Antony

I love stumbling upon new things that give unexpected pleasures. Normally, it’s musicians I haven’t heard before, even if they have been around for years. This happened to me a couple of weeks ago. Every year on a weekend towards the end of January we celebrate Wellington Anniversary — it’s a holiday weekend when we get the Monday off work. We normally go camping with our friends to our favourite spot on a farm by a river. This year the weather was terrible, so we stayed at their house in the city instead. We mooched around town on the Saturday, and ended up back at their house in the last afternoon with a new jigsaw puzzle to kill the time. (I know, we were really desperate!)

While we were doing the puzzle and grazing on delicious food, my friend put on a DVD of I’m Your Man, a concert featuring songs by Leonard Cohen. I was a bit dubious because, 30 years ago, I had a flatmate who loved Leonard Cohen and tried to get me interested. I was more interested in jazz rock, reggae and punk/new wave at the time, and I thought he was dreadful (Leonard Cohen, that is. I was very interested in the girl I flatted with :devil:). Anyway, the concert was very good, but the song that stopped me dead was If It Be Your Will, sung by Antony (Hegarty). It is a beautiful version of the song. The video is on YouTube, but I can’t embed it (sorry, it’s been disabled). It’s at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1MDlMdu2gjw. The lyrics are worth a close look, too.

“If It Be Your Will”
Leonard Cohen

If it be your will
That I speak no more
And my voice be still
As it was before
I will speak no more
I shall abide until
I am spoken for
If it be your will
If it be your will
That a voice be true
From this broken hill
I will sing to you
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing
From this broken hill
All your praises they shall ring
If it be your will
To let me sing

If it be your will
If there is a choice
Let the rivers fill
Let the hills rejoice
Let your mercy spill
On all these burning hearts in hell
If it be your will
To make us well

And draw us near
And bind us tight
All your children here
In their rags of light
In our rags of light
All dressed to kill
And end this night
If it be your will

If it be your will.

So, after that little epiphany, I’ve been searching for more Antony and the Johnsons songs. I’ve picked up their début, self-titled album from 2000. Probably my favourite song from it is Cripple and the Starfish.

And another one I love is from the 2005 I Am A Bird Now album. The song You Are My Sister features Boy George on the chorus.

“You Are My Sister”
You are my sister, we were born
So innocent, so full of need
There were times we were friends but times I was so cruel
Each night I’d ask for you to watch me as I sleep
I was so afraid of the night
You seemed to move through the places that I feared
You lived inside my world so softly
Protected only by the kindness of your nature
You are my sister
And I love you
May all of your dreams come true
We felt so differently then
So similar over the years
The way we laugh the way we experience pain
So many memories
But theres nothing left to gain from remembering
Faces and worlds that no one else will ever know
You are my sister
And I love you
May all of your dreams come true
I want this for you
They’re gonna come true (gonna come true)

Love the singing, love the lyrics, love the video.

Random music videos

Here’s some stuff I’m listening to at the moment. No particular reason and in no particular order, except it’s on my MP3 player.

Common Market are part of the Seattle hip hop underground. They’ve released two excellent albums, Common Market and Tobacco Road and an EP Black Patch War. The two members, RA Scion and Sabzi, are both Bahá’í and their music has strong spiritual and political themes.

RA Scion likes to publish and explain all his lyrics (in great detail) and you can see them at http://www.commonmarketmusic.com/index.php

The Undertones were, for me, a perfect pop band. Hard guitar sound, all songs played at a breakneck speed and insanely catchy melodies. Brilliant! A very old promotional video from their first single Teenage Kicks (John Peel’s all-time favourite song).

Actually, while I’m on the topic of perfect pop songs, what about the Only Ones’ Another Girl Another Planet?

Blink-182 did a pretty tepid cover of this and managed to leave out all the urgency the Only Ones had in the original. There’s a debate about the relative merits of the two versions on YouTube. And when I say “debate”, I mean exchanges that look like 12 year olds trading puerile insults.:(

I hadn’t heard of The National until a couple of weeks ago; they were another spontaneous purchase off Emusic.com. Very nice bit of “grown up” rock music. The drummer’s my favourite musician; slightly unconventional playing.

I guess I’m going through a bit of a nostalgia trip at the moment. I just scored a live album from one of my all-time favourite punk bands, Ruts, from a 1979 gig at the Marquee in London. Of course, this song’s on it.

Enjoy.

Female ‘sing-songwriters’ I’m listening to at the moment

I’ve been listening to a bunch of different women singers/musicians lately, two of whom I’ve been impressed with for some time, and one who is brand new to me.

