Month: May 2011

Free and legal MP3: Blind Willies (rugged shuffle w/ sly sense of humor)

“Lord Thought He’d Make a Man” is an old-timey song with sprinkles of Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, Tim Waits, and Jim Morrison concocted into slinky, rugged shuffle.

Blind Willies

“Lord Thought He’d Make a Man” – Blind Willies

Any band that combines a Hammond organ and a cello has my attention, to begin with. Likewise a band that features a lyric about being tried “by a jury of your fears” in the song’s first 25 seconds.

“Lord Thought He’d Make a Man” is an old-timey song with sprinkles of Randy Newman, Kurt Weill, Tom Waits, and Jim Morrison concocted into slinky, rugged shuffle. Front man Alexei Wajchman has a sly sense of humor and a slightly unhinged singing and guitar-playing style that fully commands the aural stage (and I have no doubt of his command of the physical stage as well).

Blind Willies are a San Francisco-based band that grew from a duo of students at SF’s High School of the Arts playing a combination of American folk songs and Wajchman’s original compositions. There are now five people in the band. “Lord Thought He’d Make a Man” is from the group’s’ third album, Needle, Feather, and a Rope, which was recorded live to two-inch analog tape at John Vanderslice’s Tiny Telephone studio, with a minimum of overdubs. The album was released last month on the band’s own imprint, Diggory Records. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Robert Pollard (pretty & inscrutable, over triplets)

“In a Circle” is unexpectedly pretty, as Pollard’s songs sometimes are, and incomprehensible, as his songs pretty much always are.

Robert Pollard

“In a Circle” – Robert Pollard

Inscrutable, indefatigable Robert Pollard returns with his 157th solo album in June and the thing with Mr. Pollard is you just have to remind yourself he is not here to be fathomed. There is no understanding what he’s up to, pretty much ever, at the level either of individual song lyrics or of larger career trajectory. Semi-famous, to some, for founding and fronting the Dayton-based band Guided By Voices way back in 1983, he also remains pretty much completely obscure, and growing more so by the ticking of our 21st-century clock. Such is the fate of anyone touted as an indie legend. The fragmentation of the marketplace leaves no legacies in its wake. (Current indie legends, take note.)

(And okay this is not really his 157th album, but it is his second, already, of 2011; and he has written more than 1,300 songs all told.)

This new album, Lord of the Birdcage, was created around poems he had already written and later decided to set to music. I can’t begin to claim enough expertise in Pollardiana to be able to note any resulting differences between “In a Circle” and Pollard’s previous work. All I know is this one is unexpectedly pretty, as his songs sometimes are, and (you were forewarned) incomprehensible, as his songs pretty much always are. Words flow by over a triplet-centric rhythm, the verses slipping past before you can quite catch them, the chorus marked by a series of phrases at once floodlit by emphasis and lacking any obvious through-line: “routine exercise,” “constant reverie,” “makeshift comfort suites,” and, the one which becomes its own sort of offbeat hook based on its location, “nine o’clock meetings.” He is clearly up to something here, and if he keeps putting this much material out, maybe someday I’ll figure out what it is.

Lord of the Birdcage is due out in June, on Pollard’s Rockathan Records label. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Memorial Day break

Memorial Day is coming a bit early around here, as it has been decided that the Fingertips Home Office will be shut down as of Thursday, and that all work in progress shall be halted until at least Monday. Who am I to stand in the way of not getting work done? This week’s songs have been selected but they will now become next week’s songs. Next week’s songs have not yet been selected, and lord knows what will become of them.

The good news out of all of this is that instead of being quite late (this week), the songs will be quite early (next week), arriving online some time on Tuesday. For the insatiably curious, check out the Fingertips Facebook page, where the songs have been announced. (Did you know that every week the songs get announced a day or so in advance on the Facebook page? I didn’t think so.)

For those in need of music more quickly than that, consider a visit to the Fingertips Top 10, a sturdy haven of recent favorites, some of which you just may have missed along the way.

Free and legal MP3: Hospital Ships (fuzzy bedroom pop)

Woozy bedroom pop with a fuzzy heart and a Beatlesque soul.

