But that day, in Rampworx, Liverpool’s biggest skatepark, Lianne La Havas confided she was really happy to be here with us, again. Because we had never filmed her live.

It was a rather unusual show. Everyone, Lianne, James on the piano, the audience, packed in a skate bowl. It was huge, but it felt intimate. Maybe because the space around us, the whole skatepark, was gigantic. The Liverpool brats who had been skating all day were gone. Everything was empty except for Lianne and 200 captivated people before her. All ears. Her prettiness, her powerful voice and her sincerity – it was enough to enthrall us. Really, she must have sang a thousand times how much of a bastard this guy had been to her. But every time feels like he played her only minutes before.

 A Yale educated painter, a buried psych folk legend, a draft dodger and teacher, Ed has remained in the cult spotlight throughout the 2000s thanks to a resurrection by Drag City in 2011 and a continued distribution of new material via his band camp page.

 Tracked down via a label contact, we joined Ed in a communal home that Diane Cluck had tracked down for our uses in Ditmas Park where she was readying the room to sing harmonies with Ed, now in his 70s, on some of the songs from his soon-to-be-released new record.

We spent an afternoon with him. And the particular afternoon in question was passed in the company of a fragile being, picked up and dropped in an alien universe by a force so much greater than him. We didn’t speak the same language.

We were at le Sentier, having met in a piano bar near Oberkampf. We got there by métro. And in the métro, there was Devon, anxious, hesitant, glued to the platform. He got to singing, but his voice wasn’t steady enough to hide his timidity. A dozen trains rolled by before he was able to take the step, to deliver himself to the crowd of weary creatures, seated with their eyes fixed on him. When the doors closed, there was just this thin voice struggling to distinguish itself from the brouhaha of the train car. Then gradually, the train accelerated and with it his voice expanded.

In the métro and in the bar where he sang “Bugs Don’t Buzz”, Devon had this crazy look about him. All those times that someone has described a singer as being figuratively elsewhere, while he sings; Devon Welsh is literally elsewhere. He’s definitely looking at something, but something none of us can see. When he sings, Devon is addressing someone that only he sees, but whose presence none of us can deny. Bulging in their sockets, his eyes see beyond ours, and his voice takes us far away.

Translated by Dexter Blumenthal

-Kelli Mayo

I called Skating Polly on a sunny afternoon from the deck of an apartment in a quiet neighborhood outside of Paris. The hoarse voices of Peyton Bighorse and Kelli Mayo, originating in Oklahoma and rising from the speakerphone into the day, are content to be back home–they had a show last night.

Since an impromptu halloween party jam session in 2009, stepsisters Kelli–13–and Peyton–17–have been making music as Skating Polly. When I ask about the name Kelli’s first response is: “We wanted something kind of ironically juvenile.” I can’t help smiling as she goes on to explain how the name Skating Polly is meant to evoke an ironic tension between the girls’ stature and the sincerity of the music they write, “we are little, but we try not to act cutsie or little whenever we’re actually making our music. It was just this image in my head, like, skater girls are all tough or whatever and that clashes with the idea of Pollys being princesses.” Also, she tells me, the K in ‘Skating’ is for Kelli, and the P in ‘Polly’ is for Peyton.

Skating Polly is not a kid band–they don’t write songs about getting put down at school, or about love, which at this age they admittedly know nothing about. They don’t seem to have an age, actually, or to address a particular age group; their music speaks to everyone and is laced with universals. Halfway through one of their songs, you might notice the stinging of an impending tear welling in your eye for no particular reason, and then you realize that there’s just something innately beautiful about the phrase “lost wonderfuls,” something that coaxes powerful emotions to the surface. And I can’t say for sure what that something is, because it’s different for all of us.

Yet apparently “Lost Wonderfuls” is about a stranger’s encounter with a secret government agency–Peyton and Kelli don’t take lyrics too seriously. They don’t worry about making sense given their propensity for choosing a repeated lyric like ‘Placer’ because “the word sounds interesting with the music.” What is Placer supposed to mean? Even Kelli couldn’t tell you, but that’s of little importance because the lyric makes sense exactly where it is. The track is one of the purest, most evocative pieces of punk rock you’ve heard since the last time you listened to “Debaser” by the Pixies. Skating Polly covers a host of genres without losing that unique signature, the timbre in the voice that can always be traced back to the musician–a musical fingerprint, however subtle. “I always try to write music that sounds like it’s coming from the same person” Kelli says of their multi-genre setlist. They’ve listed artists like Johnny Cash alongside Nirvana and Babes in Toyland as influences. A Beirut-esque ukulele track, a simple, plodding piano piece, and the scorching scream-filled chorus of ‘Placer’ are artfully crammed into their latest disc.

