http://www.saidthegramophone.com/ a music weblog en-us 2005-04-28T07:07:02-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/stg_has_moved_update.php SAID THE GRAMOPHONE has MOVED. Please update your bookmarks - and your RSS feeds! We now live at: saidthegramophone.com. See you there.... Sean 2005-04-28T07:07:02-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/fickly_updates.php SAID THE GRAMOPHONE has MOVED. Please update your bookmarks. We now live at: saidthegramophone.com. See you there.... Sean 2005-04-08T06:06:14-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/damon_krukowski_writ.php [Sorry for my absence. I hope that Dan and Sean took good care of you while I was away. I hope you didn't feel abandoned. I'm still your dad. You're still my kids. I'll still pay for college. You'll still drink and philander, though it shames me. Anyway, what I wanted to do was organize a guest week before Sean came back and things got serious. That proved harder than hoping, and in the end I received only one submission. It is, however, a very good submission. The author of today's blog is half of Damon and Naomi, he runs Exact Change Press (a small publishing house devoted to 20th century experimental literature), and was Galaxie 500's drummer. He is Damon Krukowski, and not only did he come through by submitting to the site as he said he would, but he worked to make a deadline. That was very kind of him. - Ed. Himelfarb ] Mr Krukowski wrote: I've never contributed to a blog before, but from reading a few, it seems like an opportunity to express your innermost crankiness. (Isn't that a good cranky start? I've already insulted blogs, now I'm going to insult the independent music business.) I'm just back from SXSW, 1300 bands crammed into a few square blocks of Austin Texas, and the overwhelming cranky feeling I had there was: there's too much music in the world. No, wait, I'm someone who enjoys subway musicians, AM radio in Newark NJ, cantors, even people singing to themselves in the car in front of me in traffic. There can't be enough music in the world. But there are too many bands! In Austin, I heard bands that made me never want to hear clever postpunk again; bands that made me hate sensitive singer-songwriters; bands that made me regret I ever played a slow backbeat on a drumkit; bands that made me crave silence. But amid the cacophony, I did hear two things that made me happy: happy for music, happy to be making music, happy for the world of sound. A Hawk and A Hacksaw - "Portlandtown" A Hawk and A Hacksaw perform as a duo; she (Heather Trest) plays violin, and he (Jeremy Barnes) . . . he plays accordion with his hands, and percussion with his feet, knees, and head (by means of a hat, with bells and a stick strapped to it). He also sings, on occasion, in a vibrato-less baritone that recalls Clive Palmer. The rhythms feel like Eastern European folk dances. The melodies sound like Child ballads. The attitude is subway musician meets Newark AM radio meets cantor meets someone singing to themselves in a car in front of you. [Info] Gram Parsons - "Hearts on Fire" The other joyful noise I heard was on the radio -- 2 a.m., driving away from the live music capital of the world, Emmylou and Gram Parsons singing Hearts on Fire in the black Texas night. I want to sing, right here in the car, and I don't care if anyone sees me, much less hears me! [Buy]... Jordan 2005-04-07T02:26:30-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/cliches_are_there_fo.php Neil Young - "Bandit" from Greendale. it's the only song I've heard in it's entirety, but it knocked me down/around. Apparently the rest of the album is more guitarry, well...fine. The following are all good things: It's so tired. This song is the end of the rope, and it's like wishing you luck as it pries loose your fingers. There is so much unsaid, it's as if the chorus is missing words: "someday you'll find / everything you're looking for / because I didn't, and people should". Even the guitar is tired, it rattles like it has trouble breathing. And I want to listen to every word like it's true; like it's been proven by a lifetime. [Buy the cd, dvd, and book] The Robot Ate Me - "You Smile" Lullabies are supposed to be sad, 'cause then you want to go to sleep to escape it. [Buy]... Dan 2005-04-06T01:59:04-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/dumplingering.php Sean 2005-04-05T09:27:47-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/bark.php