Archives : all posts by Jordan

Cortney Tidwell - "The Missing Link"

One must delve beneath the surface of Ms. C. Tidwell’s work if one wishes to acquit oneself well when discussing it. One might easily be fooled by her Yankee aristocrat’s cognomen or equally by her provenance, being as she is the brat in a long line of Nashville performers. Her music sounds nothing like Fitzgerald reads or like the traditional country of her familial predecessors must have sounded. She has a reputation amongst those in the dark as a country singer of considerable power, and amongst those in the penumbra as a gifted country-shoegazer. Here in the light, it’s clear she’s more Morrissey than 4AD in delivery, though vice versa in arrangement (wash, not jangle). The instruments are heavy, the bass rumbling and round, the snare thumping, insistent, relieved on every sixteenth beat by a hissing high-hat. The genre: pop-rock. The singer: neither aristocratic nor otherwise, neither country nor shoegaze, the carefully belting Ms. C. Tidwell.

[Buy]

The Band - "Jawbone"

1) You are a daily reader, but a newborn baby.
2) You are an irregular reader, in either sense, of Said the Gramophone.
Or:
3) You fondly remember the Summer of Rumours - the daily sing-alongs, the heavy thinking you did while listening to “Dreams,” the even heavier drinking while listening to “The Chain.” We spent our summer together, Dear Readers, all of us with our ears glued to the speakers, the needle of our record players digging right through to the bottom of our albums, until the grooves were holes and our erstwhile Rumourses rendered but broken vinyl. And so ended the Summer of Rumours, just in time for fall.

Welcome to the gateway into the Winter of the Band’s Self-Titled Sophomore Album, The Band, aka the Winter of The Band, aka the Winter of our Contentment! What a bunch of unassuming, musical workman geniuses do make up The Band! Here’s a piecemeal and plodding song, by no means their most perfect, yet it contains a chorus of such pure, moving brilliance as to exert a wrenching pressure in my chest every g-d time I hear it. And speaking of g-d … Every g-d song on the whole of The Band has a moment nearly as powerful, as surprising. To list the specifics would be like listing all of the Real Numbers, i.e. impossible, but trust me when I say that they appear on every song and between every two there is another, ad infinitum. Epistemologically problematic? On the contrary, my babies:

The chorus I present to you here holds a clue to the infinite goodness contained elsewhere on the album. The thing that The Band does better than anyone and do better here than anywhere else is The Wait, The Drag, The Fall-Behind. It’s just a moment really, just a second of holding back, of speeding up, of finding the tempo. Nothing more than a stutter at the beginning of each of the vocal riffs that makes up the chorus, yet each one is harder to wait through, more agonizing than the last. It’s easy to sit in judgement of a man who, like the singer of this song, drank himself to despair, to death, really, with Grand Marnier. That sickly orange liqueur; what an indignity! But what must it have been like to live in the world with such a skewed sense of time? Sit through one of those pauses and you will miss work, lose your job. Another and your girlfriend will leave you (she can’t wait forever). A third (and in each chorus there are three) and you will be quaffing a snifter of triple sec, asking yourself how this man lasted as long as he did. After all, we must keep warm somehow this winter. [Let's winter together.]

***

Buffaloswans - "Long Hundred Picture"

If you think Richard Manuel is the only member of the The Band who understands The Wait, just listen to “The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down,” and tell me that Levon Helm doesn’t have a firm grasp on the manoeuvre. Of course, Helm also has the power of heart-breaking minimalism, of hitting the snare drum once less often than you think possible. Such is the way also of Buffaloswans’ drummer, who sounds his snare on every 2, without fail and nowhere else. It’s as if, in the mind of the drummer, there were no other beat in the bar.

