August 2011 – Page 2

Free and legal MP3: Caveman (sweet & driven, w/ accoutrements)

The song moves along in 4/4 time, at a brisk clip, and then in the chorus, the drive remains but something’s awry, extra beats sneak in and then out in a way that creates a kind of hiccup in the rhythm.

Caveman

“Old Friend” – Caveman

Sweet and dreamy, but with a sense of drive and purpose, not to mention a playful sense of time, “Old Friend” starts in the middle of the story (“And I sat down on the wall…”). I like that. I also like the haunted-house organ and those ghostly harmonies and those scary synthesizer washes and how Matthew Iwanusa offers up his sugary tenor as if he doesn’t hear any of that. He’s not scared, not him.

Most of all I like the time-signature-based hook in the chorus. The song moves along in 4/4 time, at a brisk clip, and then in the chorus, the drive remains but something’s awry, extra beats sneak in and then out in a way that creates a kind of hiccup in the rhythm. Two things seem to be happening. First, the melody line has been skewed even further away from the beginning of the measure than it already had been in the verse; in the chorus, each new line starts two beats before the next measure starts, rather than a beat and a half in front. Okay, doesn’t sound like much, but trust me, it’s different. Second, the chorus begins with two measures of 6/4 before proceeding as previously in 4/4. The 6/4 measures start at 0:47, around the word “around,” and then bump back into the 4/4 stream at the lyrical seam between the words “right on time” and “it was just an old friend.” As usual with this kind of stuff, it sounds clunky and hard to follow as I describe it, but what you’ll hear is delightful and engaging.

Caveman is a five-piece from Brooklyn that formed in January 2010. (Yes, we are getting there, folks: listening to bands that did not exist even in the ’00s. Time flies, whether you’re having fun or not.) “Old Friend” will be found on band’s debut album, CoCo Beware, coming out next month.

Free and legal MP3: High Places (jittery & propulsive, yet introspective)

High Places is one technopop duo which is clearly not in it just to twiddle knobs or to woo the dance crowd.

High Places

“Year Off” – High Places

We are greeted by what sounds like a heavily synthesized beat, but right away there are clues that things are not what they may seem. There’s something spacious about the sound itself, even as the clipped precision of the beat speaks of serious computer manipulation. And then there’s the odd fact that the beat unfolds for all of seven seconds before the vocals start. Wow—a technopop/electronica song without a mindless, overlong introduction. Bonus points to High Places, a duo which is clearly not in it just to twiddle knobs or to woo the dance crowd.

And then there are the words themselves: “The brackish water/Swirling around/In a basin I left in the yard”—a stark, organic image, spoke-sung by Mary Pearson with, now, a new element in the mix: a chime-like keyboard tracing a C minor octave in a repeating pattern. Keep your ear on that, as it becomes the backbone of multi-instrumentalist Rob Barber’s jittery, multifaceted soundscape, which takes shape before our ears between 0:32 and 0:48 as new elements are layered in. Pearson doesn’t begin fully singing until 1:20 (and a lovely, careful voice she has, too), at which point she settles mostly on a motif that echoes the melody given us by the C minor synthesizer. Nothing about this song is very song-like in any pop sort of way, but likewise does it rise above typical club fodder in the sculpted precision of its sound and the dreamy introspection of Pearson’s vocals. Barber’s sounds often originate in organic instruments (Pearson has a degree in bassoon performance, of all things), and if that isn’t necessarily clear to the casual listener what is noticeable, and notable, is the striking texture he creates—a propulsive yet elusive setting that sounds on the one hand like little more than a beat and yet on the other hand feels fully like music. In what amounts to a bit of aural sleight of hand, the song makes do with only two chords, as far as I can detect. I for one don’t even miss a third.

High Places was founded in Brooklyn in 2006, but has since relocated to Los Angeles. “Year Off” is from the album Original Colors, the band’s third, set for release in October on Thrill Jockey Records. MP3 via Pitchfork. A duo with a definite visual flair, the band has a blog featuring photographs from their travels, which is well worth a visit. They were previously featured on Fingertips in January 2010.

Free and legal MP3: Ages and Ages (sing-along w/ accumulated intensity)

While it has an unmistakable Grateful Dead meets Neil Young kind of hippie-dippie orientation (and not that there’s anything wrong with that!), there’s also something grounded and purposeful in the air here.

