Archives : all posts by Sean

There's only about one week left in our annual funding drive.

if you enjoy this persistent nonsense
(& the rad tunez)
please donate

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Please give, if you think you can afford to.

We're so, so, so grateful to everyone who has donated so far. (And we'll be in touch with you soon.)

Lunice ft Young L - "Hip Pop". Love that this sounds midway between two bozos purring nonsense into their MacBook microphone and, um, dry wet spectral Neptunes snap shit. It's that subgenre of hip-hop which is best suited to miners, moth-men, solar astronauts and midnight dancers. Only it was made in Montreal, probably some #based NDG 3 1/2, just a bike-ride to Akhavan and Momesso's subs. Whatever the water that fed this awesome thing, it's the water that runs in my own taps, right here, hot and very cold.

[more Lunice]

T H O M A S - "Jesus Was Born".

I do not believe in your god; but all right I will lie in your garden and I will eat these grapes and I will watch the lion gambol with the lamb; but only because it suits me, and it suits my sweetheart; and what else would we do on a Sunday.

The way Toronto's THOMAS opens the song, it feels more like over-earnest pastiche than anything else - a man with a lute, Sufjan at his worst. But by the time he is halfway through, THOMAS has gathered friends, he has picked up a flute, and he is sounding out an exceptionally beautiful nothing. My friend, who has met THOMAS, says he can never tell if he is being sincere or sarcastic. Here, I am not sure whether THOMAS is distilling the sugar of celestial ambrosia, or spritzing the sweetness of the masses' best opiate. It's very pretty, all the same.

[THOMAS on Bandcamp / merci philippe]

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Montrealers, lots of lovely things on this week's calendar:

• Monday
  
  • Mali's inimitable Khaira Arby plays a free show at Jazzfest. Her gig at Pop Montreal was one of our favourites of 2010; and her songs too. [MySpace]


• Tuesday
  • The Greasy Goose Salon continues, with the theme SCRAPS. Greasy Goose is our wonderful informal community lecture series, from the academic to the loony. This month's speakers include Endless Banquet's Anthony Kinik.
  • Later on that night, there's a stupendous riot grrrl night: five bands, formed randomly, had one month to become tribute acts. From the Raincoats to Bikini Kill, it'll be live at Il Motore. And it's a fundraiser for Rock Camp for Girls! I wrote some more about it for this article in Hour.


• Thursday
  • Maisonneuve magazine is launching its summer issue with a comedy night. And guess who is among the performers...


• Sunday
  • Speaking of Endless Banquet... Anthony and Michelle have organised a stupendous Strawberry Social for Sunday (so far, facebook link only - sorry!). Location TBD. Have I mentioned this will be stupendous? Yes.

(photo and installation by Nathaniel Lewis)

Kelis - "Milkshake (Shlohmo remix)".
Missy Elliott - "Work It (Nicolas Jaar rework)".

Evening skews. Your girlfriend's drunk, at the other side of the street. Why is she down there? Who is she speaking to? You are standing at the bottom of her walk. You see her standing with two people holding their bikes by the handlebars. She is wearing a summer dress. The last sunlight is strafing her dress through the trees. She is gesticulating. Her hair is long. You know you cannot communicate with them. Your voice would not carry. You wonder whether this evening will turn, right itself, in the time between when she leaves these two people and when you climb together to the third-floor apartment, to all the plants and open windows. Perhaps you will find each-other's matching shapes and forces. Perhaps she will begin speaking at precisely the volume that makes you feel like co-conspirators, lovers, and not simply like people in a room together, declaiming. Perhaps the faded blue sky will go rose, stars fainting through. Perhaps there will be an accident, something in the way your faces turn and glimpse each-other; it will illuminate the instant and slip between you, connective tissue. Or perhaps she will remain the woman she is at the end of the street, too far to call to, freer in the afar, and the nighttime church bells will sound sad.

[more of our old friend Nicolas Jaar / more of Shlohmo]

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Elsewhere:

Alice captures some of the essence of Montreal: We are all living at the borders of language ... and it gives a kind of frontier spirit. A community of accidental intention ... We fall in love with Godard and Jarmusch, dream of summers in Paris and New York and Quebec, clatter on our bicycles into the night, humming an old, old song that may be in no language at all.

Herohill has launched an astounding free tribute album for Canada Day (which is today): 36 Gordon Lightfoot covers, including renditions by Adam & the Amethysts, Shotgun Jimmie, Digits, Olenka Krakus, and many many more. Hoping to write about a couple after I make my way through it. It's a free download.

(photo source)

Burning Hearts - "Into the Wilderness". Whipsmart, fine, you got me dumbstruck. You talk of foxes, forests, wilderness, but I'm still right here, present, sure-footed in the just so. I'm too smitten to think faraway, to think spruce-quills and woods. Today the summer seems all light and heat, blitzed blue skies, glints on a billion mirrored surfaces. I hear fingersnaps, running water, bare feet on concrete. The frilled shhhf of an accidental touch. Our hands are covered in fine creases. No winter.

