Archives : all posts by Sean

Mozart's Sister - "Chained Together". There is a game to obsession, to aftermath. Play it like you would play dead, play hopscotch, play a wheezy old keyboard. Put on a mask, take it off, cock your head and smile. Caila Thompson-Hannant coos a letter to her ex, like a deadened Cyndi Lauper, with bruised knuckles and pixel click. She teases and worries, wilts and refreshes, not certain if she is furling or un-.

[Montreal's Mozart's Sister plays SXSW tomorrow night / previously / Bandcamp]

Arrington de Dionyso's Malaikat Dan Singa - "Perawan Berawan". The gateway between worlds is gold and red and the colour of your eyes. It leads from the world you are in to the world beside the world you are in. Those who pass through lose their hair, their rings, forget their name. They stumble, hearts pounding, onto flattened grass. The gateway between worlds has a distance. It has a landscape and a soundtrack. There is a rock'n'roll band in the gateway between worlds, with gamelan and electric guitars. With fangs and a barrel full of rings. They sing choruses about pouting lips, mankilling tigers, shredded hearts, moon landings. It is not clear whether they themselves are travellers from another world. It is not clear whether they know their names.

["Perawan Berawan" is taken from Sunshine Off the Tracks, an exceptional benefit compilation raising money for GEMS, a NYC org that helps young women "who have experienced commercial sexual exploitation and domestic trafficking". There are terrific new songs by a whole slew of Said the Gramophone favourites, including Nat Baldwin, Way Yes, Adrian Crowley, Travels and Gym, Deer, plus new-to-me standouts like the tracks by Aan, Doleful Lions, White Birds, In One Wind, The Building. (IE, a lot.) So support a great cause and hear some gorgeous tunes: buy]

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Montreal's Under the Snow festival began last night, but my highlights start tonight. Elfin Saddle launch their new album at Sala, with Monday Night Choir, and tomorrow Julie Doiron will perform the entirety of 1997's Loneliest in the Morning.

(painting by Clayton Merrell)

Black Atlass - "Ways". He tried folding up his desire. It was like a quilt - too broad, too thick, too corporeal. He pushed at the corners, strained, tried to fit it into its chest. Every time he got one side of his desire down, inside, the other side would slip up over the lip. In time he found the going was better with the lights on, or under a strobe, with all his picture-frames turned away, toward the wall. [website/download EP]

Rose Cousins - "For the Best". To perefect his longing, he took a jet to Switzerland. He took a jet to Switzerland then a train to the countryside, then a cable-car up the sheer garden slope of a low Alp. He dragged his suitcase along the delicate cobble stones, like thin porcelain plates. He stood at the edge of the valley, finally arrived, looking down onto the pale sapphire lake and all that wide open air. He cupped his hands around his mouth and tried. To yodel, to sing, to make his longing clear. It wasn't bad. It wasn't bad, for the first time it wasn't bad. Maybe he'd yet become skillful, like Dolly Parton or Jimmie Rodgers, and be able to sing out, full of sure heartbreak, and watch his audience shed single tears. [buy]

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I hope you didn't miss DAD DRIVES, the first episode in a proposed webseries by our own Dan Beirne. Please watch it, happily squirming, and tell your friends, and spread the word, because it would be a very helpful thing for him (and thus for me, because I love the guy). Also: it's hilarious.

(source of Girl with a Digital Camera painting unknown, sorry!)

The Just Barelys - "Ok Yeah Ok". Shortiola's teachers don't understand her. Her knowledge seems to jam up: weeks of hard work and A-grades, then suddenly it's flunk flunk flunk, these dumbbrained numbbrained answers, cataclysmic quizzes. And then abruptly she's free, she's back, neurons firing as they should, lessons learned. It's as if something gets blocked, Mr Hendricks tells her parents. Like there's a sudden freeze, suggests Ms Khan, and it takes a while for the river to get moving again. The teachers don't ask Shortiola's parents the question they most want to know the answer to, the question of Shortiola's name. She is tall and blonde, statuesque on her skateboard, skipping the curb. At lunch she sits on the steps, knees up to her nose, tossing jokes and laugh-snorting. Looking out into blue sky, dreaming of moving to a smaller town, a village where she's the only cheerleader at a tiny school, hangs out with the QB, falls in love while they stream Fellini on Youtube. Later she'll learn to play drums, a little guitar. [buy or download the Just Barelys very charming, pop-&-herkyjerk]

Vijay Iyer Trio - "The Star of a Story". The heart of this song, the part where I raise my eyebrows and make my mouth a line, comes in the second half. It is as if this light little party has become serious: the dinner-party filigree is still filigree, still spry and conversational, but the stakes are there. The stakes have come into the room. We must all try to do the things we love, to make the world a better place, to be kind to others. And we will all die. We will all die. The man in the bowtie does not get up from the piano. Raise your glass whenever you're ready. ["The Star of a Story" is originally by Heatwave / listen to all of Accelerando / buy]

(photo source)

Damien Jurado - "Life Away From the Garden". I did not collect sports cards except in my early teens, when I lugged around a binder of Pro Set hockey cards. I didn't collect them because I was interested in hockey: I collected them because they were little treasures, cheap enough to collect. Glossy hologrammed treasures, that came in packets of eight.

I'm older now, but sometimes I think that buying records - those shiny CDs, beautiful black 12"s - is motivated by the same thing. Hoarded treasures, lined up on a shelf. Unlike hockey cards, records have an enormous inherent value. (They call this "music".) But there's no denying that for many of us, music fetishism answers the same impulse as the 13-year-old boy, swapping rookies.

If I did still collect hockey cards, I would want the players on my favourite cards to do well. I would want them to win games, championships, cups; to score hat tricks. I'd want my cards to be the cards of champs, but I'd also want my favourite cards to become the cards of champs, just because I liked them. The athlete with the kindly eyes, the dashing slapshot - let him be a winner. Let him hoist a trophy.

