Fingertips

This blog has been moved; update your RSS feed!

2010-08-11T13:11:00.003-04:00

This note is to remind you that the separate Fingertips blog no longer exists, but has been consolidated into the main Fingertips site, at www.fingertipsmusic.com

If you are reading this via your news reader, please update the feed address if you'd like to get back on board with the weekly Fingertips MP3 selections. The RSS feed is now located here:

http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/?feed=rss2

Now you'll be automatically redirected

2010-06-14T15:37:00.001-04:00

If you've come to find the Fingertips blog, it no longer exists here on Blogger. You will be automatically redirected to the new site within about five seconds. If you can't wait, the link is http://www.fingertipsmusic.com.

See you there...

Attention linkers: change the Fingertips URL

2010-06-11T22:41:00.002-04:00

Anyone currently linking to Fingertips using this Blogger URL is encouraged to change the link to http://www.fingertipsmusic.com. This Blogger site is no longer being updated.

Reminder about new site and new feed

2010-06-09T19:01:00.002-04:00

This week's MP3s will be posted tomorrow. Just wanted to remind everyone that Fingertips is now one site rather than two; the new site, now live at http://www.fingertipsmusic.com, incorporates the blog and the RSS feed.

Please change your feed URL through Feedburner. It's as simple as can be.

Thanks, and see you at the new site...

This week's posts now up on redesigned Fingertips site

2010-05-27T15:59:00.002-04:00

The new MP3s this week are from Sarah Harmer, Light Pollution, and Sarah Jaffe. But you won't be able to read about them here, alas.

Because the time has come to relieve Fingertips of its split personality and deliver one site where there used to be two. The newly redesigned Fingertips site is now itself much more blog-like than before, rendering the existence of this separate blog suddenly and permanently superfluous.

Weekly song picks will no longer be available here. Actually, pretty much nothing new will be available here moving forward.

But to ease the transition, I will for the time being post weekly here just to let everyone know that the new week's songs are up and to remind everyone to switch over to the new RSS feed.

You can do that via Feedburner.

I'm also working out whether the existing RSS feed can be automatically redirected. Such a thing is beyond my technological IQ but I've got some crack technicians on the job as we speak.

I will not be sorry to be off Blogger, but I will be sorry to leave my Blogger followers behind. The best way to follow Fingertips moving forward, besides simply subscribing to the new RSS feed, will be through either Facebook or Twitter or, even better, both.

Free and legal MP3 from The King Left (sharp, rumbling rocker at the edge of dissonance)

2010-05-18T22:34:00.001-04:00

"The Way to Canaan" - The King Left
     Okay so noise is one thing. When you come right down to it, it's easy to make noise. Never understood what the fuss was about from the rock'n'roll primitivists who glorify sheer volume. I mean, okay--turn the bloody amps up and boom. It's noisy. Like, wow.
     Start combining noise with discipline and you begin to get my attention. Start understanding music enough to create different kinds of noise, not all of which are simply loud, and now you've really got something going. The King Left certainly does, playing continually along the edge of dissonance in this sharp, rumbling rocker. From the outset, we get no settled sense of tonic, a base chord to call home; instead we get slashing, clanging guitars and--key to keeping things unsettled--a dynamic bass line, running up and down and all around. The sound is at once harsh and tight. And listen to where the music goes when the lyrical line ends, at 0:27, and again at 0:40--we're left not only without resolution but bopping itchily in a clashing key, with that bass guitar refusing to ground us in a stable place. The chorus at long last delivers an anthemic release, but--there's a catch--buries it under a searing lead guitar, while Corey Oliver, even as he all but shouts, delivers his vocals as if now down in the basement. Nothing is easy but the hand-hold here is that it's all very precise. Knowing you're in good hands relaxes the ear, I think.
     The band's MySpace page lists Radiohead, The Beatles, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Nirvana, and R.E.M. as its first five influences and damned if "The Way to Canaan" isn't some kind of crazy-brilliant amalgam of all five. The song is from the New York City quartet's first full-length album--which is unfortunately also their last. They played their final show last week and are now no more. MP3 via the band's site. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head's up.

Free and legal MP3 from Sarah Blasko (smoky vocals over Morricone-ish setting)

2010-05-18T22:33:00.001-04:00

"All I Want" - Sarah Blasko
Nothing says "cinematic" better than a Morricone-inspired whistling introduction, but I like how down-to-earth and personal everything still manages to sound here. Often this kind of spaghetti western-ish styling opens up sweeping vistas with a certain amount of ironic winking, conjuring bleak deserts and dusty trails in an almost cartoonish way. But here Blasko takes the whistly intro, the Spanish-like guitar, and a touch of martial snare and wraps them up in her smoky, heartsore voice, singing a simple, haunting melody. By the time the strings arrive, we aren't picturing a lonesome rider in the blistering vastness of the faux Wild West; she is clearly singing about inner landscapes, not outer ones. That producer Björn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn and John fame) has found a way to personalize a musical setting rooted in outsized gestures is a mighty part of this song's charm, but it took Blasko's distinctive husky-breathy voice to pull it off. I'm guessing her voice gave him the idea in the first place. There's something haunted and unreachable in it.
Blasko is from Sydney, where she has a sizable following after three well-regarded albums. "All I Want" is from her third and most recent CD, As Day Follows Night, which was recorded in Stockholm with Yttling and released last year in Australia and this spring in Europe. A U.S. release is scheduled for August.

Free and legal MP3 from Pallers (graceful electronic dance-ballad)

2010-05-18T22:32:00.000-04:00

"The Kiss" - Pallers
     This graceful electronic dance-ballad unfolds with a New Order-like majesty, but minus the melodrama. Despite the quickly established synth-driven pulse, a gentle dreaminess prevails during the song's careful build-up. There's no hurrying this song and in the end, you don't want to, because the payoff, while subtle, is deeply felt.
     So let this one happen on its own terms. The simple pulse--a robotic synthesizer line backed by a conga beat of organic simplicity--fuels an extended intro, while another synthesizer slowly plays with a melodic line that finally takes over the front of the mix nearly 50 seconds in. The singing starts at 1:06, adding a wistful melody to the carefully constructed beat. New synth lines emerge at 1:40. No one is in a hurry, remember. A new layer of percussion and previously unheard synthesizer flourishes add palpable substance around 2:30 but soon the song retreats back to its conga-and-synth origin before blossoming, from 3:00 to 3:15, into almost goose-bumpy wonderfulness the rest of the way, as the melody doubles its pace and we see now that our gentle electronic dream has transformed itself into something brisk, sturdy, and memorable.
     The Swedish duo Pallers is Johan Angergård (also a member of Acid House Kings, Club 8 and the Legends) and Henrik Mårtensson. "The Kiss" is a digital single due out next week on Labrador Records (a great Stockholm-based label, itself worth checking out). MP3 via Labrador.

Free and legal MP3 from Phosphorescent (slow-burning singer/songwriter fare w/ classic rock guitar)

2010-05-12T15:49:00.001-04:00

"The Mermaid Parade" - Phosphorescent
     At once laid-back and expansive, "The Mermaid Parade" brings a slow-burning quality to its sauntering vibe. Singing this affecting if slightly mystical (or maybe just surreal) tale of love gone wrong, front man Matthew Houck has the knocked-around tone of a man who's been hurt a little too much; his voice has a built-in crack to it without ever really cracking, and he sings with the relaxed cadence of someone slowly draining the beer from a long-necked bottle.
     And the thing, to me, that really gives "The Mermaid Parade" its piercing quality is the electric guitar that plays like a backbone through the skeletally told story. Neither fancy nor newfangled, the guitar brings a classic-rock majesty to the singer/songwritery proceedings. The climactic lyric is plainspoken and startlingly moving: "But yeah I found a new friend too/And yeah she's pretty and small/But goddamn it Amanda/Oh, goddamn it all."
     "The Mermaid Parade" is four tracks in on Here's To Taking It Easy, the fifth full-length release from Phosphorescent, a band which is basically Houck and anyone else he can get to play with him at the time. The album is out this week on Dead Oceans, sister label to Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar. MP3 via Dead Oceans.

Free and legal MP3 from Villagers (indirect, well-crafted keeper from Ireland)

2010-05-12T15:44:00.001-04:00

"Becoming a Jackal" - Villagers
     "Becoming a Jackal" is not necessarily an immediate smash hit; it insinuates rather than sweeps away. Never is it uninteresting, however, and I mean that quite literally, in a moment to moment way. Great hooks are awesome, don't get me wrong, but songs can sometimes coast a bit too much in between the hooks, not to mention that sometimes it's a fine line between hook-y and facile, never mind hook-y and annoying. (You'll know what I mean if you've ever gotten a song stuck in your head that you don't even like.) So there's definitely a place in my pop universe for songs like this that use well-crafted indirectness, unexpected twists, and tension-building restraint to gain your trust and devotion.
     Sink into the song's small moments, let them float by and gain strength, notice the subtle shifts in accompaniment, and eventually a few become their own, quirky sorts of non-hooky hooks. The recurring phrase "I was a dreamer" at the beginning of the not-very-chorus-like chorus may be the first that sticks but a number of other melodic motifs grow in stature as the song unfolds. I like the one that first comes, at 0:26, with the lyrics "in the scene between the window frames"; when we hear it (I think for the third time) at 2:21, with the lyrics "you should wonder what I'm taking from you," it sounds like a climactic moment, but only because of how artfully we've arrived there.
     Villagers is the name Dubliner Conor J. O'Brien has given to his musical project, which is kind of a band but kind of not a band. "Become a Jackal" is the title track to the debut album, to be released next month on Domino Records. MP3 via Domino.

The Free Music Mirage (a Fingertips Commentary)

2010-05-06T09:36:00.007-04:00

Some music free, certainly; all music free, no

Steadily, over the course of the last 10 years, the idea that recorded music "has" to be free has been transformed from a radical stance taken by those adept enough to navigate the geeky interfaces of file-sharing sites to a standard online rallying cry.

The tables have in fact been turned so entirely that anyone who dares now to suggest that people should still pay for recorded music can expect derision.

Along the way, many musicians themselves have acquiesced to the situation. Gamely, they've been willing to go along, willing to say, "Well, okay, if music has to be free, I'll figure something out, I'll get by."

But what if it's all been a figment of some overactive imaginations? What if recorded music does not in fact have to be free?

Looked at from the outside, free music is an odd conclusion to come to. To begin with, the idea originated in violation of intellectual property rights. However imperfect and in need of adjustment over time it may be, intellectual property is still a vital cultural concept. One can argue that certain aspects of intellectual property law are out of whack--such as the ridiculous copyright extensions that have been granted in recent decades--without concluding that there should be no intellectual property rights at all, or that musicians in particular should be giving their music away for no cost, all the time.

And there is also the matter of human decency. Even if you think you have good intentions, taking something for free that was not intended to be given out for free is not nice or fair. To turn around and distribute this same something to thousands of other people for free is, well, really not nice.

But of course the matter of music-sharing isn't quite so black and white. Also looked at from the outside, it should be clear that the taking and sharing of music online happens along a nuanced spectrum, including everyone from the aficionado sharing out-of-print music on a blog with fifty readers to someone who just loves a new song so much she wants to share it with a few friends to the kid stoked by ripping brand new mass-market CDs on the day of their release (or earlier) and putting them on the P2P networks.

A worthy discussion of all this might have been launched in the early '00s that accounted for the different kinds of sharing that was actually happening.

This discussion never much occurred, of course, in large part because the major record labels from the get-go have brooked no nuance, aiming to fight every instance of online file sharing, no matter the context.

It may be no coincidence that those arguing that music must be free have likewise been little interested in gray areas. Perhaps this arose as a counter-reaction to the mainstream music industry's onslaught, perhaps it's just that the free music adherents, like all good zealots, veer naturally towards extremism.

In any case, between vociferous calls to artists to stop even trying to sell actual music (they should be selling "experiences" instead; or, maybe, t-shirts) and gleeful anticipation of our imminent, cloud-based future--in which any one musician's specific songs or albums are worth fractions of pennies at best or are entirely ad-supported, and no one has to sell anything resembling either a physical product or a digital file--the free music crowd in 2010 is all but ready to declare victory.

But just because a lot of people believe something does not make it true, or right, or good. And because conversations on the internet tend to be dominated by the loudest and most self-promoting voices, it's all too easy for the true and right and good to be pushed aside.

And, bless their hearts, the free music folks have been nothing if not loud and self-promoting, convinced that they alone have a grip on reality. "Get used to it!" they explain. "Stop living in the past!" they clarify. One can all but feel their hands on one's collar, ready to yank us out of our humdrum, 20th-century-fixated lives.

But here's a news flash: it may be the free music cheerleaders who are stuck in the past.

They're the ones who are attached to the old-fashioned idea that monetary value depends on something having a three-dimensional presence.

As far as I can see, the truly future-oriented music visionary will be one with a plan that involves an industry economy that can and does attach genuine monetary value to digital entities.

Please understand that in arguing that music does not "have to be free," I am nevertheless not: a) a stooge for the major record labels; b) a believer that all music must on the other hand be paid for; c) convinced that great numbers of people will necessarily pay money for MP3 downloads per se as the future unfolds.

I understand that the technology will continue to evolve, that people may generally go in the direction of paying for access rather than ownership, and that as yet unanticipated options may arise. And I absolutely believe that there have been and will continue to be great benefits to loosening up our ideas of how and why music is distributed and paid for.

But make no mistake. Anyone who looks at the crazy, fluid, work-in-progress that is the 21st-century music scene to date and claims that the future requires all recorded music to be free both to own and to listen to is seeing things. It's a mirage. The rest of us should shake our heads, rub our eyes, and keep walking--we have an actual future to get to.

Going to Extremes

One reason the free music camp has gained credibility is because they are so resolutely opposed to an enemy already mistrusted and disliked. Few people stick up for the big record companies, for good reason. They have navigated the digital scene very badly, because--basically--they navigate badly in any arena in which fair practices must be maintained. They have consistently stood in the way of rightful progress.

But--this is the part you don't tend to hear--so have the free music proponents.

If the historical model for music revenue distribution was exploitative--which it most certainly was--then let's use this opportunity to change it. To insist that the new answer is that all recorded music must now be free is just as absurd and extremist a response to 21st-century realities as was the record companies' suing of their customers. The latter was a sort of fascist fever dream, while the former is little more than adolescent fantasy.

If nothing else, this insistence on a free music future seems an inexplicable diversion of good energy. Why are people more willing to fight for free music than to fight for a talented musician's right to earn money from his or her handiwork? Why do people jump through hoops to invent alternative scenarios for musicians to make money, rather than fight to defend the value of music itself?

These are worthy questions, not often addressed. Defending their position, some free music adherents sound like querulous children who don't want to be told they can't eat candy for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. Many respond with belligerance to anyone suggesting there might perhaps be moral or legal or logistical problems with their grand idea.

Curiouser and Curiouser

Now I'll admit, something without physical substance is a curious circumstance for a material species such as ourselves. And this is after all the bedrock of the "music must be free" stance: that something that's just digital bits doesn't really have to cost anything.

But then here is the even more curious circumstance. If we were willing to pay for music in the past, when it was housed on a compact disc or a cassette tape or a vinyl LP, and we are not willing to pay for music now, when we can still hear it--more conveniently than ever, I should add--then the implication is clear, but startling: in the past, we were paying solely for the physical object and not a penny for the music itself.

And yet of course that's wrong. Surely we were paying for the music--in fact, I'd say the plastic and the packaging were not much on our minds as we plunked down our money. And so--it seems quite clear in this context, yes?--if we were paying for the music back then, then we should still be paying for the music now. We should be paying for it, that is, with one notable change: the music should cost quite a bit less, because there are fewer material costs involved, and fewer distribution costs.

The bits argument is intellectual sleight of hand. We should dismiss it, and ask, instead: what is it about the internet that makes us think we should not and will not pay for music?

There is one camp that believes the answer to this question is a purely economic one--an argument most famously laid out by TechCrunch's Michael Arrington, who declared in 2007 that the price of music would "inevitably" fall to zero because the marginal production costs are zero. By this he meant that it costs nothing to produce an identical digital copy of any given song.

To his credit, Arrington encouraged discussion. He didn't shy from criticism, but dismissed most of it as "emotional." He argued from the position that economic theory was as immutable a truth as the law of gravity (which I feel compelled to point out it rather obviously isn't). He noted repeatedly that this isn't about fairness.

But in that case I have to say, with all due respect, that the argument is pointless. Fairness actually does matter, as the free market has always been properly constrained and guided by legal and cultural considerations. We live in a world of moral complexity, not of abstract economic theorizing. If you beg off the question of right and wrong then you have begged off having a voice in the matter worth listening to.

What, Me Worry?

Free music proponents who don't take refuge in hard-core economics like to employ two other prominent rationales to explain why the internet means music now has to be free. And if the economic theory rationalizers sidestep the right and wrong debate, the folks using the next rationale try to confront the morality issue head-on. This is the "I'm not doing anything wrong" rationale.

There are actually a few variations of this one, but the most common is the "I'm not doing anything wrong because nothing is actually stolen" argument.

This outgrowth of the "digital bits aren't real" concept overlooks the basic idea, mentioned earlier, that if you decide not to pay for something that the owner is otherwise asking a price for, and you take possession of this thing anyway, this is wrong. As soon as you start reverse-engineering a "What, Me Worry?" morality based on interpretation and semantics and loop holes, you've already skipped over the part about taking possession of something that is somebody else's without paying for it.

What's more, the entire premise is rooted in illogic. On the one hand, the "I'm not doing anything wrong" crew has argued that they should be able to take the digital music for free because it doesn't have any real value; on the other hand, they want the music enough to have it, which means--um--that is has value.

Because of course it does. Digital files may be elusive physically but they are still very real. To claim you're not stealing anything because the owner maintains the original file is nonsense. By a similar argument, one could say there's nothing wrong with hacking into your bank account and adding money to it because "nothing is being stolen."

Already Free? Um, No

The other interesting rationale for claiming that all music must be free is the "Music is already free" rationale. By this people mean that whether it was right or wrong no longer matters, everyone can get everything they want for free via file-sharing, why are we even discussing this any more, you idiots. (Or something like that.) Note that people using this argument are often kind of angry.

"Music is already free" is a rhetorical trick--the rationale of a wily debater who wants to frame the discussion past the point of argument. But it doesn't wash. The only way music is "already free" is if you're willing to take, for free, what the owners of that which you're taking are not offering for free. By the same assumption, one could say that everything currently in stores is already free to anyone willing to steal it.

And forgetting arguments over intellectual property rights for a moment, it should also be noted that music isn't "already free" because--minor detail--lots of people are still buying it.

People still buy CDs and people still buy digital downloads, in relatively large numbers, sometimes unexpectedly so (as with the recent Sade album, never mind the Susan Boyle album). Yes, sales are way down from where they were at the height of the CD boom, but the reasons for this are many and varied--a good subject for another essay. But there is no solid evidence to suggest that all the people who no longer are buying albums are now simply accessing their music for free, just as it is specious to pretend that no one at all buys music anymore.

Another nagging way reality is at odds with the "already free" vision: musicians themselves still sell their music. And, as Glenn Peoples recently discussed in Billboard, there remain compelling reasons for them to do so.

And what about the fact that 35 percent of Americans are still not using broadband? If you don't have broadband, you're not downloading music. Music is not free for these people.

And by the way, while precise information on this remains sketchy, common sense tells us that most people who are using broadband have no particular idea how to use the P2P networks, if only because the history of home technology has shown time and again that the average computer user has no interest in using anything even a little bit complicated.

Resuscitating Value

There is one final problem with the "music is already free" assumption; it is in fact a problem that compromises all arguments put forward by all free music zealots. And it is the indisputable fact that many music fans to this day enjoy buying songs and albums from musicians they like. Not t-shirts. Not special boxed sets of b-sides and remixes. Regular songs and albums.

I am one of these fans. And I for one resent the the assumption made by the free music advocates that anyone who is into music wants nothing more than to have all the music they want for free.

I find this kind of insulting.

Why do they think it's somehow wrong or old-fashioned to want to pay musicians for their art? Is it old-fashioned to buy a painting from an artist you admire? Is it old-fashioned now, somehow, to spend money on anything that someone else created and produced?

Which leads us back to the fundamental question I asked earlier: what is it about the internet that makes us think we should not and will not pay for music? To put it another way: why have so many people been hellbent on using the existence of digital files as an excuse to undermine the idea that an individual piece of music by an individual artist has actual value?

All this talk about how music "must" be free is peculiar in the midst of a society that has hardly abandoned the concept of capitalism. The free music camp think they're somehow saving or reinventing the music industry when they're actually bringing some big shovels to the graveyard.

And hiding behind alternative revenue schemes doesn't work. All these roundabout ways that musicians might get paid--from merchandise sales to percentages of advertising on ad-supported music sites--have one thing in common, regardless of how much or how little money they generate: they all implicitly devalue the music.

