Archives : all posts by Jordan

Fontella Bass - "Hold On This Time"

Despite first appearances, "Hold On This Time" is a song of surpassing dignity. Yes, Bass sings of being cheated on, of being lied to and made a sucker. She admits to having been abandoned and used and then, more or less, having begged for more. The history she recounts is one of continual self-abasement in the course of maintaining a relationship in which she clearly holds the lower hand. On first listen, it may seem that Bass is being pathetically dependent and hopelessly undignified when she admonishes this unrepentant cheater to "hold on" and stay with her. But listen up:

Fontella Bass loves the miserable bastard, and she sees his presence in her life, so long as he is faithful and honest, as a positive one. She is willing to forgive past misdeeds, but by no means to tolerate new ones. She sings her words with firmness and a full voice, without hesitation, but with confidence and resolve. Stay or don't, she says, but no more fucking around. Most importantly, Fontella herself is not fucking around; indeed, she sings with a cocky surety that communicates the knowledge of a self-worth degraded by dude's philandering and contains the implicit threat of a last chance. She asks him to stay not for her sake, mostly, but for his (he's wrong to think she'll always be there to take him back). And she sings that sweet, straight melody so well that this man, whoever he is, recedes into the background, an incidental, probably unworthy inspiration for something rather special.

Shockingly, Fontella Bass is as good at singing as her parents were at naming children.

[Buy]

Foday Musa Suso - "Apollo"

Use a bird's eye to listen to the kora playing of Foday Musa Suso and you will hear something simple, repetitive, stuttering and lovely. But press your ears against your speaker, I say, and you've done the aural equivalent of putting your eyeballs against an M.C. Escher drawing. A close examination of the song's component parts and their complex interrelationships initially makes for a more stressful listen than does a passive appreciation of the whole, but eventually gives way to something more hypnotically soothing. A wide, mind-boggling array of rhythmic and melodic paths slowly makes itself heard, and yet despite the extraordinary technical virtuosity displayed in the playing of this song, the dominant impression it leaves is of a sad kind of playfulness; a man wading out into musical infinity. [Buy]

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Bikeride - "Moonracing"

Bikeride's Tony Carbone is perhaps the greatest proponent of the Early Music/Baroque practice of "word painting" at work in pop music today. Throughout his music, when Carbone sings "high", he sings high, and when he sings "quick", he does so quickly. Here, he sings "harmonize" and layers his voice on top of itself, forming a rich chord. Carbone is such a skilled word painter that when he sings of a late summer night, amid hand-claps and xylophone, Iron and Wine guitar and airy organ, the sun actually sets and the spring shrinks away. [Buy]

The Kingsbury Manx - "Pageant Square"

There's a hill near the University of Oxford, which, if you clap at it, will squeak at you in response. You clap, it squeaks: an ancient dialogue of seemingly negligible importance. What the clapper should understand, however, is that her conversational gambit sets into motion a chain of events so complex and inconsistent that its outcomes cannot possibly be predicted. Amid a field of perfect green grass, and rose bushes in full bloom, the clapper finds something deep within the Oxford earth: a silliness verging on the sinister.

After this writer first clapped at the hill, and listened attentively to its response, the idyllic town of Oxford took on a decidedly disquieting aspect. For instance, one night, after drinking pims and lemonade at an outdoor pub peppered with peacocks and oak trunks, I walked back to my sister's apartment along the banks of the Thames, as a mathematician sculled abreast, reciting Lewis Carroll's "The Hunting of the Snark" from memory. The sun was setting. Suddenly, to my great surprise, I had come under physical attack. The culprit: a white swan whose rotundity was surpassed only by its belligerence. The swan opened its beak wide and growled like a jaguar, as if to say "You will not pass, Farbs!" We traded blows for several minutes until I had thoroughly knocked that bird out.

"And when quarrels arose/as one frequently finds Quarrels will..." the mathematician continued.

Carroll himself once clapped at that Oxford hill, I'm sure. As did Monty Python and Ludwig Wittgenstein. And what delight they must have taken at the mound's unexpected reply. There's no gift quite so sweet, after all, as that of complementary sound. Whether the feedback loop of insanity that I put into effect with my clap was initially physical or psychological, I'm not sure (in the end, it's just the same), but I do know that such is the power of a simple sound, pointed in precisely the right direction, when the world is at ready with an answer in harmony.

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Shannon Wright - "Everybody's Got Their Own Part to Play"

As a metataxonomist I'm constantly asked which of the many fields of taxonomic endeavour draws the most profound geniuses to consider its problems. "Metataxonomy, of course!" I respond without exception. Many minutes later, after the laughter has died down and things turn serious, I explain that the deepest thinkers in our field tend to be those who are charged with the enumeration of all things blue. I know one man, for instance - an immortal by the name of Immanuel Kant (no relation) - who has been listing blue things since the late medieval period. How insane is that? I mean, his list includes, yes, cobalt, but also "my personal friend and contemporary, St. Thomas Aquinas." This is the guy who saw that 'blue' is an anagram for 'lube', a word with blue connotations.