Jordan Geiger

“Love or Death” – Hospital Ships

Woozy bedroom pop with a fuzzy heart and a Beatlesque soul. Without introduction, “Love or Death” dives directly into the eight-measure melody that becomes its backbone. The sound is buzzy and semi-distorted without ever losing its sense of sharpness and movement. There’s a big difference between fuzz and mud, and Jordan Geiger, Hospital Ships’ one-man band, embraces the former without getting stuck in the latter. Listen, for example, to how he processes and reverbs and layers his high-ranging tenor so that it becomes an important textured element of the music without at all losing its humanity. Listen too to that deep, cello-like synthesizer that provides a melodic bass line for the song, comingling as the song unfolds with a buzzing organ (maybe?) that manages to add both to the distortion and to the musicality.

The song’s brisk spirit is reinforced by its irregular structure. The eight-measure melody cycles through five times, each time with different lyrics; there is a break after the fourth iteration for something that might be a chorus except we hear it only once. The lyrics seem to rise and fall out of earshot, with certain phrases calling more attention to themselves than others. “Like a mirror just reflects his lonely twin” is one such line, ripe with sudden poignancy and deeper meaning—so much so that in this case, Geiger pulls the name of the whole album from this lyric: Lonely Twin.

The album is the second for Geiger as Hospital Ships, and is due out next month on Graveface Records. Geiger, from Lawrence, Kansas, was formerly in both Shearwater and the Appleseed Cast, and was front man for Minus Story. Thanks to Consequence of Sound for the lead here.

Free and legal MP3: Johan Agebjörn (with Sally Shapiro) (nimble, ravishing neo-italo-disco)

Tasteful, exquisitely crafted, melodic, and pleasantly melodramatic, “Casablanca Nights” plays like the soundtrack to a movie made in the near future about the fading past.

Johan Agebjorn

“Casablanca Nights” – Johan Agebjörn (with Sally Shapiro)

I have no particular feelings either way for the sub-genre of italo-disco, but I do have a huge music-crush on the exquisitely crafted, pleasantly melodramatic neo-italo-disco work done together by the Swedish producer Johan Agebjörn and the singer known as Sally Shapiro. (They have been featured here twice previously, both for songs credited to Sally Shapiro, which has also been the name of their duo.)

“Casablanca Nights” plays like the soundtrack to a movie made in the near future about the fading past. Agebjörn specializes in melding a shiny, club-like expansiveness with a bittersweet sort of introspection. Some of this effect is due to the airy brilliance of Shapiro’s vocals, but a lot of the music’s depth of spirit comes from Agebjörn’s deft arrangement. In what is almost an aural illusion, he here crafts a driving dance beat out of nothing that’s actually moving with any particular drive or power. Many of his individual motifs are slow, even tentative—a compact, haunting synth line here, a desultory guitar line there, and to cap it off a jazzy noodle of an electric piano solo. The only sustained, powerful drumming we hear is the in-retrospect-ironic pounding that opens the song and lasts all of three or four seconds. In many ways “Casablanca Nights” is a glittering mirage.

And what about that chorus? Almost breathtaking, it effects its magic in large part via a shifting sense of tonal center—each new lyrical line, every four measures, starts from a place either a half step below or a half step above the previous line’s start point. A half step change in this context sounds ravishing and theatrical. Don’t miss also the marvelous effect of the male vocal singing the same note as Shapiro (might be Agebjörn, not sure), blending so nimbly as to sound more like an aural shadow than a separate voice.

“Casablanca Nights” is the title track to first album Agebjörn has released under his own name. Shapiro (alas!) does not sing on every track (just four of 11); he has brought in a variety of other artists to help him with the others. The album came out last week on Paper Bag Records. MP3 via Paper Bag.

Free and legal MP3: The Warped 45s (old-fashioned backwoods rocker)

An old-fashioned backwoods rocker with an absorbing tale, “Grampa Carl” builds with a well-plotted dramatic arc towards a culminating guitar solo of Youngian ferocity.

