August 2011 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Sunbeam (assured ensemble pop from Portland septet)

Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow.

Sunbeam

“Bulldogs” – Sunbeam

By all appearances breezy and unassuming, “Bulldogs” has a rock-solid core. A new band from Portland, Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow. Six people in a band sounds like a lot on the one hand, but many rock songs do indeed feature at least six distinct instrumental sounds: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, and percussion. For practical and logistical reasons, most bands make do with three to five members, doubling up on instruments (typically of course the drummer plays percussion too) and/or bringing in outside players.

So the larger band does not require a larger or more complicated sound, but it does change the vibe in elusive but meaningful ways. A song can, as here, feel at once brisk and relaxed, as it makes room not simply for its sounds but for the people who make the sounds. Separating the drummer from the percussionist has a notable impact. I also like the purposeful way the electric guitar is used—not as a background noise producer but as quiet foreground texture. And then there are horns (oops! a seventh sound, and eighth: two horns), which blend into the fabric of the song without any “now listen to the cool horn part” posturing. (Horns are both played here by an outsider, but the band has since added a trumpet player to the fold.) In the end, for all the extraverted appearance of being played by a larger ensemble, “Bulldogs” has an appealing introversion about it, which is embodied in Brian Hall’s sweetly yearning vocal style but plays out too in the restraint of the arrangement and, even, in the recurring wordless vocal/keyboard hook that in the intro sounded like a throwaway but as it returns acquires a lovely centrality, and will probably be the thing that sticks in your head most of all.

“Bulldogs” is fifth on the band’s 10-track debut album, Sunbeam & the Lovely Ghost, which was self-released earlier this month. You can buy it for a price of your choosing at Sunbeam’s Bandcamp page. MP3 via the band.

Free and legal MP3: Meshell Ndegeocello (genre-crossing minimalism, w/ conviction)

A steely conviction running through the center of this rhythmic, genre-crossing song.

Meshell Ndegeocello

“Dirty World” – Meshell Ndegeocello

After 16 seconds of indistinct, ambient background noise, we get a bass line, and a funky snaky ear-grabbing bass line it is. This is Meshell Ndegeocello; she plays bass; and this is how she plays. She had me at hello.

Listen to the mincemeat she makes of the 4/4 time signature, without ever actually leaving it. How could someone conceive of this particular rhythm, never mind add an edgy drumbeat to it, never mind write a song around it? Surely she is not singing while she’s playing here, though I guess you never know. Her smooth round voice floats, unhurried, over the knotty instrumentation of the verse, with a breathy loveliness that belies the venom of the lyrics. With the chorus, everything changes: the beat normalizes, her voice acquires first a plaintive sting and, at the end, as a kicker, plunges into a gruff lower register. As the title suggests, she isn’t singing about rainbows and flowers. There’s a steely conviction running through the center of this song.

Look, too, at how she accomplishes so much with so little. Much of the song is just bass and drums and voice. Guitar and keyboard are not an assumed part of the proceedings but are added only when deemed necessary. The chorus is not much more than the two words, “dirty world,” repeated; the substance comes from the rhythm—specifically, the subtle but definitive shift in emphasis from stressing only the word “world,” the first three times, to additionally stressing the first syllable of “dirty” the fourth time around.

Genre-crossing minimalism has been Ndegeocello’s trademark since Plantation Lullabies, her 1993 debut. “Dirty World” is a track from Weather, her ninth album, due in November on Naïve Records.

Free and legal MP3: Gringo Star (old school, updated, w/ Beatley flair)

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other.

Gringo Star

“Shadow” – Gringo Star

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other. As suggested by the name, this Atlanta quartet traffics in a certain amount of Beatlesque-iness, and the best kind, in my mind: a nod to the Fab Four that brings the sound further along, rather than remaining stuck in rigid homage.