Neither can we hide behind the forces of history. No historical precedent exists to justify the idea that going digital means music must be free. History is full of shifts from one type of product to another--ice cubes to refrigerators, horses to cars, film to digital photos. In all cases, the replacement product performs the old job in a new and better way, and people pay for it accordingly.

The one valid reason I can see why the blossoming of the internet as a music medium in the 21st century has provoked the idea that music must be free has nothing to do with history, nothing to do with intellectual property laws, and nothing to do with marginal production costs. It does, however, have something to do with economics--namely, the trusty, even homely theory of supply and demand.

As the internet has all but eliminated the barrier to entry for a musician to record and distribute his or her music, the market has been flooded, the drain pipes clogged beyond repair. With the supply of music all but infinite (or at least, to quote Dr. Seuss, "up in the zillions"), the price of music should, indeed, theoretically fall to all but zero.

Unless...okay, it's a crazy idea, but...unless we somehow begin to work to distinguish quality from quantity. Sure, there's an unimaginable glut of music, but there has been and always will be a much (much) smaller supply of quality music. I have no exact idea how this could play out--maybe the subject of another essay--but if we can begin to delineate between the dabblers and the virtuosos, we might be able to establish why some music is actually worth paying for, while other music is entirely suited to free distribution.

There is plenty of precedent for this. Think about home-based artists who draw or paint or sculpt just because they love to, without any desire or need to be paid for it. Their existence, however, has never implied that nobody should be paid for those painting or drawing or sculpting.

We need tiers of musical activity. We cannot allow the existence of millions of songs that do not deserve an audience beyond friends and family to negate the idea that some songs are worthy of value in the marketplace. We need not to be telling musicians that they must work harder at mastering social media. They need to be working harder to master their craft, and need to remember that no one owes a musician a living.

But neither do we owe them a swift kick in the ass while we consciously and demeaningly deny all potential value from their chosen calling. If we can shake the sand from our eyes and look hard and fast at the horizon--if we can understand what's really there and what really isn't--we may recognize that it is up to us as well. As streaming sites continue to develop, it's easier than ever to use the internet to listen, so you can make an informed decision. Then you can do the truly revolutionary thing: buy the music that you like.

Because here's the new rule: if someone else made it and you really like it, it's not supposed to be free.

Photo Credit: http://www.saharamet.com/desert/impactite/glass.html

Free and legal MP3 from Hey Marseilles (rollicking 21st-century ensemble pop)

2010-05-04T15:21:00.001-04:00

"Rio" - Hey Marseilles
     Funny, if you think about it: the 21st-century to date has arguably contributed two abiding types of music to the rock'n'roll idiom, and they're kind of the exact opposites of each other. One is the music played by a two-person band, with keyboards and synthetic sounds at the forefront; the other is the music played by a large-ish group of people (typically five or more) wielding an idiosyncratic assortment of often (but not exclusively) acoustic instruments. Not that each type of ensemble plays one precise kind of music, so I'm not really talking about two new music styles or genres as much as two new musical energies or platforms, both thriving over the last ten years or so.
     Hey Marseilles, as you can almost guess from the name, is the second type--a seven-piece band from Seattle that plays things like accordion, cello, viola, mandolin, banjo, trumpet, and (wait for it) drumbourine. Now on the one hand, just putting a bunch of musicians with a bunch of instruments together is no guarantee for sonic success, and yet one could argue on the other hand that seven people who can play non-amplified instruments well enough together to make a coherent sound have an immediate leg up over a standard, four-person electric outfit. But then on the other other hand it also happens that larger ensembles can get so caught up in merely making the sound they make that the songs themselves--melodies, chords, structures--come up lacking. Not so with these guys, however. "Rio" is a joy from the opening hand claps, a sweetly rollicking neo sea shanty with terrific interplay between music and lyrics and delightfully rich instrumental layers. You never quite know which sounds are going to match up with which other sounds as the piece bounds along. It's great fun, both light and deep.
     "Rio" is a song from the band's debut album, To Trunks and Travel, originally self-released in 2008, but which is getting a national re-release in June via Onto Entertainment. Thanks to the irrepressible Largehearted Boy for the head's up. And if you want a sense of what this musical energy is like in person, check out this live performance of "Rio" from the band's visit to KEXP:

Free and legal MP3 from the National (brisk, deliberate burner)

2010-05-04T15:20:00.002-04:00

"Afraid of Everyone" - The National
"Afraid of Everyone" starts spooky, slowly and surreptitiously picks up a pulse, then a driving beat, but even as it does remains tight and restrained. This juxtaposition of brisk and deliberate adds layers to the eeriness, just as the fear expressed lyrically broadens from interpersonal to existential: what begins with a reference to today's poisonous political environment ends with Matt Berninger singing, semi-imperceptibly, "Your voice has stolen my soul." Notice (this strikes me as important) that the song itself does not change tempo; what happens is that the band finally--first around 1:10 and then more fully at 1:25--picks up on the song's implicit beat, and literally drives home the frightened and frightening message. Repeated listens give this one a palpably deeper and deeper burn.
Originally from Cincinnati, now in Brooklyn, the National has been steadily building a critical and popular following, as expansively discussed in a recent article in the New York Times. Personally, I've been reserved about them in the past, in part because I didn't give Berninger's portentous but limited (and mumbly) baritone enough time to let the intrigue of the music penetrate. Not sure if I'm in the process of full conversion, but I very much look forward to listening to the new album, High Violet, in its entirety (which you can do this week on NPR.) The album comes out officially next week on 4AD. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3 from the Mynabirds (Laura Burhenn returns w/ more great retro pop)

2010-05-04T15:19:00.002-04:00

"Let the Record Go" - the Mynabirds
     I cannot resist a repeat visit to the Mynabirds album, with this second free and legal MP3 now available (and also given what a great little set of music this comprises with the previous two selections). I just mainline this kind of sound--open my veins and inject it straight in. Laura Burhenn takes the standard blues progression and shapes it into a fiery piece of retro pop. Every last detail is exquisite, and yet the thing just plain stomps too. Right away, I love how the song starts in such a hurry it feels as if we're joining in midstream and then oops it stops at that place four seconds in for that great, conflicted "Oh!" from Burhenn.
     So many parts to like in such a short song!: the extended, melismatic "Oh" that functions as something between a verse and a chorus at 0:26; the repeated way the music stops or slows at just the right moments, without ever giving us the feeling of being interrupted; the fleeting bit of theatrical singing we hear at 1:04, as if maybe Lene Lovich has made a brief cameo; and then oh man when that opening "Oh!" comes back a third time right near the end (2:15) it completely melts my heart.
     So if you missed it the first time, please rush back and listen as well to "Numbers Don't Lie," the first Mynabirds MP3 featured back in January. And then do yourself an even greater favor and buy What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood, which was released just last week on Saddle Creek; it's a strong strong effort from a gifted musician.

New Fingertips Commentary: The Free Music Mirage

2010-05-04T12:28:00.004-04:00

As I'm working on this week's regular song reviews, I wanted to pop in and let you know there's a new Fingertips Commentary posted on the main site, entitled: "The Free Music Mirage." Subtitled: "Putting an end to a persistent illusion." Sub-subtitled: "Some music free, certainly; all music free, no." I'll be posting it here on the blog too in the next couple of days, but anyone who wants a head start can get one via the main site.

Note that this split-personality thing is almost over, as Fingertips will be online with a new, single site in the reasonably near future. It's online now in beta form if you're curious to see where things are heading. Lots of pages and links and formatting remain less than perfect but the general look and feel is on target. In the meantime, however, we're stuck with this dual-posting thing for a little while longer.

May Q&A: Greta Morgan of Gold Motel

2010-05-02T22:25:00.004-04:00

This month, the Fingertips Q&A--featuring, as always, five questions about the future of music in the digital age--talks to Greta Morgan, front woman for the Chicago-based band Gold Motel. The band's song "Don't Send the Searchlights" was featured in February on Fingertips. Previously in the Hush Sounds from 2005 to 2008, Morgan assembled the five-piece Gold Motel in 2009. The band's self-released, self-titled debut EP, came out in December; their first full length is due in June.

Free and legal MP3 from the Silver Seas (buoyant pop w/ faux '70s-soul sheen)

2010-04-28T12:38:00.001-04:00

"The Best Things In Life" - The Silver Seas
     Effortlessly enjoyable pop with a faux '70s-soul sheen. And I mean the faux part in a good way--after all, it's not the '70s anymore (by a long shot). It's far more fun to hear a group of 21st-century popsters re-imagine this sound with a present-day oomph than to hear some slavish recreation of the distant past.
     But there's no doubting that the '70s are the musical mother lode for this Nashville-based trio. Last time we heard from them they were more in James Taylor/Jackson Browne mode; this time Daniel Tashian and company have swung, literally, into Hall & Oates territory, with a loving, twice-removed nod to the Philadelphia Sound that that duo themselves mined. It's a breezy R&B groove poised brashly between Motown and disco, and the breeziness is exactly why slavish recreation would be self-defeating. You have to sound sharp but you can't sound rigid, and these guys strut it just right, propelled by a melody that steadfastly refuses to align with the beat in a song filled with large and small pleasures. A favorite smaller moment comes with the third lead-in to the chorus (2:34). The previous two times, the chorus begins after two smooth H&O-like "oo-oos," covering four brisk measures, which is exactly what the song appears to demand. The third time, they sing the two "oo-oos" once and then repeat them, which if you're not listening carefully you might not even notice. But it's one of those great songwriting tricks, giving us a subtle, unexpected, hang-on-what's-not-quite-right delay before the final payoff.
     "The Best Things In Life" is a song from the band's new album Chateau Revenge, which was released digitally by the band this month; the physical album is due out in July. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3 from Patrick Wolf (both channeling and reinterpreting K. Bush song)

2010-04-28T12:36:00.001-04:00

"Army Dreamers" - Patrick Wolf
     I can count on one hand the number of cover songs I've posted here on Fingertips over the years; I'm not at all against them in theory, but I don't usually feel compelled to talk about them. It's more of a "Oh, that's interesting," and on we go. But this was a no-brainer from the opening drum-and-piano salvo. How different from the original and yet immediately exactly right. Wolf here has done the near impossible with a cover version: he has revealed the depths awaiting us in a song that even its writer hadn't quite plumbed.
     And that is to take nothing away from Kate Bush, whom I love unabashedly. But she wrote and sang "Army Dreamers" for her 1980 album Never For Ever, which found her in transition between the lush, piano-based, teenaged sounds of her first two records and the more complex, Fairlight-fueled, experimental direction she would develop fully with The Dreaming and Hounds of Love. Her original was a delicate, string-filled waltz, with a hint of weird around the edges. (But, note, a #1 record in the U.K.) Wolf--an intense, theatrical character in his own right--has done nothing as much as show us how Bush herself might have recorded this once she truly hit her stride. The martial rhythm, the creative synthesizer flourishes, the inventive percussion, the ghostly backing vocal (whether real or synthesized, an obvious homage), not to mention the exotic counter-vocal, are all evident Bushisms. But perhaps Wolf's most splendid and mysterious accomplishment is singing in his shadowy baritone--not doing an imitation, not in fact remotely sounding like her--and yet all but channeling the great and mighty KB. Thirty years later, he delivers a cover that sounds at least as authentic as the original.
     "Army Dreamers" is a track from a massive compilation album put out by the Spanish music collaborative Buffetlibre in support of Amnesty International. For five euros, you get 180 MP3s from 50 musicians from around the world, including Marissa Nadler, Ra Ra Riot, Ryuichi Sakamoto, and the Antlers. All songs are exclusive and previously unreleased. Visit Buffetlibre for more information. And what the heck, you can listen to the Kate Bush original via Lala, here:

Free and legal MP3 from Marching Band (Swedish indie pop duo)

2010-04-28T12:33:00.002-04:00

"It Will Never Slip" - Marching Band
     Marching Band is a duo. If you were Sherlock Holmes, that should tell you everything you need to know about this song, which engages and delights largely via a subtle, playful contradiction between the big and the small. "It Will Never Slip" is full of grand, large-scale gestures performed in a modest, almost intimate setting. The song is big and echoey but also small and unassuming. It opens and closes--as do any number of bloated, album-rock standards of the '80s--with an elusively familiar acoustic guitar riff. But note that otherwise you don't even hear the acoustic guitar, because, after all, there are just two guys in the band. They've got other instruments to tend to.
     And there are pretty much just two chords in the whole song. I do not believe this is because they only know two chords. Instead, consciously or not, it's another sly way of being big and small at the same time: you've got the fleet-footed melody, alternately bouncing and running up and down, but you're framing it onto those two chords--which are, in fact, C and G, perhaps the two most basic chords in the whole game. Verse and chorus, both the same two chords, but check out how they sew it all together in the chorus, between the lyrics, with that anthemic downward trio of notes (so it's like mi-re-do). That's typically heard in a huge, stadium-rock gesture, complete with slashing guitar chords. Here I think I'm hearing a banjo.
     Marching Band hails from Linköping, Sweden, a small city roughly halfway between Göteburg and Stockholm. They've been playing since 2005, and released their first album in '08. "It Will Never Slip" is from the forthcoming Pop Cycle, due out next month on U&L Records. The MP3 is another available via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3 from the Middle East (slowly unfolding, deeply engaging)

2010-04-21T12:55:00.001-04:00

"Blood" - The Middle East
     Over a stately acoustic guitar noodle that wouldn't sound out of place on a mid-career Genesis album, "Blood" unfolds slowly yet engages the ear instantly. (That's an advanced maneuver in the rock'n'roll style book, by the way.) The anticipation is delicious; the song doesn't fully cook until 2:55 but I don't think you'll be bored. Engaging musicianship, sensitive and creative arrangement, affecting vocals, intriguing and well-crafted lyrics, short-term melodies, long-term structure: this six-piece from northern Queensland offers a full arsenal, even--what the heck--a children's chorus before the thing is through.
     I read somewhere that this song tells the story of three different relationships, two ended by death, one by divorce, but don't expect to pick that up easily; the band's singer has a lovely, Bon Iver-esque tenor that functions more like an instrument than a tale-teller. We pick up the occasional sonorous phrase--"She woke up in a cold sweat on the floor"; "Burned by the sun too often when she was young"--but as the song develops musically, the words fade into the fabric of the composition, eventually to be left aside entirely once the central musical motif--a refrain first heard as a whistled melody at 2:01--rises in climactic, wordless, choral repetition two-thirds of the way through (the aforementioned children's chorus).
     Formed in 2005 in a quiet village near the Great Barrier Reef, the Middle East self-released an album entitled The Recordings of the Middle East in 2008. And then decided to break up. And eight months later decided to re-form, with some personnel changes. The original album was then given an Australia-wide re-release in abridged form as an EP by Spunk Records, an Australian label that happens also to release a lot of big-time American indie rock (Spoon, the Shins, Joanna Newsom, Okkervil River, et al). The EP made it to the U.S. late in 2009, and the band itself arrived for the first time this spring and is currently touring here. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3 from the Love Language (brisk, shuffly indie pop)

2010-04-21T12:44:00.001-04:00

"Heart to Tell" - the Love Language
     This one also begins with an acoustic guitar riff, but an entirely different kind that goes in an entirely different, happy-shuffly Shins-meet-the-Left-Banke direction. A brisk slice of indie pop sparkle.
     Attentive visitors may recall the Love Language from "Lalita," a song featured here last May that ended up on the year-end "Fingertips Favorites" list. "Heart to Tell" likewise swings on a pronounced one-two rhythm, but with a gentler vibe than "Lalita." This time around the band has jettisoned the distorted vocals and funneled its penchant for harsh guitars into one short--but memorable--instrumental break. Also jettisoned this time around, in fact, is the band itself--Raleigh-based master mind Stuart McLamb has let go of the four or five or six others (reports varied) who last time functioned as the Love Language, now doing the mad genius thing by himself, aided and abetted by producer BJ Burton. The end result is a less lo-fi Love Language, but no less loose and energetic.
     "Heart to Tell" is from the Love Language's forthcoming Merge Records debut, Libraries, slated for a July release. MP3 via the fine folks at Merge.

Free and legal MP3 from CocoRosie (gentle, invigorating, inscrutable exotica)

2010-04-21T12:36:00.001-04:00

"Lemonade" - CocoRosie
     Ah, CocoRosie: I do not know what planet these two women live on but it is surely a richer and more exotic place than the one the rest of us inhabit. Or maybe it's just that they inhabit a far greater percentage of this planet than most of us do, being quite the globe-trotting pair of sisters. This new album of theirs alone was recorded in Buenos Aires, Paris, Berlin, New York, and Melbourne. Good thing this was before the volcano.
     Fortunately, you do not have to understand what they are trying to do, or why, to find yourself captivated by this gentle but invigorating song. A soothing, chime-filled opening measures leads to a lovely piano line, alternating major and minor arpeggios, and the tender but haltingly sung verse. Not sure if it's Sierra or Bianca here but the phrasing is odd and the words are odder, offering images but no discernible story. A fat synth joins in, and some horns, which play in slow motion but lead to the jaunty, double-time chorus, enlivened now by some deep, rubbery drums. Lyrical clues now tell us we are in childhood memory territory, but there's still no narrative, just image-moments, and a magic realism sort of sensibility ("Shot a rabbit from the backseat window"?). But with the Casady sisters, given their unusual, itinerant childhood, this could all be a simple tale of a family outing. I'm not sure I'd've wanted to be there, but I do love hearing about it.
     "Lemonade" is from the duo's new album, Grey Oceans, which is coming out next month on Sub Pop Records. MP3 via Sub Pop.

Fingertips Flashback: Vague Angels (from December 2006)

2010-04-16T14:04:00.002-04:00

I always liked this one for relatively mysterious reasons. And this seems longer ago than it was, somehow. Anyway, this never really caught on, but it's still online, so here you are.

[From "This Week's Finds," December 17-23,2006]

"The Vague Angels of Vagary" - Vague Angels
Even though this came out in March and has nothing whatever to do with Christmas or the holiday season of any kind, I like featuring a song by a band named Vague Angels this week. It seems like all we can hope for these days, and maybe all we actually need. And never mind any of that: this free-flowing, structure-free song is itself extraordinarily cool. Rolling firmly to a strong yet elusive train-like rhythm, "The Vague Angels of Vagary" seems, well, vaguely to be about trains, and journeys, and searches. NYC-based singer/songwriter/novelist Chris Leo (brother of Ted) speak-sings the odd but engaging lyrics like Lou Reed with a higher voice and no leather jacket; he seems more bemused by what he sees that pissed off. What hooks me with this one: the energetic, good-natured, descending guitar riff that keeps the song afloat--relentlessly it climbs back to its apex and spills yet again downward while Leo goes on about train track tundras and the WPA and the MTA. "The Vague Angels of Vagary" is from the CD Let's Duke It Out At Kilkenny Katz' (yes there's that weird floating apostrophe in the title), released earlier in the year by Pretty Activity. The MP3 is via the Pretty Activity site; thanks to the Deli for the head's up.

ADDENDUM: It doesn't seem that the Vague Angels have been up to anything since 2006. According to a busy and difficult to read MySpace page, Chris Leo put out a solo album under his own name in 2009, but there is no other sign of it on the web. Leo had his own blog for a while but hasn't posted since January 2009. He may currently be living in Italy. He is still Ted Leo's brother.

Free and legal MP3 from Color Of Clouds (lovely blend of acoustic & electronic, nicely arranged and sweetly sung)

2010-04-13T20:07:00.002-04:00

"Brother" - Color of Clouds
     With a hint of glitch seasoning its spry intimacy, "Brother" is the work of a band with a gift for uncomplicated complexity, if that phrase makes any sense. Great pleasures await here in straightforward juxtapositions. For one immediate example, listen to how the beat glides seamlessly from a chime-like electronic stutter into a cozy 4/4 with a wistful bounce, driven by the gentlest of drumbeats. And then, without fuss, enters singer Kelli Scarr, arriving as if she'd been here all along, starting the story just about in mid-sentence, in tones of bittersweet honey. She has us at hello.
     And things only get better from here in a song blending the acoustic and electronic in a most gracious manner--the instrumental palette here is nothing short of delightful--and building towards a brilliant, light-footed chorus. I still can't tell if that's some sort of steel guitar in there or a nuanced synthesizer, but those are definitely stringed instruments that arrive for a first visit at 0:57, returning with the chorus to mesh almost heart-breakingly with that steel-guitar-ish sound and, most nimbly, that subtle persistent electronic glitch in the beat. And yes I'm afraid this is one of those songs that's far more trouble to describe than to listen to. Rest your eyes and reward your ears with repeated listens.
     All three band members were previously in the electronic band Moonraker, and Scarr has also been a frequent collaborator with Moby. "Brother" is a song from the debut Color of Clouds album, Satellite of Love, released digitally this week via Stuhr Records.

