Fire of emotions shiver and dance at the corners of my vision like stained glass windows with a sunset behind them. This record is perfect. This song is perfect. The heat is perfect - oppressive, I can hardly breathe. We walk down a hill, feet slapping on the bitumen, skin glowing. A friend comes over, we sit on the cool tiles drinking cold beer, tapping our feet, you know, there's no where I'd rather be. The sun peeps through and I swear everything's melting. There's a storm coming and you're all sweat and smiles. Put your hand on my chest, my heart beats in time with the music.
I can get really proud of my favourite bands, like in the way a parent is proud of their children, if I feel I have some common roots or they're somwhat of an underdog. Like Cut Copy, for instance, being an Australian band, I pumped my fist in the air when they made the top ten for Pitchfork's Albums of the Year for 2008, or Electrelane or Vivian Girls, being such a success and all girls bands that I actually listen to, makes me grin and want to pat them on head and send them off further into the world.
Beaches make me proud as pie, an all girls band and they're from Melbourne, and obviously, they're awesome (or I wouldn't be posting them here). Despite having the most un-Googleable name ever, these girls play with such intensity, timelessness and glee - huge, rousing guitars, 60s beach punk vibes, loud bass and drums - all driving towards some great end. While they, and their music, is beautiful and mysterious you can still tell they're having fun, they're enjoying this just as much as you are, smiling into their shouts [how much do you love "san - DY!"?!], posing all serious while playing that killer riff, pulling out that ripper beat just as you toss your head back - the way you laugh and show off when you know you're winning a race - cause, you know, you're all winning, no one else comes close.
Brisbane, watch out, these babes are cruising through on 6th March for Summer Tones with High Places (!!!), Dan Deacon, Lawrence Arabia and the Ruby Suns.
It's complicated, you know. We don't know what we want. Well I know what I want, happiness. Like, I want to smile more and I think she could give me that. My toes tingle when I see her sometimes and life's short. So the complications... I just want to set them alight. But we can't, she can't. It's New Year, for fuck's sake, I just want to see her, it's too much not to see her.
Balearic rhythms and guitars, melancholy and clarity, watch out for this in '09. [via Rose Quartz]
By the time Christmas rolls around each year, the need to curl up with family and wrap myself in light, warmth and beauty, is pressing. Like the deep breath between one year and the next. Laziness, easiness and love surround me. Not many Christmas songs capture the season as as well as this.
A wonderfully clear rendition of one of my favourite Chrismas carols. Her angelic voice echoes through your head speaking of Christmas' timeless story. I lie on the rug with my head under the Christmas tree, scratching the cat with one hand and squinting through the branches to see the light of the angel at the top.
What starts off as underwater journey is quickly pulled back to the surface by a beautiful voice and warm guitars, sort of how a beautiful voice and warm hand are the only things that are acceptable to pull you from your own journeys in your sleep. The surfacing/song is insistent with spaced-out, occasionally arching, guitar and siren-like vocals. Do you like your pop dreamy? Yes, please, thank you very much.
This session was recorded by Bradford Cox [Deerhunter/Atlas Sound] in September of this year on Platts Eyott, an island reserve in the middle of the Thames river, London. It's a continuous stream on consciousness containing songs from this year's Microcastle and 'Spring Hall Convert' from Cryptograms and is supposed to be listened to all at once - a tribute to John Peel. It's fantastically melancholy and confessional, a great headphone listen that somehow feels heavy on your ears. This song in particular, from Microcastle, makes any room you listen in seem a dimly lit, smoke-filled haven.
Listen to the entirety of the session here, and my favourite song from Microcastlehere.
***
Also:
Along with every other teenage girl in Australia, I will be going to see this today:
A group of young things sat at a cafe on the beach front, two among their number, of about ten, thought of nothing but each other. They laughed along with the others and watched each other's reactions and still refused to look the other in the eye. It had been three weeks since they had broken it off and she was still the last thing he thought of before he fell asleep. Later, the group walked along the sea front, kicking water at each other and telling stories. The two of them ended up walking next to each other, dragged behind until they couldn't hear their friends. They talked about anything and everything but themselves and the sun was in her eyes and the wind blew her hair everywhere till she couldn't see, her eyes were blurry and wet. Stupid, stupid, stupid. She made her excuses and ran to catch up with her friends. He went and stood in the water, watched her walk away and tried to recapture some of her warmth in the sun.
They raced very fast on their bikes until the road ran out and then they stopped, gasping for breath at a barbed wire fence at the foot of, what looked like a hill 10 minutes ago, but which now more resembled a mountain. Ignoring the 'Do not trespass' sign, they gingerly pulled the fence apart for each other and slipped through. The sun was so hot the backs of their necks were burning as they put one boot in front of the other pulling themselves further to the summit. She tripped over some rocks, he picked her up, tucked her hair behind her ear and they continued. They talked and listened to a bird that was singing in a tree at what seemed like the very top. About half way up they stopped under a tree to shed jumpers and catch their breath. They sat on a log very close, their legs were full flush against each other and her perfume, their mingled sweat and the dry grass were all they could smell.