Kant has written on the mundane ("the sky is blue, the sea is blue, and the earth is blue, too"), and of the mundane ("it is blue"). He's pointed out the existence of blue language and blue films and a certain four-chord progression that can be spread over twelve bars to a particularly blue effect. To this last point, Kant has dedicated much of his life's attention. From his book The Critique of Pure Reason (no relation): "The music called the blues is carried close to my heart (blue) for reasons besides the obvious. The blues are like an inoculation for the blues: they make us sick with a little sadness to prevent the otherwise inevitable deluge." A flood is blue and so is the blood of James Blood Ulmer, a royal in the world of the blues.

What makes the exhaustive listing of all blue things a seemingly intractable task is that though bleu is always blau, it can sometimes seem otherwise. I told Kant that I thought Shannon Wright seemed misplaced on his list. She appeared to me more white with anger than blue. I told him I was green with envy, humbled by Wright's ability to arrange her music with such subtle expressiveness (a distorted guitar, way in the back, mirrors her vocals; a tom drum smacks against each eardrum). In response, Kant added my name to his list.

Trust Immanuel Kant to distinguish between the real and the chimerical: "In the emotional spectrum, white and green are secondary," he explained. "Blue is always primary."

The National - "Fake Empire"

When "Fake Empire" was given to The National - by a god or a Santa or a spirit with access to Plato's form world - it was given just as it is, (seeming) flaws and all. It's entirely possible that The National was displeased by the fact that there's something vaguely "Walking in Memphis"-ish about their new song or that the horn section at the end, beautiful as it is, sounds jacked from a late Lionel Richie synth line. Unfortch for the aesthetically particular among the band, there's no room for redaction when you're dealing with a draft from a higher power. God doesn't give you a song for you to fuck it up; he gives it to you for you to release, just as it is, on your indie rock album, where it will outshine a bunch of sadly imperfect, all too human compositions. [Buy]

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Mike James Kirkland - "Baby I Need Your Loving"

Tell me that no one ever asked Mickey Mantle what he thought of Roger Maris breaking the single-season home run record in 1961 and I'll have a prolonged laugh at your expense. Why not propose that Thomas Hobbes was never asked about Robert Boyle, or that Admiral Byrd wasn't always hearing questions about Roald Amundsen? I've never heard anything so absurd in my life! If your list of life goals includes and is limited to writing a play that will be immediately received into the canon of absurdist theatre, then here's a piece of invaluable advice: take the line "Admiral Byrd wasn't always hearing questions about Roald Amundsen" and stick it in the middle of "Look Back In Anger." Voila! You can die now. Name one occasion on which Byrd wasn't hearing questions about Amundsen and I'll name one occasion on which I was lied to ( i.e. the very previous moment, when you were speaking).

When whoever it was that asked Marvin Gaye about The Four Tops' "Baby I Need Your Loving" did the most important deed of his or her life (i.e . asked Marvin Gaye about the Four Tops' "Baby I Need Your Loving"), I would be very surprised if Gaye's response wasn't a remarkably close aural approximation of Mike James Kirkland's cover of "Baby I Need Your Loving." A relaxed, slightly melancholic discussion of a song, which happens to take the form of a song itself; indeed, the exact harmonic form of its subject. With tone and intonation that owes everything to Gaye and a voice nearly as unstrained and sweet as the master's, Kirkland presents a song borrowed and clearly cared for, an enviable work of music appreciation that we can make love to. And hopefully, through different means, I have achieved the same.

[Buy]

Willow Willow - "Colusa"

It's no secret that strings and glockenspiels sound nice together, nor that vibraphones and pretty female voices make for a pleasing combination. Lord knows, I'm not saying anything of any note whatsoever. (If you're still reading, you just wasted fifteen minutes of your life!). Combining those elements is like putting olives and feta into your pasta and tomato sauce: it's more or less cheating your way to the sublime. Willow Willow is guilty of the former crime and therefore should be put to death; except that there's something slightly out of the ordinary about the backdrop against which their winsome instruments are set, which pushes the song beyond the merely nice. Namely, note the manner in which the acoustic guitar is played: roundly and sprucely and ever so carefully - an element that acts in the context of the song just as taking a painful bite out of a cold, crisp apple does in the context of a lazy, unfocused day.

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Edd Henry - "Your Replacement Is Here"

By any standard, Edd Henry is a cold-hearted bastard. "Your Replacement Is Here" is addressed to a woman Henry is dumping and describes in excruciating specificity another woman with whom he is in love. Yikes. Henry has only good things to say about his new girlfriend and he spares his jilted soon-to-be-ex no detail in enumerating her replacement's many attributes and her own plentiful shortcomings. Trust Henry to find the exactly inappropriate musical backdrop for his ill-conceived love song: a jubilant jamboree; a promise that if the to-be-replaced were to suddenly die, Henry would Mash Potato all over her grave. [Buy]

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The Staple Singers - "This May Be The Last Time"

It seems highly improbable that a family with as much soul as the Staple Singers could simply sit down and eat a meal together. It's a sad fact, but one significantly incanted "paaassss the peeeaaas" and dinner would be ruined: Dad capsizing gravy boats with his earth-shaking tremolo guitar, Mom scuffing the varnished wood table's surface with her brushes, Bro-baby and Sister Big Voice emptying their mouths of food as they fill them up with harmony. Though famished, the Staples have no choice but to heed the Talking Heads' imperative and stay hungry. [Buy]