Archives : all posts by Sean

Lower Dens - "Brains". Like a skeleton opening the door and welcoming you inside, and he shows you a good time, with interesting guests & tasty snacks & the fancy kind of gin, sitting right out on the counter, and you forget he is a skeleton until it is time to leave, and he reaches for an embrace, and your arms are around his ribcage, and you smell that smell like chalk, fresh snow, old earth, and you realize that he is not your friend.

[website / Nootropics is due May 1 on Ribbon Music]

Reversing Falls - "Curse This Place" (Song removed at band request - for now!) You do not undo a thing by saying, F*ck this thing! You do not destroy a land by damning it. Reversing Falls grit their teeth, charge their guitars, but they know they cannot unmake the place they are cursing. It is bigger than they are, crueller, fiercer and louder and more motherfucking killer. That is what makes it worthy of cursing. As a band cowers in a basement rehearsal space, chugging, singing, spending one guitar-pick after another, the city stands permanent and beautiful around them. Its skyline is ambivalent, and its snowplows, and its nighttime spotlights, skimming the clouds. Curse the shine on this diamond, curse the love in these clutching hands.

[website for this riffwave stuff / bandcamp / Reversing Falls are from Montreal / Southern Souls video for "Curse This Place"]

(image source)

Schoolboy Q - "There He Go". Now this is how you swagger. This is how you do braggadocio in 2012. Striding, driving, charging right up to the thing that you want; and taking it. Q is high and elite, hot and packing heat. He's a fucking asshole, stealing girls, slinging metaphor. Pistols, pistachio, "whatever occur". He's not wrong when he raps: "Magnificent / They be like, 'There he go!'".

[buy Schoolboy Q's outstanding LP, Habits & Contradictions, at iTunes]

Bernice - "Rêve Général". She found him in spite of it all. Parc Avenue was a warzone: battered shopfronts, cleaved sidewalks, broken glass. Pianos were still falling from the sky. Each one began as a distant black dot, almost imperceptible in the cloudcover. Then slowly it would get larger, and larger, all telltale shape. And the birds would get out of its way. And then suddenly the piano would be so close as to be unavoidable, hurtling, fated. Each one hit the street with a sound like the end of the world. One unthinkable chord, jarring the air. Everything splintering: wood, wire, ebony, ivory. This was happening all around her. It had been happening for days. The pianos began to fall and now they kept falling - a whimsical devastation but still utterly murderous, unkind, final. She walked along Parc Avenue, dodging each growing silhouette, watching cats lap at black lacquer, toward him; and she found him, in spite of it all, because of the seriousness in her eyes.

[Toronto's Bernice have made a marvellous thing, with THOMAS's Thom Gill, Daniel Fortin, Sister Suvi's Nico Dann, and the singer Robin Dann / buy]

Woodpigeon - "Are You There, God? It's Me, Mark". A song of seeking love, like so many others. But Mark Hamilton beseeches the universe in a tone that is unexpected, rough. "Are You There, God?" is gorgeous and furious. It's unsettled. These are the browns and navy blues of a painted shipwreck, a frozen shipwreck, a shipwreck at that moment where it is not yet wrecked; and the sun may rise, and the waves may settle, and the world may be kind, not cruel. Even the coda's sweetness is laced with something bitter; perhaps it is poison, perhaps it is nothing at all. Perhaps everything can work out OK.

[from Woodpigeon's beautiful & serious For Paolo EP / listen now / out Jan 23]

