October 2016 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: The Holiday Crowd (brisk & jangly, w/ killer chorus)

The chorus is a recurringly climactic gem, with a shiny-catchy feeling that marvelously transmutes the song’s influences into something all its own.

“Anything Anything” – The Holiday Crowd

If you have any long-term knowledge of rock’n’roll history, when you listen to “Anything Anything” you are likely going to be put in the mind of the Smiths. This is not a bad thing; the Smiths were a seminal band, trafficking in a sound so unique as to be sui generis. Pretty much anyone influenced by the Mancunian quartet at all ends up kind of sounding like them in certain unmistakable ways.

But I will quickly note that “Anything Anything” is not Smiths 2.0; it’s quite a wonderful piece of pop on its own terms. If it manifests shared characteristics with Morrissey-Marr compositions—from the fade-in intro through lead singer Imran Haniff’s discontented lilt to the chiming guitar arpeggios—the song at the same time has an underlying energy that feels warmer and brighter, and a structure less willfully idiosyncratic. And boy oh boy this chorus, which feels almost goose-bumpily climactic every time it recurs, with a shiny-catchy feeling that marvelously transmutes the song’s influences into something all its own.

That all said, a visit to the band’s Facebook page informs us that they may not be in love with the Smiths comparisons. Oops! But then again, not. Because look, it’s my (self-appointed) job to put new songs I’m enjoying into their musical contexts. I compare new bands to older bands regularly. I try to do so creatively and sensitively but to act as if an obvious aural correlate doesn’t exist, or to feel it is somehow taboo to point it out, is silly. I mean, were I to write about this song and not mention the Smiths, most of you would wonder how I managed to miss that. Online commenters love to rail against “lazy” reviewers who use comparisons rather than descriptors, but this isn’t a zero-sum game. I believe in comparisons and descriptors, and anything else that assists with the eternally thorny problem of dancing about architecture, as it were. It is no more a crime to be influenced by a major musical antecedent than it is to point out this influence. End of soapbox.

The Holiday Crowd is a quartet from Toronto. They formed in 2010, and released their first album in 2013, which you can listen to on Bandcamp. “Anything Anything” is a song from their forthcoming self-titled album, due out in January. Thanks to Magnet Magazine for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Magana (short, off-kilter, hypnotic)

This quiet, off-kilter electric ballad all but hypnotizes me, for reasons I’m still unraveling.

“Get It Right” – Magana

This quiet, off-kilter electric ballad all but hypnotizes me, for reasons I’m still unraveling. I like the cold opening, I like the smoky clarity of Jeni Magana’s voice, how she uses reverb to add texture without adding muddiness, and I feel especially engaged by the low-register electric guitar work, breathing a nonchalant semi-atonality into the bottom of the mix. Everything is simple-sounding, and it’s a short song, but it glides by without giving you a firm handhold to breathe out during. This is a fetching dynamic; I have gladly kept this on repeat for quite a while.

Jeni Magana is a Brooklyn-based musician doing musical business, succinctly, as Magana. “Get It Right” is the lead track on her debut EP, entitled Golden Tongue, which was released last week on Audio Antihero Records. Magana was previously in the Brooklyn band Oh Odessa, which released one album in 2012.

You can both listen to Golden Tongue and purchase it via Bandcamp. MP3 once again via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Almanac Mountain (ambling vibe, classic rock undertones)

There’s something wonderfully out of time about the ambling vibe of “Harborside”; it has the feel of a lost classic-rock nugget while not really sounding all that classic-rock-y.

“Harborside” – Almanac Mountain

There’s something wonderfully out of time about the ambling vibe of “Harborside”; it has the feel of a lost classic-rock nugget while not really sounding all that classic-rock-y. I think it’s the unhurried, three-note sampled-strings synthesizer riff that we hear in the intro and which anchors us throughout that brings the joy here—it’s got a bit of cartoon loony-bin about it, in maybe a Pink Floyd- or Supertramp-ish way. (And those are two groups that didn’t have much to do with each other, I realize, except for being British and thriving in the ’70s but in retrospect, here we are.)

