Archives : all posts by Sean

The Daredevil Christopher Wright - "The Animal of Choice". The return of the band behind one of the best gigs - and my 48th-most-favourite song - of 2009. As I said when I stumbled across their debut: Here's something great. With lightness, vigour & appetite, these Wisconsin folkies set themselves apart from all the lonelies and weepies. The Daredevil can sing in three-part harmony but their music isn't posed, over-deliberated. Nor has it been imposed upon some poor back-porch. Like "Clouds", the best track on In Deference To A Broken Back, "The Animal of Choice" is a journey, a romp. It roams from samba to bruised pop, each section like a sideways step. Three minutes after it opens with lyrics about wolves, bears, "sympathetic tragedies", Jon Sunde (?) is singing happily, catchily, about hideous bros. Do you think those dudes were just born plain horrible? / Nah, I don't think so / but then I been wrong before. As a song it's absolutely fucking delicious, a newsletter I would like to subscribe to, a plant I would water every day.

Their new EP, The Longsuffering Song, is available now at Bandcamp. I cannot wait for the new LP. See them on a Canadian tour this fall with the (unfortunately simpering) Dan Mangan. Dates include Toronto! Sackville! Montreal! Vancouver! Do go see them - I will vouch, vouch, fistpump for the quality of their live show.

Chayse - "Walls (ft Jadakiss)". Like building a good raft and setting it in the river and jumping up and down, up and down, happily, proving with every jump that it is a good raft. The song goes like this: If these four walls could talk / they would be like / "Hello! Hello! Hello! " And this: You make my body say, "Hello! Hello!" For Chayse, Hello means love, orgasm, fulfillment. Which casts my everyday greeting in a very different light. [website]

---

Elsewhere:

I wrote about Adam & the Amethysts for an Hour cover story.

And this weekend is the fourth annual M60 - the Montreal 60 Second Film Festival. I help run this thing, which results in dozens of of one-minute movies from amateurs and pro filmmakers across the city. (Dan and I both contribute!) There are no submission fees, no judges, no jury, no prizes - just gangs of willing folk and, this weekend, a willing crowd. If you're in Montreal, please do join us. Screenings take place at the magnificent Rialto Theatre on Friday, Sept 16 and Saturday, Sept 17, 7:30pm. Tickets are just $8 - with free popcorn. Read more about the festival in today's Gazette.

(photo source, not photoshopped)

Howe Gelb & a Band of Gypsies - "Blood Orange". Howe Gelb begins this song as if accepting a dare. The first line is this: See the sky a-broil and the colour of a blood orange. Yes, he must rhyme with "orange". On the next line, as he sings the word "door-hinge", you cannot even hear his grin. He lets the song lie dry and motionless. The sashay is almost imperceptible, until the middle of the track. Even then, after the girls have made their appearance, the dance number does not go to them; instead it is the guitar and pedal steel, twirling in tiny circles. [buy]

XMTR Derailleur - "No Sleep Ever". A simple series of actions, like locking your front door behind you. But did you remember? Did you forget? You go back and check. Yes, you did. You walk away. You go back and check. XMTR Derailleur's electronic shuffle recalls the Eels, Emperor X and the Books. It is not complicated. It is direct. But it is deceptive. Did you remember? Did you forget? You go back and check. [Bandcamp / thanks tyler]

(image from Wacky Cards)

Hospitality - "Friends of Friends". I'm one of those guys who shoves his friends. It's how I say Hi. It's how I say, I love you, you dumb fuck. I take two strides over and pow both hands, into the sidewalk. Then my friend dusts themself off and says, "Yo, Goonie!" Because my name is Goonie. I'm a DJ, a gardener, I make the best ice-cream sandwiches in the world. I shove my friends into brick walls and pavement. I've never been to New York but when I go I won't take the subway, because the subway is for chumps who are too lazy to walk. [Merge will release Hospitality's debut in early 2012]

Lindsay Buckingham - "Seeds We Sow". I am not an engineer or a musician but if I had a studio like Lindsay Buckingham's studio, like the studio I imagine Lindsay Buckingham to have, I would never leave my house. Every single dream or wish, I would render in music. I would record a song of true love, of fulfillment, of a holiday in St Petersburg. I build up my friendships with chords, I would say my farewells with reverb. My walls would be lined with golden records, each one with a secret message in the slow fade out. [buy]

The Cyrillic Typewriter - "Names".
The Cyrillic Typewriter - "Troops of Pure Silver".