So the nostalgia here suffuses the sound without actually being pinpoint-able. The scratchy guitar that rasps out the introductory line has a vaguely retrospective sound, but the specific riff doesn’t conjure any particular place or time. I like the immediate juxtaposition of the rapidly hammered guitar and the laid-back tempo, which takes the classic rock’n’roll backbeat (emphasis on the second and fourth beats of the measure) and offers it up in half-time. The occasional background nuttiness is partially psychedelic, partially just nutty. And the chorus is plain wonderful—a heart-warming descending melody, covering six full whole steps, that resolves through a chord progression so sturdy and steady that your ear barely registers some of the shifts, although it will thoroughly enjoy the glide through the relative minor around 0:53.

Gringo Star is made up of brothers Peter and Nick Furgiuele, along with Pete DeLorenzo and Chris Kaufmann. All four can play guitar and sing, both Petes can drum, and all but Pete F. will play bass. “With the swapping around of the lineup, we end up being actually 10 different bands,” Nick has been quoted as saying. A pretty cool concept, it seems to me.”Shadow” is the lead track on the band’s second album Count Yer Lucky Stars, which is due out in October on Gigantic Records. The album was produced by Ben Allen, who has worked with Gnarls Barkley and Animal Collective, among others. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (succinct & jittery, w/ a power pop heart)

This time around, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah exhibits a Cars-like capacity for wrapping an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

“Maniac” – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Succinct and jittery, “Maniac” does its best to disguise its power pop roots with multifaceted synthesizers and vocal effects (and affects) but the thing about power pop is in the end there’s no hiding it. The chorus gives it away pretty much by definition. So there it is, at 1:09, the power-pop heart of this otherwise anxious-seeming song.

And yes I realize that it’s anxious-seeming in good part because Alex Ounsworth, with his strangled, nasally tenor, makes David Byrne sound almost relaxed. CYHSY have in fact drawn a lot of Talking Heads comparisons in the past, for clear enough reasons, but this time around I find some unexpected linkage to a different band that arose in late-’70s New England—the Cars. “Maniac” doesn’t sound like the Cars as much as it behaves like them, for its successful wrapping of an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism. Though, on second thought, this may likewise sound more like the Cars than it might initially seem. Segue “Maniac” into “Gimme Some Slack” (Spotify users: give it a try) and you will find some wonderful resonance—not an exact fit by any means, but the echoes are there. I direct your ears in particular to the deep guitar line at 2:07, which introduces what works as a kind of an alternate chorus here, and is both very Cars-like and a beautiful power pop device. That’s really where everything comes together in this one.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a five-man band from Brooklyn with a bit of internet history that you either know already or don’t need to know. Seriously. Forget about it. Let’s just listen to the music, sports fans. “Maniac” is a track from their upcoming album, Hysterical, which the band will self-release next month. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Dark Dark Dark (warm & wistful, w/ captivating piano line)

Dark Dark Dark

“Daydreaming” – Dark Dark Dark

With its tender, ear-opening piano motif and graceful, ruminative momentum, “Daydreaming” is fully engaging throughout its almost five-minute length, which is a relative rarity in 21st-century rock’n’roll. (When aiming for some kind of pop, few songs of this length manage without some dead spots.) Singer/pianist Nona Marie Invie is front and center from the start, her haunted voice offering up plaintive phrases, surrounded by warm acoustic instrumentation.

What exactly we are hearing in the background becomes a bit of a mystery, however, as the song progresses. Beyond the piano and the percussion there’s an accordion involved, and, according to promotional material, a banjo (that could be what we hear briefly at around 0:20); band members are also known to play clarinet and trumpet, but I’m not sure either of those account for that sound we get for a moment or two at 1:17. Invie’s repeating piano refrain, with its recurring blue notes, remains at the song’s backbone, but listen to how the accompaniment grows increasingly tense and solid after the three-minute mark. Her singing is nearly overwhelmed by the ghostly wash of noise—a clamor that is tamed only by the second round of her incisive, swooping “oo-oo”s as the song draws to its wistful close with one more half-iteration of the captivating piano line.

“Daydreaming” is not a new song, but it has arrived newly in my inbox. It comes from the Minneapolis ensemble’s second full-length album, Wild Go, which was released on Supply and Demand Records in October 2010, and then in Europe and the UK in April 2011 on Melodic Records. Featuring as many as seven members at certain times, Dark Dark Dark is currently touring in a five-person format.