For a pair of teenagers whose mentors have included Exene Cervenka of the ‘80s punk rock group X  and Kliph Scurlock of the Flaming Lips, Peyton and Kelli are admirably modest when it comes to discussing their musicianship, “I always kind of think, at least of myself, that I can’t play anything” Kelli admits. Between the two of them, they play guitar, drums, keys, bass, and a homegrown instrument called a bassitar–a guitar strung with two bass strings tuned a fifth apart–that their father made for Kelli when her fingers were still too small to play all six strings of an actual guitar. Small, yes, but the levelness of their voices, the assuredness that buttresses their statements–it’s evident that time spent in this brutal business where judgement and taste are the primary arbiters of success has taught valuable lessons in self-confidence, faith and perseverance. Peyton is telling me about the time they opened for Band of Horses,  ”I didn’t notice that people in the crowd were booing until our family told us after, and then people up front looked like they were annoyed and bored out of their minds. If I ever thought I started looking like I was bored I would look at them because I thought it was pretty funny that they looked so bored,” to which Kelli adds: “Yeah, whenever I see people plug their ears or look like ‘this is just noise, I don’t like this’ I just kind of get humor out of it and play harder. I throw a music tantrum.” What the members of Skating Polly just described is every artist’s worst nightmare, except the fans are twice their age–yet these two are completely unfazed.

Skating Polly is a duo of unfailing optimists. In between the answers they offered me–answers more honest and thoughtful and unburdened by ego or pretension than those most adults in their position could have given–they giggled. They talked about being booed on stage and they giggled. Skating Polly is not a kid band, but they remind us what it’s like to be kids, unaware of age, delivered from the weights we ultimately hang on ourselves with the passing years. There’s a sort of wisdom to be found in their music, at once tranquil and determined. “Me and Petyon plan on doing this for the rest of our lives” says Kelli, and there isn’t a doubt in my mind that they’re going to do exactly that.

Bonus : “Walking With Jesus (Spacemen 3 cover),” Skating Polly feat. Depth & Current

We had work to do : transform one of their cages, usually meant to welcome ‘Ultimate Fighters’, into a stage : remove gratings, clip some lights, plug the instruments. At the end of the afternoon, everything was ready to welcome Fenech-Soler. The show was for sure not as violent as what probably happens the rest of the time in this cage. But it was as energetic : Ben Duffy was jumping, shouting, dancing, arousing the audience, as if his fight was to get everybody around him dancing. He sure succeeded.

Arriving in Rome we felt bizarre, thrown out of sync with the rest of the city. It was the day that François, the new pope, was to be inaugurated; holy men were to be found strolling on every via, street or strata; a helicopter hovered over the distant Piazza San Pietro.

We had to find the seven members of Of Monsters And Men at the start of the afternoon. The group, having just arrived from Bologna the previous evening, proposed that we stay with them for part of the day to film a Take Away show before their concert later that night.

For once, we found ourselves in the same situation as the group: having arrived just hours ago in a city foreign to us, we had to improvise, take everything as it came to us with only intuition to guide our choice of locations that we hoped would complement the fantastical music of Of Monsters And Men.

We met up at the top of one of Rome’s abundant hills with the idea that, in any case, it would be easier to wander back down into the city in search of an appropriate place to film.

Upon their arrival, Nanna and Ragnar, the group’s two lead singers, confirmed our intuitions: they also wanted to amble about the city. We caught them in the middle of an exceptionally long tour, 12 months that would carry them across 4 continents to finish in the United States in October, and they came to us with the firm intention to see as much of the eternal city as possible in their few free hours.

Questioning Nanna about these interminable tours she replied that she likes the promiscuity of being on the road, sharing every moment with her bandmates, many of whom are old friends that she’s worked with in the past.

One has the impression that with Nanna, music is a family affair, and that for her the success of a band’s vocal contingent lies in an attitude of collusion.

Once everyone is adequately equipped, we set off to stroll in Rome with a collective bent towards spontaneity. The uptempo attitude of the group, their overall kindness is quite hard to pass over without admiring. Very soon after, we test the natural acoustics.