The riff, traveling from the home tone to the major third to the augmented fourth, has an inherent majesty, which throughout the song plays engagingly against the loopier touches (the opening, standalone flourish; the jaunty, bridge-like chorus; the intermittent interjection of warbles and odd sounds; the abrupt, oceanic ending). The subtle mirth here also for vague reasons brings some of classic rock’s better efforts to mind, as underneath the rock’n’roll mindset, however dressed in frills and gilding, has been an understanding that we can’t be taking it all too too seriously. I have long contended that when music can make you smile, independent of lyrics, there’s something substantive going on.

Almanac Mountain is the name that New Hampshire-based Chris Cote has given to his work as singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist/producer. “Harborside” is the closing track on his latest album, Cryptoseismology, released last week. It’s the third full-length Almanac Mountain album, and note that Cote’s sound with the project tends to have a heavier, ’80s-ish sound to it (Depeche Mode this time more than the Smiths), which makes “Harborside” all the more curious and lovable. You can listen to the whole thing, and buy it either digitally or physically, via Bandcamp.

Now we’re alone in this freaky place

Eclectic Playlist Series 3.09 – October 2016

I’ve been pretty much only thinking about one thing lately and I am not enjoying that this is all I can think about, in fact it is disturbing me at a deep psychological level. Talk about transcendental blues. And I am trying not to personalize it and say there’s just this one man I’ve been thinking about pretty much all the time because in the end it’s not him. It’s not him. It’s the people who believe him. This is the freaky place we’re alone in, you and I, though not entirely alone. We are alone together, wondering who these freaky people are, are they our neighbors, are they our friends, our family?; what world are they looking at that they see what they see, believe what they believe?; how far have we come from where we thought we were heading all this time? We are alone together, you and I and all of us who understand that we are humans together, that being darker or lighter or thinner or fatter or from one place or another place doesn’t add up to trouble and stupidity but to strength in our amazing diversity. What ails these people, how afraid and wounded and uninformed have we let our fellow citizens become? And how certain they now are in their unseeing, in their not-knowing, who accuse the tolerant of intolerance, the wise of ignorance, the compassionate of depravity?

And yet. Think of the good that exists, think of the positive energy we have here on the side of humanity and respect, on the side of love and understanding. Sometimes I think that the terrifying energy we’ve seen unleashed by the amoral swindler currently doing business as the Republican candidate for president of the United States is somehow required by the universe as a kind of balancing out, yin-yang-ishly, for all the amazing progress we have made, interpersonally, in so many gratifying ways, over the last few decades. The trick is not to lose sight of the light, even as the dark persists, and wants to yell at us and call us names and beat us up and keep us down.

Here is a playlist for listening to alone but together, a group of songs that for mysterious reasons are stronger together. Just like us.

“The Magnificent Seven” – The Clash (Sandinista, 1981)
“Longer” – Lydia Loveless (Real, 2016)
“Autumn Sweater” – Yo La Tengo (I Can Hear the Heart Beating as One, 1997)
“Les Filles C’est Fait Pour Faire L’amour” – Charlotte Leslie (single, 1967)
“Mr. Understanding” – Pete and the Pirates (Little Death, 2008)
“You’ve Been in Love Too Long” – Bonnie Raitt (Takin’ My Time, 1973)
“Bodies” – Farao (Till It’s All Forgotten, 2015)
“Since I Held You” – The Cars (Candy-O, 1979)
“T.H.E. Cat” – Al Hirt (The Horn Meets the Hornet, 1966)
“John Paul’s Deliveries” – Nathan (Key Principles, 2007)
“Christine” – Siouxsie and the Banshees (Kaleidoscope, 1980)
“To a Forest” – They Might Be Giants (Phone Power, 2016)
“Leavin’ This Town” – Terri Binion (Leavin’ This Town, 1997)
“To Be Someone” – The Jam (All Mod Cons, 1978)
“I Got a Feeling” – Barbara Randolph (single, 1967)
“The Opera House” – The Olivia Tremor Control (Dusk at Cubist Castle, 1996)
“Transcendental Blues” – Steve Earle (Transcendental Blues, 2000)
“Kimberly” – Patti Smith (Horses, 1975)
“Don’t Let It Trouble Your Mind” – Rhiannon Giddens (Tomorrow Is My Turn, 2015)
“Everybody Knows” – Leonard Cohen (I’m Your Man, 1988)