Sean 2005-04-04T08:44:06-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/hangover.php Indeed, yesterday's April 1 post about Gramophone-Going-Pay was entirely a poisson, a gag, and I'm relieved that not many of our readers believed it. (Contrast this with the people who seemed unsure about the sincerity of Fluxblog's awful april fools songs.) StG will never have ads or subscription fees, and we've never made a dime from InSound or Amazon. I just don't think it's cool. It's quite possible, however, that while you were reeling with consternation or amusement, you missed Dan's other April 1 post, with real music/poetry to hear. It's here. Elsewhere - Via Tofu Hut, I just discovered the fantastic RIFF CENTRAL, a goof-off mp3blog-of-sorts that's half drew, half uh something else. Fake interviews with music bigheads, silly and stupid and smart and - most important of all, - genuinely funny. He snarks Matthew Herbert so hard. My favourites: the Game, Prefuse73, Sasha F-J. I just wish he updated more often. GOSH: Pokey the Penguin is for sale. Have a great weekend. Oh. And even though I really do mean that righteous anti-corporate stuff, we just sprung CND$169 for a new .mac account, to keep the music flowing. If anyone is feeling generous enough that they want to help us cover that cost, you can PayPal sean@tangmonkey.com. Any amount is appreciated. (Nothing more will ever be said about this.) We really, really, really appreciate all of your support - verbal, monetary, sincere.... Sean 2005-04-02T07:52:54-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/we_all_knew_it_would.php Due to server bandwidth, upload/download expansion, and CVI (computer visitation increase), Said the Gramophone will be a members-only site from now on. Please choose from any of the convenient plans below: "StG-mini" Plan (29.99€/yr.) - full access to all the standard songs, and a synopsis of every review. "Full Gramo" Plan (59.99€/yr.) - full access to all songs, including the 'adults only' songs which will be a weekly fixture, and full reviews from every contributing author, plus a picture of us writing the review. "Pay-by-Post" Plan (2.99€/entry) - entries can be purchased individually, for those who can't commit for one reason or another. there will be no previews offered for p-by-p purchases. So, the last free entry is below. Please don't think of this as the end of something free, but rather the start of something better. at your soonest convenience, please e-mail us with your choice of plan. - StG staff... Dan 2005-04-01T01:36:21-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/on_a_fender_with_jul.php Sunset-Valley - "Mr. Extreme Jeans" My body is starting to react to the amount of time I've been spending at the computer. Wrist pain, then eye pain, and now, wait for it, a blister on my thumb from pressing the spacebarsomuch. So, in case I die before the end of this paragraph: WHAT A CHORUS! I've noticed recently that people will quickly relate a song's being really catchy to it's potential to sell something. "That song will probably be in a commercial" etc. I'd look down my nose at this, but I did the exact same thing when I heard this song. But maybe it's good, that way, ad people will be bowing to OUR standards as opposed to setting trends. Party in the street! (no cameras allowed, ever again) [Buy] Jack Kerouac - "an excerpt from The Subterraneans" There's not really many author-celebrities today, are there? I guess Dave Eggars does his thing, and lots of people know who he is, but he doesn't like, go on tv and stuff. No one who's just an author enjoys the kind of attention that Kerouac....experienced. Hearing him read was really the key to enjoying his writing for me. I could listen to him read for hours, often ceasing to listen to the words and hear only the sounds. Which I think he started writing like eventually, after the midpoint in the chronology of books, stuff really starts to lose sense. But not this one, Mardou is one of his most vivid characters in my opinion, entirely because of the lack of description she receives. He felt he had her figured out, I guess. [Buy]... Dan 2005-04-01T00:57:47-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/building_a_causeway.php In Ireland everything was white and green. Belfast was battered and somehow happy, Bangor was cool and twinkling, the Giant's Causeway was a marvel - oh, the list goes on. Except for Cork. I didn't like