Archives : all posts by Jordan

Angels of Light - "Untitled Love Song"

Imagine you are being serenaded by a lover. It's approaching sunset and you two were out all day - walking, holding hands, eating food from each other's plates. Not a word was uttered between you. On the wild lawn in behind your home, your lover sits you down, pulls out a ukulele; he or she whistles and is joined by a band. There's a Hawaiian with a slide guitar and is that Dabney Coleman on bass? In the background there's a drummer in a white suit and a Bermuda hat. He's laying his brushes on a snare drum, he's lightly kicking a kick drum, he's clapping two high-hat cymbals together. By parachute, an accordion falls slowly from the sky into your lap.

What a lovely song your lover is playing - a love song, and for you. You squeeze your squeezebox and sing along. Except that there's obviously something wrong. Your lover hasn't looked at you once, is clearly distracted. Not from the song, which seems to be at least as much a reflection of the distraction as it is of your lover's love for you, but from his or her affections. The source of this distraction? Perhaps pressing chores or the pressures of work or something small and practical that slipped your lover's mind? Dabney Coleman shakes his head 'no'. No, perhaps he's sinned - killed someone or thieved. Dabney Coleman won't dignify that with an answer. Maybe then it's existential and metaphysical concerns, questions of theodicy or even godlessness and of the human body and what, if anything, beyond. Dabney Coleman plays the notes b-i-n-g-o on his bass.

Angels of Light - "Black River Song"

Six years later, and now that the tenderness has receded, the otherworldly romanticism gone, the metaphysical obsessing taken on new dimensions, you think maybe you shouldn't have married your lover. Sometimes your spouse asks you to play chess and you think this might be an opportunity to reform a connection, but then, inevitably, he or she plays the indefensible English Opening and brings his or her queen out eccentrically early. The lover you once had is no longer, and only the thinker, however opaque, remains. Still your spouse serenades, though you no longer think this is for you. The imprecision of love has given way to the exactitude of heaviosity; the hardness that first appeared in the eyes is now instantiated in brutal riffs; the melodicism that once carried questions, discarded for a purer discourse on the corporeal and the transcendent.

[Buy 2001's How I Loved You, the new We Are Him]

The Great Invisibles - "Laughter and Grace"

It turns out I'm allergic to peppermint tea. I drank a cup and now I can't stop sneezing, my nose is running, I'm intolerable, I know. The tea was a failure not only in terms of the harm it caused, but also in the healing it failed to effect. I have a big goose egg on my head, you see; I got it today at the corner store.

Living in a city in your second language puts you on your toes, and sometimes when you're distracted by thought and a stranger speaks to you, panic is your only response. So it was today as I reached for a Diet Pepsi, and a man, pulling an ice tea from the refrigerator, asked in French if he was in my way. I dropped my soda, bent down to pick it up, and on my way back up to respond, whacked my head on the fridge door handle. "Ouch ... Non," and then I left without paying.

In so many ways we can be invisible. We can slip on Gyges' ring, or don an invisibility cloak. We can disappear in a shadow, or in a flood of light. We can be marginalized in the minority or drowned in the majority - hardly seen, or seen but rarely perceived. According to this song, The Great Invisibles become invisible in water - which is cool - but they are also almost invisible in song. Here is a melody slow and straight, like a Michael Gira or Flying Saucer Attack song - so slow and straight that you hardly hear it at first. Here is a song that doesn't pander, that isn't easy, that recedes and takes you with it.

[Buy]

Nathan Lawr and the Minotaurs - "Righteous Heart"

With bodies of man and heads of bull, Nathan Lawr's band plays his finely crafted folk-rock from the centre of a labyrinth. The outside walls of this maze are the rich musical heritage of Aaron Riches; the middle walls, Lawr's ubiquitous sailorly metaphors - his ships and compasses, his seas and sharks; and at the labyrinth's centre are the Minotaurs, Lawr and his most righteous heart. Because the nautical, like all things, fades, dissolved to its centre by its cause. [info]

Having contributed $150 each to the StG dinner at the Cheese Mountain restaurant, Dearest Readers, I can't help but feel that you deserve a more detailed, accurate account of the night of August 18, 2007, than that perfunctory sketch provided by Sean yesterday.

With Sean's tale my beefs are many. Yes, I wore a hat. But nowhere is it mentioned in yesterday's post the exquisiteness of that hat; nowhere the softness of the felt, nowhere the pathology of the hatter (madness). Furthermore, Michaels is milquetoast, sure, and Beirne is PG 13, but the utter baseness of my banter is by no means given its due. At one point while guessing what Sean had been up to since I'd last seen him, I overzealously pronounced the name of a sexual act, bringing on a sudden silence at the table next to ours. My hot cheeks flushed, and I considered while pouring myself another glass of wine whether I'd had enough. Of the red wine, Sean wrote several truths: the bottle hailed from Italy, and my father is Canada's ambassador to that country. However, contrary to Sean's report, that coincidence did not go unmentioned. No, after I excused myself under the false pretense of needing to go to the bathroom, I slipped into the kitchen and angrily explained to our waiter that the next time I set foot in Cheese Mountain, I expect to be walking into a literal mountain of cheese, or, at the very least, a hill of meat and cheese, and did he know that we wouldn't be paying for the wine for reasons related to diplomatic immunity. He responded that the restaurant's name, La Montée de Lait, translates more accurately to 'The Ascension of Milk.' A scoff and then my wordless reply: the presentation of a PhD thesis co-authored by Sean, Dan and me, entitled "On the Subtleties of Literary Translation Lost On the Common."