Free and legal MP3: Firs of Prey (odd but lovable)

Eccentric vocalizing, offbeat song structure, unorthodox instrumentation—“What You Say” has it going on, oddball-wise.

Firs of Prey

“What You Say” – Firs of Prey

Eccentric vocalizing, offbeat song structure, unorthodox instrumentation—“What You Say” has it going on, oddball-wise. Long before the trombones descend (that would be around 1:53), this song has little that might be identifiable as “normal,” little that sounds like a hook, and yet, go figure, it manages to grab the ear quickly and hangs on for dear life. There really is, even after all these years, much more that people might be doing with what is loosely called rock’n’roll than people tend to do.

Of course it’s easy enough simply to be odd. I hear plenty of odd, day to day. To my particular kind of musical preference, oddness, however potentially enticing, is never enough by itself; as a matter of fact, oddness is a special kind of attractive characteristic in that it is inherently not attractive at all. Once committing to being odd, a song has to double back on actual goodness to be worth one’s time as a listener, it seems to me. Andrew Miller, the low-profile mastermind behind Firs of Prey, doubles back and then some. The minimalist soundscape he creates sets the stage—a deep, unadorned tribal drumbeat combining with a wordless vocal melody, layered in wacky harmony is not your everyday intro. New elements are eventually woven in: the aforementioned trombones, delightfully off the beat; a layer of lower-register vocal harmonies; a pulsing, bubbling keyboard down below; and a suddenly appearing electric guitar, speaking with splendid clarity in this otherwise guitar-free zone.

Firs of Prey, based in Portland, has released one EP to date, 2009’s Keep the Lions Asleep. “He is known for doing things like being tall, speaking really loud and hugging people too hard,” Miller says, of himself, on the sparsely informative Firs of Prey site. “He hopes to one day live in a Lighthouse.” Miller is also in the band Datura Blues, which has a marginally better web presence than his solo project. “What You Say” is a song from a compilation album with the fetching title of Well, I Don’t See Why Not Vol. 3, featuring independent musicians from the Northwest. It is indeed the third in a series, all of which have been offered up by Ms. Valerie Park Distro, a self-described “small distributor of independently-created things,” based in Olympia. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead, and thanks to MVPD for permission to host the MP3 here.

New playlist: summer, persisting

When last I checked my calendar, it was still summer. Even with fall looming on the horizon (did I just see Halloween candy in store? I did), I assert our collective right to maintain a summer attitude for at least a little longer. This playlist is a step in that direction.

The Fingertips Playlist is a curated flow of music featuring free and legal MP3s, all of which are still available to download, and all of which were originally featured on Fingertips. Total play time this time is about 42 minutes.

Free and legal MP3: The War On Drugs (dogged drumbeat in a hazy soundscape)

Emerging from a blur of awakening keyboards, driven by a dogged drumbeat, “Come to the City” feels at once drained and determined, the sound of a second wind, of someone or something past a breaking point but not broken.

The War On Drugs

“Come to the City” – The War On Drugs

So it could be that all I’m really looking for, week to week to week, is command. Command is a potent buzzword in 21st-century baseball; they’re always talking about a pitcher’s command—does he have his command, has he lost his command, can we measure his command, and on and on. Turns out command is crucial in music too, if rather more ineffable. There’s nothing equivalent here to a pitch’s accuracy and movement and velocity. Command in music is a vibe thing, an alluring kind of presence; consider it, if you would, an alchemical marriage between spontaneity and inevitability. A band with command plays as if they’re making it up as they go even as they seem to be heading somewhere preordained.

“Come to the City” is the sound of a band with command. Emerging from a blur of awakening keyboards, driven by a dogged drumbeat, “Come to the City” feels at once drained and determined, the sound of a second wind, of someone or something past a breaking point but not broken. The melody, a repeated descent, plays over the rumbly, hazy soundscape; the chorus is little more than a subtle upward gesture. Front man Adam Granduciel nearly buries his buzzy voice in a swirl of reverb yet still sounds sharp and unalloyed and full of personality. I can picture him tilting upward at the microphone, making rapture faces, without even knowing what he looks like.