Free and legal MP3 from Colleen Brown (girl-group theatrics meets D.Springfield-style R&B, & then some)

2010-04-13T20:04:00.001-04:00

"Boyfriend" - Colleen Brown
     "Boyfriend" marches to a big, retro, triplet-driven beat, delivering a vibe that's part girl-group theatrics, part Dusty Springfield-style R&B, part something elusive and (dare I say it?) new.
     This is in fact a quality that strikes me again and again about Canadian musicians, if I may generalize (and I assume positive generalizations are somewhat less irritating than negative generalizations!): their capacity for drawing upon influences without either drowning in them or negating them through archness and irony. Here, Edmonton-based singer/songwriter Colleen Brown--with a slightly dusky voice, some sly lyrics, and an easy way with a time-shifting melody--has built a song and a sound clearly grounded in the past while managing, at the same time, to resist painting herself into a history-centric corner. I'm not exactly sure how this works up there north of the border but I appreciate it every time I hear it. In any case, "Boyfriend," with its driving stomp and gleeful vocal energy, is very much a winner in the here and now.
     You'll find the song on Brown's second solo album, Foot in Heart, which was re-released last month by Dead Daisy Records, an independent label run by Canadian singer/songwriter Emm Gryner. The album had been previously self-released in 2008. Brown has also recorded as a part of a duo called the Secretaries. MP3 via Spinner.

Fingertips Flashback: Dealership (from December 2004)

2010-04-09T09:05:00.001-04:00

Here's an innocent burst of indie-electro-something-or-another that sounds as delightful to me now as it did five-plus years ago.

[ from "This Week's Finds," Dec. 5-11, 2004]

"Forest" - Dealership

A certain sort of confidence is required to open a song with the line "Let's go, and I'll play all my songs," but singer Chris Groves has such a sweet-sailing voice that he has me right there--I'm thinking, sure, go ahead, play away. A do-it-yourself style trio from San Francisco, Dealership transcends its indie trappings through gorgeous melodicism and songwriting aplomb. The song is propelled by the juxtaposition of a jittery/infectious guitar line against a bell-like (and inexpensive-sounding) keyboard underneath a melody that cascades on itself, like noiseless fireworks arcing pattern upon pattern. When Groves arrives at the chorus, singing, "An electronic forest, a pixelated version" and then whatever he sings next (I can't decipher the words at that point), we are in a certain sort of pop heaven. That guitarist Miyuki Jane Pinckard adds some solid yet airy (go figure) harmonies to the proceedings only adds to the feeling of being transported somewhere quite lovely, if a little bittersweet. I like how the band doesn't waste the last minute of the song (which is when a lot of songs go into automatic pilot): listen to the edge Groves' voice acquires at around the 2:15 point, and then feel the band pull the energy back at around 2:30 only to kick into a punched-up sprint to the finish at 2:50 or so. It's all pretty subtle but I tend to like subtle. "Forest" is from the CD Action/Adventure, the band's third, released in August on Turn Records; the MP3 can be found on the band's web site.

ADDENDUM: Founded in 1995 (wow), Dealership may, alas, no longer exist. The band's web site shows no sign of life since 2007, and the band's anticipated fourth album, due first in 2007 and then in 2008, seems never (yet) to have arrived. While Wikipedia has them existing to the present day, the entry itself hasn't been updated since late '07.

Free and legal MP3 from Stanley Ross (slow & swingy w/ a nod to bygone musical styles)

2010-04-07T20:50:00.001-04:00

"Bicycle (Take So Long)" - Stanley Ross
"Bicycle" is fetchingly slow and swingy in a way that tips its hat to bygone stylings such as doo-wop and torch songs and the Rolling Stones trying to do country. And yet the music is at the same time entirely un-nostalgic--it is performed simply, without affect, with a grounding organ line, some nice back-porch guitar work, and a winning smidgen of idiosyncrasy in the guise of Nick Meiers' slightly neurotic (I mean that in a good way) tenor. None of this would work, I don't think, with a more straightforward singer. But Meiers has an edgy voice that gives the impression of being more wavery than it actually is, an effect that--I like to imagine--is being generated by his shaking his head so deeply in time to the music's slow-burning groove that he's sometimes missing the microphone. This is no doubt an inaccurate conjecture but I'll stick with it anyway.
Stanley Ross is another one of those "hm; is this a person taking on a stage name or is this a band?" acts. Press material is shifty on the matter. I do know that Meiers, the Chicago-based front man and singer/songwriter, has himself called Stanley Ross his "band," and the Facebook page lists three "members" so let's stick with band. In any case, "Bicycle (Take So Long)" is a song from Stanley Ross's third release, an EP called MN-EP, which follows two previous full-length albums. The EP is out this week and may be downloaded in its entirety for free via the netlabel RockProper.com.

Free and legal MP3 from Making Movies (crispy and crunchy Spanish-language, Latin-spiked rock)

2010-04-07T20:49:00.001-04:00

"La Marcha" - Making Movies
     Crisp and crunchy Spanish-language, Latin-spiked rock'n'roll from...Kansas City, somehow. I'll take it from wherever; to my ears, Latin rhythms are a natural for rock'n'roll--we haven't over the years heard nearly enough of them in any sort of mainstream way (whether mainstream mainstream or, as it were, indie mainstream).
     "La Marcha" vigorously exploits the dynamics of a style of music called cumbia, which is known for melding a lopsided rhythm to a steady 4/4 beat. Get this one going and check out how easily your body wants to keep the beat even as the music itself seems to snake and sway in and around but never, it seems, directly on that same beat. One of the delights of that group-sung grunt (first heard at 0:10) is how precisely on the beat it is, compared to almost everything else that emerges from the drums and guitars. I also like how effectively the band works a slightly distorted rhythm guitar sound, straight from the rock'n'roll textbook, into the chorus, and how it leads with the Latino chord changes in a gratifying way. Don't miss, also, when the band drifts seamlessly into a salsa montuno (you may not know what that is but you'll hear it) for an instrumental rave-up at 1:56.
     "La Marcha" can be found on the album In Dea Speramus, which the quartet self-released last month. The album, by the way, was pretty much recorded live, vocals and instruments together in real time--yet another reason this song has so much energetic allure.

Free and legal MP3 from Jen Olive (looped undulating acoustic guitar, layered vocals, wonderful melodies)

2010-04-07T20:47:00.003-04:00

"Wire Wire" - Jen Olive
     A swirly, heady stew of ~~loop-addled~~ undulating acoustic guitar and shimmering layers of vocals, "Wire Wire" feels rich and complex while still offering the simple pleasure of a good melody, smartly delivered. While comparisons are at once inevitable and instructive--Björk meets Jane Siberry meets Juana Molina is one way to conceive of her sound--I am enchanted by the head-turning newness of the end result. Olive writes outside the box of the beat, floating the melodic line in the verse like elusive tinsel that decorates the tree without touching the branches. The warm sturdiness of the short chorus becomes all the more delectable, almost mysteriously so; she sings, "I could get/Lost in it/No regret," to a straightforward melody that out of context might not strike your ear and yet here hooks and nourishes in a wonderful, almost uncanny way.
     I have no idea how someone could conceive of writing this sort of song and it may well be because no one person did; it turns out that Warm Robot, Olive's new album, is the product of a unique collaboration between the singer/songwriter and Andy Partridge, who personally signed her to his Ape House Records label. (The XTC front man has called Olive "this astounding allegro algorithm from Albuquerque.") She recorded the basic tracks--guitar and voice and some idiosyncratic percussion sketches made on found objects like kids' blocks and wine bottles--and Partridge arranged and enhanced to create the final songs. The two didn't meet face to face until the album was already finished.
     The Ape House blog by the way has a two-part podcast online featuring the entire album with track-by-track commentary by Olive, worth checking out if you have time.

And I stand corrected on the original assumption that the guitar was looped. Apparently it's Olive playing live. Which makes this song all the more original, says me.

April Q&A: Laura Burhenn of the Mynabirds

2010-04-01T18:11:00.003-04:00

This month's Q&A is a lively one, featuring Laura Burhenn, formerly half of the duo Georgie James, now doing musical business as the Mynabirds. Burhenn answers the five questions about the present and future of digital music with particular verve. The Mynabirds' debut album, What We Lose in the Fire We Gain in the Flood, is due out later this month on Saddle Creek Records.

Spring Break

2010-03-29T12:37:00.006-04:00

Fingertips will be on spring break this week. New selections will return on or around April 6. In the meantime, a few suggestions:

* Catch up on older featured songs. From the feedback I get, I know that lots of people don't manage to listen to all three songs every week, even when they intend to. You can go back here on the blog and listen via the play buttons next to each song, or you can go to the main site's "This Week's Finds" page and use the media player there.

* Read the playlists essay. Yeah, okay, it's long--about the length of a feature in a traditional magazine. I trust that your attention span is up for it.

* Listen to some music offline, and mindfully. This is a radical idea, and is based on a blog post I recently read by an L.A.-based musician named Eric Jensen. He suggests both making a special place you can listen to music and setting aside a special time when you can give it your full attention. I really like this idea and may even put my old turntable back into action so I can listen from a comfortable couch, with a glass of wine, and an album cover in my hand.

* Or, just go out for a walk. Never a bad idea, any time of year.

Fingertips Flashback: Novillero (from June 2005)

2010-03-26T09:39:00.004-04:00

Here's an entirely overlooked gem from 2005, with far more musical and lyrical sophistication than one dares to expect from a largely unknown band. But it's kind of what keeps us music seekers on the prowl. You never know what you might yet find.

[from "This Week's Finds," June 5-11, 2005]

Aptitude" - Novillero
Anchored by a swinging piano riff, appealing chord progressions, and what seems an unusually hard-headed philosophy for a pop song, "Aptitude" is both immediately enjoyable and lastingly affecting. A quartet from Winnipeg founded in 1999, Novillero sounds like the real thing to me, capable of delivering music that is at once melodically and lyrically astute--no mean feat in our mash-up culture. The chorus is especially marvelous, rendered all the more effective for its jaunty bouncing between major and minor chords. Even better, it builds with each iteration--first delivered in a restrained vocal-and-piano setting, the chorus next arrives with the full band fleshing out the harmonics, and the third time with vocalist Rod Slaughter (he's also the piano player) singing an octave higher, adding a keening edge to both the music and lyrics. This works particularly well as the song has now shifted its focus: what began as a world-weary warning about how we are all limited by our inherent capabilities reveals itself (if I'm hearing it right) rather poignantly as a philosophy borne from disappointment in love. Complete with nifty horn charts. "Aptitude" is on the band's cleverly titled second CD, Aim Right For The Holes In Their Lives, which was released in the U.S. last week on Mint Records. The MP3 comes from the band's web site.

ADDENDUM: The band has since become a quintet, and was featured again on Fingertips in 2008, when their most recent album was released. Things have been quiet on the Novillero front since their last stage appearances in Canada in mid-2009.

Playlist Nation: The Unbearable Lightness of Sharing (a Fingertips Commentary)

2010-03-25T08:33:00.004-04:00

Quick question for you: do you make playlists?

Okay, kind of a stupid question. If you're reading this, you're probably more than a little interested in music, which means you have an iPod, which means yes, of course, you make playlists.

Next question: do you share your playlists? All sorts of web sites have sprung up over the last five years that encourage you to do so. Some are stand-alone communal playlist sites, others are on-demand streaming sites that offer a playlist creation function (e.g. Lala, Mog, and even MySpace now, with the acquisition of imeem). Go to these places and you'll see there are plenty of playlists posted. Someone, surely, is sharing.

Even so, playlist sharing is not at this point a mainstream activity the way that simply listening to an iPod is a mainstream activity. You yourself may share playlists all the time, or you may not even be aware that it's something you can do.

Leading to the big, final question: do you listen to other people's playlists? While you don't in theory have to be a playlist sharer to be a playlist listener, the blanket assumption of playlist sharing is that people who are sharing theirs are also listening to the playlists of others.

And so it is that playlist sharing is becoming, in theory, its own kind of music-consuming experience. With all these playlists available, people don't have to stumble around online looking for songs to listen to; they can also tap into other people's playlists. And in so doing will no doubt find out about music they didn't otherwise know.

Which--bing bing bing--turns out to be a big part of why sites that offer online playlist sharing think they are valuable. The communal playlist site 8tracks sums it up with a pithy tagline: "Share your mix. Discover new music."

It all sounds great, and the future of music cognoscenti, ever furious to second-guess the future before it arrives on its own, are all over it. Wired's Eliot Van Buskirk in late November wrote an article focused on 8tracks with a headline that said it all: "Playlists Could Be Free Music's Killer App."

The article focused on the economics involved: because playlist-sharing sites can launch with much less of an onerous licensing burden than an on-demand listening site, playlist sites are more likely to thrive and ultimately become the best place for people to listen to free music, whereas on-demand may ultimately be available only via a subscription. But Van Buskirk was implicitly enthusiastic about the communal playlist concept as a music fan too; at the end of the article he shared a playlist he himself made on the site.

8tracks.com is spiffy at first glance. I like how simple it looks, how easily it draws the visitor in. Each playlist is just eight songs (thus the name), so that sounds manageable, yes? You can either click on one of the 24 intriguing graphic squares on the home page, each leading to a playlist, or you can browse by genre. Once drawn in, however, watch out.

Want to browse by genre? 8tracks gives you seven all-purpose genres on the main page. Okay, so let's start with "alternative rock"; click it and you'll see the eight most recent lists with that genre tag, out of (yipes) 21,000 more. And let's stop right there because a human being cannot "browse" 21,000 items of any kind, never mind playlists, even if they each have only eight songs. (Another barrier to effective browsing: because of its licensing arrangement, 8tracks cannot tell you what songs are on any given list, can only mention three of the artists included.)

And okay, not all genres have quite that many playlists. R&B has only 2,100, synthpop a mere 200. So maybe the thing to do is to scope out the genres first, narrow down to one you'd like? Good luck with that. You are then invited to click through page after page of genres, 50 per page, with literally hundreds and hundreds of choices, in no discernible order, and with nonsensical overlaps (there's "R&B" and then there's "r & b," for instance). There are standard genre names like indie, soul, jazz, and reggae and then an astounding assortment of less standard things like rain, bastard pop, fuck you, and bob. All told there are 77,000 (and counting) playlists to sort through.

I don't mean to bog down on details, but in the end, pundit pronouncements aside, these are the details that comprise a user's experience. And the details are preposterous. 8tracks.com is the future of nothing. No doubt it's a brilliantly busy place but the web is filled with brilliantly busy places; the internet is heaven for splinter groups. This doesn't make any one of them worthy of widespread attention, never mind a "killer app."

And, the larger point: the idea that the future of music hinges upon masses of people sharing playlists online is absurd. Yes, there are already apparently thousands upon thousands of people doing it on countless different sites, but numbers of users in this case are not only irrelevant but actively misleading in terms of the success and value of the overall concept.

I know that we are trained on the web to believe it's all about eyeballs or followers, that it's the sheer number of people doing something that makes it a winning concept. But this is an advertising-centric goal only. If the intent is to attract advertising, then yes, attracting many visitors is a logical aim.

Not so with the sharing of playlists. In this case, the more people who do it, the less helpful it is. There are already way too many playlists online to be useful, and if playlist advocates have their way, we've just gotten to the tip of the iceberg. Lord help the Good Ship Music when it plows straight into this one.

The situation is almost poignant, because in theory and aspiration, the playlist is a wonderful idea. I'm sure there are any number of delightful playlists buried among 8tracks.com's 77,000, or on any of the other playlist-sharing sites that exist. Used properly, with restraint and constraints, playlists could be an invigorating part of a thriving music industry.

But it doesn't look like we're heading in that direction. And, as it turns out, having too many playlists online is only part of the problem.

I. The Rise of the Playlist

To be better prepared for the rest of the argument, let's rewind a bit.

Music has been online for more than a decade now and we are still trying to wrap our collective arms around how this impacts the ways we find, listen to, and absorb the songs that musicians continue to give birth to. (They just don't stop, these people. All those songs. I mean, honestly.)

So, okay, we all know the obvious things: how music, once digitized, became effortlessly reproduceable, and how that led to the ability to transport songs into physical and logistical contexts far beyond the old idea of putting a record on a record player and sitting down in one particular room to listen to it.

Forgetting for a moment the havoc this has played with the economics of the music industry, let's concentrate on the one underlying revolutionary circumstance here: no longer requiring a physical object to exist, songs no longer had to stay where the people who created and recorded them put them.

Thus piracy. Thus the iPod. Thus all the present-day dreams of "music in the cloud." A song does not need a physical object to exist. The very idea seems to excite and confuse people.

Apple was the first company to figure out what to do with this new reality in a significant way, and therefore the first company to get the physically-oriented record companies to play along. The iPod has been something of a success, yes?

Towards the goal of helping average consumers deal with these ghosts of songs, these songs unmoored from their physical contexts, someone somewhere along the way at Apple decided that the experience would include a new organizational and conceptual element: the playlist.

It seems obvious enough now but it was new with the first iPod: this idea that consumers were henceforth going to be actively deciding not only when to listen to any given song but in what context. The menu hierarchy on the iPod put "Playlists" at the top of the "Music" menu, above "Artists," "Albums," and "Songs." Apple's designers--due either to research or intuition or both--understood the ramifications of song-as-electronic-file and that people, now that they could, would inherently want to group songs together for all different sorts of reasons, and listen to them in these new and shifting contexts.

The iPod playlist was, of course, a direct descendent of the mixtape that avid music fans, in the cassette age, would make for themselves and their friends--a carefully selected and ordered group of songs, culled from a variety of albums, ideally to be listened to in one sitting.

But the playlist of the '00s left the mixtape of the '80s and '90s in the dust functionally speaking. Making a mixtape was actual work, occurring in real time and consuming physical space, and limited physical space at that--typically 60 or 90 minutes' worth of magnetic tape. You had to record songs before you could hear exactly how they sounded together, and you had to play them in their entireties to record them.

A playlist, on the other hand, is made with a few clicks and drags. It can be as long or as short as the maker wants it to be. And because shorter is harder--the narrowing down to cassette length for a mixtape was always tricky--playlists err on the long side.

The playlist as a result is a far more elastic concept than the mixtape, and making playlists a much more common activity than making mixtapes used to be. You don't need a lot of time, you don't need a lot of thought. You can dump all 203 Kinks songs you have into one playlist called "The Kinks." You can find a few dozen extra-quiet songs and put them, in no particular order (why bother? you'll shuffle it anyway) in a playlist called "Headache." These kind of things work fine for your own purposes.

But here's an interesting thing. Most individual iPod users understand the inherent quantitative limits of playlists. On one's own iPod, there comes a point of diminishing returns--so that even in our own private, relatively limited digital music universes, playlists stop being useful when there are too many of them. Playlists can't be effortlessly organized like albums (by artist; artists in alphabetical order), and when something can't be obviously organized, there exists a practical limit to how much of this something can exist before, basically, all hell breaks loose.

So imagine the kind of hell we're talking about when theoretically millions of people are throwing their playlists online in uncountable, unstoppable numbers.

II. What's Not to Like

And so, yes, a big part of the problem here in Playlist Nation is sheer volume, as already noted. But even if we could somehow manage the crazy numbers of them--who knows, maybe someone will figure out an effective filtering system--online playlist sharing still fails as a music listening experience.

The first reason relates to the playlist's origins in the iPod. By its nature, the iPod playlist is a casual, impromptu affair, often little more than a quick dumping together of songs for very personal reasons or, just as likely, for no particular reason at all.

And now, via online playlist sites, people are being encouraged to share these not always brilliant groupings of songs with the whole wide world. Unlike mixtapes of old, which were typically created with a specific purpose and usually for a specific person, playlists online are created with unnerving randomness and launched onto the internet at breakneck speed. (Note that on 8tracks, if you filter by most recently posted, the first eight playlists you see on the front page have all been posted within the last hour.)

Certainly there must be people out there creating thoughtful, well-designed playlists, but if so they are drowning in a flood of real-time frenzy. The briefest of visits to any playlist sharing site will be enough to familiarize you with the Stupid Playlist Tricks that predominate in that world. (The most common problem is the way-too-long playlist but that is hardly the only type of silliness on display.)

And then, as a sort of maladroit pièce de résistance, playlist sharing online takes widespread poor design and adds to it the bane of anonymity. Online playlists are presented by an endless array of screen names and avatars. It passes for social online but it's still anonymity. ("Nobody knows you're a dog," as the famous cartoon caption read.)

And anonymity defeats the point of sharing playlists. Think, again, of the mixtape's very reason for being: it was one individual's deliberate effort to put a limited number of songs together for one particular friend or, sometimes, a small group of friends. There was nothing anonymous here. This was human-to-human connection. In theory the main reason you wanted to listen to a friend's mixtape was exactly because of the friendship, because someone you liked and respected chose these particular songs for you to listen to. The music discovery was a by-product of the friendship, not the other way around.

What's more, a mixtape's very physicality was part of its essence. It was a three-dimensional object that sat on your desk or near your stereo or in your car, a reminder of your friend and the work that went into it. An online playlist is ever so much more ignorable, just something else to blip across your ever-changing screen, something else to glance at quickly and/or ignore and/or delete. Even if it comes from a friend, it's far easier to overlook, not deal with, never listen to.