In Italy, perhaps, a zumpano is the name for a sparrow, a magpie, a quick black bird that snatches berries from branches. In Canada, Zumpano is just a musician, a Vancouver familiar, but he too is quick, snatching. The Cyrillic Typewriter's Cyrillic Typewriter is a suite of short-long songs, vignettes and portraits, like a collection of handmade stamps or a YouTube compilation of sunrises. They feel handsewn but not at all ramshackle, and so it's fitting that this is a vinyl release: warm, solid, scratches strung together on a disc. "Names" is one minute long and full of silver hooks, all jumble and harmony. There's a more complicated progress to "Troops of Pure Silver" - advancing, retreating, testing the ground. Maps you can't trust, destinations that may no longer exist. Listening to that patient cello I imagine a field with buried chests, treasure or landmines, cows idling through the clover.

[buy The Cyrillic Typewriter, on limited edition vinyl, for just $20]

(image source unknown)

The World Provider - "Gary Sinistre". A fiery arrow of guitar pop, just that little bit melancholy, recalling the Rentals, the Cars, and maybe somehow um rental cars. Bashful oh-oh-ohs, drums as flat as level looks. But what I love most of all are the bells in this song, deep in the mix. I hear those distant sounds and I can't figure out if it's a cathedral I'm imagining or just someone at the door.

[Montreal's World Provider release History of Pain on September 13. They are launching the album with gigs in Montreal, Toronto and Guelph. Download Adam & the Amethysts' remix of "Gary Sinistre" at the World Provider website.]

Stephin Merritt - "You Are Not My Mother and I Want To Go Home". Terse, persistent, fucked-up. Like that part at the end of a dream where you know you are going to win. You are going to win so long as you do not get distracted. Do not conjure strange forests, new enemies. Tell the dream you are going to win and then exit through the blinking door.

[buy / originally part of the Coraline audiobook]

(image source unknown - i think a movie?)

The Blow - "Hey Boy (Nicolas Jaar re-work)". Nico Jaar takes Khaela Maricich's indolent complaint and makes it a thing of regimented community, marshaled handclaps. It's my favourite kind of dry and hopscotch beat: you trace and retrace the same dance steps, stamping footprints into the floor. Clouds assemble and dissipate; hurricanes wave and skim away. The boy never calls. [buy Jaar's Bluewave Edits, which also includes his version of Missy's "Work It"]

Jhene Aiko - "Snapped". "Baby," Jhene begins, "I got ya / I shot ya." She is a cold-blooded killer. She is deliberate and merciless. She is a girl who runs the world, who writes her songs herself, who takes no prisoners. The exquisite "Stranger" did not prepare me for this brutality. Look:

(image by the inimitable Uno Moralez)

Cermak - "Plaza Meditation". Rupert Grog wove in and out of the parking lot's lines, driving and reversing and hiking the parking brake; turning the key in the ignition and flicking the windshield wipers. This is an exercise, he repeated to himself. Take it easy. He imagined a class in Taking It Easy, where objects are placed on a table and you pick them carefully, calmly, easily up. Take the bowl, easy. Take the wheel of brie. In advanced classes, the taking would get harder. Take the kitten. Take the steam. Rupert followed the curve of the median. He was illuminated in sodium lights. It was summertime but getting cool.

[Cermak's Common Citysongs is about the easiest pleasure, right now. Rhodes, vibraphone, easy-listening Moondog grooves. Buy/listen at Bandcamp.]

The-Dream - "Murderer". Meanwhile, the protagonist of "Murderer" is having a rough August. A song that's grim, doomed, Terius's autotune like voices in your head. If the Spanish guitar recalls bad action movies like Deperado or good action movies like Miami Vice, know that this tune is "inspired" by the upcoming Zoe Saldana vehicle Colombiana. Certainly it feels like music for only a fictional murderer; unlike the death ballads of Notorious BIG or Scarface, "Murderer" is melancholy without grief, sweeping shots of green jungle. But it's also pretty wonderful, a two-minute coda to the best-ever episode of Law & Order.

The-Dream will apparently release two albums before the end of 2011 - one free record, 1977, due 8/31, and another, The Love, IV: Diary of a Madman, a little later. "Murderer" will not appear on either one. Mr Nash is beautifully prolific.

(photo source)