Someone to dance with

Image: Q's

The Only Lonely Girl - Storm Gordon

In this shy, soul-smattered disco track, Storm Gordon fails to live up to her name. Her voice is as easy, gentle breezy as a bright June morning, her phrasing a succession of graceful pivots and limber swoops over a balmy beat and electric pulse. The lonely girl's not so much lonely, as alone (a crucial distinction) dancing with herself, but self-contained, complete.

From Someone To Dance With (eMusic). Storm Gordon's Myspace.

Simon Sez - Baby Dayliner

I don't know if you remember that recurring Saturday Night Live skit from several seasons back with the goth kids in Florida? Not particularly funny, but it nevertheless neatly captured the pathos and poignance of alternative culture-making in a relentlessly normative climate. Think of Baby Dayliner (New Yorker Ethan Marunas) making a similarly silly and audacious and possibly profound gesture in a club cluttered with tan-limbed girls and street-language slinging suburban dudes. Enter heaving synths and a labored thump-thump, then the delicious artifice of BD's stentorian demand: Move all you females on the floor. Titters and head shakes follow, more drinks are poured and passed around. The white-pallored DJ in tight jeans boosts the beat and pleads, can't you hear talk is cheap? And promises, hit the dancefloor, I swear it's better than the rest love has to give. And some of these girls and boys (but only a few), slowly venture out to inhabit the pure unthinking--if only for a few hot, damp minutes.

From Critics Pass Away (Amazon, eMusic). Baby Dayliner's Web site.

Also:

Nick Southall of Stylus has written a beautiful, bittersweet piece on the dismantling of a great record collection.

Merge Records is having a charity auction on eBay with signed CDs of every 2006 Merge release (including albums from Destroyer, Robert Pollard, Essex Green, Portastatic, Spoon, Lambchop, Camera Obscura). Think very, very special Christmas/Hanukkah present.