The Warped 45s

“Grampa Carl” – The Warped 45s

An old-fashioned backwoods rocker with an absorbing tale, “Grampa Carl” builds with a well-plotted dramatic arc towards a culminating guitar solo of Youngian ferocity. That a song like this can succeed in 2011—and boy does it ever—is both fascinating and inspiring. Moral of the story, yet again, is you just have to be good. Related moral of the story: being good doesn’t necessitate being different, just good. Or, maybe, better: being really good is itself a valid way of being different.

Things start with a drumbeat and a spoken introduction, with co-front man Ryan Wayne McEathron letting us know that the song is about his great-grandfather, who smuggled booze from Canada into the U.S. during Prohibition. Bass and keyboards join in, the lead guitar slightly after, and McEathron shifts from speaking to singing so casually you almost don’t notice. The casual authority of both the song and the band is what carries the day here—that and, specifically, Ryan’s cousin Dave on guitar. Dave’s got it going on, big-time: he can support the vocals with inventive but not intrusive licks on the one hand, while stepping out in between verses with honest-to-goodness lead guitar lines on the other. That indie bands have generally put the lead guitar aside is one of 21st-century rock’n’roll’s lesser accomplishments. But: I fearlessly predict that the ability to show mastery on an actual physical instrument will become more and more highly valued as the new decade wears on, and we grow collectively tired of having reduced most of our exertions to touching fingers to screens. (One can always dream, can’t one?)

“Grampa Carl” is the third track on the band’s second album, Matador Sunset, which is coming out at the end of the month on Pheromone Recordings. Because I’m so impressed with the simple power of this band and this song, I’m posting a video performance of it that does nothing but show the McEathron cousins and company doing their thing. No actors were harmed in the filming of this video.

Free and legal MP3: The Dogs (edgy stomper w/ fuzzbox riff)

In this charged-up, edgy little ditty, The Dogs win me over with that unanticipated gang-style shout of “Hey!” that kicks things into gear at 0:23, demarcating the moment when “Dance More” flips from acoustic crispness into deeply satisfying heaviness, with that two-guitar, fuzzbox-powered riff, as crunchy and classic-sounding as all great guitar riffs must be.

The Dogs

“Dance More” – The Dogs

The ongoing surprise of what may prove to be aurally alluring in any given song is one of music’s perpetual delights. In this charged-up, edgy little ditty, The Dogs win me over with that unanticipated gang-style shout of “Hey!” that kicks things into gear at 0:23, demarcating the moment when “Dance More” flips from acoustic crispness into deeply satisfying heaviness, with that two-guitar, fuzzbox-powered riff, as crunchy and classic-sounding as all great guitar riffs must be. Singer Peter Walters takes over from there, his amiable, shouty voice backed, here and there, by some yelping, trumpet-like sounds.

And the thing is, I didn’t realize quite how much I loved that “Hey!” until it came back, just one more time, at 2:14, to finish up what it had earlier started. That moment of recurrence is so perfect—on the one hand, I had almost forgotten about it; on the other hand part of me was clearly waiting for it again—that the entire song becomes retroactively energized. Truth be told this is a rather an odd and disarming piece of work. There’s no real sense of verse or chorus here, just one unhurried descending melody sung in two slightly different variations. Then we get the yelps; then one separate line of lyric, with a more or less one-note melody that’s kind of spoken/sung; then the crunchy riff. We cycle through this curious series twice, and this is somehow a song. And yet with the “Hey!”s as bookends, “Dance More” glows with the bracing vitality of something large and luminous, and all is right with the world.

The Dogs seem to be centered around Chicago, yet the four members are at this point widely scattered—in Minneapolis, in Washington, in Boston, and, go figure, in Norway. The band’s debut album, Camping, was self-released digitally in March, and that’s where you’ll find this song. The album is available on a pay-what-you-will basis from Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for allowing Fingertips to host the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Maggie Björklund (with Mark Lanegan) (warm, dreamy, bittersweet waltz)

I always forget how much I like the sound of a pedal steel guitar. It’s easy to forget because the instrument has been all but hijacked by the cheesiest of cheesy country songs. “Intertwined, ” rest assured, is no cheesy country song; it is, rather, a warm and dreamy if vaguely bittersweet waltz, a cozy meditation with a vein of melancholy.