Cork. In Northern Ireland we stayed with the kind and wonderful Ross, whom I first corresponded with when he sent me one of his band's tunes - "Wait for Me". When I posted it last May, I said that it reminded me of Idaho, that it was taunting. Listening to it today, it's Grandaddy I hear, and I hear dressed-up desperation. Five Dollar Soul (Ross' band) recently released a collection of all their demos and lofi recordings. "Wait for Me" is on it, and so is "You'll Never," or at least it sort of is - it's tagged on at the end as a hidden track. Five Dollar Soul - "You'll Never". Sooner or later they're going to get around to releasing a Nuggets 3, and I have the feeling that there are hundreds of songs like this from the turn of the twenty-first century, songs that run in a direct line from those first comps, from early garage and proto-ponk, through the Kingsmen and into grunge. "You'll Never" is messy and childish, poorly recorded and full of off-key yells. But it's grand, it's great - it's a joyous chain of guitar riffs, of repeated chants, classist put-downs shouted back in the authorities' faces. It's not the Sex Pistols, it's just kids with a melody and their fists in the air, with goofy half-laughs and grins, with rage amongst their kindness, with a soaring silly song that they can bellow at the top of their lungs. [order?] The Frames - "Trying". 2004's Frames release, Burn the Maps, is a tough one. After the intimacy of For the Birds, it's jarring to come up against such an alienating record, one so sparse with its hooks and its catchy. I've heard it compared with Kid A, but I think Amnesiac is a much better touchstone. Electronics have been mixed into the band's folk and rock, but unlike Kid A, where the bleeps seemed the most human thing about it, on Burn the Maps and Amnesiac the electronics are confrontational, splintering, intimidating. (Of course, let's not go overboard: The Frames don't exactly play drill-and-base, they don't even get as noisy as Wilco on Ghost is Born, and everything's always pretty mellifluous.) Furthermore, the album's full of knotty little half-songs, vignettes of frustration or disappointment, one twisting into the next. Burn the Maps is like a bad night's sleep, all that wasted energy, that squandered feeling, those tangled sheets. The nightmares hardly get started before they wisp away, so hard to hold onto. And in those few moments of rock single, of articulated anger, it's only that hopeless fury of waking from a dream - of finding the reality to be something other than the somnambulist fantasy. It's a better album than it is a collection of songs, so I struggled choosing one as a sample. But -- here. "Trying" is for me all about when the drums, the tom or timpani, come on. The acoustic guitar and Hansard vocals are just the treading of water, like someone saying in long, run-on sentences that they're stuck in a pool of dark water, waiting for torrents, waiting for some kind of change. I wish it went on ten times longer, a hundred times longer, that stormy shriek with its banging drums, that we really could get flooded out and pushed into some new landscape. But we don't - isn't that the point? And like all the album's other songs, it fades away and into something else. (On the album, this "something else" is a blast of melody called "Fake," the first single.) [buy]... Sean 2005-03-30T09:50:37-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/lonelily_daffodily.php Sean 2005-03-29T08:54:14-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/twins.php Sean 2005-03-28T08:51:18-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/youd_better_be_right.php Freddie & The Hitch-Hikers - "Sinners" I bought a cell phone today. And I literally caught someone elbowing their friend and saying, "Look, at the sucker." Sigh. I felt like my former self (my pre-celf, if you will (please don't)) was singing this song to my future self as I sat there and actually said the words "If I have a choice, I'll take the free mp3 player." This is how it starts. Soon I'll be buying $30 shirts, and saying things like "I really like that belt." What's interesting about Freddie (and the boys) is that he knows the sinner is wrong, he seems to take pleasure in describing the suffering the sinner will endure. He's so sure of it, he can play the laziest (and smallest) guitar solo I've ever heard, and get away with it. [I got it here] Daft Punk - "Technologic" In keeping with the spell-it-out