And if instead it is just a list of songs from an anonymous stranger, where on earth is the inducement to pay attention through 30 or 40 or 60 or (way) more minutes of unfamiliar songs? When playlists are created by anonymous screen names on web sites accumulating dozens of new lists by the hour, there is no authentic connection, and little motivation to listen very carefully for very long, if at all.

III. Many to None

As it turns out, however, the lack of long-term motivation to listen to playlists may easily coexist with the continual motivation to create playlists. This is something that online playlist proselytizers and entrepreneurs either don't understand or to which they turn a willfully blind eye.

That was indeed something of a dirty secret of the mixtape era--the fact that they were all too often more fun to give than to receive. Coming up with the songs, crafting the order, nailing the segues, even writing the titles down just right, and then handing it over to a friend--for serious music fans, that's really where the fun was. Being at the receiving end? Often, somehow, less fun.

The dirty secret of the mixtape era becomes a flagrant lunacy in Playlist Nation, beginning with how this is always called "sharing" ("Share your playlists!") when this is actually not sharing in any proper sense of the word.

True sharing requires both sides to be partaking in what is being shared, requires a more or less equivalent desire to give on the part of the giver and to receive on the part of the receiver. Playlist "sharing" is unilateral sharing--a giving that is largely ignored or lost in the torrent of everything else that's ongoingly uploaded. Here, the giver gives and prays to the heavens above that someone, anyone, might want to receive.

Media theorists have long since noted how the internet has upended the traditional "one to many" broadcasting model with a "many to many" paradigm. I contend the academicians have overlooked the perhaps equally significant "many to none" paradigm.

And the more the "many," the likelier the "none" at the other end. Once put online, a playlist is merely some more lines of text and buttons in a continual tsunami wave of text and buttons. Spurred by boredom, random listeners may stumble upon random playlists. But this isn't connection. This isn't "social." It's web surfing. It's not much different than Chat Roulette. Next!

For all I know, most of the people who post playlists aren't even expecting any listeners. A playlist may be seen as nothing more or less than another mode of self-expression, like joining an offbeat Facebook group or choosing an avatar. And at that level there's nothing much wrong with it. (Or, maybe there is.) But in any case, playlist sharing cannot be considered a serious new way of encountering music, not if the vast numbers of playlists put online to be "shared" are rarely if ever heard by anyone but their creators.

IV. The Stunning Conclusion

The lack of substantive sharing when it comes to online playlists belies a selling point pushed by playlist-sharing sites and many music futurists alike--the underlying idea that music is an inherently social activity, that people naturally and incessantly want to share music with each other, that we are indeed perpetual music sharing machines, at long last enabled by web 2.0 technology.

I believe this view has no basis in fact or history. Yes, there is beyond doubt a percentage of music fans out there who are keen on active sharing--who constantly seek out new sources of music anywhere they can--but strong anecdotal evidence, not to mention the occasional research paper, suggests that this segment is an overwhelming minority.

The reason more people don't share music more often? It's all but heresy to suggest it, but what the heck, I promised a stunning conclusion: people don't share music more often because for most people, the connection to music is not primarily social at all but, rather, internal and personal.

This contradicts what the music futurists and social media mavens are telling us (24 hours a day), but I contend that most engaged music fans do not relentlessly look to their friends either for new music suggestions or to make suggestions to them. Some do, quite joyfully, but they are the vocal minority. And many who do enjoy sharing their musical discoveries with friends tend to have very specific friends with whom they do this. They are not parading with their music down the hallways of their lives on the off chance someone might connect.

Because at its core the music makes a personal connection in your own individual mind and heart and spirit. When you sense another who understands, you share. But this is not a "contagious" activity that spreads willy-nilly throughout one's (actual or virtual) friend base.

Age is a factor in this to be sure. It seems more natural to share music with friends when you're in your teens and 20s than later in life. You might do a bit more parading at that age. But even for those in their teens and 20s now, things will change later. The futurists forget this, time and again--the fact that people's behaviors evolve naturally with age, the fact that the future does not turn into what everyone does in their teens and 20s, and that the internet doesn't change that. People with plenty of time on their hands to make lots of playlists--and maybe even listen to other people's playlists--will find that time diminishing as they get older, work longer hours, have children, shift focus, etc.

And this may be the ultimate and entirely unremarkable reason why playlist sharing, however much of a side activity it may be for some people, has no significant mainstream future: because listening to playlists takes too much goddamned time. Never mind that there are too many to listen to; I'm talking about how any one given playlist itself represents a serious time commitment.

So much of what we do online has been streamlined, designed for speed, created for zippy convenience. But even in its digital form, released from the plodding cassette tape, a playlist maintains one crucial, analog-like reality: to experience it, one must listen to it end to end. Forgetting those nonsensical 200-song playlists for a moment, let's remember that even a modest 15-song playlist takes maybe an hour to listen to.

Playlists are time sucks because they're attention sucks too: if you're not listening relatively closely, it defeats the purpose of even listening at all. The underlying point is to discover new music, right? You just can't do that if you're not paying attention. And isn't that an endemic problem online? That no one is in fact paying attention to anything for very long? A playlist is really kind of an oddity, a dinosaur, a relic from the day when people actually had more than two or three minutes to devote to any one thing before moving on. (Next!) Maybe that's one of the reasons they're flooding online but making no impact. We'd love to think we had that kind of time. We'd love to think we could pay that kind of attention.

And yet. The fact that random, frenzied playlist sharing is an exercise in collective expressive futility should not, in the end, blind us to the beauty and power of a good playlist, which generates from the beauty and power of sharing music in a genuine social context rather than the often artificial "social" context of "community" web sites. "Many to none" is outlandish; one to one, or one to few, is another matter.

So that's where we can and should take the playlist idea moving forward. Forget publishing playlists so that "someone" may see them--this is an empty gesture that feeds the ego while missing the place where music matters: the soul. For the sharing to have meaning, it should start not from "what are my favorite songs that I need to tell the whole world about?" but from "What friend do I want to reach out to, with music?"

And here's your assignment: think of a good friend of yours, perhaps someone you haven't been able to connect with for a while. Make a playlist with this person in mind, and either send it to him or her via a link to one of the available playlist-making tools (I recommend using either Lala.com or Mog.com), or--a radical idea, I know--just burn the thing onto a CD and send it to him or her in the old-fashioned mail.

And if this seems like a little too much work all of a sudden, never mind even the playlist. Simply take one song you've recently discovered and really love, think of one particular friend who might also love it, and send it via the transmission method of choice (email, tweet, Facebook, etc.).

Don't let the music futurists brainwash you into thinking you're "supposed" to do this all the time, with all of your friends. This is not a grand, public gesture. This is not a "look at my great taste in music" bit of online territory-marking. This is, simply, true connection. We are not here for anything more, or anything less.

(This is a full re-post of the essay that was published on the main Fingertips site on Monday. The only difference is that this version lacks the footnotes of the original.)

Free and legal MP3 from Annuals (exuberant, unusually structured, relentlessly attractive)

2010-03-24T15:51:00.002-04:00

"Loxtep" - Annuals
     Fingertips veterans from Raleigh, Annuals have been featured three previous times over the past four years and somehow are still only in their early 20s. I promise at some point to stop pointing out how young they are. But geez, just listen to the conviction with which they render their exuberant, unusually structured, complex yet relentlessly attractive 21st-century rock'n'roll. I need to keep noting their relative youth because otherwise you'd never know.
     "Loxtep" is another shot of Annuals adrenaline, and if it again features a characteristic shift in dynamics, note how this pliable sextet continues to explore different ways to affect that shift. This time, it's not a straightforward matter of going from soft to loud, or slow to fast; instead, when the band crosses the dynamic borderline, at 1:08 (and can't you sense it coming, as it gets closer?), the tempo does not increase, and while the volume does to an extent, the song isn't as much louder after the change as deeper, and more intense. Basically, the rhythm section has kicked in, both drum and bass adding bottom to the mix that wasn't there before (the most significant percussion we heard in the first minute was, charmingly enough, castanets). But at the same time, strange stuff is happening, such as that funky-sounding synth joining in (1:21) apparently for the fun of it.
     I won't begin to try to untangle further "Loxtep"'s structure--which features among other things a series of musical reconfigurations of previously heard motifs--except to point out how, at around 3:05, the song manages to turn something that wasn't the chorus (namely, the lyrical phrase beginning with "lying around") into a sort of second, de facto chorus. Here's a band that is truly reimagining what a pop song can be even as you can still sing and dance along. "Loxtep" is from Sweet Sister, a five-song EP the band will release next month on Banter Records. MP3 via Banter.

Free and legal MP3 from Tracey Thorn (Everything But The Girl vocalist returns w/ wistful, Brel-like waltz)

2010-03-24T15:50:00.001-04:00

"Oh, The Divorces!" - Tracey Thorn
     Just the sort of lovely, bittersweet song that Tracey Thorn, known best as half of Everything But the Girl, seems born to sing. A Jacques Brel-like waltz with both pathos and humor, minimally scored with piano and strings, "Oh, The Divorces!" deftly captures the exquisite sorrow of marital demise, viewed from that stage in life when one's friends begin to break up, in seeming droves. "Who's next?/Who's next?" she sings at the outset. "Always the ones that you least expect."
     The nicely sculpted lyrics are a particular treat, and not just because they emerge from Thorn's dusky yet velvety alto, although that doesn't hurt. At once matter-of-fact and ever so slightly sly, some of the words shine with almost Sondheimian savvy ("And this one is different/And each one of course is/And always the same/Oh, the divorces"). There's something gratifyingly grown-up about this song--from the wise, hurt depth of Thorn's singing to the wistful (and yet also sometimes almost ironic) bowing and plucking of the violins--and those rock'n'rollers who persist in championing loud and aggressive music as the only legitimate means of expression are so incredibly missing the boat I'm beginning to feel sorry for them, rather than annoyed. (Although I'm still pretty annoyed. Essay to follow. But read Azzerad's first if you haven't.)
     "Oh, The Divorces!" is the lead single from Thorn's upcoming Love and Its Opposite, slated for a May release on Merge Records. MP3 via Merge. This is her second solo record since EBTG went on hiatus in '02. Thorn remains married to band mate Ben Watt--happily, one hopes.

Free and legal MP3 from Air Waves (snappy, lo-fi chugger, w/ great happy energy)

2010-03-24T15:49:00.001-04:00

"Sweetness" - Air Waves
     Lord knows I don't think of Fingertips as me sharing playlists with the world (um, see essay), but I have to say I entirely love how the three songs this week interlock musically. In particular, check out the strummy warmth of the intro here and how welcome it feels after the swaying sadness of Thorn's tune. (And how perfect, somehow, that we first get that solitary drum beat, which functions as an instant head-clearer.)
     Front woman Nicole Schneit is another alto, but hers is a different instrument than Thorn's--a fuzzy, plainspoken, lo-fi voice, happy to get almost but not quite lost in the mix, happy to deliver a sing-song melody over a rumbling, chugging, two-chord accompaniment. I keep listening for a third chord but I don't think they get there, and it goes to show you how far a snappy melody and some good innocent instrumental energy will take you in a pop song...along with, okay, some "oo-oos" and other oddities in the background, including maybe bird noises. At least I think those are bird noises.
     Air Waves is a Brooklyn-based trio founded by Schneit; the name comes from a Robert Pollard song and is definitively two words, not one. To date the band has released one EP--in 2008, on Catbird Records; "Sweetness" is a new song, released on a compilation Winter Review 2010 disc put out in December by the label Underwater Peoples. The band has recently added a fourth member; a full-length album is expected later this year.

New Fingertips Commentary on the main site

2010-03-22T17:47:00.005-04:00

I'll post the essay in full here in another day or two but for those interested in a head start, you can check out the new Fingertips Commentary essay right now on the main site. It's called "Playlist Nation: The Unbearable Lightness of Sharing," and it casts a skeptical eye on the idea of online playlist sharing. Fun!

Fingertips Flashback: Blonde Redhead (from February 2005)

2010-03-21T22:10:00.000-04:00

I like bands that stay creative and largely intact for the long haul. These guys have been around since 1993, and (see addendum) are very much still at it. Meant to post this Friday. Too busy reading SXSW tweets. Glad that's over.

[from "This Week's Finds," week of Jan. 30-Feb. 5, 2005]

"Misery is a Butterfly" - Blonde Redhead
Talk about a simple, repeated melody--"Misery is a Butterfly" succeeds, to my ears, largely because of the plain, recurring piano riff that serves as a backbone for this atmospheric, borderline melodramatic piece. There are strings, there's almost a dance beat popping up here and there, there are breathy-emotive vocals from guitarist Kazu Makino, there are Rachmaninovian chords, but time and again we get back to the piano riff, and everything seems all right again. Blonde Redhead is a veteran NYC-based trio that has gravitated over time from a Sonic Youth-style dissonance to a lusher sound that early fans of the band might not like very much. Me, I'm kind of intrigued by the still-somewhat-strange-ness of the whole thing. The song is the title track from the group's sixth CD, released last year on 4AD Records; the MP3 is found on the Beggars Group, U.S.A. web site.

ADDENDUM: The band's most recent album, 23, was released in 2007. (The title track from that one was also featured on Fingertips.) They last played live in 2009, but lo and behold, just last week, a teaser video--perhaps for a new song?--appeared on the trio's web site. Their eighth album is expected out later this year.

Free and legal MP3 from Judson Claiborne (Americana flavored, w/ an air of timelessness)

2010-03-17T07:46:00.002-04:00

"Song For Dreaming" - Judson Claiborne
     A pleasantly droopy piece of Americana-flavored indie rock, with a sharp sense of melody and nicely integrated guitar work. Not only do the acoustic and electric guitars play beautifully in and around each other--the ear even loses track, somehow, of which is which at some points--but the lead electric lines are central to the song's development. You don't hear a lot of that kind of instrumental integration these days--what we hear instead all too often is a lot of what might be called instrumental hipsterism, when sounds are used merely to be unusual--and it lends something deep and timeless to this casually-paced song.
     Judson Claiborne is a stage name adopted by the singer/songwriter Chris Salveter, of Chicago, who previously sang and played guitar for the band Low Skies. But the name also seems, maybe, to have turned into the band's name; half the material I find online refers to Judson Claiborne as a band, an impression aided by current press material showing five people in a photo labeled Judson Claiborne. In any case, it's Salveter up front, singing a melody with wistful leaps that accentuate both the warmth and idiosyncrasies of his informal, slightly quivering voice. He's got a touch of Jim James in there, a touch of Roy Orbison even, for crying out loud, but he never goes too far, always retreats into seeming more like a guy who happened to wander up to a microphone and who's happy just to play guitar than any kind of self-styled crooner.
     The pseudonym and/or band name by the way comes from combining a first name his father had wanted to name him (his mother: nope, "too redneck") and a last name from ancestors on his father's side of the family. "Song For Dreaming" is from Time and Temperature, slated for release next month on La Société Expéditionnaire, a Pennsylvania-based label. MP3 via La Soc. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3 from Ceremony (putting the pop into noise pop)

2010-03-17T07:45:00.001-04:00

"Someday" - Ceremony
     Ever since My Bloody Valentine there have been no shortage of bands choosing to wallop our ears with washes of noisy guitars while teasing those same ears with muffled vocals, but not enough of them--either in the original shoegaze era or in its current "neo" phase--have bothered mixing a strong melody into the sonic assault. The duo calling themselves Ceremony, on the other hand, while making themselves inaccessible Googlistically speaking, have decided to put the "pop" back into noise pop.
      Springing from the same Fredericksburg, Virginia trio--Skywave--that ended up giving birth to NYC's A Place to Bury Strangers, Ceremony are loud, no question. But right away see how they take the noisy, rapid-fire beat and use it to as a framework for a melody both leisurely and tuneful. The first hint we get is the lilting--in fact, rather Cure-like--instrumental theme that emerges from the beat at 0:16. That's an ear-friendly hook before the singing even starts. The vocals, when they arrive, are buzzy but not buried; you can not only understand a good number of words, but the singer--either Paul Baker or John Fedowitz (both are listed with the exact same credits: vocal, guitar, bass, drum machine)--sings like he wants to be heard; he's got a portentous baritone, but he enunciates, while singing a catchy little tune when all is said and done. Rather audacious of him, especially on a song with this straightforward refrain: "Take my heart and my life/'Cause someday you'll be my wife." Borrowing a bit from a recent post by Michael Azzerad, one might argue that in a loud and angry age such as ours, using this particular aural toolbox to deliver an unironic, non-violent message of love and connection is more subversive than any effort to be just noisy.
     "Someday" was released on a 7-inch single in January, and will appear on Ceremony's ~~debut~~ second full-length album, Rocket Fire, to be released next month. Both releases are on Killer Pimp Records, which also hosts the MP3. Thanks yet again to the indefatigable Largehearted Boy for the head's up.

Free and legal MP3 from Emily Jane White (lovely, stark, textured, and sad)

2010-03-17T07:44:00.001-04:00

"Liza" - Emily Jane White
     "It's not my job to create happy music," says Emily Jane White, a San Francisco-based singer/songwriter. "I'm okay with that." This may be a tricky stance to maintain for a long career, but you and I can be okay with that too for now if the end result is something as lovely, stark, and textured as "Liza." Sure, there's surface-level sadness in the air, but the music, while reasonably simple, offers an enticing depth of sound and spirit right from the outset. The introduction alone is mysteriously satisfying, with its evocative blend of picked electric guitar and violin, and that repeat musical line at the finish, which makes me feel like I've just heard an entire story in 24 seconds.
     Certainly White's subtly toasted alto is well-suited to the "not happy" vibe, but I'm actually enjoying more her phrasing and delivery than her tone. It's not too hard to sound gloomy; it's hard to sound interesting while also sounding gloomy. I like her off-handed delivery, the way she manages to sound like she's just deciding what to sing as she sings it, rather than reciting lyrics committed to memory--a particular feat in a song featuring not many lyrics in the first place. And why does the abrupt entrance of the drumming, at 1:51, sound like precisely the thing that needed to be there? Curious. The first verse, re-sung, is transformed by that insistent drum beat, which soon drives the violins into a double-time swirl, creating the feeling of a chase through the woods. The subsequent slowdown (2:56) is likewise sudden but somehow wonderful. We hear the first verse yet again. And that repeat finishing line from the introduction gets an extra repeat at the end of the song, exactly as required.
     "Liza" is from White's second full-length, Victorian America, set to be released next month on Milan Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.

New Fingertips Contest: win Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown

2010-03-10T15:08:00.003-05:00

The latest Fingertips Contest is giving away three copies of Anaïs Mitchell's Hadestown. Hadestown is a full-fledged "folk opera," which originally came to life on stage in 2007. The story is based on the Orpheus myth, updated and tweaked to seem just right here in 21st-century, Great Recessionary America. Mitchell sings the part of Eurydice, and she's recruited some mighty interesting friends to fill out the cast for this special recording, including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver) as Orpheus, Greg Brown as Hades, and Ani DiFranco as Persephone. The music is as bleak and friendly and beautiful and creaky as Randy Newman doing his Tom Waits impression at a Kurt Weill convention.

More info on the Fingertips web site.

Free and legal MP3 from Efterklang (dexterous, affecting blend of pop brevity and classical complexity)

2010-03-09T22:15:00.002-05:00

"Modern Drift" - Efterklang
     Beginning with compelling, quasi-minimalist piano lines, structured around two related melodic motifs, and brilliantly integrating strings and horns with electronics and percussion, "Modern Drift" is more composition than song. Consider this a good thing--a way of bringing some of classical music's attractive complexity into pop music's attractive brevity. Everybody wins. We just have to work on the fact that they only seem to be able to do this sort of thing in Scandinavia.
     I suggest listening to this song four or five times in a row just to let it begin to make sense in a wordless way. But if you want some handholds through the process, I recommend keeping an ear on each instrument that makes an entrance after the original piano lines--the percussion, guitar, strings, horns, and electronics. Each interacts with the underlying piano spine in a particular way, and each will come front and center in the piece at a particular time--for instance, the way the guitar begins a complementary echo of the piano at 1:28, or the very satisfying horn punctuation we begin to hear at 1:47. And listen how the strings step forward at 2:27 and create an unexpected bridge to the electronics that start at 2:45, which in turn offer a beepier version of original piano line, but now it sounds like this is home, this is where it was leading. And then the electronics withdraw and leave the unusual--but, somehow, quite natural-sounding--combination of strings and drums to bring this dexterous and affecting piece to a close. Pay attention and you'll also hear the guitar and piano return with background support.
     Efterklang is a quartet from Copenhagen that has been active since 2001. The name is a Danish word that means both "reverberation" and "remembrance." (Grieg, a Norwegian, once wrote a lyric piece for the piano called "Efterklang.") "Modern Drift" is the opening track from the band's third full-length album, Magic Chairs, which was released last month on the British label 4AD. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3 from Bettie Serveert (Dutch proto-indie band returns, faster and crunchy)

2010-03-09T22:13:00.001-05:00

"Deny All" - Bettie Serveert
     Moving into their 20th year together, the Dutch band Bettie Serveert may at long last be outlasting the "college rock" tag they earned as a proto-indie band in the mid-'90s. In any case, when their new album, Pharmacy of Love, is released later this month, they will have released more albums in the 21st century than they did in the 20th. So the time is ripe for listening to this engaging, not-quite-place-able-sounding band with new ears. It's not 1995 anymore in any possible way that I can think of.
     "Deny All" presents the Betties at their fastest and crunchiest. Guitarist Peter Visser couldn't be having a better time, combining searing lead lines with exuberantly squonky chords--one moment barely choked out, another fraying with dissonance. Leave it, however, to the fetching Carol van Dyk to distract us rather unfairly from Visser's heroics. The Canadian-born, Netherlands-raised singer has always helped to give the band a subtly inscrutable sound; moving to Amsterdam at age seven, she apparently never quite mastered a native Dutch accent but didn't grow up speaking English as a North American either. If you don't listen carefully you might not notice anything unusual but then again, given that lucid voice of hers, at once bright and dreamy, why aren't you listening carefully?
     "Deny All" leads off Pharmacy of Love, the band's ninth album, due out this month on Second Motion Records. MP3 via Second Motion. Bettie Serveert was previously featured on Fingertips in December 2003 and January 2005 (the latter appearance still has a free and legal MP3 available, the very appealing "Attagirl," so check that one out if you have the time).

