The Easy Gramophone ft The Limes

1. Leopold and His Fiction - Be Still
Be Still is built around rattling drum-sticks and a persistent kick drum, but despite the track's indie-rock vitality there's a distinct aura of weariness. Leopold, or perhaps his fiction, sounds tired. And this contrast seems to manifest a particular spring angst, like Wilco's Jeff Tweedy getting into a fight in a New York garden.
Download at: http://www.leopoldandhisfiction.com/songs.htm

2. Skuli Sverrisson - Geislar Hennar
While I was in Iceland I stopped at the record-shop 12 Tonar and asked the owner for some recommendations. "This is one of the best album ever made," he said, and he gave me a white CD by Skuli Sverrisson, called Seria. We listened to it as we drove through ice and snow, around icebergs, toward the Northern Lights. There's an old, steady melancholy to this drone and wheeze; to the organs and guitars that seethe under Olof Arnalds' song.
Download at: https://www.smekkleysa.net/shop/item.php?id=598

3. Katie Dill - The Body's Only Rental
She strums the hard steel of a ukulele and sings to an echoing, empty room. But while she sings some sad lines - "And lonely is what you make it / and I am sure to make it," - there's nothing sorrowful in the song's lifting la-la-la. She's a singer-songwriter with a heart full of hopes, and every confidence in tomorrow.
Download at: http://www.myspace.com/katiedillmusic

4. The Limes - Between Roof and Bird
The Limes are a collaboration: the French groups Toy Box and Orouni, the Paris-and-New-York singer Mina Tindle, the songwriting of an American called Henry Sparrow. Trading bits-and-pieces by email can seem like a recipe for disaster, for an incoherent whole, but instead The Limes make something remarkable. Between Roof and Bird is insisting in its gentleness, like a dozen voices calling and being loudly answered. Tindle sings with a dusky jazz-singer's voice and behind her there's organ, cello, guitar, and a wistful love.
Download at: http://www.myspace.com/thelimesproject

5. Sufjan Stevens - Casimir Pulaski Day (demo)
I shared a Sufjan duet last month and yes, again here's more - but here's the thing. Whereas Sufjan's albums are often meandering, unfocused, on individual songs he's forced to tighten things up. So these one-off appearances are worth crowing about. Casimir Pulaski Day is the single finest song that Sufjan Stevens has ever recorded, and this demo shows it before it's fully grown, before there's hair on its legs. The timidity is almost cute - especially when Sufjan threatens to "kick [someone] in the face" - and for all its wussiness the lyrics remain a beautiful, complicated rumination on death, god, and a little bit of sex.
Download at: http://asthmatickitty.com/news.php?newsID=133