MP3: Balmorhea – “Harm & Boon”

From All Is Wild, All Is Silent, out 3/10 on Western Vinyl

Everyday Marvels

Shelby Sifers - “Are You Devo? (The Spirituals remix)” If I had heard this remix in 2007, the year it came out, it would have been on my best songs list for that year. If I had heard it in 2008, it would have been on my list for last year (ps: this list is still online!). But no I just heard it last week, trollin' around after the Sarcastic Dharma Society. Shelby is a singer I know, but Tyler Tadlock & The Spirituals - they are new to me.

“Are You Devo?” is a song about loving someone as fiercely as you love a song. “Are you a man or are you Devo?”, Shelby asks. “Because I get the same strange feeling next to you / as when I put my Devo record on.” It's an odd thing to hear, coming from Shelby. Devo evokes blippy synthesisers, energy domes, “Whip It” - not the twisty earnestness of her songs. It's herky-jerk.

But what I later realise - and what the Spirituals understand from the beginning, - is that Sifers isn't saying that “my love feels like Devo.” She's saying “my love feels like how Devo makes me feel.” Which is to say, more herk- than -jerk, lunging and longing and lusting and leaping, breathing and dreaming, makes her feel alive and full of sparks. The Spirituals fill this beautiful song with bells, rings, swishes, claps, drums; they fill it with a lush pitterpat of glimmers, crashes, gleams. It's a remix that sounds like a kingdom falling down the stairs, a chandelier in the wind, a jazz combo at sea, a heart spun silver. It's the sound, I think, perhaps, of being in love.

Update: Mat from the Sarcastic Dharma Society in fact recorded the original "Are You Devo?", writing and playing all the "instrumental" bits other than the drums. Also, I got the year wrong. Anyway - thanks, Mat!

[Shelby Sifers's MySpace/download her albums free, Creative Commons-licensed/The Spirituals' MySpace]

Carrie Brownstein, on the dissolution of Touch & Go's distribution arm. I can't agree enough. If you care about music, please don't stop buying the records you love.

Being found is as splendid as the finding. Stumbling upon an MP3 or a blog or a Web site is only half the search. We seem to have forfeited our duties and become half-participants -- and at the cost of the creators. But we have to realize, and the Touch and Go announcement is a reminder, that in order for there to be anything left in which to participate, we have to show up. We have to show up with not just our half-selves, our virtual selves, our broke-ass selves, but with our whole selves, and in the spirit of giving. Mock participation is more than just an absence of real engagement; it is a falsehood that has allowed us to justify our apathy. When, exactly, did we stop showing up? And how long until there's not much left worth showing up for?

I don’t think this is a real, actual product, but still.

Bringing a modern-day charm to the long-forgotten LP player is the Zero. 1. It’s a CD Player that can also play the vinyl records. What’s really unique is that a system has been incorporated where the device is able to “read” the gaps between the tracks, memorize them, and make it selectable, quite like how you would do with a CD.


via Yanko Design

Dianne & Carole “Feelin’ The Pain” “Feelin’ The Pain” is a pained soul ballad, but it’d be hard to pick up on that if you tuned out the vocals and only paid attention to the rhythm section. The melody is plaintive, but the beat is all busy Latin funk, with groovy bass parts lifting the listener out of the sad bits and into an up-tempo fanfare that shifts the song’s self-pitying melancholy into a sort of ecstatic melodrama. I’m especially fond of the organ sound on this thing, and the way it melts into the strings, horns, and percussion to get this perfect, brilliant musical and emotional tone.

Buy it from Amazon.

The Broken West – “Perfect Games”

Swan Lake – “A Hand At Dusk” That best of all the Canadian troikas of musical geniuses, Swan Lake (aka Destroyer Dan Bejar, Frog-Eyes’ Carey Mercer, and Sunset Rubdown/Wolf Parader Spencer Krug) have released a track from their forthcoming record Enemy Mine (out 3/23 on Jagjaguwar). “A Hand At Dusk” is shambling but not shambolic, and should prove to be perfectly weird enough to please fans of any of the three principals.

This track was “Pitchfork‘s;” but note that you can also stream the “Spin Exclusive” of the track “Spider” at Spin.com, and you can download “Spanish Gold, 2044” if you sign up for Stereogum’s E-Newsletter.