Free and legal MP3 from Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies (wistful-cheerful blast of horn-peppered indie pop)

2010-03-09T22:12:00.001-05:00

"The Ballad of Cherry Hill" - Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies
     Wistful-cheerful blast of horn-peppered indie pop. When last we left Steve Goldberg, in 2007, he was a graduating college senior in Pittsburgh who recorded an album as a senior project with a revolving-door cast of fellow students. He has since come east to Philadelphia, pared the basic outfit down to four, and continues doing business as the Arch Enemies.
     While the basic sound remains intact--he comes across as a more extroverted version of Sufjan Stevens--the production value has improved, which has given his voice more depth and the music more oomph. I like that he has bothered to create two complete musical themes that are independent of the song's eventual melodies--these are the first two things we hear in the introduction (the pizzicato strings theme, then the horn section theme). One of the pleasing things about the song, then, becomes listening for how and when these themes recur, woven back into or between the primary melodies. (Even if you don't realize this is pleasing your ear, honest, it is.) Another perhaps unconsciously pleasing characteristic is the juxtaposition of downcast lyrics (here painting a scene of suburban alienation) and upbeat music. This itself is not an uncommon trick in pop music, but I like how Goldberg manages to bleed the two moods into each other a bit, thus further complicating the song's complexion--the lively music somehow lifting the words beyond mere despair even as the words simultaneously lend a bittersweet air to the music.
     "The Ballad of Cherry Hill" is from the band's four-song EP Labyrinths, which was self-released in January. Inspired by stories by Jorge Luis Borges, the EP is available for a price of your choosing, with no minimum, via the band's site. Thanks to Steve personally for the MP3.

Fingertips Flashback: The Fauves (from October 2004)

2010-03-05T07:09:00.008-05:00

This was always one of my favorite, power-poppy Fingertips finds. Glad to see it's still around, as, apparently, is the band.

[from "This Week's Finds," Oct. 24-30, 2004]

"The Dirt-Bike Option" - the Fauves
Gruff but lovable guitar pop from an underappreciated Australian band. That is, in Australia they're underappreciated; here in the U.S., they're completely unknown. But there's no way I for one am not going to like the heck out of a song with a sing-along chorus featuring this lyric: "Ooh, the dirt-bike option paid off/We never settled with the workers that we laid off." The rumbly guitars balanced by spiffy harmonies in the chorus and a wonderfully cheesy organ line are further merits. Plus I am bound to be partial to a song that arose as follows: "The title came from listening to Terry [Cleaver; the bass player] bang on backstage at a gig in Bateman's Bay about a new computer game he'd been playing; one in which he had 'exercised the dirt-bike option'. Songs about computer games are boring so the main lyric dealt with the somewhat unrelated topic of messiah complexes and cults living in fortified compounds." It seems poetic justic, somehow, that the world-weary, self-deprecating Fauves have now lasted longer than the early 20th-century art movement after which they named themselves. Formed in Melbourne in the late '80s, the band scored some commercial successes in Australia in the mid-'90s, but have struggled more recently to get themselves heard--a reality implied by the name of the 2000 single ("Celebrate the Failure") which contained "The Dirt-Bike Option" as a B-side. The MP3 is available on the band's web site, along with a number of other enjoyable B-sides and rarities.

ADDENDUM: The band has definitely been active since 2004. Their most recent album came out in the fall of 2008, and late that year they played a few gigs, including a special 20th-anniversary show in Melbourne. They seem to be laying low since then.

Free and legal MP3 from Jump Into The Gospel (21st-century rock w/ timeless NYC sound)

2010-03-03T10:40:00.001-05:00

"Flagship" - Jump Into The Gospel
     At once prickly and resounding, "Flagship" shows that even in 2010 there somehow remains a recognizable New York City rock-band sound. Certainly things have gotten more convoluted and diverse since the days you could trace a clear line from the Velvets to the New York Dolls to Television and the Ramones and Patti Smith, and the 21st-century alone has spawned a wide-ranging new generation of New York rockers (and note that "New York City band" does not equal "Brooklyn band," even though Brooklyn is of course part of New York City; anyone from New York knows this intuitively). And yet, as Jump Into The Gospel demonstrates, New York City rock endures, has a distinct vibe, and will apparently survive until the day the internet, because there's so much music here--and so much interaction and so much sharing and so much you-too-can-be-a-musician--kills music altogether. (And when that happens I suspect the New York bands will be the last to go.)
     So what sounds like New York here? Front man Louis Epstein, for one, all nasally and insistent and yet also edgily vulnerable. Second, the tick-tock beat, which functions just as well during the minimalist verse as it does during the expansive chorus, and is the sound of Manhattan's street grid, and timed traffic lights, and the unstoppable flow of pedestrians immune to the buses and taxis hurtling by. And then, New Yorkiest of all, for no reason I can articulate, that place in the chorus where the melody takes a further step down than you might initially anticipate (first heard at 0:29, on the third syllable of "situation." (Bonus points: the drummer's name is Chris Stein, the previous Chris Stein being Blondie's co-founder/guitarist/songwriter. Such a good NYC rocker's name it's been recycled.)
     "Flagship" is from the band's debut, four-song digital EP; all four songs are available for free at the band's site. Thanks to Some Velvet Blog for the head's up.

Free and legal MP3 from Kate Miller-Heidke (cheeky, theatrical pop from Australia)

2010-03-03T10:39:00.001-05:00

"Politics in Space" - Kate Miller-Heidke
     This has nothing to do with NYC, and maybe little to do with Planet Earth. A classically trained soprano, Australia's Miller-Heidke took a left turn out of the conservatory and didn't look back; she traces her musical lineage not geographically but aesthetically, and maybe even psychologically. Artists like Lene Lovich and Kate Bush and Björk come to mind once Miller-Heidke turns herself loose, and the process of singing becomes intertwined with something resembling performance art.
     But the cool thing is none of this is remotely ponderous--wacky, humorous, and cheeky, yes, but not ponderous. (Listen to how she briefly puts her "conservatory voice" to use--around 1:04--and you'll see how cheeky.) Musically, the song hues to a deliberate beat, with relatively austere accompaniment--there's a rubbery bass, a deep drum beat, a simply strummed acoustic guitar, hand claps, and not much else--except, that is, for the backing vocals. Turns out this song is all about the backing vocals, pretty much. ("Pretty much.") Follow them all the way through and you're in for a smile or two.
     Miller-Heidke has had hit records in Australia, and also reaped praise last year for her performance in Sydney of Jerry Springer: The Opera. Previously featured on Fingertips in 2005, she has not had any music released in the U.S., until now. (Although some may know her from the live-recorded song "R U Fucking Kidding Me? [The Facebook Song]," which has had some viral success on the social media circuit.) Curiouser, an album originally released in Australia in October '08 (and actually recorded in Los Angeles), will be released here this month on SIN/Sony Australia. Thanks very much to Victoria, at Muruch, for the lead.

Free and legal MP3 from Josh Rouse (sprightly faux Latin pop w/ Paul Simon feel)

2010-03-03T10:36:00.001-05:00

"I Will Live On Islands" - Josh Rouse
     I've had this song in the listening pile for a few weeks and maybe it's the (finally) receding snow that has allowed me to open my ears and enjoy this merry, warm-weather-inflected bit of lovingly crafted faux Latin pop. Perhaps I didn't quite realize how aggravating the song was previously making me, its breezy narrator imagining his imminent escape to island living. No matter the narrator is literally in prison; the metaphor hit home (Seriously: "I want to see some green/Get me out of this place").
     But spring appears to be springing, however slowly. It'll be May before all the parking lot piles melt around here but grass is at long last visible and this week I'm charmed by Rouse's bright, Paul Simonesque romp. And I at long last listened closely enough to understand that the point is the guy's infectious optimism, not his present confines. Should've featured the tune weeks ago. Anyway, musically, yes, the echoes of Simon are clear and, even, are emphasized by the singing voice Rouse adopts. (Listen to the way he sings the word "convicted" at 0:35--that's an homage, no way it's not.) But let's of course remember that Paul Simon himself was borrowing existing styles and rhythms, and Rouse, a transplanted American who has lived in Spain for five years, knows the original sources very well by now himself. If you want to see just how well, check out the Spanish-sung "Valencia," which has been quietly available as a free and legal download via Vanity Fair since the fall.
     Both songs are from the album El Turista, which is set for release next week on Yep Roc Records. The "I Will Live On Islands" MP3 is via Spinner.

Fingertips Flashback: Emily Haines (from September 2006)

2010-02-26T09:46:00.004-05:00

Snow won't stop the music this week. I just wish the music could stop the snow already. Here's a melancholy bit of social commentary for you, a song at once gorgeous and unsettling.

[from "This Week's Finds," Sept. 24-30, 2006]

"Doctor Blind" - Emily Haines and the Soft Skeleton
Lead singer for the band Metric and one-time member of the ramshackle Broken Social Scene ensemble, Emily Haines strips things down here for a haunting, piano-based reverie with a pointed message. I'm immediately attracted to the time-signature challenges in the chorus, which lend a meaty flavor to an already tuneful piece--I think she abuts a measure of 5/4 to a measure of 7/4, but I could be wrong; it's beautifully articulated and engaging in any case, with Haines singing in a weary, not-quite-deadpan voice. Everything is draped in lamentation (listen to how the strings sound when they join those ghostly echo-noises in the background), which is perhaps as it should be when the subject turns, as it seems to here, to our society's sickening reliance on pharmaceutical products for our quote-unquote well-being. And actually I'm loving those echo-noises, whatever they are (unearthly guitars? distorted vocal samples?); they acquire a more prominent place in the background during the last minute or so, sounding like a chorus of alien ghosts trying to warn us, through a some sort of interdimensional doorway, about something we wouldn't understand anyway. "Doctor Blind" is a song from the CD Knives Don't Have Your Back, coming out this week on Last Gang Records.

ADDENDUM: Haines is still very much active at the head of Metric, a band whose Fantasies album was among my favorites in 2009.

Free and legal MP3 from David Vandervelde (catchy neo-Buckinghamian craziness)

2010-02-24T17:34:00.002-05:00

"Learn How to Hang" - David Vandervelde
     Bright, fast, and spacious, with compelling echoes of Lindsay Buckingham. And it's not just because of the guitar licks and vocal characteristics, although that's a start. Buckingham, especially outside of Fleetwood Mac, has often had an unravelled edge about him, has played and sung in a way that suggests that standard social constraints may not apply once he's got a guitar in his hands. Likewise the Nashville-based Vandervelde, although he's a multi-instrumentalist so you really have to watch out.
     But the cool thing is that, like Buckingham before him, he seeks to funnel his borderline nuttiness into the relatively strict confines of a three-minute pop song, which creates a wonderful ongoing tension that drives the song both generally and specifically. Take the multi-tracked vocals he launches into at 0:41 to sing the lyric "You were talking shit"--there's something just kind of crazy about that from top to bottom, but it's also playful and winsome and, as a bonus, gets turned into a neat little back-door hook when he adds the next lyrical phrase "Didn't know how to tighten your lip." More broadly, notice how a song this open and flowing nevertheless stays grounded throughout in a quick, syncopated three-beat rhythm, which you can hear most prominently in the clipped chorus, where the three beats correspond to the words "learn," "how," and "hang." This tells us subtly, all along, whether you notice or not, that this thing is not going to fly apart at the seams, however much you might hear that in Vandervelde's hurtling voice.
     "Learn How to Hang" is the title track to a digital EP released last week by Secretly Canadian Records. MP3 via Secretly Canadian.

Free and legal MP3 from Red Pens (bashy, reverbed, and loud, but also musical)

2010-02-24T17:32:00.001-05:00

"Hung Out" - Red Pens
     Things maybe haven't been loud enough around here for a while. Not that loud is an automatically positive value; lord no. But done with the right spirit, and with a concurrent sense of musicality, loud can be fun. Bashy and reverb-laced, "Hung Out" is definitely fun, and it's definitely loud, or definitely should be. That's up to you and your volume dial of course, but if you don't turn this one up pretty high, it's not going to sound right. (No, even louder than that. Go on, I'll wait.) Listen to this too softly and you'll just get thin, tinny, clangy, and indistinct instead of rich, resonant, three-dimensional, and mind-opening. Or at least sinus-clearing. And you'll definitely miss the nuances of Howard W. Hamilton III's crazy guitar solos.
     I mean, check this out at 2:22: the solo's already underway and now he introduces a motif featuring notes that are rapidly attacked but taken together sketch out a slower melody, a melody that, at high volume, rings out with unexpected melodicism, and then wow to how it crunches at 2:25 into an outlandish mondo-chord that has no business being there except that now it is. Somewhere within is the chord that the ear was expecting, and as it turns out the other chords that are packaged around it make the elusive "right" chord all the more persuasive.
     Red Pens, based in Minneapolis, are Hamilton on guitar and lead vocals and Laura F. Bennett on drums and backing vocals. "Hung Out" is the lead track from Reasons, their full-length debut, which was self-released in June '09 and then re-released by Grain Belt Records in the fall. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head's up.

Free and legal MP3 from Electric President (electronic/acoustic combo, crafted w/ precision and warmth)

2010-02-24T17:28:00.002-05:00

"Safe and Sound" - Electric President
Here we have another duo, but that's about all "Safe and Sound" has in common with "Hung Out." Instead of sculpted noise and a simple verse-chorus-verse structure we here get a carefully conceived instrumental palette, a sweet-voiced singer, and a three-sectioned song linked by a chorus we hear only twice. This song sounds at once very relaxed and very precise, which is an engaging combination; every sound carries the weight of purpose, from the reverberant tom-tom of the intro to the acoustic rhythm guitar that is given a quiet 10 seconds of playing by itself in the middle of the song, to the gentle, clap-driven gospel swing that drives the song but below the level of conscious awareness until the keyboard joins it halfway through. While electronica is at the root of the band's approach, this song replaces overt glitchiness with something that seems very much like organic warmth and is no worse for the wear.
Jacksonville is home base for Ben Cooper and Alex Kane, who have been doing business as Electric President since 2003. (Their first album, released in 2006, was called S/T: "Self-Titled.") They do most of what they do jointly and electronically, while Ben is the aforementioned sweet-voiced singer. Their third full-length, The Violent Blue, was released this week on the small New Haven, Conn.-based label Fake Four Inc.

Fingertips Flashback: Low (from February 2005)

2010-02-19T12:59:00.004-05:00

Last week's Flashback was apparently snowed out, but it's back this week with an uncharacteristically rousing song from the veteran "slowcore" band Low.

[from "This Week's Finds," February 20-26, 2005]

"California" - Low
How much to keep sounding the same and how much to evolve and explore is a question that faces all bands that manage to stay together for more than a few years. Remain too much the same and risk staleness ("There's a fine line between a groove and rut," as Christine Lavin once sang); change too much and risk alienating fans who like how you sound already, thank you very much. And in the indie rock world, any change that smacks of "accessibility" is treated with the harshest of scorn, for reasons I have never quite figured out. In any case, here's Low, a band from northern Minnesota that cultivated a devoted following through the '90s while giving new depth of meaning to the word "slow" in the so-called "slowcore" genre. And here's a song from their latest CD, The Great Destroyer (Subpop Records) that moves with a nice crunchy, toe-tappy bounce. This is not the first upbeat song the band has recorded by any means, but so far they remain indelibly associated with their brooding, slow-burning material. Me, I'm enjoying the grit and intensity a band that knows slow brings to a peppier number. On the one hand, I love the big, fat, but still ambiguous chords that open the song, and drive its center; but on the other hand, check this out: right at the moment in the song where songs that have these kind of big, fat chords will break into a bashing, cathartic instrumental break (at around 2:00 here), Low, slyly, retreats into quiet--instead of big bashes we get a slow, ringing guitar and gentle harmonies, which simmer slowly together before delivering a final almost-bash. Pretty cool. The MP3 is available on the Subpop web site; the CD was released in January.

ADDENDUM: "To this day, Low continues to create and record interesting and unique music," says the band's web site. The trio has not, however, put out an album since 2007. In fact, two of the three members--vocalist/guitarist Alan Sparhawk and bassist Steve Garrington--are currently doing business as another trio, Retribution Gospel Choir. That band's second album just came out in January.

Revenge of the casual fans (or, how to stop worrying and learn to love Sade)

2010-02-18T20:19:00.008-05:00

I'm not picking up on a lot of online, future-of-music chatter about how the reclusive Nigerian singer Sade and her band (also called Sade) managed to sell quite so many albums in a week while ignoring pretty much every piece of conventional wisdom about the way the "new" music industry is supposed to be navigated.

The silence is kind of deafening, actually.

But there are the facts: without any effort to engage social media, without any kind of 24/7 pop cultural presence, Sade released a new album, Soldier of Love, her first in 10 years, and it sold 502,000 copies in its first week. The band's last album, Lovers Rock, sold 370,000 copies in its first week in 2000. The fact that album sales in general have declined 50 percent since then makes Sade's feat all the more striking.

At a time when music futurists are insisting that success involves engaging true fans, Sade has come along with an army of casual fans and has reaffirmed, at least for a passing moment, the power and possibility of large-scale appeal.

Now then, there are no doubt those who think her success has nothing to teach anyone who isn't already successful and famous. And there are likewise those who would assure us that musicians of the future have no interest in or need for selling a half million copies of their albums--who would tell us, in fact, that there aren't going to be any albums to sell.

And there are those who will in any case write this off as an aberration, an eleventh-hour blip in the death spiral of a moribund industry.

But even if Sade's success has nothing to do with the future (and I'm not at all convinced of that), it has a lot to do with the present, and theoretically has something to teach us.

Look, we have gotten amazingly good here online at ignoring outside, objective facts that don't align with our inside, subjective view of reality. This is a harmful tendency in general, and blatantly shortsighted when considering the future, which--news flash--none of us can predict, in the slightest, especially when it comes to either social behavior or technology.

So for just one moment, let's put aside speculative pronouncements about where music is "going." Let's acknowledge that Sade has a distinctive and appealing sound, and that a surprisingly large number of people are eager to hear this music when she and her band are ready to record and release something. These are people who don't need to know what's on her mind 24 hours a day, who don't need to interact with her, remix her, or do anything else but enjoy her music when she chooses to put it out. And these are people who are quite willing to pay actual money for an actual album.

I am tired of the hive mind ruling the day on what the future of music is supposed to look like. I am tired of people who are hypnotized by the fantasy that there's something in the bits we manipulate and the screens we stare at that has suddenly changed human nature in a deep and lasting way. I am tired of people who look at their immediate cohort ("Hey! We all love remixing!" "Hey! We all hate to pay any money for music!") and presume momentous, irreversible sociological trends.

Maybe these crazed, black-and-white pronouncements that tend to proliferate on the web are an inevitable consequence of our collective digital underpinning (every bit is 0 or a 1 after all, a yes or a no). But, in truth, all the online articles and blog posts that begin with all-or-nothing provocations ("Is Indie Dead?" "Music Must Be Free!" etc.) cannot be supported by the diversity of real life itself.

How nice it would be if we could give that all a rest for a while. I would, in fact, suggest putting some Sade on your music player of choice. She can surely teach the world a thing or two about just chilling out.

