Directed by Clara Balzary. From No Home Record, out now on Matador.
Kim Gordon already made a video for this song back in 2019, but if she’s going to go to all the trouble of making another video for it, I guess the least we can do is watch it.
This new one stars her daughter Coco who is getting down in a lumber yard parking lot. Kim herself makes a cameo appearance as a grumpy store manager and naturally steals the show.
And the song is still as cool as it was 16 months ago when we first heard it.
Directed by Joe Baughman. From Little Oblivions, due February 26 on Matador.
Whoa this is pretty dark.
Say it’s not so cut and dry
Oh, it isn’t black and white
What if it’s all black, baby?
All the time?
You might know Julien Baker as a member of indie rock supergroup boygenius, alongside fellow saddies Phoebe Bridgers and Lucy Dacus. All three of them are great.
Baker says, “A few years ago I started collecting travel ephemera again with a loose idea of making a piece of art with it. I had been touring pretty consistently since 2015 and had been traveling so much that items like plane tickets and hotel keycards didn’t have much novelty anymore. So I saved all my travel stuff and made a little collage of a house and a van out of it. I wanted to incorporate it into the record and when we were brainstorming ideas for videos we came across Joe Baughman and really liked his work so we reached out with the idea of making a stop-motion video that had similar aesthetic qualities as the house I built did. I don’t know why I have the impulse to write songs or make tiny sculptures out of plane tickets. But here it is anyway: a bunch of things I’ve collected and carried with me that I’ve re-organized into a new shape.”
What is it about sad music that can make you feel so good?
From How to Solve Our Human Problems (Matador, 2018).
“The video is a small tribute to the amazing people who posed, modeled and enrolled to appear in our artwork for the How To Solve Our Human Problems EP releases.”
I spent a semester at the University of Aberdeen in 1991-92. My dorm room in Dunbar Halls (demolished in 2003) had a bed, a desk, and a sink. When I first arrived at my new home I was greeted by the 70-year-old porter who spoke entirely in Scotticisms with such a thick accent that I literally could not understand a word he said and he practically had to drag me to my room. In relatively short order I would be proficient enough to not only understand what everybody was saying, but I also could tell where anybody was from. Maybe not down to the neighborhood like Henry Higgins, but the region for sure. That knowledge fades fast. These days I can’t even determine if someone’s from Ireland or Wales. But I used to.
All the people I knew from Glasgow were good looking. And I’m sure that not everybody in a Belle and Sebastian video or record cover is from Glasgow, that’s what I remember them all looking like. The band goes for a certain look. And back in 2016 they asked their fans to submit headshots to use as artwork on their upcoming series of EPs. Over 1,100 applicants submitted photos and the band ultimately selected about 50 people to shoot professionally. These were used for the artwork on the How To Solve Our Human Problems EPs.
And as a Throwback Thursday a couple weeks ago, Belle and Sebastian made this “wee video” to honor those folks. And they’re all good looking, just as I remember them being.
Directed by Loretta Fahrenholz. From No Home Record, out now on Matador.
You’ll never be as cool as Kim Gordon. It’s stupid to try. She proves it’s possible — although extremely rare — to be arty and rockin’ at the same time. Seriously, how many other musicians can pull this off without coming across as a totally pretentious dingdong? Her secret is that she confident and capable in both worlds. Plus she digs loud guitars noisy enough to blow the wine and cheese out of any art snob’s trembling hands.
Let’s make music
All day long
But not today
Some other time
Directed by Stuart Murdoch. From the Days of the Bagnold Summer original soundtrack, out now on Matador.
It’s not every day you hear Belle and Sebastian use the f-word, but these are not normal days, my friends.
Though the world is fucked according to the news
Doesn’t get you out of what you have to do
Though the world is fucked and swinging to the right
Doesn’t get you out of what you have to do tonight
“This Letter” is a pretty bossa nova ditty in the form of a letter to a special friend. “All I want for you is joy and peaceful love / Who you get it from is not my main concern.” Wonder if these guys have been listening to Leonard Cohen?
