a cleaning of the house. You hope this. But perhaps it will not bet. Perhaps you are caught in a whirlpool, a vortex, with companions that cannot show their face in the mirror. [buy]

Napster Vertigo - "Tragic Future Film Star". This song is also nauseating. But only mildly so. It is like a belly-ache on an otherwise perfect day. You had a rad brunch, you went for a bike ride, you saw the girl you're in love with. So what if there was something wrong with the eggs benny? So what if your stomach's slowly swirling. Your head already feels like aurora borealis, shapes passing through; and there are some drugs around; and she's a willowy beauty. Sometimes falling in love is like getting stoned and lying on your bed and listening to an old movie soundtrack. You need to get your turntable tuned. You need to replace the cartridge. You need to throw up. A little. Watching the spiral of the record's rotation, the swirly "Ka eyes" of the woman on the couch opposite. Each of you is staring at the rug. Each of you is silver on the screen. Eventually the question will be: is there an emergency exit? [with Basia Bulat on backing vocals / bandcamp]