Free and legal MP3 from Gold Motel (new Chicago band with a '60s flair)

2010-02-17T20:37:00.001-05:00

"Don't Send the Searchlights" - Gold Motel
     With a clipped, fleet Motown beat, an expansive girl-group-style sing-along chorus, and an oh-so-classic length of two minutes fifty seconds, "Don't Send the Searchlights" has one eye quite obviously on our musical past. But at the same time there's something lovely and casual going on that allows the music to transcend its influences; Greta Morgan, the band's singer, songwriter, and keyboard player, has the sound of someone just kind of happening upon this song rather than sweating the historical details, and "Don't Send the Searchlights" jumps and swings accordingly.
     I think a good part of the song's flair arises from the melodic intervals Morgan builds into both the verse and the chorus. You can hear an example when she sings "before we hit the dawn" at 0:18--from the "we" she jumps down a fifth to "hit" and then back up a fifth to "dawn." This larger-than-normal interval creates a sense of movement and freedom, and in so doing reflects the lyrics, which on the surface extol the benefits of breaking off a relationship so it won't turn sour ("Always leave before tomorrow comes/All the greatest loves are the unfinished ones"). But don't believe everything she says. There's something wistful playing at the edges of the song's breeziness, and once again a melodic interval comes into play: the leaps she takes while singing both "goodbye" and "good guy" turn on the half-step difference between the first and second "good," which turns the chord from major to minor. She may not be as happy as she'd like to believe she is. And the chorus ends musically unresolved--not typically a sign that all is well.
     Formerly of the Hush Sounds (2005-2008), Morgan assembled the five-piece Gold Motel in 2009. "Don't Send the Searchlights" is one of five songs on the band's self-released, self-titled debut EP, which came out in December. Expect a full length in June. MP3 via the band's site.

Free and legal MP3 from Cats On Fire (Finnish Smiths worshippers make nice new song)

2010-02-17T20:35:00.001-05:00

"The Borders of This Land" - Cats On Fire
     Maybe you wouldn't expect a band from Finland to sound quite so much like the Smiths, but such is musical life in this mashed-up century of ours. And yes I mean really a lot like them: check out the urgent yet lilting minor-key suspended chord strumming; check out the meandering, melancholy melody, and the way it feels as if we're somehow joining it already in progress; check out (as if you could miss it) the Morrisseyan croon of singer Mattias Björkas. Turns out it is sometimes a very fine line indeed between transcending and re-transmitting one's influences.
     But the song charms me. I keep listening, I keep saying, "Okay, maybe too much," and yet sure enough, by the time Björkas gets to that part about being lowered into the ground (0:48), the song--ironically enough--comes alive. In my book, sounding like someone else, even a lot, doesn't prevent you from writing a good song. And if you've written a good song, then look at that: you've transcended your influences. (For the record, there's a healthy dollop of Belle & Sebastian in here too.) I particularly like the changes that unfold through the chorus: how it starts as an extension of the verse but takes first a melodic twist (at "your friends will set up..."; 0:56), and then both a rhythmic and tempo shift ("supporting all the boys..."; 1:02), which is not only not particularly Smiths-like but is in fact nicely unusual. And then the chorus kind of lingers on beyond its natural ending point, which makes the return to the lilting, brisker, strummy section especially effective.
     "The Borders of This Land" is the second "side" of an MP3 single the band released on the Swedish label Cosy Recordings in December. (Note that the song is labeled a "live demo" but doesn't to my ears sound notably demo-ier than the A-side.) I found out about the band via a recent Contrast Podcast with the theme of "Borders"--specifically thanks to JC, who runs the Vinyl Villain blog. MP3 via Cosy Recordings.

Free and legal MP3 from Moneybrother ("Radio Clash" meets Northern Soul)

2010-02-17T20:32:00.004-05:00

"Born Under a Bad Sign" - Moneybrother
With his Joe Strummer voice, abiding love for Northern Soul, and greased Christopher Walken hair, Anders Wendin is a big-time pop star in his native Sweden, dating back to Moneybrother's Swedish Grammy-winning debut album, 2003's Blood Panic. If the upcoming, first-ever Moneybrother U.S. release fails to accord him similar status here (I'm not holding my breath), it's not for lack of agreeable material. Take "Born Under a Bad Sign"--not a cover of the old Albert King song, but a rousing club-floor body-shaker that adds a compressed, 21st-century edge to the feeling of some of the Clash's dancier numbers. I find it easy to love tightly-crafted songs that manage to maintain a ramshackle vibe, and this is surely one of those, as Wendin's rough-edged voice and his nearly shouted, gang-style backing chorus belie the song's nimble beat and crisp guitar licks.
After five successful releases--and a new line of eco-friendly Moneybrother tomato soup (?)--Moneybrother will see album number five, Real Control, come out here on Bladen County Press Records in April. MP3 via Bladen County Press.

Free and legal MP3 from Anaïs Mitchell (memorably sung, sadly swinging ballad)

2010-02-10T12:06:00.002-05:00

"Flowers (Eurydice's Song)" - Anaïs Mitchell
     Slow down and breathe with this one--it's a burner and a keeper. And don't be worried that the song is part of a so-called "folk opera" that reworks the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, set in Depression-era America. In fact, I probably shouldn't even have mentioned that. Forget I said anything.
     Instead, just listen: to Mitchell's indelible voice--part pixie, part pop star--and her incandescent phrasing; to the unhurried viola which accompanies her so balefully (note to self: the viola is one underutilized instrument) and turns the song on one unexpected note (1:47); to the ache and pain that exists around this piece but never, completely, in it. In much the same way, the song unfolds with its simultaneously steady and hesitant gait and never quite coalesces into any solid verse or chorus structure. The mighty myth that underpins the music provides all the structure we need, and Mitchell's lyrics, in service to it, can be stunning in their understatement. Here's how Eurydice recalls what may have been her last living moment: "Walking in the sun, I remember someone/Someone by my side turned his face to mine/And then I turned away, into the shade." By and large she uses short, concrete words and trusts her splendid voice to add layers of meaning. Listen, for one example, to how she sings the simple word "now" at 1:09. I don't think you can teach that.
     Hadestown is the name of the theatrical work that the Vermont-based Mitchell wrote in collaboration with composer Michael Chorney. It premiered in Vermont in December 2006, and went out on a partially fan-supported tour of New England in 2007. The recording, for Ani DiFranco's Righteous Babe Records, features a variety of prominent indie music voices--including Justin Vernon (Bon Iver), Petra Haden, and Ben Knox Miller (the Low Anthem)--along with grizzled folkie Greg Brown and Ms. DiFranco herself. The album, well worth checking out, will be released next month.

Free and legal MP3 from MiniBoone (energetic neo-new wave, w/ harmonies)

2010-02-10T12:05:00.001-05:00

"Devil In Your Eyes" - MiniBoone
     Energetic, crisply executed fun, filled with rhythmic dissonance, echoes of 1978-ish American new wave music, and large-scale harmonies falling somewhere on a line connecting Queen to Sparks (but not, to my ear, Animal Collective, as per some of the band's press). And hey I really like how effectively this shifts the mood from Hadestown's heavy-hearted tragedy even as it delivers a synchronistic lyrical alignment (which believe it or not I didn't notice until I'd already laid this week's songs out in order).
     I especially love the guitars here. From beginning to end they play prickly, often rapid-fire chords that seem never to align quite with the melody either sonically or rhythmically. Listen, for instance, to the choked-neck sound you hear at the beginning, just past the organ opening: the engaging noise made by a guitar used more percussively than tonally. None of the actual notes that emerge jibe with what the song theoretically would want harmonically but the kinetic insistence of it becomes its own logic. The sound continues into the verse but note how the guitar steadily comes to life, the choked hammering giving way, around 40 seconds in or so, to fuller-fledged chord slashes that any music writer worth his or her salt would be tempted to call "angular" except maybe for how lively an atmosphere the band is churning up at this point. Typically, angular guitars are heard in a less flamboyant setting. One more example of creative guitar work comes in the chorus, when the layered harmonies take over center stage, pushing the guitar into making odd little offbeat exclamation points.
     MiniBoone is a five-piece from New York City. "Devil In Your Eyes" is a song off the band's new EP, Big Changes, which was released at the end of January on Drug Front Records. MP3 via the band's web site.

Free and legal MP3 from Midlake (gorgeous, well-crafted British folk revival sound)

2010-02-10T12:02:00.001-05:00

"Acts of Man" - Midlake
     Last heard in a Fleetwood Mac-ish soft rock mode (2007's The Trials of Van Occupanther), the boys from Denton, Texas have reemerged with a renewed hankering for a more traditional-sounding British rock. But rather than the semi-psychedelic early Pink Floyd and Procol Harum-esque pageantry on display through much of Bamnan and Slivercork, their 2004 debut, the quintet takes it back a notch further to a '60s British folk scene sound--think Steeleye Span, think Fairport Convention, think gentle, chivalrous melodies and general melancholy woebegone-edness.
     But me, I'm eating it up because the stuff is marvelously crafted, ravishingly performed, and drop-dead gorgeous. What a vibe the band has here! Tim Smith's medievally baritone is just the start of it. From the golden-toned acoustic guitar to the almost regal rumble of the drums to the deep and delicate flute lines and the potent minor-key melody that holds it all together, "Acts of Man" presents an aural landscape that all but makes me cry, for reasons beyond explanation. This is music working--as classical music is so often supposed to--at the level of pure emotion.
     Apparently not everyone gets it. In addition to a number of supportive reviews, the new album, The Courage of Others, has gotten some notable pans, including a tone-deaf dismissal in Pitchfork. Normally I get a bit worked up over that kind of thing but this time it just occurs to me to feel badly for anyone whose head and ears can't let them hear the beauty and worth of this album. Released last week on Bella Union, it's only going to get better over time. MP3 via Insound.

Fingertips Flashback: Tessitura (from Dec. 2005)

2010-02-05T11:54:00.004-05:00

This week we flash back to December 2005, and a solo effort from a member of Cincinnati's fine, ongoing ensemble, the Spectacular Fantastic. A lovely song, worth hearing again, or for the first time.

[from "This Week's Finds," December 11-17]

"Nervous" - Tessitura
Jonathan Williams sings in a warm, buzzy voice, rendered warmer and buzzier by his fetching tendency to sing in octave harmonies with himself. He further accompanies himself with clean, patient acoustic guitar licks; there's something of Pink Floyd's stately acoustic side in the air here, particularly when Williams spins out a line with such a haunting convergence of melody and lyric as this one: "Even in a dream/Things could seem far too real." There, I think, we arrive at the song's center of gravity, its point of pure allurement--it's not just the nice chord he reaches on the word dream, it's the way the word "dream" stretches out almost unaccountably, with a mysterious, standing-still sort of rising and falling. This is a real song, not just a guy with a nice voice strumming a nice guitar. (Not enough people these days seem to be able to differentiate between beautiful-sounding and actually beautiful, says me, and there we are yet again back at Ives' great distinction between manner and substance, but I'll steer clear of that particular soapbox for now.) Tessitura is a side project for Williams, who is otherwise a member of the fine, endearingly-named Cincinnati-based ensemble The Spectacular Fantastic. "Nervous" is a song on a new free-to-download split single featuring both bands; it can also be found on Tessitura's recently released free-to-download full-length CD, On the Importance of Being Confused.

ADDENDUM: Seemingly impossible to find out any new information on Williams. Tessitura appears to have been a one-off effort. But I still love this song, should've been much more widely heard. Fortunately, it's not too late.

Free and legal MP3 from the Morning Benders (musically astute pop with crunch and charm)

2010-02-02T22:08:00.001-05:00

"Promises" - The Morning Benders
     Chunky, loping, and unaccountably engaging new song from a long-time Fingertips favorite. But never fear, I will try to account for it. First, note how the octave harmonies (I always love octave harmonies as you may know by now) set up the first kind-of-hook, which is at 0:25, when the melody shifts from something low and slinky to something higher and more forceful. The melodic shift hooks the attention precisely because of the octave harmonies: the first half of the melody naturally focuses your ear on the lower harmony voice but when the higher-register section starts the ear now latches onto the higher voice. So it's like we hear a more pronounced displacement than is actually happening. It may not be a hook per se but it's subtly compelling. You want to keep listening.
     Next point on the tour: that crunchy, unresolved chord that both ends one verse and starts the next (0:31). And then, notice that as the second verse unfolds, it doesn't play out like verse one, and now for the first time we get phrases that stand out both musically and lyrically. The first is when Chris Chu sings "They say it's only natural," and then, even better: the linchpin point to which the song has been building (0:58), at the lyric, "I can't help thinking we grew up too fast." Things deconstruct a bit after that, with shifting time signatures and accumulating noise. And round about now I'm noticing how thick with musical detail this song actually is--there are engaging guitar licks, hidden keyboard flourishes, unexpected percussive accents, stray sounds, and an ongoing parade of nifty chord changes. These guys know what they're doing.
     The Morning Benders, a quartet from Berkeley, are no strangers here, having been featured twice previously--in June '08 and, for the sublime "Grain of Salt," in December '06. "Promises" is from the Big Echo, the band's second full-length, and first for Rough Trade Records, due out next month. MP3 via the Beggars Group, of which Rough Trade is a part.

Free and legal MP3 from Lali Puna (lustrous electro-pop from veteran German band)

2010-02-02T22:07:00.001-05:00

"Remember" - Lali Puna
     Lustrous electro-pop from the veteran German quartet Lali Puna, but the first new song heard from them since 2004. Centered on a recurring sound that has the aspect of a wordless question, the introductory beat is oddly poignant-sounding, and nicely launches this smartly orchestrated mix of rubbery aluminum synth lines and understated percussion. Everything's electronic but not too blippy or scratchy; there's instead something palpably formed about the sound, something that gives this the feel of musicians actually playing instruments rather than twiddling knobs. There are even sounds mixed in--am I making this up? I don't think so--that resemble the sound of fingers changing chords on guitar strings.
     Meanwhile, Valerie Trebeljahr's wistful vocals find their whispery place in the hypnotic mix, neither too forward nor too restrained; and listen too to the shadow of male harmony accompaniment all the way through, most clearly heard on the recurrent refrain, "Will you remember me?" Oh and don't miss what happens at 1:29 when for seven seconds or so the smooth electro stylings are stripped away and we're left with a most idiosyncratic aural skeleton, as if beneath the limpid facade is a deviant alien core.
     "Remember" will be found on Our Inventions, Lali Puna's fourth album, scheduled for an April release on Berlin-based Morr Music. MP3 via Morr Music.

Free and legal MP3 from Aidan Knight (effortlessly strong, country-tinged sing-along)

2010-02-02T22:05:00.002-05:00

"Jasper" - Aidan Knight
     When a song comes along as effortlessly gladdening as "Jasper" I actually get a little suspicious. "That's it?" I think. "It's that easy to write a really good song? A sing-along even? Anybody could do that!"
     But of course as it turns out anybody can't. Otherwise we'd have a lot more of this around, which we clearly do not. There's something ramrod solid about this song, even as it glides so easily through its three and a half minutes. Perched squarely on the shoulders of Aidan Knight's comfortable, boy-next-door baritone, "Jasper," for all its laid-back, singer/songwriter-y vibe, shines with the melodic assurance of an old Elton John song. (This is, to be clear, a compliment, and anyone who doesn't realize that would do well to go revisit some of the songs Sir Reg recorded between 1970 and 1974.) The song sounds channeled more than written, and everything about its presentation--from the delightfully restrained steel-guitar licks to the climactic group-sung chorus--rings true and right, as if no one had to decide any of this, as if it sprung to life of its will alone.
     Knight is from the lovely city of Victoria, B.C.; "Jasper" is from Versicolour, his first album, which is due out early next month. It is also the first release for the record label Adventure Boys Club, a label started by Knight along with Tyler Bancroft, of the Vancouver band Said the Whale.

February Q&A: Ben Walpole of the Minor Leagues

2010-02-01T14:45:00.003-05:00

The latest--and somewhat overdue--installment of the Fingertips Q&A is now online at the main Fingertips site. This month, Ben Walpole of the Minor Leagues take a crack at the five quick questions. And even so I fear I tuckered him out before the end.

Fingertips Flashback: Le Reno Amps

2010-01-29T21:01:00.004-05:00

Okay, the second installment of the Fingertips Flashback returns us to the year 2005 and a song that I thought never got the attention it so richly deserved. Fortunately, Le Reno Amps still seem to be active, and this song is still available online.

[from "This Week's Finds," Oct. 9-15, 2005]

"Once You Know" - Le Reno Amps

Scotland's answer to They Might Be Giants, Le Reno Amps are two guys (Scott and Al) from Aberdeen with an idiosyncratic sense of song, playful ideas about making lo-fi production come to life, and an enviable knack for melody. The modus operandi is stripped-down, always geared around their two voices and two guitars. But there's goofiness in the air too, lending an ineffable magic to the aural landscape. "Once You Know" sounds like it was recorded in a gym, with bouncing balls and/or stamping feet ingeniously employed as the rhythm section for this sharp and sprightly down-home ditty. The song gets off to a great start based on melody alone; when the "percussion" kicks in with the second verse, ably accented by some hardy background "hey!"s, the song is unstoppable. The fully-whistled verse that starts at 1:14 appears at that point both a crazy surprise and utterly inevitable. "Once You Know" is from Le Reno Amps' archly-titled debut CD LP, released under their own (ha-ha) Vanity Project imprint last year. The MP3 is up on the band's site. A second CD is apparently in the works for these guys, due out some time in 2006.

ADDENDUM: "We try to write with all the fat cut out so you can savour their buttery goodness," says Scott Maple, who founded the band with Al Nero. Hard not to like that. Turns out the band's second album did not emerge until 2007, but the good news is these guys still exist, and put their third album out just last year. The band's name, mysterious as it sounds, is simply a pluralized anagram of the names Maple and Nero.

Fingertips Top 10 update

2010-01-27T14:50:00.004-05:00

The Fingertips Top 10, over on the main site, is always a good way to catch up with some of the best songs that have been posted here over the last few months. I haven't blogged about it since October, and it's yet again turned over since then. Here's where it stands now:

1. "Johanna" - Think About Life
2. "Hotel Lights"- Amy Cook
3. "Numbers Don't Lie"- The Mynabirds
4. "The River" - Audra Mae
5. "Good Boys" - the Minor Leagues
6. "Castaways" - Shearwater
7. "Vendela Vida" - Dinosaur Feathers
8. "Floating Vibes" - Surfer Blood
9. "Get Going" - Headlights
10. "Empty-Hall Sing-Along" - Woodpigeon

Like everything else on Fingertips, the Top 10 is idiosyncratic and synchronicitous. No research is involved, no polling performed, no focus groups consulted, and no "people who like this also like..." recommendations heeded. The list exists merely to say "Well done" to ten particularly wonderful songs at any given time. Remember, however, that Fingertips only features carefully filtered music to begin with, so you can't go wrong with any of the MP3s featured here, basically ever.

Free and legal MP3 from The Fine Arts Showcase (gracefully melodic Swedish pop, w/ crooning and clapping)

2010-01-26T20:44:00.001-05:00

"London, My Town" - The Fine Arts Showcase
     The hand claps you hear at the outset of "London, My Town" aren't just an intermittent percussive accent or atmospheric frill; they're here for the duration of the song, soon acquiring a riveting sort of desperation about them. Hand claps are usually smile-inducing but these ones, not so much; whether organic or artificial, they have the sound of palms being driven together with an almost violent tenacity. That they do so underneath a most graceful melody adds to their disconcerting vigor. Neither for that matter does front man Gustaf Kjellvander, with his crooner's baritone, have the kind of voice you expect to hear happy-claps behind.
     And so check out how the song's second section arrives, at 0:35, and immediately something feels like a clearing or a release. Yup: it's because the hand claps have stopped for the moment. "And I've given up on truth," Kjellvander sings at this point, accompanied by a pensive slide guitar line. "'Cause I'm running out of youth." Aren't we all. And then the unyielding hand claps return. The song has something to do with Kjellvander's moving back to Malmö from London after his relationship (the "Hanna" mentioned at the song's abrupt end) has broken up; the entire album, Dolophine Smile, in fact, offers an unsparing look at the crumbling relationship. Set to graceful melodies.
     The album, the Swedish quartet's fifth, was released back in April 2009 on Malmö-based Adrian Recordings. "London, My Town" has just been made available as a free and legal MP3 via Adrian, in advance of the Fine Arts Showcase's imminent German tour.