The War on Drugs was founded in Philadelphia in 2005 by Granduciel and Kurt Vile, who had played together for two years prior to that as well. A quintet at the time of the band’s mid-2008 full-length debut, Wagonwheel Blues, by year’s end just Granduciel and bassist Dave Hartley remained, as Vile set off on a solo career and two others also left. Now with drummer Mike Zanghi, the band is a trio, or maybe a quartet, depending on which bio you heed. “Come to the City” is a track from this incarnation’s first full-length release, Slave Ambient, which came out this week on Secretly Canadian. MP3 via Secretly Canadian.

Free and legal MP3: Mr. Gnome (offbeat & mood-swinging)

I’m not exactly sure what one would expect a band named Mr. Gnome to sound like, but I’m pretty sure it’s not like this.

Mr. Gnome

“Bit of Tongue” – Mr. Gnome

I’m not exactly sure what one would expect a band named Mr. Gnome to sound like, but I’m pretty sure it’s not like this. The beginning, maybe, with its winsome clickiness, but as soon as Nicole Barille opens her mouth, smoky and flirty as she wants to be, I’m getting a disconnect between the name and the vibe—which is no doubt part of the point, it eventually occurs to me.

Look at how the song itself changes course rather drastically, more than once. While generally the song is divided into the quiet first half and the noisy second half, “Bit of Tongue” actually has at least four distinct sections, depending on how you parse it, each of which repeats a certain number of times before moving to the next section. The opening vocal section, beginning at 0:26, is unaccountably beguiling, its thoughtful melody and purposeful momentum interrupted at the end of each extended lyrical line, only to head back and do it again, four times in all. The subsequent shift at 1:38 however is nothing compared to the rearrangement at 1:57, when pretty much all hell breaks loose. From there on we’re in the “noisy half,” as Barille, the duo’s guitarist, joins with drummer Sam Meister (who also plays piano) in a feisty, good-natured bash for about 20 seconds or so. The mood swings don’t stop there, by any means. These guys are either relentlessly creative or have very short attention spans. Or both. In any case they appear to enjoy confounding expectations at every turn. Mr. Gnome it is.

“Bit of Tongue” will be found on the Cleveland-based band’s forthcoming album, Madness in Miniature, not due out till late October, on El Marko Records.

Free & legal MP3: The Minor Leagues (briskly-rendered nostalgia)

With a melodic bass line, atmospheric piano refrain, and well-placed, chimed accents, “Ghost Maps” sweeps us without resistance into its briskly-rendered nostalgia before a word is even uttered.

The Minor Leagues

“Ghost Maps” – The Minor Leagues

With a melodic bass line, atmospheric piano refrain, and well-placed, chimed accents, “Ghost Maps” sweeps us without resistance into its briskly-rendered nostalgia before a word is even uttered. Once the singing starts, Ben Walpole, with his soft-spoken, Stuart Murdoch-y croon, manages the keen trick of being both front man and band member, his voice finding its central but not over-bearing place among the guitars and chimes and female harmonies and indistinct wash of background sound, all coursing along at a near-breathless pace. On the one hand this does make the lyrics somewhat harder to discern, but on the other hand, it renders the often wistful phrases that come to the foreground all the more redolent. The whole thing feels like someone rifling through a photo album too quickly to see anything but a Kodachromatic blur of oranges and yellows at once bleached and vibrant.

“Ghost Maps” is one of two singles the band has released in advance of its next album—you can download this one here, or both of them together via a .zip file on the band’s site. The album is to be entitled North College Hill and is slated for a release some time this fall on Datawaslost Records. It’s the Cincinnati-based septet’s sixth full-length album and their first since 2009’s This Story Is Old, I Know, But It Goes On. The band has been featured on Fingertips both in 2009 and in 2006. MP3 via Datawaslost.