Firstly, there’s Ruth Theodore, an English folkie with a bit of a gypsy/jazz flavour to her music. She has a good range to her voice and is one hell of a guitarist, often playing a fast finger picking style. This song, ‘CO2’ off the album Worm Food, gives a good idea of her style.

Another really nice song is Grounded, although it’s a bit dificult to hear her over the background talking in this club! Nice guitar playing, though.

Actually, she reminds me a bit of Marian Arts — a New Zealand singer/songwriter/guitarist, who broke through in the 1970s as a member of the Red Hot Peppers, a jazz/folk combo that also featured her husband Robbie Laven, a terrific multi-instumentalist. They were moderately popular for about 4–5 years in NZ and Australia, the group broke up and Marian and Robbie went to Europe (Robbie’s homeland of the Netherlands), where they refined their style into a very European jazz/folk style. Robbie’s amazing playing get better, but the real change was in Marian’s singing, which took on more jazz stylings as she started playing with the sounds her voice could make. A former workmate of mine, Kevin Ikin (an excellent folk guitarist in his own right), had one of their albums from the 1980s The Lost Angel, which really turned me onto this style of music. I suspect it’s virtually impossible to get (I haven’t been able to find it anywhere on the net), but a specialist folk music supplier might be able to find a second-hand copy somewhere in the world.

Another woman I’ve been listening to for a while is Alina Simone, a Ukraine-born, USA-raised singer. She’s a more intense performer than Ruth Theodore — there’s more of the Ani DiFranco style in there. This song, ‘Night Swimming’ off the album Placelessness, is a good example of her style.

There’s not a lot of fun in her music. Her latest release, Everyone is Crying Out to Me, Beware, is a cover album featuring the music of Russian cult icon, Yanka Dyagileva, a Siberian punk-folk singer who died in 1991. This isn’t one of the songs from it (even though it’s in Russian).

The third, and latest singer I’ve discovered, is Jenny Owen Youngs, another American. She has a bit more folk/country sound, and she uses some of the types of instuments Ruth Theodore uses in her music — woodwind and string instruments as backing. She’s definitely more fun (generally) than Alina Simone. I downloaded her second release Batten the Hatches from emusic.com a couple of weeks ago and have been giving it a fair thrashing. This song, ‘Fuck Was I’, seems to be one of the better known songs from it.

She’s just released a new album, Transmitter Failure, which I haven’t heard yet, but hope to get in the next couple of days. This song ‘Clean Break’ is on it.

Jamendo – great online source of free (and almost-free) music

One of my favourite websites — Jamendo — was voted one of Cnet’s 2009 Webware 100 winners. Apparently, this is a big deal, and isn’t bad when you consider it is on the same list as iTunes, last.fm and Amazon MP3. The Luxembourg-based site has only been in operation since 2005 and is basically a music sharing site. It hosts more than 20,000 albums, many of which hold a Creative Commons license that lets users download tracks for free.

I hadn’t been on it for a few weeks — I’ve been getting enough new music from Emusic.com, which I was very disappointed to see wasn’t on the list of winners :down: — so I went to have a look to see what was new. There’s an interesting variety of music, with heaps of artists you wouldn’t normally hear of in a music market dominated by the USA and UK (as New Zealand is). Lots of music from Europe and Latin America. So, anyway, one of the first albums I came across was entripao by entripao, from Argentina. A good selection of slightly electronic, melodic rock. Check out their music…

But the real find was when I replied to a friend request (yes, just like My Opera) from Kris of the French group Borea. She’s the bass player, and she and her partner Fred, with drummer Nico, make up a fine pop group. A number of songs off their album Single Ride are on Jamendo.

If you like it, you can buy it from their site for 4€. Not a bad price, really.

Calexico

I first heard about these guys when I downloaded a version of a Goldfrappe song (Human) that Calexico had provided Spanish vocals for. I thought they were a Spanish group – understandably enough – and was a little disappointed to discover they were actually a couple of Anglos from California. But, the music won out, and I recently got a copy of their Hot Rail album, and it’s great stuff. This song is from it.

I’ve always loved western movies, so I’m a sucker for this sort of music. It reminds me of those great ‘spaghetti’ westerns from the 1970s featuring Clint Eastwood as ‘The Man With No Name’.

Baby Charles – hot retro-funk

These guys are terrific. I’ve only just started listening to them — I downloaded their album “Baby Charles” from emusic.com a few days ago and it’s high on the playlist. They’re an eight-piece band, fronted by singer Dionne Charles. I guess they are a bit like Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings, but with a much rougher sound. There aren’t many decent videos available on YouTube — mostly just parts of songs from live performances, but this item from RECmag.com is a pretty good intro to them (French subtitles).