You Slip into the Breaks and Look Around

From Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man:

Now I have one radio-phonograph; I plan to have five. There is a certain acoustical deadness in my hole, and when I have music I want to feel its vibration, not only with my ear but with my whole body. I’d like to hear five recordings of Louis Armstrong playing and singing “What Did I Do to Be So Black and Blue” – all at the same time. Sometimes now I listen to Louis while I have my favorite dessert of vanilla ice cream and sloe gin. I pour the red liquid over the white mound, watching it glisten and the vapor rising as Louis bends that military instrument into a beam of lyrical sound. Perhaps I like Louis Armstrong because he’s made poetry out of being invisible. I think it must be because he’s unaware that he is invisible. And my own grasp of invisibility aids me to understand his music. Once when I asked for a cigarette, some jokers gave me a reefer, which I lighted when I got home and sat listening to my phonograph. It was a strange evening. Invisibility, let me explain, gives one a slightly different sense of time, you’re never quite on the beat. Sometimes you’re ahead and sometimes behind. Instead of the swift and imperceptible flowing of time, you are aware of its nodes, those points where time stands still or from which it leaps ahead. And you slip into the breaks and look around. That’s what you hear vaguely in Louis’ music.

Last time I was in NYC, a couple years ago, the MOMA was running a photography exhibit and they had one of Jeff Wall’s wall-size backlit photos. This one was inspired by that creepy prologue to Invisible Man – it showed the narrator in his hole, his back to us, hunched over amid his ragged belongings, dozens or hundreds of lightbulbs sprouting from the walls. It was something to see; I stared at it for a long while, & kept coming back to look at it again, even after I’d moved on to other rooms.

There’s a long & interesting feature on (Vancouver’s own) Wall in the latest New York Times Magazine.

Wall thought big. When he emerged in 1978 as a fully formed artist, he presented photographs that demanded equal status with paintings. In sheer size, they were measured in feet, not inches. He produced them as unique objects, not in editions, and their aura was heightened by the mode of display: enormous transparencies lit from behind by fluorescent bulbs, a “light box” format that was typically used for advertising. Like a commercial light box, a Wall photograph grabbed you with its glowing presence, but then, unlike an advertisement, it held your gaze with the richness of its detail and the harmony of its arrangement. You could study it with the attention you devoted to a Flemish altarpiece in a church, and you could surrender yourself to its spell as if you were in a movie theater.

• Louis Armstrong, “(What Did I Do to Be So) Black and Blue” (buy here)

Darkness Comes and Darkness Goes Away

And finally tonight, here’s a real mood elevator. To me it sounds eerily like Wilco – the vocals and the chords – though it predates them by a decade and a half or so. Lots of momentum, but lots of textures too.

• The Toms, “Sun”

It’s from a comp of power pop from the late 1970s and early ’80s. Learn more here and buy it here.

Dancing All Alone in Your Room

I’ve seen Crooked Fingers a couple times, and a few years ago I remember having a nice chat with Eric Bachmann at a Smog show at a friend’s tiny club in Waterloo (Bachmann was acting as Smog’s road manager at the time, I think). But I haven’t followed their records all that closely and apparently missed out on their 2005 album Dignity and Shame altogether. Which is my bad, because this is a really lovely song.

• Crooked Fingers, “Twilight Creeps” (buy here)

Feels like he’s trying out his best Springsteen here, and there ain’t nothing wrong with that in my house. That piano line is elemental, and it really helps to sell the words. The parts that make me breathe in deepest, though, are the cooing girl-vocals and the trumpet. Makes you think it’s not just the singer saying his piece, it’s something less – I dunno, less defiant? Less lonely? More comforting? (Huge thanks to Michelle for putting this on a mix that she gave me.)

Just Like Pagliacci Did

See, the thing about running a blog like this one is when you write something you want to sound enthusiastic & entertaining & funny. Which runs the risk of shading into a certain glibness, especially if glibness is your natural defensive reflex. And then after a while you start to feel like you’re putting on a show. It’s not cool to mention frustration, or humming anxiety that makes you twitch & start, or other dark clouds in the sky of your brain.

Nevertheless.

• Bonnie “Prince” Billy, “I See a Darkness” (buy here)

Still, the line “we can stop our whoring” always makes me laugh. And it’s good to laugh. Now let us never speak of this again.

It’s Alright, It’s OK, It’s Alright, Oh Yeah

I am in love again! With Times New Viking, who come to us from Columbus, OH. Guitar drums keyboard, loud loose clatter, people singing together lots though I wouldn’t use the word “harmonies.” They kick up a sloppy racket and they record it badly, but all that distressed fuzz trails tunes that fly right at you straight & true and make you gasp. Like this one.

• Times New Viking, “Teenage Lust!” (buy here)

It’s from their brand-new record, The Paisley Reich. (Or, technical full title, I think, Times New Viking Present the Paisley Reich. I always have a soft spot for titles that incorporate the band name, whether Meet the Beatles or Never Mind the Bollocks Here’s the Sex Pistols.)

And here’s one from their other record, Dig Yourself.

• Times New Viking, “Skull Versus Wizard” (buy here)

They’re touring a bit but not getting up this way it seems. However, they are playing on a Saturday night in late March in Pittsburgh, PA, and I’m so taken with them that a roadtrip to Pittsburgh, PA is kinda tempting.

The band Times New Viking seem to namecheck themselves most often is the Clean, and that’s certainly cool with me. Though they’re maybe more single-minded than the Clean, less friendly or expansive. But we can’t all be friendly & expansive, can we?