Free and legal MP3 from High Places (beat-driven, but short and engaging)

2010-01-26T20:39:00.003-05:00

"On Giving Up" - High Places
     While beat-oriented songs usually puzzle me (okay: bore me) more than engage me, "On Giving Up" offers some extra hand-holds of interest and allure that make it more, to my ears, than just another manipulated groove of a song.
     Let's start with the beat itself, in which a blend of distinct sounds become difficult to pry apart aurally, and create, together, something larger than themselves. You can hear it at the very beginning: there's the deeper, thumpier part; there's something of an electronic tom-tom sound closely aligned with the thumpier sound (but note how the tom misses the third beat, playing only 1-2-x-4, which helps give the song its late-night swing); and then there's this distinct, higher-pitched sound, almost like an electronic wooden drum, delivering, off the beat, what feels like the song's central rhythm. And, phew, look: all these words to describe something happening nearly below conscious awareness and before the song even really starts. Maybe that's why I usually steer clear of this stuff.
     So anyway then comes that reverberant synth melody (0:09) and slinky bass line (0:17) and, lastly, Mary Pearson's floaty, echoey, Beth Gibbons-y voice, equal parts burn and withdrawal. Partly I suspect this needs to be heard at ear-vibrating volume on a foggy and mysteriously lit dance floor while surrounded by blissed-out, slightly sweaty strangers. If you get there let me know how it is. "On Giving Up" is from this Brooklyn-based duo's second album, High Places vs. Mankind, set for release in early April on Thrill Jockey Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3 from the Mynabirds (splendid neo-retro-gospel-pop; yup, I'm coining that)

2010-01-26T20:36:00.001-05:00

"Numbers Don't Lie" - the Mynabirds
     A simple stuttering stomp of a keyboard vamp lies at the center of this nifty piece of neo-retro-gospel-pop (or some such thing; hey, I make this up as I go). While there are clearly a lot of nods to bygone times in the aural landscape of "Numbers Don't Lie," what charms me the most is the subtle but sure sense of currency that likewise defines this song. It is a song that belongs here in 2010 (numbers don't lie, after all), and I think what gives me that impression has to do with clarity of presentation. From the plainly articulated keyboard notes to Laura Burhenn's double-tracked vocals to the instantly enticing melody (note the hook-y chord change comes right in the second measure), all the pieces of the song ring with presence, with a "thereness" that separates a song that transcends its influences from a song that is smothered by them. (And, okay, those telephone-button blips in the bridge are a fun present-day touch too.)
     Another point of clarity involves the song's use of reverb, which is effective in its restraint. While the choral-like backing vocals get a reverb rinse, and the rhythm section also maybe a dose of it, Burhenn keeps her lead vocals clean. It makes an understated but incisive difference in the overall sound, and even though reverb is popular in present-day indie rock, this song's judicious use of it makes it seem more real, more its own new thing as a result.
     Laura Burhenn is known to some as half of the D.C. duo Georgie James, which played together for three years and released one album on Saddle Creek Records before breaking up in 2008. "Numbers Don't Lie" is the first song made available from What We Lose In The Fire We Gain In The Flood, her first release as the Mynabirds, slated for an April release on Saddle Creek. Burhenn by the way named her project after the Mynah Birds, a Canadian R&B band in the '60s that signed to Motown but never released any albums and at one point, impossibly enough, featured both Neil Young and Rick James in its lineup. MP3 via Saddle Creek.

Dipping into the archives (introducing a new feature, w/ one free & legal MP3)

2010-01-21T17:44:00.008-05:00

Fingertips has been reviewing free and legal MP3s since mid-2003, which first of all means yikes, that's a lot of songs by now. And second of all this means no way anyone following this site in 2010 has read all the reviews and listened to all the songs lo these many years.

Some of them, by now, and alas, are gone with the digital wind, free and legal no more. The older they are, the more likely is this to be true. But a good many of them are still available, against all odds, and what I plan to do once a week is revisit an old post, complete with the link to the still-existing free and legal MP3. Let's say we call it the Fingertips Flashback. Or Flashback Friday, as I'm planning on doing this every Friday, pretty much. Could be Fingertips Flashback Friday for that matter. Or we don't have to call it anything at all, as the names are sounding goofy. But it is going to need a name. I'll work on it.

This will be a feature-in-progress but the idea is to present the original review and the link, and then maybe follow it up with a few words looking back at the past through the lens of the present, because we are all older and wiser now and have so much more interesting things to say than we used to say. In theory. Here we go, the first Fingertips Flashback:

[from "This Week's Finds," week of May 8-14, 2005]

"Glorious" - A. Graham and the Moment Band
There are certain sorts of on-and-off-pitch voices that are so immediately friendly and unassuming that they welcome you in like an old friend handing you a beer. Andy Graham has one of those voices. Then again, this entire song is kind of like an old friend handing you a beer, most of all the loose-limbed, sing-along chorus, featuring four of the English language's finest words--"Glorious/ Triumphant/ Optimistic/ Transcendent"-- woven together with spot-on pedal steel accents. Like Doris Henson, A. Graham and the Moment Band are another endearing, worthy band from Kansas City, Kansas. "Glorious" is the lead track on the band's 2004 CD This Tyrant is Free, released on Sonic Unyon Records. The MP3 is available via Lawrence.com, one of the better (if also unassuming) local/regional music resources on the web.

ADDENDUM: Well, even Google can't seem to inform me of the fate of this crazy little band from the heartland. Nothing, apparently, has been recorded since their 2004 release. In its listing on Lawrence.com, the band claims to be "alive and kicking" but there are no signs of it I can see. The song remains as friendly and approachable as ever. I don't always feel those four words but this song reminds me it's never out of the question.

Free and legal MP3 from Regrets & Brunettes (terrific sustained mood, both brisk & world-weary)

2010-01-20T17:03:00.002-05:00

"Tough Love" - Regrets & Brunettes
     "Tough Love" does so much so effortlessly in its first 15 seconds that a casual listener may not hear much more than an intriguing mood. But check it out: first the brisk minor key guitar strum, at once mellow and urgent; then the slightly dissonant second guitar line (harsher and crunchier but also somewhat distant); then--out of left field but instantly perfect--the wistful, Bacharachesque horn motif (and that could be a keyboard sounding like a horn, but no matter). It's an extraordinarily compact introduction; Richard Bivens begins singing, with the compellingly blasé tone of any number of great rock'n'roll singers--at 0:16. Better believe I'm listening.
     The opening's terrific atmosphere sustains. This is one of those unusual pop songs in which the chorus is less catchy than the other elements, and truly this seems part of the plan--as Bivens repeats "I can't shake it," I can just about feel the physical gesture suggested and it's not supposed to be entirely pleasant. Everything works together here; in fact, I'm half convinced one reason the music withdraws a bit in the chorus is to give us a chance to ponder the curious lyric Bivens left us hanging with: "You used to take off your clothes/You used to curl up your toes with me."
     "Tough Love" is as song off the L.A.-based band's debut album, At Night You Love Me, which was self-released last month.

Free and legal MP3 from Lay Low (twangy toe-tapper w/ Icelandic charm)

2010-01-20T17:01:00.001-05:00

"By and By" - Lay Low
     Doing musical business as Lay Low, Icelandic singer/songwriter Lovísa Elísabet Sigrúnardóttir combines a genuine feel for--of all things--classic country and western with the ability, consistently shared by musicians in her home country, to tap into something marvelous and otherworldly.
     On the surface, yes, the song is an upbeat, twangy little thing, but me, I am for some reason paying extra attention to how Lovísa meanders away from the regimen of the sprightly beat that appears at first to define the song. In the verses, only the first two words of each line are firmly on the beat; by the end of the verse, she willfully ignores the momentum of the song, her voice all but purring with an unusual blend of intimacy and puckishness. The chorus, meanwhile, sounds like a return to alignment (0:59) but for the life of me even when the melody appears to be in lockstep with the beat I swear she sounds like she's laying off ever so slightly. And then soon enough (1:04) she lets it go entirely. Listen to how she manages the transition between the words "before" and "I"; I cannot describe it. And behind her it's all just perky country playing, as if nothing is awry, as if it's maybe just a big guy in a cowboy hat who's on stage and we're group-imagining this (marvelous, otherworldly) Nordic visitation.
     "By and By" will be found on Lay Low's second album, Farewell Good Night's Sleep, due out in March on Lovísa's own Loo label.

Free and legal MP3 from Matt Pond PA (another stellar effort from indie-pop stalwart)

2010-01-20T16:59:00.001-05:00

"Starting" - Matt Pond PA [not a direct link]
     All these years and personnel changes later and Matt Pond PA, founded in 1998, still holds it own on the strength of its front man's voices--both his singing voice and his writing voice, that is, each of which is indelible.
      Vocally, Pond trades on a pensive graininess of tone and an elusive range that gives him the sound of neither--or both--a baritone and a tenor. Once you've heard his singing voice it is thereafter unmistakable, which is a splendid, if probably random, characteristic. And yet his true strength is the means by which he gives himself something to sing: the staunch, well-crafted songs that he writes, full of concrete words to draw us in (dead bolts, gasoline, hips, knees), parallel structures (i.e. lyrical lines that share a certain construction) to display offhand authority, inaudible lyrics to make us listen harder next time, and bright turns of melody that in fact make us want to listen any number of other times. I especially like how, in a largely inscrutable song, he manages to slip in a conclusion as pithy and suasive as: "Make no mistake/There's no love/When the words are gone."
     Matt Pond PA was one of the first bands whose sound and depth impressed me as Fingertips was first getting going back in the '03-'04 time frame, and indeed became one of the first 21st-century indie bands to hit some semblance of the big time via exposure on broadcast TV soundtracks. But the '00s showed us that there is indeed a fine line between up-and-coming and down-and-going. I feel sorry for quality bands stuck navigating their careers through a fickle and fragmented culture that hews to a shallow and imaginary view of good and bad, but I am happy that Matt Pond and company persevere. "Starting" will appear on the album The Dark Leaves, the band's eighth full-length, slated for an April release on Altitude Records. MP3 via Paste Magazine. Note that this is not a direct link; click on the song title here and you will be taken to a page from which you can then download the song.

New contest: win July Flame, from Laura Veirs

2010-01-15T16:20:00.007-05:00

Win the new Laura Veirs album, July Flame, at the contests page on the main Fingertips site. While there you can also watch a short, homey documentary on the making of the album. July Flame is Veirs' seventh release; it was produced by Tucker Martine, who has worked with the Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens, among others. "Wide-Eyed, Legless," from the album, was featured here in December.

Free and legal MP3 from Woodpigeon (spacey strummer becomes western hoedown, w/ lots of voices)

2010-01-13T15:44:00.001-05:00

"Empty-Hall Sing-Along" - Woodpigeon
A multifaceted musical adventure awaits you here. What begins as a sort of spacey, choral Fleetwood Mac-ish strummer takes a left turn at 1:37 and reinvents itself as a western hoedown a la Poco or Pure Prairie League (reference for those of a certain age). Front man Mark Hamilton clearly likes to surround himself with musicians--Woodpigeon is a shape-shifting ensemble featuring eight semi-regulars and a dozen and a half potential guests--but here their presence is as much vocal as instrumental. If you listen carefully, you'll discern more than the usual number of guitar and percussion sounds, yes, but what ultimately dominates the song are an unexpectedly large chorus of voices. Five of the central eight are listed as singers and while there's no telling who exactly is singing what, what I'm liking a lot is the vibe of a group of singers singing together, which creates an entirely different feel than multi-tracked harmonies. This is a "sing-along," after all.
Woodpigeon is based in Calgary and issued its debut album in 2006. I don't think I can stop myself from telling you that Hamilton called his first band Woodpigeon Divided By Antelope Equals Squirrel. That was while he was living in Scotland and it didn't apparently amount to much. "Empty-Hall Sing-Along" comes from Die Stadt Musikanten, Woodpigeon's third album, released this week in Canada on Boompa Records; the American release will be in March. MP3 via Boompa.

Free and legal MP3 from White Hinterland (mysterious-sounding, beat-driven electro-pop)

2010-01-13T15:43:00.001-05:00

"Icarus" - White Hinterland
     Arriving on the indie scene in 2006 as a precocious, Nellie McKay-ish singer/songwriter/pianist, Casey Dienel has since taken on a band name (White Hinterland), a band mate (Shawn Creeden), and a new musical setting. I for one am happy to hear it, as I believe the world can use propulsive, mysterious-sounding, beat-driven but melodic electro-pop a bit more than it needs a second Nellie McKay.
     Underscored by swooshing wind-like white noise, "Icarus" has a slinky sound that gains traction via the interplay between Dienel's airy, plaintive singing style and the clattering rhythm sticks that are placed front and center in the mix. They are unavoidable there, and are thus transformed from percussive accent into full-fledged musical statement, particularly when Dienel sings the wordless refrain of "oo-oo-oohs" that functions as a chorus-like link between verses. Check out how the clacking rhythm stutters and syncopates along the way, just enough to keep your head in the game, to keep the song from fading into over-smoothness. Time passes much more quickly because the ears aren't being lulled to sleep; every time I get to the end--at 3:47, the song is not notably short--I feel a little startled.
     Born and raised in the Boston area, Dienel studied classical voice and composition at the New England Conservatory of Music before leaving to have a go as a pop musician. She is now located in Portland, Oregon. "Icarus" will be found on White Hinterland's second album, Kairos, which is due out in March on Dead Oceans. MP3 via Dead Oceans.

Free and legal MP3 from Sangre Degrado (sleeper w/ something of an early '70s vibe, but not exactly)

2010-01-13T15:41:00.000-05:00

"Pearl and Oyster" - Sangre Degrado
     "Pearl and Oyster" has the casual aplomb of some forgotten nugget of early '70s rock goodness. And it's not so much that this California trio sounds precisely like this or that long-ago band as much as that they don't especially sound like anything I'm hearing out of my trusty desktop speakers these days. Lead singer and guitarist Dan Chejoka has a chesty baritone with an elastic range, not to mention an engaging falsetto; behind him, his twin brother Nart, on drums, and their good friend Greg Johnson, on everything else, romp with determination and spirit through this sleeper of a song that has gotten about zero attention to date from the fickle and trend-obsessed blogosphere.
     And pretty much everything you need to know about this one you can hear even before Chejoka opens his mouth, in the brisk and yearning introduction with its rubbery, soaring guitar line. That's the sound of people not just looking to fill up space before the lyrics start, it's the sound of a band with a story to tell that transcends words (which is what good music, even if it has words, should ideally do). The easy way the song unfolds from there--the elaborate melodies in both chorus and verse and the effective instrumental building blocks in between--is both delightful and matter of fact. Listen in particular to how the dramatic, falsetto-charged chorus builds to an emotional--but, interestingly, not a musical--resolution. I don't think that's easy to do.
     "Pearl and Oyster" is from a debut album with a great title, The Nerve of That Ending, which the band self-released in October. MP3 via the band's site, where the entire album is in fact available for free.

Free and legal MP3 from Paper Route (majestic, wistful, full-bodied rock w/ electronic fuzz)

2010-01-06T21:23:00.001-05:00

"Thank God The Year Is Finally Over" - Paper Route
     A bracing blend of majesty and wistfulness, from its direct and poignant title straight through to an unexpected appearance by a harmonica in the outro. (The harmonica is surely one of music's most wistful instruments.) There's enough fuzz and noise along the way for shoegaze fans to appreciate but not enough to overwhelm the song's simple but effective melody (note how the long descending line of the chorus sounds nicely late-December-ish), not to mention the octave harmonies in the vocals. (I love me my octave harmonies--that is, when the harmony vocal is the same note but one octave higher or lower.)
     This band surely aims for a big-hearted sound, and yet more than ever, it seems, there's a fine line between a band with big heart and a band with a shallow heart. Somehow. The fact that these guys are touring with the curiously popular Owl City doesn't help the "big heart" case but listening with my ears (a good practice), I find something splendid in this smartly-paced piece of expansive, electronic-tinged rock. And that harmonica surprises every time.
     Paper Route is a quartet from Nashville; their debut full-length CD, Absence, was released on Universal Records in April 2009. "Thank God The Year Is Finally Over" is from a free Christmas EP the band released in December. MP3 via Spinner. (The entire EP is available as a zip file here.)

Free and legal MP3 from Dinosaur Feathers (ramshackle, pseudo-Latin indie pop)

2010-01-06T21:22:00.002-05:00

"Vendela Vida" - Dinosaur Feathers
Ramshackle, pseudo-Latin indie pop that may engage your ear and spirit in a way that Vampire Weekend didn't manage to (if, that is, you happen to be among those whose ears and/or spirits were not, in fact, engaged thereby; I know some of you are out there). The music by this Brooklyn-based trio has an amiable, second-nature feel to it, while singer/guitarist Greg Sullo possesses a marvelous rock'n'roll tenor, at once lazy and insistent. He sounds like a guy who doesn't sweat the details and yet for whom the details seem to work out pretty well most of the time.
Vendela Vida--and isn't her name fabulously easy to say?--is a writer, and wife of the perhaps more well-known writer Dave Eggers. Not sure how the song relates--Sullo does manage to rhyme "Vida" and "read her"--but she was born to be a lyric, among her other accomplishments. You'll find the song on the band's debut album, Fantasy Memorial, which is scheduled for self-release in March. MP3 via Magnet. Oh and as another sign of these guys' musical aptitude, check out the cool mixtape they made in conjunction with an interview on the Music is Art blog last summer, which connects the Kinks to Harry Belafonte to NWA to Genesis and more.

Free and legal MP3 from Amy Cook (exquisite song from Austin-based singer/songwriter)

2010-01-06T21:19:00.002-05:00

"Hotel Lights" - Amy Cook
     And here's a real new year's treat--a song as good as anything you're likely to hear over the coming 12 months. On the one hand, it's a quiet bit of singer/songwriter fare; on the other hand, oh my, what an exquisite tune. Cook plays an electric guitar here--the old-fashioned kind, with f-holes--not an acoustic one, and its rich, rounded tones lend an immediate depth to the song, and nicely complements her ever-so-slightly-dusky voice.
     But it's sheer songwriting prowess that makes this one shine. Cook, based in Austin, works wonders in particular with asymmetricality. Listen, first of all, to the melody line at the beginning of the verse (0:12), and how those three words ("All the girls") are set apart, separated by a measure and a half from the rest of the line, which then streams out without a break through the lyric's end. There's great power in that quiet lack of regularity, and Cook uses it again, in a different way, at the opposite end of the structure. After the first two lines of the chorus, in which her words emerge in two-syllable clusters at the beginning of each measure, she proceeds to extend the second line four extra measures, partially mirroring the two-syllable clustering but now filling in the empty spaces with an uneven but luscious melody. Much more delightful to listen to than to read about.
     "Hotel Lights" is from Cook's album Let The Light In, produced by Alejandro Escovedo and slated for an early March release. This appears to be her third album but details are sketchy. Thanks to Bruce at Some Velvet Blog for the head's up.

Favorite free and legal MP3s of 2009

2009-12-24T08:02:00.002-05:00

It's time for the third annual "Fingertips Favorites" list, presenting the free and legal MP3s that were my absolute favorites of the year. As with previous years, you'll note there are two lists: one of my top 10 favorite free and legal MP3s of 2008, and, this year, one of my next 10 favorite free and legal MP3s of 2008. Not only is it too hard to narrow it down to just 10, but this year I'm thinking I could feasibly exchange any (or all) songs in the second 10 for songs in the first 10. It's all guesswork, and everything is really good.

TOP 10 FAVORITE FREE AND LEGAL MP3s, 2009

"Johanna" - Think About Life [more]
"What You Said" - The Decks [more]
"River of Dirt" - Marissa Nadler [more]
"Davy Crockett" - South Ambulance [more]
"Trophy Wife" - The Winter Sounds [more]
"Gloomy Monday Morning" - The Black Hollies [more]
"The River" - Audra Mae [more]
"She Comes To Me" - Adam Arcuragi [more]
"Goodbye" - The Argument [more]
"The Letter" - The Veils [more]

Honorary Top 10: "Loaded" - The Idle Hands (no longer available) [more]

10 MORE FAVORITE FREE AND LEGAL MP3s, 2009

"When the Devil's Loose" - A. A. Bondy [more]
"My Maudlin Career" - Camera Obscura [more]
"Madeline, Every Girl" - Cameron McGill & What Army [more]
"It Hurts Me All the Time" - Faunts [more]
"Die Young" - The Sweet Serenades [more]
"Tammie" - the Dø [more]
"White As Diamonds" - Alela Diane [more]
"Lalita" - The Love Language [more]
"Harold T. Wilkins" - Fanfarlo [more]
"Miracle" - Sally Shapiro [more]

Oops, late posts this week

2009-12-19T10:50:00.003-05:00

This week's selections were posted on the main Fingertips site a day later than usual this week, so they've been up there a few days, but somehow in my scurrying around I forgot entirely about posting them here. Oops. But it's okay because there won't be any more new MP3s reviewed until January at this point, so it's not like these songs will be bumping into a new batch very quickly.

What's happening next week is I'll be posting a list of my top 20 favorite free and legal MP3s of the year. Bigger news is that I'm also busy working on a site redesign which will merge the main site and the blog--which means no more forgetting to post here, thank goodness. Lots of tedious work to do between now and then. WordPress here we come. Eventually.

