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SAID THE GRAMOPHONE has MOVED.

Please update your bookmarks.

We now live at: saidthegramophone.com.

See you there.

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]

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]

You take a ferry from Finland to Estonia. We took it twice, because we forgot things in Finland. This sort of forgetfulness is not recommended.

Tallinn, capital of Estonia, lies on the tense border between picturesque medieval town and sprawling, coughing post-communist city. The Old Town is beautifully preserved, lovely for walking, but when we ventured out into the greyness of urban Tallinn, we were not very charmed.

I bought a record by Urmas Alender at a supermarket in a shopping mall. I bought it based on the artwork, and by how many other Urmas Alender records were on the wall. And although I don't entirely regret my purchase, I kinda do, because it's not really to my taste.

He started as a member of Ruja, one of the country's most important bands, playing guitar and then later leading the prog group. Their career spanned decades, lasting through perestroika and into the early 1990s. In 1994, however, Urmas Alender was among those who died when a ferry sank en route from Stockholm to Tallinn.

Although I didn't know it at the time, Kohtumine Albertiga is a (clearly) posthumous release, gathering songs from Alender's other early groups - Andromeeda, Varjud, Teravik, and DATA. This is the opening track -

Urmas Alender - "Varjude revolutsioon". The repeated guitar strains at the beginning of the song remind me most of the Monty Python and the Holy Grail theme, but that feeling soon diminishes. Alender sings amid a rising wail, joined by trumpet and psych organ, a brew of sound. I can hear traces of Genesis, but it's folkier than that (Yes? This really isn't my genre.). The most important thing is the lazy power of the track, the way these chill hippie elements coalesce into a folsky potency, a revolutionary fervour. [I can't find a website for ordering this CD, but if anyone does, please let me know in the comments and I'll update accordingly.]

From Tallinn we traveled to Riga, the beautiful capital of Latvia. It's a wonderful city, rising organically out of the water and the stone of the old town, parks in strips that run toward the Liberty monument. The market is astonishing, four airplane hangars full of fish, grains, meat, vegetables, surrounded by hundreds of stalls that sell everything from pet food to bootleg CDs. Julian bought an mp3-cd with every Leonard Cohen album. I bought dumplings.

Later, though, I bought a CD by Prãta Vetra. When they try to crossover to the anglo market, they call themselves Brain Storm. (I know.) They are essentially the Coldplay of Latvia, the Radiohead of Latvia, the winner of Latvian Grammies, the commercial radio superstars.

In the CD liner notes, it reads:
"Paldies: (thanks) ... No Doubt, Oceanfall, Bob Marley un Dave Matthews Band par inspiraciju." So there you go.

More importantly, though, they write pretty catchy tunes.

Prãta Vetra - "Pa Pareizãm". I look forward, I really do, to the day when a computer can generate songs like this. Because in the meantime I'm forced to wait for bands to get their shit together, to find a studio with appropriate resources, and to get their music to my ears. There's some surf guitar in "Pa Pareizãm," but it's been neutralized, sugar-coated, tag-teamed with a good-natured synth-line. Renars Kaupers (uh, Reynard Cowper) plays it coy till the chorus zing, then taking every pleasure at the roll of an R, the zooming silly buzz of the hook. [buy 2003's Dienās, kad lidlauks pārāk tāls]

Oh - and a needless caveat about all this music (and what follows). I speak english, french, and some latin. I don't know latvian, polish or hungarian. I have no idea what the vast bulk of these lyrics mean - if any of it's hateful, or just mind-numbingly inane, I apologize. I'm just a naif.

Elsewhere -

Whether or not you read french (and especially if you do), listen to Alex's fine "Easy Like Sunday Morning" mix at ORTF. Rare tracks by Four Tet, Mum, Chet Baker, and more. (Max de Wardener, too!)

We flew from Dublin, via London, to Tampere, Finland. "Manse" is Tampere's nickname - it's the country's Manchester. Tampere is concrete and grey, but like all of Finland (at least the little bit I saw), the space gives everything a feeling of freedom, of life.

Later we went to Helsinki, where boats sat like contented hens in the bay. Parks line the boulevards, with strange and evocative statues - Sibelius, communism, swans.

Between the two cities we took the ultra high-tech high-speed train. And I watched as tall, tall trees spinned past my window, like the stoic older cousins of the familiar Ontario and Quebec landscape. There were knotted forests, fading to blue in the distance.

The CD I bought in Finland is by an avant folk group called Kemialliset Ystävät. I went to a record shop in Tampere and picked albums based entirely on their art. Then I listened. And Alkuhärkä won.

It's a difficult record. From Panda Bear to Black Dice, this sort of psychfolk needs a certain state of mind to take seriously - just what the psych implies. (I've never understood why acts like Devendra Banhart or Joanna Newsom are given the same label. The differences are really, really clear.) Instruments blend and circle, half-melodies worming out of the soil, receding into it.

Kemialliset Ystävät - "Kiimaniityn Kutsu"
Kemialliset Ystävät - "Kamelin Hikeä"

For me, listening to Kemialliset Ystävät becomes an exercise in fictional ethnography. I don't just imagine the music, the manifestation of the synths, piano, strings, and drone, I imagine a culture that might have produced it. I try to situate the sounds in those tall, leafless trees, down the empty, wide and blowing city streets. It's the sound of the electric cables that run through the woods, and of the people who live in huts under them.

Read more about the record at Fake Jazz.

Elsewhere -

the legend is true: Montreal's grand, big, glowing cross turns purple when the Pope dies. I think it's beautiful that such an enormous monument is on a slow-time, half-century calendar, flickering briefly into a different, ghostly state. I wish I was there to see it.