style of social commentary that is the new Daft Punk album, I will immediately follow a paragraph about cell phones with...yeah, we get it...tech-no-logic. But forget all that, because Daft Punk is here to LET you dance. [Buy]... Dan 2005-03-24T02:43:44-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/try_a_little_tendern.php Good afternoon to all. A special thanks to all those who came up to me and said hello at the european Arcade Fire shows last week. Twas a pleasure to meet you all. The Grates - "Sukkafish". This Brisbane trio is knocking round the Australian charts like marbles in a cardboard box, but they're lakewater fresh to these ears. "Sukkafish" struts with a bowlegged gait, dawnblinking after an all-night DJ set with the White Stripes and The Kills. There's the pluck of a plucky banjo, corner-store drumming, and above it all the squawk and squeal and song, the girl-sounds, of Patience Hodgson. She's the ozzie hillbilly equivalent of Controller.Controller's Nirmala Basnayake, which means she wears pointy boots and chases boys into the creek. (Speaking of Nirmala, Google-hunting reveals this gem [check the comments].) I don't know what a sukkafish is, but it seems as song-worthy as the kookaburra. Still, I can't help but feel that in Edinburgh this tune is a little premature. It needs humidity and cold drinks, the old summer bake. So I'll wait. [buy The Ouch. The Touch EP] Mystery Jets - "Alas, Agnes". The Mystery Jets come from a place called Eel Pie Island. I wanted to say "It comes as no surprise that-", but let's be honest. Eel Pie Island shouldn't be a real thing. It is, though! It is! It's off of the south of England. And the Mystery Jets are from there. Richard from the A.F. passed me their demo, which I assume was passed to him at the ULU show. And boy oh boy, it's great! It's messy and silly and noisome fun, ramshackle as heck, the frantic cousin of fellow natives-of-a-weird-island, The Bees. "Alas Agnes" has random tumbles of drums, swooning arcs of melody, the Fiery Furnaces' epic musical ride. It's about illicit love and King's Cross station, champing riffs and the oink of a pig. It's dust being swept off the table, it's spring fever nonsense. And someone ought to sign them, soon. [visit their website] Two quick orders of business: 1) We are still looking for a new mp3 webhost. If there's anyone out there with a .mac account to donate, or who wants to donate hosting, etc., please get in touch. 2) This is a long-shot, but I've been listening non-stop to Otis Redding's "Try a Little Tenderness" lately, which is a phenomenal piece of music. (No really, it is, like, more than even its canonicty would suggest.) But I'm being driven crazy by the fade-out that happens just as the song's getting going. I understand that this was a necessary evil back in vinyl days, but still - still! I'm hunting desperately for a full-length studio cut of the 3:20 version from The Very Best Of Otis Redding... I found a 3:50 version (which seems to be slightly different), from Otis! The Definitive Otis Redding, but it too fades out prematurely. I guess I'm just looking for any studio recording of "Try a Little Tenderness" that is neither the 3:50 nor the 3:20 version. Better yet, maybe it doesn't fade out. If you've got one, I'd love if you could share it with me via dropload. Thanks!... Sean 2005-03-23T10:36:50-05:00 http://www.tangmonkey.com/blogs/music/archives/fuck_you_for_liking_.php Stephen Malkmus - "Baby C'mon" It's 4:24. My brain is really nervous that whatever review I give, whatever statement I give, will seal me in a tomb of regret to wake up in later on. I want to be right. I want to convert you. okay, here goes: Boy is chained to the floor, guitar strap glued to the back of his neck. Teaches himself to play and everyone gathers around and claps. Keeps playing for 10 years, every day, a constant parade of clapping, cheering people, he's still chained to the same spot. Eventually, his arms hang by his sides and he stares out at the crowd. His stare turns to conscious examination, he is fascinated why the crowd hasn't left. He begins to see why, in their expressions, in the mirrors they're holding. He shrugs, picks the guitar up from his waist and resumes playing, to much applause. I really believe that Malkmus is trying to Face some Truth, but his truth still looks and sounds like lies. It's 4:40 [if you're american, buy the single off iTunes]... Dan 2005-03-22T04:40:28-05:00