Free and legal MP3 from Shout Out Louds (musically astute, slowly building, unusually structured power pop)

2009-12-19T10:47:00.002-05:00

"Walls" - Shout Out Louds
     Musically astute and thematically cohesive, "Walls" features an odd, almost discomfiting build-up. First, we get front man Adam Olenius singing over stark bass and drums accompaniment, the melody hard to discern. (I suggest paying attention to that bass note--a D, I believe--because it is not going away for a while.) After the sparse, foreboding opening verse, a piano riff arrives to mix things up a bit but listen to how the bass note persists, and keeps the ear from sensing any resolution.
      The full band kicks in with a second verse, followed by the piano riff again, and then a third verse, and all the while, sure enough, the bass pounds that one same note. If you're feeling a bit claustrophobic by now that's why. Because of the intervening piano riff we may not quite realize we haven't heard a chorus yet, but here we are, two minutes into the song, and nope, we haven't. It feels as if the song has stayed in one chord this whole time. Then, at 2:15, we are released: the chorus arrives, almost transcendently, using the piano riff melody but now set free from the one-note bass anchor. The forcefully sung lyrics seem especially consequential in this setting, and we hear them now three times running because there are no more verses left. By 3:15, the song is done and it's like we don't really know what hit us. But it was good.
     Shout Out Louds are a quintet from Sweden; "Walls" will be found on the album Work, their third, due out on Merge Records in February. MP3 via Merge.

Free and legal MP3 from Emily Neveu (lo-fi, reverb-drenched, but w/ a sturdy melody and lovely vocals)

2009-12-19T10:46:00.001-05:00

"My Cosmonaut" - Emily Neveu
Not many lo-fi, reverb-drenched songs sneak through the Fingertips filter (certainly not as many as are out there) but this one struck my ears as a keeper, for at least a couple of reasons. To begin with, there's that appealing acoustic guitar riff in the introduction--appealing because it moves musically (many lesser songs will use an acoustic guitar as a kind of place-keeper, via monotonous strums) and because the chords themselves are refreshing (i.e. not just basic chords, but inversions, which are played higher up the neck). Second, there's Neveu's cloud-like voice and the layered way she's recorded it; such soft tones she sings with, but that doesn't keep her from experimenting with some intriguing harmonic intervals. Third and maybe best of all, this is one sturdy melody, from the ancient undertones of the folk-like verse to the distilled beauty of a chorus that hinges, poignantly, on a suspended chord.
The 26-year-old, Berkeley-based Neveu has played in the bands Calico Horse, Clock Work Army, and Indian Moon. She is currently preparing a solo album, on which "My Cosmonaut" is slated to appear. She offers a nice assortment of free and legal MP3s--both her unreleased solo stuff and band songs--on her web site. And Radiohead fans may also want to check out her charming, front-porch cover of "Idioteque," via Lefse Records. When it emerges, the solo album will be out on Lefse.

Free and legal MP3 from ShellShag (squonky guitars, unschooled vocals, and a spirited hook)

2009-12-19T10:45:00.001-05:00

"Resilient Bastard" - ShellShag
Come to think of it, not a lot of rough-hewn DIY stuff ends up here either. I've never been personally into the anarchic posturing of old-school punks, nor the fetishistic preference for noise over musicality. But every now and then I stumble upon something from that world that reminds me that a certain number of punksters are popsters at heart, and that, when used in symbiotic tandem, punk and pop can offer a uniquely satisfying experience. And I'm not talking about what has been labeled "punk pop" on the commercial side of things. I'm talking about something like "Resilient Bastard," with its squonky guitar work, unschooled but determined vocals, sly sense of humor both lyrically and musically (sleigh bells? really?), and, best of all, its spirited hook, which depends equally on the words and music. No way that chorus kills the way it does if the singer leads with a line other than "I don't care/I'm a resilient bastard."
Johnny "Shellhead" and Jen Shag (Shell, Shag, you see), although from different places--he, Missouri; she, New Jersey--are both rooted musically in the '90s DIY scene in San Francisco, and began playing together in 1999, first in the trio Kung Fu USA. ShellShag emerged from that experience. "Resilient Bastard" will be found on the album Rumors In Disguise, ShellShag's second full-length, scheduled for release in February on Don Giovanni Records.

MOG playlist

2009-12-11T20:16:00.003-05:00

Anyone out there trying out the $5/mo. unlimited listening service now offered by MOG? If so, you can check out an end-of-year playlist I made there. But it's not just a list of songs I like from 2009--it's a handful of 2009 favorites blended together with an idiosyncratic mix of nuggets from rock'n'roll history. It's not random, it's not too long, and it's waiting to be heard. Is there anything, after all, more pathetic than a playlist made for the world that the world isn't listening to? Well, probably. But still. Give it a shot, it's pretty good.

Free and legal MP3 from Shearwater (sad grandeur over portentous rhythm section)

2009-12-08T16:52:00.000-05:00

"Castaways" - Shearwater
     With his monumental voice, and taste for monumental subject matter, Jonathan Meiburg creates music with the sad grandeur of ruined palaces or Russian novels. But take your ear off Shearwater's front man for a moment, if you can, and check out what else is happening here, or not happening.
      The rumbly drama you're listening to is all about the vigorous rhythm section, which seems to have changed places with the rest of the band: the pounding drums and agile bass line are front and center, they're what Meiburg is singing with, they're what forms the musical center of the song, while guitar and keyboard play with care and tenderness around the edges. Yes, you'll hear the guitar and keys in the introduction, daintily, but once the drums kick in at 0:35, "Castaways" swings with its rhythm section's portentous rumble. I may be imagining it, but I feel as if I am more often hearing the guitarist's fingers moving on the strings than I am hearing the guitar itself. This is the type of tender detail that helps give the song its poignant depth, above and beyond its more obviously dramatic ambiance.
     "Castaways" is the first available song from the band's forthcoming album, The Golden Archipelago, slated for a February release on Matador Records. Note that Shearwater, from Austin, is a band that still very much believes in the album format. The CD will come with a 50-page booklet, and the vinyl LP is slightly reordered, with two additional songs, allowing for the difference in listening experiences. Note too that Shearwater has twice previously been featured on Fingertips: in March 2008 and May 2005. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3 from the Futureheads (neo-New Wave, and then some)

2009-12-08T16:51:00.001-05:00

"Struck Dumb" - the Futureheads
     The 21st century has not been lacking in New Wave revival bands, with their metallic guitars, punchy rhythms, and clipped British-sounding vocals (whether actually British or not). When bands fall flat in the effort it's when they get the sound right but forget to give us a worthy song in the process. So-called angularity is a notably two-dimensional quality. The ear needs more to feel satisfied.
     The Futureheads, a Sunderland (UK) quartet with three albums now under their belt, have a couple of extra things going here. First, to their spiky neo-New Wave sound they bring an intriguing outside element:
walls of harmony. It's an attractive addition to my ears, a kind of Devo-meets-Queen vibe that works unexpectedly well. Second, the song moves musically in a way a lot of similar-sounding songs--some by the Futureheads themselves, I might add--do not. Yes, that Jam-like introduction is fun and effective, but it succeeds, to my ears, precisely because the song isn't content to stay put. Sometimes this can be a simple matter of finding the right chord at the right time. The first place I hear the song open up is at 0:31, on the line "Stop living in the clouds"--it's subtle, but the chord they move through there has a wonderful theatricality to it, and it foreshadows what we'll hear in the chorus moments later. Listen in particular to the line "Negativity is controlling your dreams," beginning at 0:44, and how the chorus takes a left turn from there. We remain on the one hand within the tight sonic world of the neo-New Wave and yet also we've been launched out of it. Everything still wraps up in under three minutes, which is another triumphant gesture.
     "Struck Dumb" is from the Futureheads' upcoming album, as yet without a title or a release date, although some time in 2010 is a safe bet. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3 from Jason Boesel (friendly Americana w/ sneaky depth, from Rilo Kiley's drummer)

2009-12-08T16:48:00.003-05:00

"Hand of God" - Jason Boesel
     Loping, good-natured Americana from the voice and sticks of one of the indie scene's busiest drummers. While the casual beat, agreeable steel guitar licks, and gang-style harmonies (i.e. no harmony) in the chorus imply a lightweight yarn, there's a bit more here than might initially meet the ear. I suspect, in fact, distraction is part of the design, and that it's precisely because the words so easily roll off Boesel's friendly, reverbed voice--think Nashville Skyline Dylan crossed with Ron Sexsmith--that you don't readily notice how he's messing with you.
     But he's doing just that, largely via the time-honored songwriting trick of changing one or two key words in lines that, repeating, otherwise appear the same. In the chorus, for instance, he first is "recovering," while "remembering" is hard; on the repeat, he is "remembering," and it's "recovering" that's hard. Or, in the first verse, he goes up the stairs and doesn't know why, while in the last verse he goes down the stairs and now he knows why. (And we do too, if we're paying attention.) Also, he first hears laughing in the dark, which he realizes "could" have been him; later he hears screaming in the dark, which he admits "had" to be him. And then this subtle, trickily told story of love gone bad climaxes with an offhand lyrical gem: "I thought I was a secret/But I was too easy to keep." A song this carefully crafted always rewards repeat listens.
     Boesel is drummer for Rilo Kiley, and has also sat at the kit for Bright Eyes, the Elected, and Conor Oberst, among others. "Hand of God" is from his debut solo album, Hustler's Son, slated for release next month on Team Love. MP3 via Team Love.

Coming soon: favorite free & legal MP3s of 2009

2009-12-05T16:29:00.003-05:00

I've put together a preliminary list of my favorite free & legal MP3s of 2009; it's posted as a note on the Fingertips Facebook page, if you'd like to see. Got any preferences? I'm all ears. Or maybe you'd rather just wait and see what the final list looks like. I'm aiming to narrow it down to 20 if at all possible. Work proceeds apace.

December Q&A: Vandaveer

2009-12-03T13:02:00.003-05:00

This month, the Fingertips Q&A features Mark Charles Heidinger, who does musical business as Vandaveer. Vandaveer's song "Turpentine" was featured on Fingertips in September; the album on which it can be found, Divide & Conquer, is on my personal list of 2009's best. Heidinger's answers here are on my personal list of best Fingertips Q&As of 2009 as well.

Free and legal MP3 from the Minor Leagues (exuberant, horn-laced pop, w/ existential crisis)

2009-12-01T15:51:00.000-05:00

"Good Boys" - the Minor Leagues
     Exuberant, horn-laced pop, performing that endearing trick of sounding more slapdash than it actually is. I think drummer John Kathman, brandishing a combination of full-out bashing and asymmetrical fills, has a lot to do with this. The horns, too, carry with them the sound of a band a half step away from flying apart, maybe just from the inherent imprecision of brass instruments, which must create multiple octaves of notes from (typically) three valves. On a guitar or a keyboard, each note is precise and unique. On trumpets, less so. This occurs to me as important all of a sudden.
     And then, in the middle of this burstingly happy-sounding song comes a philosophical interlude we may not be quite prepared for, as singer Ben Walpole wonders, "Jesus, why did you give me a conscience/If I can't use it to influence my actions?/And Jesus, why do I have to know wrong from right/When the knowledge never ever beats out passion?" Um, hmm--can we get back to you on that? In the meantime, what happened to the trumpets? The guitars have taken over, along with the existential crisis. Drummer Kathman is still bashing away, however.
     The Minor Leagues, from Cincinnati, have grown to seven pieces from the quartet they were when last featured here in 2006. I like how each band member, in the bio material on the Datawaslost site, places him- or herself in an exact year with a particular band, to illustrate with unusual clarity the sound each feels most connected to. "Good Boys" comes from This Story Is Old, I Know, But It Goes On, released in November via Datawaslost, which is both a musical collective and a record label. MP3 via Datawaslost.

Free and legal MP3 from Soulsavers (Oldham channels Lanegan, w/ swampy groove)

2009-12-01T15:50:00.001-05:00

"Sunrise" - Soulsavers
     I'll admit I have something of a mental block against music that emerges from so-called production and remix teams. Maybe it's because I dislike remixes with such a pointless passion. But that's just me and my bias towards song--I find music that's so blatantly constructed (and re-constructed) to be odd and artificial at its core. And yet, here are Soulsavers, a production and remix duo from England, and I like this one quite a lot.
     Then again, this is not just a laptop creation. "Sunrise" began life as a real song--it was written by Mark Lanegan and was first heard back on his 1994 album Whiskey For The Holy Ghost--and in this incarnation features new performances by, among others, Will Oldham, who does the singing here. (Lanegan, it should be noted, has been Soulsavers' chief vocalist for the past two albums--2007's It's Not How Far You Fall, It's the Way You Land, and this year's Broken.) In Soulsavers' hands, "Sunrise" has become atmospheric in a gratifyingly swampy sort of way--we get a piano vamp, washes of cymbals, and a dirty-sounding harmonica, all rinsed through with reverb. And front and center we get Oldham singing with more rough-edged gravitas than he gives us in his more fragile Bonnie "Prince" Billy mode. He seems in fact to be doing an homage to Lanegan; this version of "Sunrise" sounds almost more Lanegan-y than the original, somehow, with its dark echoey groove and that killer harmonica, which replaces the sax heard in the original, to great effect.
     Broken was released back in August, without a lot of fanfare, on Columbia. (Note how even now the big labels don't know how to promote off-kilter projects.) "Sunrise" is actually a non-album single, released just prior to the CD.

Free and legal MP3 from Laura Veirs (evocative, idiosyncratic singer/songwriter)

2009-12-01T15:48:00.002-05:00

"Wide-Eyed, Legless" - Laura Veirs
     Long-time Fingertips favorite Laura Veirs has a plainspoken presence, a gift for evocative lyrics, and the capacity to weave magical melodies into unassuming songs. "Wide-Eyed, Legless"--and that's quite a title, eh?--begins with a plucky, fairy-tale sort of ambiance, its sing-song-y verse rooted in an ancient, semi-pentatonic refrain (mostly but not all black notes) and set against gull-like synthesizer lines.
     And that would just about be cool enough, but then comes the chorus and one of those brilliant little melodies of hers. "Will you ever more tie up my hair with velvet bows?" she sings (0:50), delivering, in the midst of that bouncy, spiky tune a moment of poignant melodic resolution. Complete with that old-fashioned wording, it's quite lovely, but she doesn't dwell on it; even as the melody repeats for a second line in the chorus it changes a bit, and ends without the resolution, plunking us back into the "hornet rain" both lyrically and musically. Something, certainly, is going on here, having something to do with ships and storms and lost love, perhaps, but I can't really be sure, and that mystery is part of the song's quirky allure.
     "Wide-Eyed, Legless" will be found on the album July Flame, Veirs' seventh, scheduled for release in January on her Raven Marching Band label. MP3 via her site.

Five free & legal MP3s, no reviews: Fingertips holiday update

2009-11-24T22:57:00.003-05:00

It's Thanksgiving in the U.S. this week, and so Fingertips is taking a holiday. Not to leave you empty-handed, here are five current free and legal MP3s that are available from artists previously featured here, minus lengthy reviews. Princeton was just featured last week so I will not likely feature them again quite so quickly, but any of the others may yet get a full-fledged review here, once I listen in more detail and see what my ears make of each of them.

Wishing a Happy Thanksgiving to all those who celebrate, and a cheerful week to one and all in any case. It's up to us, really; the world is certainly not cooperating in terms of putting a smile on our faces. Maybe that's not its job.

And don't forget: there's still one day left to enter the Hall & Oates contest. Tell me what unhip band you like. It won't hurt.

"Korean War Memorial" - Princeton   These guys were featured just last week; here's another song from their Cocoon of Love album. MP3 via NME.

"Good Boys" - the Minor Leagues   The Minor Leagues are a seven-piece band from Cincinnati; their song "Scene It All Before" was featured here in June 2006. "Good Boys" is one of two free and legal MP3s available from the band's new album, This Story Is Old, I Know, But It Goes On, released this month via the Datawaslost collective.

"Wide-Eyed, Legless" - Laura Veirs   Laura Veirs has returned to the land of free and legal MP3s after a few years at sea on Nonesuch (a fine label, but anti-free-and-legal). This song comes from her forthcoming album July Flame, to be released on her own label. She was featured here back in 2004. MP3 via her site.

"Hundred/Million" - the Whigs   The Whigs, from Athens, Georgia, are one of those bands that hit it indie-big with a song, from their second album, that didn't strike me nearly as well as the stuff they put on their first album, when they were featured here (October 2006). Could've just been me, of course. In any case, now comes the third album, and we'll see which way they go from here. MP3 via Magnet.

"The Ballad of Cherry Hill" - Steve Goldberg & the Arch Enemies   Goldberg heads up a Pittsburgh-area ensemble with a big-hearted sound. His first album was recorded as as senior project while he was at Carnegie Mellon University; a song from it was featured here in September 2007. This song comes from a forthcoming EP. MP3 via his site.

Free and legal MP3 from Scanners (musically astute & cinematic, w/out fussiness)

2009-11-17T16:05:00.003-05:00

"Salvation" - Scanners
     The London-based foursome Scanners make a kind of music once all too common and now all too rare: smartly-produced, aurally interesting, musically astute rock'n'roll. This is music that isn't trying to be fancy, or arcane, or difficult; and yet neither is it simple-minded in sound or concept. Now, I said that this sort of smartly produced (etc.) rock used to be pretty common, which leaves us with the interesting reality that we are not, in 2009, used to hearing music like this in songs that we don't already know. (Such a dispiriting genre, "classic rock"--sealed off by definition from the living, breathing world.) Kind of an odd truth, and one which makes a song like "Salvation" all the more appealing.
     I like, right at the start, how the song offers depth and drama with such sparse instrumentation: until 55 seconds in, we hear precious little but an itchy acoustic guitar lick and some distant chimes, joined for a bit by a quiet keyboard motif. The atmosphere is fostered by the minor key melody and those resonant backing vocals, which are echoey and mixed in such a way as to sound as if the voices were shouting but the volume was turned way down. It's a foreboding effect. Keep an ear on the harmonies throughout--they remain central, and get increasingly interesting. And for all the sonic theatrics, discipline rules the day. You don't hear too many rockers that will dial back halfway into a song (1:19) so that you can only hear, for three seconds, one repeated note on an acoustic guitar.
     "Salvation" is from the band's forthcoming album, Submarine, scheduled for a February release on Dim Mak Records. The band was previously featured here in Aug '06, around the time of the first album, Violence is Golden. MP3 via Better Propaganda.

Free and legal MP3 from Princeton (cheerful-wistful orchestrated pop, w/ boy-girl duet & story)

2009-11-17T16:02:00.002-05:00

"Sadie and Andy" - Princeton
     From its faux classical intro to its jaunty doo-wop melody and deadpan storytelling, "Sadie and Andy" is all craft and artifice. And pretty much irresistible. "I stock the milk and all the eggs there," Andy sings, catching Sadie up on his daily doings in the grocery store, "And all the herbal tea." Sadie is radically uninterested. It's been ten years. "I haven't thought of you at all," she says. "And I don't wish to know."
     It's the standard boy-meets-girl, boy-loses-girl, boy's-love-grows-with-loss, girl-could-care-less story, and it's found its musical apotheosis in this cheerful-wistful piece of precisely orchestrated pop, with its swirling strings, diligent trumpet, elusive oboe, and martial snare. That it's much ado about nothing--did she mention she hasn't thought of him at all?--is part of the thematic point. Matt Kivel's Andy sings with great nasal earnestness, a wannabe crooner with neither quite the voice nor the charisma to pull it off. Guest vocalist Meredith Metcalf, for her part, is a breathy ice queen, a Sadie not in any obvious way worthy of Andy's obsession, but that's always the underlying irony of this story.
     Princeton is a quartet from L.A. featuring the twins Jesse and Matt Kivel. (The name comes from the street they grew up on street in Santa Monica.) "Sadie and Andy" is the lead track on the band's debut album, Cocoon of Love, released in late September on Brooklyn-based Kanine Records.

Free and legal MP3 from Class Actress (electro-pop w/ a groove & a subtle sense of humor)

2009-11-17T16:01:00.001-05:00

"Careful What You Say" - Class Actress
     Given the synthesizer's inherently goofy sound--the rubbery beeps and boops, the cartoonish echoes, and so forth--it's a bit surprising, now that I think about it, that the instrument isn't more jovially presented as a rule. Indeed, the synthesizer is offered up rather humorlessly in rock music by and large, far more often used with austerity or gravity than with a sense of humor, even when--or maybe especially when--propelling dance music of one kind or another.
     Not so with "Careful What You Say." From the opening noodles, the synthesizer tones are charged with something resembling mirth, if not flippancy. After the song settles into a seductive electro-groove--no organic instruments in sight--something else now goes against the electro-pop guidebook, which is front woman Elizabeth Harper's singing. Rather than float above with requisite frosty archness, a match for the cold equipment around her, Harper pretty much purrs her way through this one. Whether down in the rich tone of her lower register for the verse or in the airier range of the chorus, Harper sings as if maintaining a wry, secret smile throughout, regardless of the emotional wreckage traced by the lyrics. As for that exquisitely breezy chorus, I like it all the more for how it is fitted into a song that refuses simply to be about its groove--and refuses, in the process, to take itself too seriously. (If you have any doubts about that latter point, check out the instrumental break that begins at 3:17; and just wait for it.)
     Class Actress began as a solo project for Harper, but has become a full-fledged band. On the MySpace page, Harper is listed as "Songwriter," Mark Richardson as "Beatmaker," and Scott Rosenthal as "Heartbreaker." "Careful What You Say" is a song from the trio's debut EP, Journal of Ardency, slated for a February release on Terrible Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.