Leonard Cohen – A Thousand Kisses Deep (A Cappella Demo), [Unreleased]

My knowledge of the provenance of this track is pretty limited; I randomly stumbled onto it back in the days of Audiogalaxy, but I’ve kept it close since. It’s nothing more than Cohen reciting the lyrics from (an early version of?) “A Thousand Kisses Deep” without accompaniment. The words take on a different rhythm without the lush backing found on Ten New Songs, tripping over themselves yet somehow remaining stately. This version doesn’t have all the same lines from the album version, but some of the best are only found here (“I loved you when you opened like a lily to the heat”) and I still prefer its two minutes to the original six and a half; on headphones, it sounds like Death whispering softly in your ear. Either version is rich with the despair/wisdom/memory that overlays all of late-period Cohen like a shroud, but stripped of everything but that voice, the words settle around you like snow.

[visit Cohen’s website here, buy Ten New Songs here, read Colin Cooper’s Stylus feature on “Hallelujah” here]

Kid606 – Temptation, [Kid606/LSR European Tour 7″]

This was apparently part of a tour 7” on 555 records, but realistically you’re only going to find it on the internet. This is a shame, because Depredo does an amazing job of covering New Order’s best song. The guitar line that introduced the original after Bernard Sumner’s “oohs” subsided is replaced by a warmly fuzzy sound that slowly phases into existence; eventually a glassy keyboard part takes over what would have been the vocal melody. Around 3 1/2 minutes in a new noise that occasionally scales upwards, stopping just short of pain like a feedback whine, appears and echoes in the background. Percussion clicks and burbles in the background. Finally this version gives up on emulating New Order explicitly, the glassy sound shatters softly into fragments of light, and the song sighs its way out of this world. The original is, for me, a shout of joy; the Kid’s version is still basically the same but with wordless cries in place of vocals it takes on a bittersweet air. If the original is a song to hear on a train taking you to meet someone, the landscape speeding by just out of reach, then this version is you on the same train going in the opposite direction, speeding away again, preparing yourself for the wait before you can see them again.

[visit the 555 Recordings website here, buy Kill Sound Before Sound Kills You here, read Ian Mathers’ review of Kill Sound Before Kills You here]

The Sycamores – Astroghost, [Unreleased]

Originally this was going to be offered as an example of the work of my favorite lost band of all time. The Sycamores hail from Nova Scotia, made an absolutely brilliant self-released record called Farewell To Deseronto, slowly disintegrated (although they made another album) and then just vanished. Their website went down, the email address I used to have for frontman Corey Walling didn’t work, and so on. As Farewell To Deseronto is my second favorite Canadian album of the past ten years or so, I took this pretty hard. But now, they’ve resurfaced! Their website has three new MP3s up and promises an album later this year. This means, basically, the Sycamores are my Wrens (although I also love the Wrens, of course). I still want everyone else to hear “Astroghost”, but now it feels like a celebration rather than a remembrance. Picking just one song to represent the band’s best album and their sound in general is tough (Farewell To Deseronto really does deserve to be heard in full), but “Astroghost” has most of the essential ingredients, from the lyrical reference to life in an underachieving band to those guitars! That keyboard! In a mere 3:14 the Sycamores manage to make you think you’re hearing a full-fledged epic.

[visit The Sycamores’ website here]