Damien Jurado has made so many wonderful songs. As I said earlier this month, writing about another track from Maraqopa, he is probably the artist by which I own the most records. Everything from Rehearsals for Departure and Waters Ave S to the exceptional Ghost of David (one of the great sad records of all time). Then many of those first records for Secretly Canadian, the terrific ones (Where Shall You Take Me?) and the OK (On My Way to Absence). There were folky records and rocky records and, often, in between.

But what I'm getting at here is that I love Damien Jurado. He seems big-spirited, hard-working, talented as shit. He has a beautiful voice. He sings so well. And I want him to win, to win, to win, to be a great grinning champ.

So - Maraqopa. This is a record that makes me so happy. Not just because it is excellent. Because Jurado has found a new way to be excellent. This is not a boring treasure - it is a cool treasure. It is beautifully written and beautifully sung but it also feels of the instant, of the right-now, a folk album that should only have been released in 2012, when we are nostalgic and also not, also a little antsy for the world to shed its bullshit and become something else.

Like on 2010's so-so Saint Bartlett, Jurado has worked with producer (and fellow songwriter) Richard Swift. They've built a sound that's at once warm and ghostly, full of echo, synth, psych, reverb. It's a perfect compliment for the songs, with all sorts of interesting valences - Satie, Spector, Moby Grape, Young Marble Giants.

But anyway, I asked for permission to post "Life Away From the Garden" because it is so seductive, so weird and seductive, with its melancholy children's choir. Like a regretful psalm sung with the Langley Schools Music Project; like a man with his own dreamlike call-and-answer. It is not a story-song or a convince-me song. It is the song of a feeling, a furtive feeling, written down and illuminated. Swing and gleam and kids with brown eyes, they know it too, already.

[buy Maraqopa / European spring tour / website]

(photo is of Elton John at Dodger Stadium, 1975, by Terry O'Neill)

Milton Nascimento - "Cravo e Canela". With his spice shop, Luis thought that he would get all the girls. Pots of nutmeg, jars of cinnamon peel: all this latent eroticism, he thought, all this sublimated sex. Instead, the spice shop was mostly hard work. It was mostly figuring out the cash-register. This was not some garden of earthly delights; it was a business of shavings, powders, pods, seeds, euros per gram. At first Luis was disappointed, returning home at the end of the day, but then his wife turned him around. [buy]

Baby Eagle & the Proud Mothers - "Strange Bodies". Drunk at a dinner party; you don't realize it until he knocks over a glass. He is not jolly, not fun: his mouth is a stern line, as if he has just been disciplined. Suddenly the champagne flute is a weapon. You are not worried for him but you are worried about those he loves. Maybe he will grow a third arm, in the middle of the night. Maybe he will break his desk. Maybe he will chop down the whole forest. Everyone at the dinner party is hoping that things will change when spring arrives, like ice dislodging a frozen hull. Oh no! [buy]

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Said the Gramophone was interviewed by the Guardian on Friday.

(photo source)

Eric Chenaux - "Dull Lights (White or Grey)". Eric Chenaux has made the best album of his career. After five LPs and a decade of working with acts like Sandro Perri, Ryan Driver, Drumheller and Michelle McAdorey, he has made Guitar & Voice, which is just that, just those perfect things, guitar and voice - coaxed & shattered & sublimated & splintered & mirrored & burned to ash.

Much of Guitar & Voice is unlike "Dull Lights". "Sliabh Aughty" is an eight-minute psychdelic jam, distortion singing in the wind: like Hendrix's spectral American flag but freer, jaggeder, caught in ozone and gulf stream, bedroom wah-wah. And four more songs - almost half the record - consists of bowed guitar instrumentals. These are stern, gorgeous things. The guitar(s) sound more like a viola de gamba, a Hardanger fiddle, than any beat-up old strummer. Rough and droning, baroque, these tracks feel wide and tall in ways that no pop music can; they transform Guitar & Voice from a collection of tunes into a kind of concerto, a whole roaming work.

Unfortunately I cannot just give you all of Guitar & Voice. You must order it from Constellation.

But they let me give you "Dull Lights", so let me talk about "Dull Lights", this music that evokes Perri, Chet Baker, recent PJ Harvey, Little Wings, Richard Youngs, Arthur Russell, Willie Nelson, Derek Bailey, Hoagy Carmichael and on & on. It is a song of heartache, bruise, trampled love. Ambivalence that isn't. I wouldn't mind / if everything I know / would spring and fall, Chenaux sings, low-high.

If you leave, things may happen differently
like the sound of friends and beer
If it's blue it's not me and it's not you
dull the lights ...
Let the season decide

This is unquestionably one of the best albums of 2012. (Buy.)

(photo source)

Avec pas d'casque - "Talent". As kids, our wishes are simple. For cake, for kittens, for magic wands. The wishes take on different colours as we grow older. For peace, for requited love, for two parents' reconciliation. As adults, some of us stop wishing. Not because we have stopped believing; there is still that slim chance that fate will hear our murmur, throw back an echo. No, we stop wishing because the wishes become so complicated. Our wishes become so complicated. Tu as ce talent, sings Avec pas d'casque's Stéphane Lafleur, You have this talent

for painting wolves without really knowing them
and you love people
in the same way.

You, you have this talent.
You have this talent.
Lend me a little.

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+ A sad farewell to the blog I (Heart) Music, which spent six and a half years being so generous, passionate and thoughtful about Canadian music. May the wind fill your sails, Matthew.

+ A reminder that I'll be speaking at Saturday's Polaris Record Salon in Montreal.

(Photo is of the first Paris air show, 1909.)