Stuart Murdoch says, “After the Boaty Weekender I got the chance to make another video. With limited time, I called upon 3/4 of boat mates Wet Look to help me out. They play three tired film crew people, who just made a Belle and Sebastian video – but they quite fancy having a go at filming themselves, so they get hold of Super 8 cameras, and start messing about.”
From Days of the Bagnold Summer, due September 13 on Matador.
It’s always uplifting to hear a new Belle and Sebastian song. And “Sister Buddha” is no exception.
And if God won’t show Her face
Fall upon your loving soul’s embrace
And I’ll send you all the love that I can find
Days Of The Bagnold Summer is the soundtrack album to an upcoming filmed directed by Simon Bird. It’s based on a graphic novel by Joff Winterhart and features eleven new Belle and Sebastian songs, plus two re-recordings of oldies. The movie is set for release in 2020 but the soundtrack will be out in September.
Directed by Jason Evans. From The Unseen In Between, out January 18, 2019 on Matador.
I like spooky music. Not necessarily scary music–though I have a small corner of my heart that’s draped in black set aside for Ministry as well–but music that is a bit unsettling. There are certain tones and vocal inflections that for one reason or another leave me at ill-ease. And I like it. I made an entire mixtape of 70s Creepout songs that were probably never intended to scare anyone when they were written.
Steve Gunn makes some spooky music and he’s one of my favorite artists of late. He has a good sense of melody and a great ear for guitar tones. Did he maybe spend some nights as a child falling asleep under a pile of coats while his parents partied in another room? My guess is yes.
Directed by Brandon Herman. From Lush, out June 8 on Matador.
Lindsey Jordan is a teenager from the suburbs of Baltimore who took guitar lessons from Mary Timony. And now she’s signed to Matador.
“Heat Wave” is my favorite kind of breakup song. The kind where the narrator bitterly wishes happiness on the person who broke her heart.
And I hope whoever it is
Holds their breath around you
Cause I know I did
Jordan is a badass guitar player and songwriter and — if this video can be taken as evidence — an equally badass hockey player as well. She says, “I hadn’t actually been on skates since I quit the high school team junior year, so immediately jumping into shooting this was equal parts difficult and super fun.” That’s awesome. Of course, her junior year was only a couple years ago; she graduated from high school in 2017. With a 4.1 GPA!
It’s been almost twenty years since I first heard Belle and Sebastian. A good friend of mine had picked up The Boy with the Arab Strap. We would have house parties every weekend back then. There would be a cooler in a back yard with a case of Pabst buried in ice with a six pack of craft beer on top. This was how we rolled. Everybody brought their own beer anyway, so you’d always end up with plenty. In the late 90s my friends all lived within walking distance, or at least close enough. Dogs but no kids yet. There was music as loud as the neighbors and wives would tolerate, played on CDs in boomboxes.
A party like this is where I was introduced to these Scottish introverts, probably with a disclaimer that they were lispy and effeminate. I was totally into sixties garage punk and Neil Young and fifties rockabilly and Wilco back then, so I’m sure it was a hard sell.
There’s still nothing like a warm autumn night in Michigan. When being young and having your own place and a little bit of money and getting loaded with your friends was all you needed in life. Laughing until you cried, dancing until you were sore, arguing about stupid stuff. So fun.
This was the same friend who introduced me to the Lucksmiths a couple years later and really opened up my musical tastes to gentler sounds with clever lyrics. A lot has changed since then. Life goes in all sorts of unexpected directions. People drift apart, change. Divorces, new jobs, kids, death in the family, moves across the country. We no longer have those kinds of back yard parties.
But maybe we should. Maybe it’s time to bust out the coolers and fill them up with Pabst. Throw some good beer on top. Invite some friends over and see what happens.
We had a time
If we could have it back over again
I’d be a force…