[Burning Hearts are from Finland / buy / music video]

Beirut - "Goshen". To promote his upcoming album, The Rip Tide, Beirut released a song called "East Harlem", which is not very good. But the B side is "Goshen", and this is gorgeous. I am not sure if Beirut or his label will ask us to take it down. Promoting an album, these days, means that you lay out a game plan and you stick to it. It was different in 2006, when we were more or less the first people to write about Gulag Orkestar. Zach wrote a guestpost for us, and "Postcards from Italy" went on to become my favourite song of the year. Since that first time, I have only written about one other Beirut track, an exquisite tune called "Elephant Gun". We said nothing about The Flying Club Cup, because we didn't have anything to say. Which is a roundabout way of getting to "Goshen", of asking you to trust me, of saying, I'm careful. "Goshen" is just a handful of chords, a plain piano ballad, yearning. I could almost imagine it sung by Elton John. And it's beautiful, this musical straight line, this little piece of gold. How simple, to want something for someone else. How simple and so fraught. (There is a sadness to questions which will never be answered.)

[do buy on 7"/The Rip Tide is out August 2]

(photo source)

Orval Carlos Sibelius - "I Don't Want A Baby". There are ten thousand reasons to do any one thing; and then ten thousand reasons not to. In this song, Orval Carlos Sibelius, who lives in France, offers his partner about 100 reasons not to have a baby. These reasons include his dwindling cool, his capacity of exaggeration, his intermittent self-loathing, his possible cancer, the magnificence of the status quo, and his sudden brainwave that they could instead enjoy an orgy. These arguments are, in their way, effective. But "I Don't Want A Baby" itself becomes a compelling rationale for taking this man and shanghai'ing him, as quickly as possible, into fatherhood. Because there's so much beauty in the song's delirious clanging sprint - there's wisdom and wit, peace and racket, an ear for blurring noise and wiry harmony. Orval offers whistling, la-la-la, ratatat, Spanish and North African guitar; imagine the wonders his daughters & sons might make. These diverse tastes need to be borne into the next generation. We need more Orvals, more Caloses, more Sibelii. Let's get him laid. [buy]

R.S.A.G. - "The Roamer".
R.S.A.G. - "Hotwire the Heart".

R.S.A.G. is Jeremy Hickey, from Kilkenny. On Be It Right Or Wrong he evokes the Talking Heads, Franz Ferdinand, Constantines and the Tragically Hip. But the main difference is that Hickey is one man. There is no band here, in symbiotic jam. Hickey is the one with eyes closed, defining terrain on the bass. He is the one on drums, six hands moving at once. He is the one at the microphone, yelping and crooning, trying to catch the eye of the woman in the sixth row. It is strange for solo music to feel so shared, so communal, like a conversation between friends. "Roamer", the gentlest song on the record, manifests Hickey at his most intimate; "Hotwire the Heart" shows off a taut glass bassline, dynamic switchbacks. In both songs, the music shows the glinting stuff of collaboration - accident, coincidence, personality. Only it's not collaboration. It's solitary. A man who can hear ten sounds in his head, say something with each. A man who speaks not in one voice, or in echo, but in splendid racket chorus. [MySpace - can't find a proper buy link / thanks so much, davin!!]

Oscar & Martin - "Chaine Maile". A song like a cache of tiny gems, rubies and silvers, each one slightly different. Australia's Oscar & Martin make pop-songs in a thousand overlapping watercolours; they draw from collage, r&b, twee pop, UK blubstep. There's something powerful in the way they tie these genres together, knotting them at the seams. On their best songs, like this one, Oscar & Martin rival the recent work of James Blake or Dirty Projectors. They make something spacious, surprising, sugared. It's a sound that's deeply now: breath, drum-pulse, chopped and blurring vocals, synthed steel drums. But without any of the Projectors' formal OCD, without blubstep's tether to hauntology. These are living voices, not ghosts'; this is tenderness, not lust; the duo offers solace, not loneliness. And yet it doesn't collapse in a pile of floppy soppy overdelicacy: you can hear the metal in their declarations, the chainmail's clink, and even the faint sense that if Oscar & Martin did lose their lover, they know they would get by, they would move on, they could even fall for someone else. The more I listen, the more it seems a song of not-quite-finding-the-One, of persisting, than of true & ever after.

"Chaine Maile" is one of the best things I've heard this year.

[buy Oscar & Martin's excellent debut album - thankyou andrew]

(photo by celia perrin-sidarous, who has a new book for sale.)

Micachu and the Shapes and the London Sinfonietta - "Everything". Spending rapped knuckles like currency. Three punishments and you can buy a bowl of fruit. Makes you smug. Pear in your pocket, taunting teacher, asking for it. 3 o'clock; go home; dream of tearing the sidewalk with each rotation of a bicycle tire. Sometimes it gets so late that you can't remember if the minute-hand is long or short. It is so late and you don't know the time. Your mother and father don't care; they're snoring. You're on your own, eyeing dessert-knives in their drawer, imagining your heart like a gob of strawberry jam, and you want to throw yourself on someone, a man or woman who's peanut butter. [buy]

Lower Dens - "I Get Nervous". I traded language for silver. I can no longer speak, only indicate. When I sing, I show. But I am silver. I go running, under violent streetlamps, warm wind in leaves. I pass through cars like starlight passes through glass. I skim the fields like wish. I show this, I show this, I show this. I am silver. Nobody will forget me. I will not say one word and everyone will remember the way I shone. [buy - thanks jessie]

(image source unknown)