Maggie Bjorklund

“Intertwined” – Maggie Björklund (with Mark Lanegan)

I always forget how much I like the sound of a pedal steel guitar. It’s easy to forget because the instrument has been all but hijacked by cheesy country songs. “Intertwined,” rest assured, is no cheesy country song; it is, rather, a warm and dreamy if vaguely bittersweet waltz, a cozy meditation with a vein of melancholy.

Björklund, a pedal steel specialist from Denmark, is primarily an instrumentalist, so she has brought on board a number of guest vocalists, including Rachel Flotard (last seen collaborating with Rusty Willoughby), members of Calexico, and here, of course, the gruff but lovable Mark Lanegan, who growls comfortingly through “Intertwined.” Lanegan’s rumbly, ever-so-slightly vulnerable baritone pretty much embodies the spirit of this easy-weary tune. Björklund does sing in addition to play, and what her voice may lack in viscosity it makes up for with sweetness; there may be no one Lanegan doesn’t sound good with, but add Björklund to the list of striking duet partners.

In the end, however, it may be her instrument that most impressively intertwines with Lanegan’s deep quaver, the pedal steel’s intrinsic sound of yearning complementing him with dignity and nuance. Don’t miss how gracefully the pedal steel enters (0:27), barely scratching the aural surface, only gradually moving towards the center of the song. Björklund plays with almost unheard of subtlety, opting often for singly articulated notes, resolutely avoiding the overstated slurring/sliding that pedal steel players are often incapable of resisting. This makes the moments in which she does specifically utilize the instrument’s capacity for sliding through blurred notes all the more poignant and effective.

Björklund has played with bands and as a backing musician in both Europe and the U.S. “Intertwining” is a song from her debut album, Coming Home, which was released in March on Bloodshot Records. MP3 via Bloodshot. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Art Brut (arch & catchy guitar rock)

Art Brut continues to develop its Cake-meets-Franz-Ferdinand sound in capable and fetching directions.

Art Brut

“Lost Weekend” – Art Brut

Art Brut continues to develop its Cake-meets-Franz-Ferdinand sound in capable and fetching directions. Arch as can be, the British quintet sprang to life in the middle ’00s in the midst of a semi-movement of catchy, post-punk-inspired guitar rock (think Bloc Party, think Franz Ferdinand), but was just somehow weirder than the rest of them. And it was a weird kind of weird, as front man Eddie Argos—not a singer as much as a reciter—proved himself the master of a certain kind of post-postmodern, meta-ironic songwriting, in which his dry, concrete, and often very funny descriptions of things and circumstances themselves become tangled up in the story he tells, somehow. The band’s first single was “Formed A Band,” and the lyrics began: “Formed a band/We formed a band/Look at us/We formed a band.” And didn’t say too much more than that.

This is also an outfit that gained a bit of buzz a few years back for encouraging Art Brut “franchises”—new bands going out and being their own version of Art Brut, whatever that ended up meaning. There really weren’t any rules about the whole thing. But at one point in 2006, some 100 or so different Art Brut franchises were sprinkled around Europe and North America.

Yeah so it might be tempting to write the band off as some kind of balmy gimmick, but on the one hand they’re really too ahead of you for that: if there’s a gimmick, it’s that they flaunt the fact that they have a gimmick, which is then a different kind of gimmick, and so forth. (It’s like mirrors opposite each other, receding into infinity.) But more to the point, the music’s too good, too tightly conceived and performed. Their songs are marvelous little machines of rock’n’roll goodness, all slashing guitar lines, organic drumbeats, and quippy lyrics. “Lost Weekend” is sharp and engaging from beginning to end. And on this new album, Brilliant! Tragic!, Argos says he has actually learned to sing, thanks to producer Frank Black (or Black Francis, if you will), who taught him while they recorded the album. You can hear him test the waters here the second time through the chorus—I assume that’s his singing voice at 2:20, somewhat more tenor-y than this talk-singing voice. Worlds of new arch-opportunities open up for Art Brut moving forward.

Brilliant! Tragic! is the band’s fourth album, due out later this month on Cooking Vinyl. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.