Dan looked awful. Haggard and pensive and twitchy. He wore a ridiculous tie. I would have worried had I not been utterly engrossed in my first course, tacitly inspired by Anaximander's genesis story, a duck liver stuffed to the gills with rabbit. Course two: sweet cheese gnocchi in a bacon broth, which, as Sean later explained, I should not have slurped from the bowl. Sean and I shared a diverse plate of cheeses - some soft, others hard, some new, others old, some mild, others sharp. None, of course, were as sharp as the two ivory handled knives that briefly graced our table, and with which, sweating, we intensely imagined skinning zebras on the steppe. For dessert I outordered my companions, choosing the poached peach with a palette-cleansing sorbet.

After our final course, we undid our belts, put our bellies on the table, talked and laughed and shouted and embarrassed each other. All thanks to you!

Sean's right that the three of us have never dated one another, that we've never made out, but in his insistence that our relationship is entirely unromantic, methinks the author doth protest too much ...

Before we left to catch a late showing of Supermalades, I asked the band to play our song.

The Elgins - "It's Been A Long Time"

Each of us with arms around the others, boy did we dance! The other diners held their breath, then applauded, panting, while, hand in hand, we three of StG skipped out the door. And so it was that we traveled to the theatre, all the way across Montreal.

Feist - "1 2 3 4"

[Buy The Elgins, Feist]

Aztec Two-Step - "Almost Apocalypse"

Garbage is one thing you might find in a real-life alley. Also rodents, friends on bicycles, glass(es of wine), children. Among the differences between the content of dystopian folk-rock songs and that of life is the relative regularity in the former with which heroes encounter sages in alleys. The hero of my own life, for instance, has found sages in classrooms, cubicles, bedrooms and a flower pot on my windowsill, but never in an alley.

I once told a story on this blog about a night in Montreal spent walking alone. I was horrified by the baseness of my surroundings, of the untempered rage and naked horniness of my peers. As frightened as I was depressed, I strolled through downtown streets until I came across a man, about my age, sitting silently on a street corner contemplating ... what? The order of being and essence? The relationship between the moral and the aesthetic? He opened his mouth; I didn't breathe. But what came out of his gaping maw was not the Truth, as I had anticipated, but his dinner, and then his lunch, and then his breakfast. He puked copiously and for a long time. We were just outside an alley, though he was more prophet of doom than straight-up sage.

"Almost Apocalypse" tells much the same story of alienated wandering and yet, despite itself, is ultimately uplifting. Unfortunately for the doomsaying Aztec Two-Step, their music belies their message; after all, how bad can the world really be when it contains such sweet vocal harmonies, rollicking telecaster licks, and especially those bass roots, rising up the scale and falling back down again.

[Buy]

Usman Achmad - "Stambul Naturil"

A long-unfolding, classical-sounding lead and a short, looping series of treble chords make up this acoustic guitar duet, which is unlike any I have heard before. It took only five seconds for this song to literally charm the pants off me: when the chordal part clumsily appeared, presenting a baffling counterpoint to the already established lead line, I laughed, but then, deadly serious, removed my pants. I was humiliated, but also excited, because, in truth, I search day and night for something so sublime as this - a song in 4/4, which seems also to contain all other time signatures within it. And that's just the guitars.

Do as I say = as I do = Put this song on repeat, lie back pantless and wait for a voice like a wicker chair and a linen suit and a gin and tonic and bask in the light of this singer of profound soulfulness and in his lyrics (Indonesian), which, though I don't understand a word of them, must deal with the dual themes of nature and mortality in much the same way as the early-medieval Japanese poet Kakinomoto Hitomaro - "Away I have come, parting from her/Even as the creeping vines do part" - or perhaps of the ideal and the abstract, of whether the number three is Julius Caesar, of infinite sets of varying sizes, and in precisely the same natural style, because the number three and infinite sets are just two more things in this man's world.

[Buy]

Michael Hurley - "Be Kind to Me"

A sloppy, lumbering country boogie, "Be Kind to Me" is a humble, but ultimately unreasonable plea for kindness. The specific form of kindness that Mr. Hurley is after is the reciprocation of his love for a particular woman - "the best ol' girl you've ever seen" - who for years has rebuffed him at every turn. "I hardly feel like a mustard seed," Hurley whines, "because your love is all I need." What kind of pain must this man be in to describe his status as sub-mustard seed? Unfortch for The Hurler, he doesn't quite understand the situation: "I told you once and I told you twice, why be mean when you can be nice?" he admonishes. Of course, what he needs is luck, not generosity; a requitement of love is not the kind of thing that can be given as a kindness.

"Be Kind to Me" is replete with the good things in life: Tiny Tim-like falsetto vocal leaps, Dave Coulier-style mouth-trumpet solo and a certain Leonard Cohen-improvising-at-night-with-friends-around-a- piano bohemian informality. [Buy at eMusic]

***

Sam Prekop - "Chicago People

"Chicago People" has been sitting in my metaphorical "to post" folder for several months, but always manages to get itself bumped by more melodically ambitious material. Sam Prekop writes songs that highlight the latent power in the everyday sounds of pop music: the rich trembling tone of a tremolo guitar, the round sound of a hefty and distinct bass note, the long-decaying hiss of a ride cymbal with chain, mallets and low-tuned toms, sticks and a high-tuned snare. Without hooks or riffs, just an elegant setting for tones and timbres too often taken for granted. [Buy]