Tonight Buffaloswans will release their self-titled debut album in their hometown of Vancouver. Based on the songs I’ve heard, it’s a record that should sit alongside the work of The Band in the annals of strong Canadian Americana, and its release comes just in time for the Late Fall of Buffalowans, currently underway. [Info]

D'Angelo - "Devil's Pie"

Yet another tract in the literature of soul regarding the struggle between earthly pleasures and heavenly responsibilities, between flesh and faith. Here's an ugly, greedy world, sings D'Angelo, and then, near the outset of what promises to be an anti-sin polemic, the singer, like Saint Augustine, becomes a question for himself. "Who am I to justify/All the evil in our eye/When I myself feel the high/From all that I despise?" Indeed, D'Angelo is not unlike a young Augustine, utterly seduced by "drugs and thugs, women, wine." I don't have a copy of Confessions on me, and therefore I can neither reject nor confirm my intuition that the song's key metaphor for our insatiable and varied transgressive appetites, "Fuck the slice, we want the pie," was taken from that early medieval autobiography. Of course, as with all the best works in the transcendence vs. immanence subgenre, the music does what the lyric cannot: resolve the central tension. That is to say that the song itself proves by example that what is earthbound and profoundly impious can also be sublime; that dirtiness is next to godliness.

Which is not to say that the inverse is necessarily true: Castanets - "Sway"

[Buy Castanets' In the Vines, D'Angelo's Voodoo]

The Tams - "Hey Girl Don't Bother Me"

"Hey 'Hey Girl Don't Bother Me,' don't bother me!", I implore the song, knowing full well it's too late, my position having been already compromised. By three-quarters-way through the song's first bar, I've already been made a dubious confidant of a confider either disingenuous or self-delusional - an unenviable position I'm sure we've all occupied at some point. A friend tells us that he or she is absolutely, finally done with his or her boyfriend or girlfriend, over it!, will not be hurt anymore. And we suppress our bitter laughter, bite our tongues, even though we've heard the same so many times before. No, we don't believe what we hear - and not just because we're ontological skeptics, and certainly not because we mistakenly believe in the unassailability of inductive proofs - but because we're wise, or perhaps just not foolish in love like our friend here, with whom, quite frankly, we're running out of patience. The resolve that Mr. Tams presents at the beginning of his song is a front; the conceit of the first verse - that he is repudiating, based on principle alone, the advances of the notoriously unfaithful, but undeniably sexy young woman at issue - is equally untrue. By the end of the song, Mr. Tams has all but articulated the futility of his resistance. Even as the steadfast and cool high-hat beat reinforces the distance between our protagonists, a clarinet sings impending romance, and, in a haunting minor, hints at its ugly, inevitable end.

[Buy]

Judee Sill - "There's a Rugged Road"

Judee Sill, in her spoken introduction to the California-folk ballad "There's a Rugged Road," offers this explanation for her song: "It's about everyone individually on their climb up, you know?" I'm reminded of the saxophonist Cannonball Adderley's spoken introduction to his album Inside Straight, in which he claims that he gave the album that particular title because "that's where I'm at, philosophically speaking, you know?" Obviously both introductions are unhelpful and somewhat annoying in that they both seek complicity, you know?, when, because of their obscurity, none can be given. In fact, the prologues are superfluous - Sill and Adderley are both much more articulate in their work than they are about it. Everything we need to know about Sill's song is contained therein: "There's a Rugged Road" is not, as the literal among you might think, the most general existential claim about a particular kind of road, but a study of one's struggle to stay righteous, despite the trials and temptations of life. A religious woman and a heroin addict (dead of an overdose at 35), Sill sings clearly and easily about a thing muddy and difficult: her climb up a short and rugged road to where? [Buy]

***

The Dirty Projectors - "What I See"

Ostensibly a cover of Black Flag's 1981 album, Damaged, the Dirty Projectors' latest record, Rise Above, sounds more like Prince playing Prokofiev with a juju orchestra than like the hardcore opus it's supposed to emulate (and, to be fair, it sounds only vaguely like Prince playing Prokofiev with a juju orchestra). What we hear in "What I See" is Dirty Projectors frontman Dave Longstreth's ability to seamlessly fuse seemingly irreconcilable musical influences (see the grasping, ultimately rejected description above) and to successfully plumb the ugly and the unintuitive for their latent beauty. Nat Baldwin, who once played contrabass in The DPs, and whose new album, Most Valuable Player, is a masterpiece, proves with his less difficult, more tender take on Longstreth's Melismatic beltings, that the Dirty Projectors' innovations are not just valuable in themselves, but serve as fruitful inspiration, too. [Buy]