At last, it’s in a little piazza near Trastevere, at the intersection of multiple side streets and back alleys that the adequate location reveals itself. The band stops to practice ‘Dirty Paws’ in the middle of a flotilla of pedestrians, first stunned then charmed by the sound of the first few timid measures. In no time, percussion and vocal harmonies take hold of the song and resonate in this place from another age: we are in Rome, at the center of the world. The music of Iceland’s vast spaces echoes between these walls that ancient history built.

On the way back, I asked Anna how the group had felt during those moments, whether they were accustomed to this genre of exercise. She was content simply to smile: it was a moment, un bel instant ensemble.

Even though we’d explained the concept of a Soirée de Poche quite well, they arrived with electric guitars and amps, and every intention to use them. We repeatedly asked them to turn down the volume–during soundcheck then during the soirée–but they didn’t. At any rate, it was futile: the voice of Neil Pennycook is sufficiently powerful to cover all of the crashing, smashing percussion in the world. So, we let him sing loud, and we let his acolytes play loud too. Even the cellist was going at it, riffing almost violently on his instrument (it was Pete Harvey, who plays in The Leg, which I think explains a lot).

We also knew, after a Take Away Show with them, that Meursault’s songs were malleable and that they were necessarily going to experiment with their set, playing some tunes with a relaxed air, as if exclusively in the company of friends, seated around a campfire in an old cabin in the woods. And as if by magic, there was this moment of calm, a bit outside of time itself, on a bridge traversing the Canal Saint-Martin, only disturbed by the regular beeping of a parked scooter’s alarm. Neil thought it was funny; he adapted his performance to the circumstances. He also used the occasion to revisit a few old songs, to try out some unedited and above all loud tunes, and to play raw, drawn-out versions of the singles off his last album Something For the Weakened (he replaced the string quartet on the recording). Among the night’s other songs, he did a very beautiful, very intense and stripped-down version of his “William Henry Miller” (reversing the “Part II” and “Part I”).

Once our fears of waking the whole neighborhood had dissipated, there were smiles, and then laughs…and in the end a lot of happy people.

It was the first Soirée de Poche dedicated to a Scottish band…and it held its promises.

http://meursaultmusic.com

Concrete dust blankets us in a light, toxic haze as a single light is dragged into place and Colin warms up powerful lungs. There are no run-throughs though. From the first note, I am lead on a performance odyssey that demands a reciprocal discipline of the document. Thousands of notes to the end, here stripped of any visual distraction. A big, black cave for a monster to scream in.

The execution is an antidote to cynicism. This is work, and it is impossible to walk away uninspired. As the player lurches forward and heaves to catch his breath by the end, so too does your mind seek a beat to catch itself, process the sheer magnitude of the experience it has barely kept pace with. These videos though, are two dimensional at best. If Colin Stetson plays even remotely close to the place you live, you will suffer deep regret if you do not seek him out. Stop reading this article, and check his tour dates now. I’m not even going to close with a proper concluding paragraph. Go find out when he is playing and get off the internet. This is music to save your life.

It was like nothing, no one, was waiting for us. As if we could have been left to play indefinitely, to fool around, joke about Wilco and the Black Keys, thumb through racy magazines from another era, do twenty takes of the same song. It really felt like we moved in a different time, and looking over these videos today, even though Portugal the Man hasn’t released their new album, I couldn’t watch without feeling a certain nostalgia. As if the preceding spring was sweeter still than the one we’re greeting now.

Kodaline is a band that makes you feel old. A group that knows how to draw tears and exalting squeals from girls who only stepped out of adolescence days ago; a band that shamelessly exhausts all the tricks in the book, as predictable as they are effective; melodic swells that give way to soaring harmony; a trembling voice at the end of a chorus; stories of love lost and vows of eternal passion. If we hadn’t searched beyond their music videos, we would have left them to be mobbed by girly magazines. But then there was this unusual video where they sang in an isolated room, and in which their emotion was sincere and their performance stunning.

The advantage of these lyrical groups is that they’re candy for the camera. In the more handsome areas of the city, Colin had only to let himself be guided, hypnotized as if on a track by that voice to which he also pinned his movements, his pace and his breathing. Paris did the rest, up until we met the merchant who lent us his van: “he’s good, that guy there, the Romeo, he’s going places”. An ocean of girls are thinking the exact same thing as you, Monsieur!