P.S. My extended absense was the result of end of year stuff and gettin' loose at Schoolies, sorry about that. I hope to jack up my output this summer before I start university. Lovin' the holidays, aren't you?
Listen to this amazing rendition of 'Blue Ridge Mountain' where the Fleet Foxes break into an abandoned Grand Palais and perform with such enthusiasm and care. They play in an enormous chamber-like room which makes their already echoey, perfect harmonies even more echoey, perfect and filled with mythicism and passion.
In the quivering forest,
Where the shivering dogs rest,
Our good grandfather,
Built a wooden nest.
And the river got frozen,
And the home got snowed in,
And the yellow moon glowed bright,
In the morning light.
Terrible am I child,
Even if you don't mind.
This is my favourite song from Fleet Foxes' self-titled LP of this year.
"A tremendous thing happened when Dean met Carlo Marx. Two keen minds that they are, they took to each other at the drop of a hat. Two piercing eyes glanced into two piercing eyes - the holy con-man with the shining mind, and the sorrowful poetic con-man with the dark mind that is Carlo Marx. From that moment on I saw very little of Dean, and I was a little sorry too. Their energies met head-on, I was a lout compared, I couldn't keep up with them. The whole mad swirl that was to come began then; it would mix up all my friends and all I had left of my family in a big dust cloud over the American Night. Carlo told him of Old Bull Lee, Elmer Hassel, Jane: Lee in Texas growing weed, Hassel on Riker's Island, Jane wandering on Times Square in a benzedrine hallucination, with her baby girl in her arms and ending up in Bellevue. And Dean told Carlo of unknown people in the West like Tommy Snark, the clubfooted poolhall rotation shark and cardplayer and queer saint. He told him of Roy Johnson, Big Ed Dunkel, his boyhood buddies, his street buddies, his innumerable girls and sexparties and pornographic pictures, his heroes, his heroines, adventures. They rushed down the street together, digging everything in the early way they had, which later became so much sadder and perceptive and blank. But then they danced down the streets like dingledodies, and I shambled after as I've been doing all my life after people who interest me, because the only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn and say commonplace things, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow candles exploding like spiders across the stars and in the middle you see the blue centerlight pop and everybody goes "Awww!" What did they call such young people in Goethe's Germany? Wanting dearly to learn how to write like Carlo, the first thing you know, Dean was attacking him with a great amorous soul such as only a con-man can have. "Now Carlo, let me speak - here's what I'm saying . . ." I didn't see them for about two weeks during which time they cemented their relationship to fiendish allday-allnight-talk proportions.
Then came spring, the great time for travelling, and everybody in the scattered gang was ready to take one trip or another. I was busily at work on my novel and when I came to the halfway mark, after a trip down South with my aunt to visit my brother Rocco, I got ready to travel West for the very first time."
The brilliant Jack Kerouac with one of my favourite passages from On the Road.
This week I finished the last of my high school assessment and the weather seemed to pick up on the escasties of my friends and I. It's been a lovely week of too hot, muggy weather that makes my blood sing even louder and my skin burn with the sun as well as my excitement. I feel light, free and full of optimism for the future, fully aware of my strengths and the strengths of all the wonderful people around me. Here's two songs that are, I suppose, soundtracking these days for me in a most spectacular way:
Indie pop at its very, very, very best. Gloriously infectious in a way that makes you thankful that you've got something this great to sing along to as you skip down the street. It's feelings in sound in all their complexity: wondering, hesitant and confusing even in happiness. Full acknowledgement that we can't ever turn your brain off for just a minute and just stop thinking. Can we enjoy this moment now or do we only know how to enjoy the prospects of the future and smiles from our pasts?
[from Yes or No which you should get if you know what's good for you, I love every song on this album]
Last year's summer anthem is remade into something, possibly, even more uplifting by The Very Best [go here - you can download to the entire album/mixtape for free!], I've posted about these guys before, as I said, they're a collaboration between the fantastic Malawian singer Esau Mwamwaya and Radioclit. I really cannot get enough of the clear and uplifting voice of Esau over the much loved guitar of 'Paper Planes'. Bend your knees, raise your arms and let the familiar sounds wash over you.
I just spent a good hour and a bit looking through the fascinating, varied and beautiful work of Isabel Asha Penzilen. She takes the most wonderful photographs of artists, musicians and couples in their homes as well as contrasting landscapes, cityscapes, nature, misplaced objects and nameless people. She somehow, amazingly, manages to make her images both hazy and sharp, full of soft tones but clear with contrast - like soft, dreamy skin and dark, intent eyes.
I also loved the pictures of some of my favourite musicians in their practice spaces.
Congratulations America, it's been a long time coming. I've been quietly confident for some months now that this amazing feat would come about and that having a point of view would become more than just a useless, pointless exercise in frustration. The last eight years have been horrific but the sun is shining again. It's going to be difficult to undo all the bad that's been done, but I've never seen such an intelligent, well spoken and, most inportantly, level headed politician in all my life and I have no doubt that 'yes we can'.
It isn't the first time he's made me cry, he pulls my cynicism and apathy completely to pieces. If you haven't seen this yet, then you must:
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