• The Clean, “Odditty” (buy here)

Ambient Music

As I think I’ve babbled about in this space before, one of the things I really like about big-city life is the regular chance to wander around out in the world alone but surrounded by (usually more or less well-wishing) strangers & near-strangers, which I find to be a strange sort of psychic comfort. And when you find the air around you suddenly filled with a cool song that you haven’t listened to or even thought about in a good long while, well, that’s a bonus. Heard one of these in a record store the other day and the other one in a cafe the other week. Both of them totally addled me, turned me into a nodding, twitching, smiling zombie for a few blissed minutes.

• The Buzzcocks, “Are Everything’ (buy here)
• Le Tigre, “My My Metrocard” (buy here)
  

Exploding, Plastic, and Inevitable

Was curious about this movie Factory Girl, but I seem to have lost interest in it fast. Everyone was talking about the threatened Dylan lawsuit and who plays Andy Warhol, etc., etc., and all I wanted to know was who plays Lou Reed. (Turns out it’s a guy from Weezer.)

Really I’d rather just watch I Shot Andy Warhol yet again, since there’s so much there to dig. It casts a cold shrewd gaze on the Factory scene, and has the awesome Lili Taylor playing an interesting if kind of repugnant character, and has a strong narrative throughline leading to an, um, inevitable-feeling climax, and has a soundtrack that kicks, and for God’s sake, it has Yo La Tengo in the role of the Velvet Underground. Which in my own personal cosmology is pretty much chocolate + bananas.

• The Velvet Underground, “I’m Set Free” (live 1969)

(Buy nowhere – it’s a bootleg, from “the legendary guitar amp tape.” And go here for your Velvets information needs.)

Anhedonia

From Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (Francis Steegmuller translation):

Besides, nothing was worth looking for: everything was a lie! Every smile concealed a yawn of boredom; every joy, a curse; every pleasure, its own surfeit; and the sweetest kisses left on one’s lips but a vain longing for fuller delight.

From the Black Keys' The Moan EP:

• The Black Keys, “No Fun” (buy here)

(Nothing, and I mean nothing, can touch the Stooges original, but you’ve probably heard that one once or twice before. And this one has a bluesy vibe that’s actually pretty cool, and so says me who’s usually pretty resistant to bluesy vibes.)

It’s Not the Fall, It’s the Sudden Stop

I am desperate to thaw winter’s hard cruel grip on my bones. Maybe a trick of the mind will do it – all I have to do is listen to this over & over & over again.

• Dave Cloud & Gospel of Power, “Summer Holiday” (buy here)

Didn’t work. Oh well. Now I’m still cold, but happier.

As you can no doubt tell, Dave Cloud is a snorting wildman from Nashville. A land where they hardly have winter at all, though I can testify as an eyewitness that the Opryland Hotel – O sad, gaudy city-state! – at least has Xmas spirit in punishing amounts.

This is from a double-disc set called Napoleon of Temperance. When I put this CD into my computer the “genre” tag that comes up is Easy Listening, and it’s good to know that the machine has a sense of humour. Or maybe it’s just thrown by the Bee Gees and Bacharach covers, I dunno.

Anyway, so yeah, Napoleon of Temperance. Two discs, 40-something songs, covers of the Stones and Dylan and Bowie and KC & the Sunshine Band and all kinds of others, plus all kinds of loopy originals, like the a-mazing “Lavender Clothes.” I found this in that CD barn at Bloor & Bathurst, and I must admit it was nice to feel the thrill of the chase again, scarce as that is in this Internet age. But you can buy it online too.

OK, one more. But seriously, support the man.

• Dave Cloud & Gospel of Power, “Sudden Stop” (buy here)

Stayed Up All Night ... You Know the Rest

Sometimes people think this site is called Bury Me Not because I prefer to post non-current songs that folks might have forgotten about. Whenever somebody asks me about that, I explain that I don’t really want to prescribe a meaning for the name of the site, that whatever people want “bury me not” to mean is cool with me.

And then usually somebody calls me a wanker. As they should, as they should.

But the point is I don’t necessarily have anything against brand-new songs or against posting them. So here’s one now.

• Wil, “Wedding Dress”

I particularly like the throat-clearing bits at the beginning – the almost-orchestral intro (which to my classic rock-damaged ears sounds just a note or two away from morphing into “Baba O’Riley”) and then the bass pulse. The song proper, once it’s underway, is a bit more conventional in sound, maybe (at least to my classic rock-saturated ears), but it will raise the anthemnic quotient around here, which is welcome. And the bass pulse and the orchestral bits make a little return, which is also welcome.

Wil is a Canadian dude and you can learn more about him here. “Wedding Dress” is, I believe, from his upcoming second album.

Fun with Corrections

The magazine that printed the above shall remain nameless, because hey, there but for the grace of God and all that. (I’ve never had to run a didn’t-turn-tricks correction, but about a year ago, I did have to make a promise to our own readers that going forward, everything mentioned on our cover would actually appear in the magazine. Good times, good times.)

However, while I can certainly appreciate the use of the Oops heading for corrections – it’s, like, all folksy and humanizing, or something – surely an upgrade to Yikes is in order when the error in question strays into My Own Private Idaho territory?

Anyway, here’s one of my favourite songs about male prostitution.

• The Pogues, “The Old Main Drag” (buy Rum Sodomy & the Lash here)

That’s right, “one of.” I could do a top-10 list for you at the drop of a hat, baby.

Nah, I’m totally bluffing.