Archives : all posts by Jordan

Amédé Ardoin - "Tostape de Jennings"

Accordion is not the most popular musical instrument, nor waltz the best-loved musical form. People do like rhythmic rigour, but tend not to like temporal sloppiness. It's safe to say, therefore, that the introduction to this song, which sounds like a broken eighteenth-century Viennese musical box, will probably not please the majority of you, and may in fact deeply displease tout le monde. Stay with it, though, and you'll hear a voice that transcends time (historical and musical) and proves the Hapsburgs had no hand in it. In an obscure Creole, M. Ardoin wails blue notes that never quite coalesce into a coherent melody. What results is an implied blues more vivid than Muddy. I've read that this is music for parties, a theory I reject. Any party that ends with attendees stumbling away, emotional wrecks after a thorough gut-wrenching, is most assuredly a perverse failure.

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Witchies - "Royal Blood"

Among the potential pitfalls of privilege as enumerated by the Witchies are idleness, illness, death by murder. "Woe betide," the Witchies warn heirs and royal scions, though the same antiquated imperative might be directed at the band itself. Woe betide, Witchies, for your music is a disquieting combination of macabre and merry, of Goya and ABBA, and if you don't cut it out soon, I may not emerge psychologically unscathed from this uninterrupted weeks-long listening. Less desolation than chief Witchie Chad Jones' previous band, the fine Frankie Sparo, but even more twisted romance and a touch of pop, too, amid the ornate lyrics and snaking guitar.

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I conducted a survey -- margin of error: 100 percent minus three over roughly seven billion -- and everyone agrees: The first song on the second side of Bruce Springsteen's first album, Greetings from Asbury Park, N.J., is one of only two missteps on an otherwise revelatory debut. A saccharine, meandering ballad, "The Angel" might have caused a few first-time Bruce listeners to question whether the profundity of the album's first side was merely a fluke -- a few good songs honed over a lifetime of otherwise mediocre music-making.

This kind of thinking, even if transient, is apostasy and leads over the short term to humiliation. The faithful, on the other hand, are rewarded; just seconds after the end of "The Angel", "For You" begins and the Boss's essential bossness is established once and for all.

1. Piano-led baroque pop is one thing. Virtuoso cymbal work and twangy acoustic guitar are two others. Interestingly, they can be combined for a powerful effect (cf. "For You").
2. Bruce sings that the titular "you" "did not need my urgency." Regardless, it's precisely that urgency that makes "For You" worth having. Each repetition of the chorus seems more rushed, each follows the last ever more quickly.
3. The literally breathtaking vocal crescendo arguably beginning at 3:35.

Job was rewarded modestly for his faith in the face of God's abandonment, but The Boss, more generous than even the almighty, pays for listeners' patience with riches beyond their imagining. Immediately following "For You": another work of genius.

Is "Spirit in the Night" my favourite Bruce Springsteen song?

1. Dry drums during the chest-wrenching soul of the "Spirit in the night"/"All night" back-and-forth.
2. "Me and Crazy Janey singing our birthday song ... felt so right ... together we moved like spirits in the night"
3. Listen to the saxophone here, a slyly syncopated interlocutor for Bruce's Van-like vocal, and receive an answer to a question that has haunted you since birth: Why was Clarence Clemons the only E-Streeter to appear on the cover of Born to Run alongside his boss, The Boss?

Anyway, it's nearly winter. Many of us will soon be without sunshine and without warmth; there's no reason for any of us to be without Bruce Springsteen.

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The Soiree - "Perfect Crimes"
The Soiree - "Monsters"

In Ottawa, music sounds like this. A music writer from Ottawa engaged in the futile task of describing an abstract category so familiar to him, yet entirely foreign to - perhaps ungraspable by - the vast majority of others, might be tempted to toss around words or phrases like: 'leather chairs,' 'pipe smoke,' 'bay windows at night,' 'attic.' Ottawa-born writers, I think, understand that such words bear a very particular kind of relationship to the music itself. This writer's experience of leather chairs, for instance, of bay windows at night, is mostly limited to those Ottawa nights spent staring out of the latter while sitting on the former. It's true that nights like that were often accompanied by sounds like this, but true too that those who make sounds like this must have spent some nights like that. But, no, this music isn't just familiar or of a beloved type; it's more than that, but it's that too, and sweeter for it.

[MySpace]

Percy Sledge - "Out of Left Field"

Despite all appearances, "Out of Left Field" is a happy song. The unpredictable occurrence of the title is the appearance of love in Sledge's life, and so unexpected was it that the singer seems to have been unable to adjust his miserable disposition before writing a song about it. Sledge sounds broken down and desperate, wailing (about how happy he is) over his band's mournful music. Near the end of the song, he sings, "She was a lover and a friend," giving the first and only clue that the love story is now over. It would almost justify the song's tone, but then comes the final lyric: "Everything is alright." Ultimately, "Out of Left Field" is less about a particular woman than it is about the serendipitous timing of her arrival on the scene -- or, especially, the possibility of serendipitous arrivals on scenes in general. Sledge is sustained, it seems, by the notion that, no matter how miserable the situation, something might always be lurking in the shadows beyond third base.

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The Sha-Weez - "Feeling Sad"
The Sha-Weez - "No One To Love Me"

Considering only the above subset of the The Sha-Weez's modest oeuvre, one is posed with a first-class chicken and egg problem: Does feeling sad lead to being unloved or vice versa? Perhaps the two are causally unrelated, but then again, probably not. Listen to this dude, the verisimilitude of his suffering; his sadness is alienating, his loneliness won't leave him alone. The Sha-Weez's subject is misery and with miserable voices they plumb the depths of their theme, reflecting, creating and embodying heavy-heartedness in a despondent doo-wop fit for faulty times such as theirs and these.

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Guitar Slim - "The Things That I Used to Do"

Guitar plays guitar modestly for a man named Guitar. Aimless in life, he solos aimlessly; with hollow heart, his song’s centre is empty. Between Guitar’s guitar and the piano piano that underlies it – not to mention those lethargic horns – there’s a lacuna a mile wide and rather deep, too – a sonic space that swallows hope but not beauty. Guitar may now realize that his girl was never his, but his tenorless guitar solo has the tenor of hapless, heartbroken genius.

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