Unreleased Sam Beam (iron & wine) at buked and scorned.

ftrain updates: the death of a cat. beautiful, very sad.

(main photo taken in the sculpture garden at Tampere's Sara Hilden Art Museum.

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.

"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

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]

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]

On September 23rd of last year, my friend Julian and I embarked from Canada on a three (or was it four?) month transit across some of Europe. Along the way, I bought at least one CD in every country, trying to get a taste of some of the underexposed indigenous music.

For my next x posts (interrupted with Dan and Jordan's worthy contributions), I'm going to try to take you through the best of that music.

----

We landed in Brighton. We visited Cambridge and Oxford and London, where I was finally able to buy the Go! Team's fantastic Thunder Lightning Strike. But there's no point in trying to introduce you to that - doubtless, you've already been introduced.

In Scotland I didn't fare very well, in terms of buying 'Scottish music'. Instead, I bought a Mouse on Mars CD for £3 at Fopp.

My "British" selections are therefore taken from a comp I bought at Dublin's Road Records, but which is English in spirit.

Misplaced Pets is a CD compilation benefitting two Leeds animal charities, the Whitehall Dog Rescue and the Leeds Animal Rescue. It's a great record with a startlingly fine track-list, unreleased tracks by Hood, Martin Finke, Havergal, Adrian Crowley, and more. You can (and should) buy it here.

Sufjan Stevens - "Niagara Falls". This track from the Michigan sessions is also available at the Asthmatic Kitty website. It's an oddly imbalanced track, purposefully so, Sufjan's dulcet words set off balance by the thump and sigh of the instrumental bridge, the song's sudden end. Stevens' consistency is amazing to me - he manages to imbue song after song with some aspect of the transcendent, piano and mandolin beating angelwings in his urban stories' skies. This is a song that comes and then quickly leaves, almost unfairly so, like the jarring momentous sight of Niagara Falls out the window, massive and godly and then gone.

Alasdair Roberts - "Lullaby to Holly". There's been a lot of talk about Roberts' new record (and rightly so), in the Scottish press. His work (before and after Appendix Out) is fascinating; his pure-laine folk revivalism is beautifully sincere... No, it's just plain beautiful. He's been doing Iron & Wine longer than Iron & Wine has, striding the heather and murmuring the old songs. My dad called it "real hair-shirt music". Nevertheless, it's easy to get lost in Roberts' old ballads, for these glittering songs to fold into one-another, interchangeable. It's thus with great joy that I heard "Lullaby to Holly" - it's another Alasdair Roberts song, and yet not just another Alasdair Roberts song. There's something supple in the melody, in the right placement of words and rhyme, that make it among the best things he's ever recorded.

Charlie Parr - "Roses While I'm Living". Duluth, MN's Charlie Parr sounds, like Alastair Roberts, as if he's been snatched from another era. It's trad american folk with all the passion and resignation of the greats, powerful and ghostly. "Roses While I'm Living" is indeed not an upbeat song, but Parr performs it with just the right note of sadness, letting the fact of its statement buoy the listener. He does no disservice to the Dock Boggs original.

Tomorrow - Northern, and The Republic Of, Ireland.

---

It's with some amusement that I see that the Arcade Fire is this week's Time Canada cover story. The band wasn't interested in being indie-rock poster-boys (or poster-girls), and wouldn't do a photo, but I guess Time just grabbed something from the press file and did it anyway.

Elsewhere:

Matt Haughey's "Since U Been Gone" : Clarkson Industries Annual Report

The Legends - "Call It Ours". Well would you listen to this. The Legends don't even give us a few seconds of mope before hitting us with their goofy, gravy guitar riff, that playful dance-on-the-flower-carpet sound. There's handclaps on the song's every downbeat, boy-girl harmonies, tamborine, and then the slightly phased blur of the main vox, "I said no, no no no-ooo," jangly twee crossed with The Hives' mangey scruff. Maybe there's a bit of Jesus & Mary Chain, too, but more important still is the Happy, the innocence, the kiddy glee that tumbles down the tarmac and into urban decay. Thinking of when I wandered in Stockholm a couple of weeks ago, watching a drunken sausage-scromping Swede admit his love for Eric's Trip, I could imagine this music in the crack of underfoot ice, in the way the messy snowlight stung your eyes. [buy]

The Roches - "Hammond Song". The Roches were a force from my childhood, the lulling silly soundtrack for cartrips to Toronto, the monotonous windowwash of Ontario forests. I was listening to "We," this week, that Roches calling-card, immortalized on Tiny Toons, and I heard in the girls' weaving harmonies the following line:

"A trio we are, born on the fourth of December."

Yes, that's right. The Roches were born on the same day as Jay-Z.

If this isn't a glorious coincidence, the sort of synchronicity that this blog feeds on, then I don't know what is. So I toyed with posting Jay-Z and The Roches, "We" and "Izzo", fraternal twins side-by-side at last, smiling for the camera.

But then I decided not to.

"Hammond Song" is something more suited to today's episode of the Edinburgh spring, where the sunny daffodilled streets have gone slicked and grey and rainy. It's a song of reluctant goodbyes, of head shakes and slow stirs of tea. And in the sigh of that organ, the wringing of the voices, even the - beautiful, beautiful, - elegiac flowerings of guitar, there's a sorry inevitability. She'll go. It's inevitable. And it's an inevitability we all know so well, we've all seen in eyes across the table. The Roches, often such giddy cartoons, are here just birds, and friends, and streets, and New Years': all straining at the thought of your ["her"] departure. Such thick, full, blue-green music, such a bleed of voices. (Produced by King Crimson's Robert Fripp!) [order]

---

More of The Legends over at The Big Ticket.

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]

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!

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]