Archives : all posts by Sean

Cynthia Dall - "Christmas (California)". This song has spent almost two years in my "to-post" folder, waiting for the right moment. It is a Christmas song, so I thought I would post it around Christmas; it is an unhappy song, so I thought I would post it when I was feeling unhappy, full of grey-black smoke. Today is a spring day that feels like summer, hot as hell, thunderstorms brewing. I am happy. I had coffee with my friend. But I have learned that Cynthia Dall died on April 5th. She was 41. This death feels incorrect, a story that ended at the wrong time. Cynthia should have lived to a ripe old age. She should have released another record, and have been rediscovered, and have staged a comeback, years later, covering "Someone Like You" in slow-motion electric guitar. But instead this - a terrible incongruity, a wrong thing, tragedy.

So let's listen to this wrong song on this wrong day, in a tribute to the wrong thing. Let's not hear the bruise in the singing but rather the gift of the work: this beautiful awful crystallization of a certain feeling. Dall makes a song in simple sounds - distorted guitar, schoolgirl voice, chiming piano, like an inverted "Good King Wenceslas". There are drums - tom, bass, tambourine. They are simple sounds but woven intricately: sounds pan from channel to channel, things disappear unnoticed. This is music mirroring meaning - when we have that blurry feeling, roiling, angry & sarcastic & hurt & wounded, sharp like the head of an axe, what seems simple is complex, a smear of many colours. It doesn't matter how this song was written - it matters how it was played.

Cynthia Dall could play.

[buy Untitled]

(photograph_ of Anna Schuleit's installation, Bloom)

TW Walsh - "Struggle and Strife".

"Struggle and Strife" is exactly itself, each of its stanzas telling themselves. Rare these days that you hear a song that does this and is also excellent, beautiful. Here is a recording that feels like part of a life. A drawing that looks like a photograph. Bruce Springsteen had a dream of a song and he woke up and he wished he could remember them, those perfect verses; wished he could go into his studio room and press a button on a panel and put those flawless, melancholy lines onto hissing magnetic tape.

[thank you TW Walsh for sending me your outstanding record / buy]

Miguel - "Gravity".

It does not have the rosy intimacy of "Adorn", but it has hook hook hook, singalong and rumpapumpum, these pulleys of sighing and crave, up down down. This song will not make a paradise but it will secure one, chains gold garlanding the gates.

[website]

(photo source unknown)

Plants and Animals - "The End of That". Rupert could remember when he wrote "The End of That", sitting in the basement at about 11 o'clock pm, on the night Joe and Thom called to say they were going to The Swallow, going there again, the fourth night straight, the night after Rupert bumped into Claire on the street and she was with a girlfriend and he hadn't seen her in forever, and it was her that recognized him first; she said, "Rod!" and he stopped zipping up his jacket and he blinked and then he saw who it was, with a shorter haircut now, Claire, standing with a friend of hers in pink he didn't know. "Claire sweetheart," he said, kissing her on the cheek, and just that kiss felt huge and awful, stinging, everything tightening in his chest. She said, "Lucy this is Rod-- uh, Rupert. RP." Lucy sort of folded at the shoulders. "I know who he is," she said. Claire's eyes were blue and beautiful and seemed like something Rupert had lost and then finally found. "How you gals today?" he said. He finished zipping up his jacket, tucked back a slip of hair. "On our way to the market," Claire said. "How are you?" Rupert laughed, like it was a joke. "I'm great. You know." Claire nodded. "Things seem to be going so great for you guys." Rupert shrugged and found himself flicking Lucy's pink elbow, saying, "So do you live here?" and immediately in a panicked terrible way he wanted to cry, to burst into tears, because he didn't know why he was flirting with Claire's random friend, not here, not now, when all he wanted to do was to show his heart to Claire somehow, to show her everything as it was, like Spock in that new Star Trek movie, a mind merge or whatever, and get over everything, get over the night at the canyon and the thing with Jess and the morning things were weird, at the cabin. Just to get over it all. But instead Claire looked at Lucy and then said, "Well we gotta go. Good seeing you." And again she leaned in to kiss his cheek and again Rupert, Rod, RP wanted to cry and he didn't even notice Lucy go away because he was staring at the back of Claire's head, the back of her neck, the nape.

Rupert could remember how Joe and Thom called him that night, to go to The Swallow, but Rupert was already in the basement with the organ and his guitar, and he told them "Nah..." and he stayed home, and he wrote "The End of That". He wrote it in one perfect long sitting, all the melody, all the lyrics, imagined the backing singers and the bassline, everything, feeling for one fucking pure second that he was getting it out, getting the real thing out, onto the page, saying everything true about Claire and him and the end of it.

Then they recorded it, him and Joe and Thom, and it was perfect.

Rupert remembered all this as he sat on his hands backstage at the TV studio, watching the playback of their performance of "The End of That", watching himself in his stupid suit and stupid hair and stupid makeup, lip-syncing like this was just another song, tilting and grinning like a pop star, cosying up to the backup singers - no, whispering fucking dirty come ons to the backup singers, - smirk and preen, high as a kite, while Joe and Thom did their jobs. He should have expected this by now. He should have expected this of himself. Even this song, even this song, even this this this this song, Rupert Poole, troubadour, ladies man, tearing down his memories and building nothing but ruins.

[Plants and Animals' The End of That is out now / buy / Warren, Woody and Nic are on tour]

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Elsewhere: This is the other important music video in Montreal right now.