Water Liars/Phantom Limb - "Whoa Back" (Song removed at label request.) "Hi Julie. You need to update your message! Anyway, how are you? I never got to finish the story I was telling you this morning. I told you how Susan got a boat and then we found this nice little cottage timeshare on Craigslist. But what I didn't get to say is how we went down there in September, towing the boat. Two beautiful days in the countryside - rustling aspens, shouting bluejays, the whole caboodle. Very much in love. And then one afternoon we went out in the boat to the middle of the lake, and hoisted our fishing lines and Susan caught the end of a piece of rope. It wasn't a gross seaweedy rope - just a regular wet rope. When she tugged it, she could feel something on the end, down below. So we dragged it up into the boat. It was a giant ruby. I mean - we didn't know it was a ruby, it just looked like a beautiful shiny something, the size of a navel orange. The rope was tied to the ruby and then the ruby was tied to something else: the rope continued into the lake. So we pulled it out some more, and this time got a golden boot. A knee-high boot, made of gold. Like a sculpture. And more rope. So we pulled and pulled and kept getting these incredible treasures. A silver tiara, a diamond sceptre, a huge emerald and another giant ruby. Also some weirder things - a marble bust, a binder full of baseball cards, a locked jewellery-box that we still haven't opened. Soon the boat was way overburdened. Like, we were going to sink! We had enough treasure, anyway. So Susan snipped the rope and we rowed right back to shore. We waited a day or two. Then we drove everything into town. We're millionaires now and it's just the begin--" [message abruptly cuts off]

[Water Liars' excellent Phantom Limb LP recalls Phosphorescent, Songs:Ohia, Bedhead and the peppery smoke of heartbreak. Also, it is a collectors item. Formerly known as Phantom Limb, the band changed their name in December, after the CDs/LPs were printed. // Buy -- highly recommended.]

(photograph is Le Trombe del giudizio, by Michelangelo Pistoletto, 1968.)

Hospitality - "Eighth Avenue". A jumbling season, winter gone summered. Tyrone is standing at the top of a skyscraper and he can't remember if it's November or July, if the city is glinting with sunlight or with ice. He has also forgotten the condition of his heart. Standing on the escalator, descending from the viewpoint, he passes an acquaintance, his former florist. "Hey how are you," says the florist, who is ascending. Tyrone nods a greeting. But he asks himself: How am I? It shouldn't be so hard to work out. Is he brokenhearted or in love? Is he sad or happy? When did he last visit the florist, and to what end? This damn city is confusing him; it's so beautiful, jumbled beautiful, with the skidding buses and crowing horns, the dusty smells, that he can't catch the gist of his own silhouette.

[Love this song's blur of Belle & Sebastian and all sorts of other things, from Big Star to Beulah, dappled crashing / Buy]

Steve Gates - "You Were Always On My Mind (ft Catherine MacLellan)". Sometimes the things you've said before bear repeating. They are like flags, hoisted. There is no need to stand or salute; it is enough to know the pennant is there, spangled, rippling, matching the colour in your face.

[buy]

Neal Morgan - "Fathers Day". Sometimes you hear a song and you go: oh shit i need to buy this. Other times, like this time, you hear a song and go: oh shit i need to buy this and also i need to buy a drumkit. I went to Neal Morgan's website, clicked BLUE AUDIOPHILE LIMITED LP w/ mp3 because I am a sucker for limited edition things by artists that make the top of my head fly off, skimming out across the room to hit the painting over the lamp. After I had ordered Neal's record I went to ebay.ca and did a search for sweet drumkit and then clicked Buy It Now and ordered a vintage GRETSCH orange drumkit 60s, and three weeks later it arrived.

I set up the Gretsch drumkit on a rug in my living-room, beside the painting and the lamp and the top of my head. The reds and blacks in the rug worked well with the orange of the drums. I keep drumsticks in a beautiful chest and so I took the sticks out of the chest, smoothing the velvet with the back of my hand. I raised the drumstool until it was perfect and then I sat down. I raised the drumsticks. I hit the drums. I racketed and blitzed. I was remembering the way Neal Morgan coos and hoos and bloos, like a red and black bird. I was remembering the way he hits his cowbell, like he is rattling a golden egg. As I played the drums, I stood up and sat down. I rocked back and forth. I farted and died. I came back to life with a clear blue look in my eyes, the look of a lover or a killer, someone who is going to stroll into someone else's memories and point at the person who will cause them harm and say, into the camera of the rememberer's mind's eye, This person will do you harm, and then pull out a knife. That's the look I had, which is a complicated look, and not one you forget.

[you may have seen Neal Morgan on tour with Bill Callahan or as part of Joanna Newsom's band / holy shit, right? / buy]

(photograph by Horst P Horst