Robyn Hitchcock - "My Favourite Buildings"

The scary thing about Robyn Hitchcock's special breed of insanity is that it very nearly passes for lucidity - he buries his absurdities in verses of seemingly meaningful, but ultimately ridiculous, lyrics. Hitchcock is deceptive too because he presents his words in a trust-inspiring naive pop, like a British Jonathan Richman. At first his song seems to be an analogue of Joni Mitchell's "Big Yellow Taxi," where, unlike in the latter song, paradise isn't nature, but Hitchcock's preferred architecture. Hitchcock sings, "My favourite buildings are all falling down/feels like I dwell in a different town," and maybe the listener gets a bit choked up, moved by the thought of the collateral damage of human progress. Then, with the same sad conviction, Hitchcock intones, "But why should I bother with painting them brown/when they'll all be pulled down in the end?" Uh, who said anything about painting them brown?! Still, what a nice song, so the listener gives him the benefit of the doubt, and immediately regrets that decision upon hearing the following similes: "My favourite buildings stretch upward for miles/remind me somehow of your favourite smiles/like oak leaves in autumn/cascading on stiles/in the rain." Poetic license be damned: Common sense has been contravened! The last verse confirms that the song is literally nonsensical and, if metaphorical, only incomprehensibly so. The listener is left nodding her head to this melancholy pop song, wondering how she could have been so affected by the product of a mind not bound to our particular modes of understanding. [Buy]

***

Erin Costelo - "The Trouble and the Truth (Part 1)"
Erin Costelo - "The Trouble and the Truth (Part 2)"

Perhaps this speaks more to the unusual musical proclivities of my adolescence than it does to the quality of Erin Costelo's baritone voice, but when Costelo sings, she reminds me most of all of Genesis-era Peter Gabriel. Costelo doesn't sound like Gabriel exactly, and more often than not, her jazz-inflected, sprawling pop songs owe a greater debt to the composer of "Big Yellow Taxi" than to the man behind "Carpet Crawlers." It's in the way Costelo acts the parts of her songs' protagonists that she recalls Gabriel and his ability to inhabit his many characters and convincingly sing in their voices. In the two versions of "The Trouble and the Truth," the careful ballad that begins and ends Costelo's new EP of the same name, the singer and pianist shows us how a melody's meaning depends upon its frame. The first part - rumbling organ, lonely and reflective - sounds like a distant but formative memory; while the second part, in which Costelo sings more vigorously, accompanied by church-reverb piano and an affectingly unsteady male voice, seems vital and immediate. Only because of the Gabriel-like evocativeness of Costelo's arrangements and delivery can we hear that she begins her album at its end and ends it at its beginning. [Info]

The Barons - "Some Kind of Fool"

The Barons blushed when the Baronesses from whose wombs they sprung first heard "Some Kind of Fool." Not because of the messiness of the beginning (a cacophony of skittering guitars, clanging cymbals, booming tom drums) - no, the Baronesses had long been accustomed to the Barons' untidiness, particularly as manifest in the carelessly strewn laundry that covered their bedrooms, neatened nightly by the titled matrons since the baby barons' births - but because of the dirtiness of the slow and syncopated guitar line that appears at the half-minute mark and, despite the urging of the prudish, simply won't quit. That and the obvious irony of the falsetto vocals that follow, which denote not emasculation, but its opposite. If I could ask the Barons one question, it would be this: When once, on a stage and under a spotlight, I said the words "Frau Reich had assuredly milked my balls clean," while my mother sat in audience, what, exactly, did I do?

Kate Bush - "Cloudbusting"

[Buy The Barons, Kate Bush]