Kendrick Lamar - "The Recipe (ft Dr Dre)". A paean to the west coast and its "three Ws", women, weed and weather. I have never had the chance to visit California, to sun in California, to gawk at the bronzed California women or to evaluate the notorious Californian foliage. But it all certainly sounds good, right here. It certainly sounds very, very good. Producer Scoop DeVille borrows Twin Sister's "Meet the Frownies", but Andrea Estella's Brooklyn coo feels perfectly at home, perfectly blonde; I think of Don Draper waking, bewildered, in a sun-licked mansion. I love Lamar when he is stricken & questing but also here, leaning (back and foward), contented as a field of psychoactive sunflowers. [from Lamar's forthcoming Aftermath / via Nah Right]

Walrus - "Growing Pains". Halifax's Walrus sing in low, flattened notes, with sighing organ. The bass is getting by. The glockenspiel is unconvincing. The harbour is emptying out, one boat at a time, because it's for the best, it's for the best, it's for the best but still there's something sad in the barren pier, the uninterrupted sky, the lick of waves against logs, without anybody around. [bandcamp]

(photo source)

Damian Weber - "Soul Night". Although I do not share Mr Weber's particular preferred music-to-dance-to, we seem to have a similar perspective on what our dancing is for. Which is to say that Mr Weber talks little of got it/flaunt it, show me baby/yeah - instead "Soul Night" has an attitude of well let's get out there. Emphasis on the let's. Emphasis on the contraction 's, which stands for us, which is plural and communal and means you & you & you.

Mr Weber does have some specific instructions for the dancers. Here is a selection:

I like that Mr Weber resists the temptation to make these instructions all-caps (eg: NOW HOP). You can tell they are in small-caps from the tone of his voice. Writing a song like this, about the dance floor, most people would make everything as loud as insistent as possible, shouting with fun. Not Mr Weber. Shouting is no way to convince a stranger to dance.

Mr Weber is shrugging with fun. He is loping with fun. He is polishing your shoes with fun, hand-cranking the disco ball. He is making dancing music with guitar, bassline, plinky piano, a ratty snare. In fact, this is hardly dance music. This song is a keepsake, a reminder, a polaroid photo - it's the reminder of what you will do, what you ought to do, the feeling that will come splintering out from your heart when you do, when you do do do do, do do-do dance (do).

[download what is truly Damian's best record yet, Soul Night]

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For My Own Benefit

As Dan said, Said the Gramophone's own Jordan Himelfarb will be performing in Toronto tomorrow night. He is one half of a duo called the New Humourists. They make beautiful nonsense.

Tuesday will be their Ontario debut - a fundraiser called FOR MY OWN BENEFIT, raising money for pancreatic cancer research at the Princess Margaret Hospital. This cause is very close, too close, to our hearts right now.

If you live in Toronto, I hope you will be able to come join us at The Shop Under Parts & Labour at 8pm. I am driving down from Montreal just for this. Besides the New Humourists, there will be performances by Picnicface's Mark Little, Uncalled For's Anders Yates, Tony Ho and the acclaimed improv act Personals. More details on Facebook or at the For My Own Benefit website

If you cannot attend in person, but would still like to make a donation, please visit the website formyownbenefit.com and you can donate online. Charitable tax receipts (it's a Canadian hospital) can be provided.

(photo source)

Wiz Khalifa - "The Grinder". I'm just going to do the things I ordinarily do, the things I automatically do, the habits I do not even think about, and yet because of these things I will be extraordinary. I will be utterly rad. This is the way of my humdrum: incredible. This is how I do: stupefying. I don't do shit and everyone's all jawdrop eye-rolling. Maybe it's the springtime, maybe it's my name, maybe it's my swagger or my girl. But there's nothing that wins more medals than just me wandering through my day, bewildered as any other. [grab Khalifa's Taylor Allderice mixtape]

(photo source)

Project Mayhem - "Dope Party".
Plan B - "Ill Manors".

Two very different right-now sounds. The first is all glittering laid-back party vibe, shrug and innuendo. Chicago's Project Mayhem are miles away from the fight club cinderblocks that gave them their name: they are singing about a purple-hazed get-together where everyone has an easy good time. Forget doom and challenges, forget the Great Recession and the sinking feeling in our chests. Light up, inhale. Enunciate each ss like you're flicking the flint on a flame. It's all good.

And then Plan B leaves us none of these indulgences. His new single is fisted and gnashing, the fury of a kid who has seen his country take too many wrong turns. The Guardian calls it "the greatest British protest song in years". They're absolutely right. Labour MP Jamie Reed compared "Ill Manors" to Marvin Gaye's "What's Going On", the Graun's Dorian Lynskey name-drops Public Enemy and the Clash. Me I hear Rage Against the Machine. As with de la Rocha & co, the politics here are a little muddled, a little clumsy - Ben Drew is hardly offering an electoral platform. But what "Ill Manors" lacks in policy talkingpoints it makes up in a precise, racing wrath, bottleshard-sharp. I think of the nettling slur that follows the Occupy protesters: What are your demands? Plan B has no demands, here. He has a list of complaints. He has a list of snarled complaints and he wants you to know that he is angry. OY, RICH BOY: there are more of us than there are of you. As 2012 ticks into spring, four months after the first eviction of Zuccotti Park, we need songs like this, need them to remind and provoke us. It's fine to go out to dope parties, grab some bbq or maybe a Blizzard at DQ. But shit's not fixed. Let's keep demanding more.

[Project Mayhem website / Ill Manors EP out next week / peep the video]

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(image source)