Ages and Ages

“Navy Parade” – Ages and Ages

With the head-bobbing backbeat and the guitar-based, sing-along vibe of a hippie anthem from 1970, “Navy Parade” is something of an antidote to the synthesized gravity of “Year Off.” Instead of two-person, California-cool digital manipulation we get a Portland-based septet recording live, singing into one microphone. But hey: the fact that each kind of song exists makes the other all the more powerful and appealing. That’s something that the diversity-averse among us never seem to understand.

But I digress. As for “Navy Parade,” while it has that Grateful Dead meets Neil Young kind of hippie-dippie orientation (and not that there’s anything wrong with that!), there’s also something grounded and purposeful in the air here. Actually, as falsetto-y front guys go, Tim Perry oozes more Thom Yorke than Neil Young; he’s got that kind of edge if you listen for it, and the song, without abandoning the central shuffle, builds in intensity. This is not merely a question of volume; the structure here is built to acquire potency as it progresses. Part of this has to do with the verse’s melody line, which extends a full 16 measures and includes a nice modulation away from resolution halfway through (first heard with the words “hour finally came” at 0:25; it’s even more satisfying the second time, when Perry sings “and that’s the worst thing that you could do,” at 1:00). The rest has to do with the song’s overall framework: there are two distinct halves, and once we arrive at the second half, featuring an accumulating repetition of ensemble singing, we do not return to the first. The linear movement can heighten a sense of climax. All those voices singing together in real time don’t hurt either.

“Navy Parade”—which carries the parenthetical words “(Escape From the Black River Bluffs)”—is from the debut Ages and Ages album, Alright You Restless, which was released back in February on Knitting Factory Records. (Okay, so the album was sitting on my desk for a little while. Better late than never.) And while “Navy Parade” was not the first single from the album, it was in fact the first video. As often noted, I’m not a great video fan but this one I’m fond of, both for the storyline and for the authentic Portland imagery, with the splendid St. Johns Bridge serving as a backdrop for the song’s climactic second half.

Free and legal MP3: Washed Out

Buoyant, hopeful/wistful synth pop

“Amor Fati” – Washed Out

Washed Out is a mild-mannered-looking young fellow with the mild-mannered name of Ernest Greene who managed, via a handful of laptop-generated songs posted on MySpace in 2009, to give birth—inadvertently, of course—to an entire genre. Or maybe it was a sub-genre, or maybe it wasn’t really a genre at all as much as an ironically named, accidentally grouped cadre of bands who didn’t realize they entailed a movement until a blogger with nothing better to do pointed it out one day. And even though 2009 is ancient history now, in internet years, the semi-ironic, semi-concocted genre of chillwave continues to exist not merely as a point-of-reference label but, in a meta kind of way, as a symbol of both the artificiality of rampant sub-genre-ization and of the acceptance of the artificiality. Or something like that.

Anyway, okay: “Amor Fati,” Latin for “love of fate,” or, more to the point, “love of one’s own fate”; the phrase is Nietzsche’s, but hey, if the history of chillwave is too elusive for effective summary here, then forget about Nietzsche. I’ll stick to the song itself, which is a buoyant electronic concoction, achy melody atop a wash of synths, with something reverberant and inexact about the beat and something incomprehensible about the lyrics. Greene has said he doesn’t want his lyrics to be fully audible, that he’s after a mood, and wants the songs to take on life in a listener’s head. Objective achieved, but elusively: said mood is simultaneously hopeful and wistful, cool and warm, introspective and expansive, ’80s and ’10s. With hand claps.

I should note that after a couple of bedroom-constructed EPs, Greene was signed by Sub Pop. His debut full-length, Within and Without, released in mid-July, features a well-textured, fuller-fledged sound that might run counter to chillwave’s distinctly lo-fi origins, but to me illustrates a point always worth remembering: some who employ lo-fi techniques do so only of necessity, not out of philosophical conviction. Greene sounds like someone who deserves an actual studio. “Amor Fati” is the third track on the new album. MP3 via Sub Pop.

Free and legal MP3: Alina Simone (sparse but powerful)

Alina Simone

“Beautiful Machine” – Alina Simone

Prickly and haunting, “Beautiful Machine” depends for its potency, first, upon Simone’s unadorned, almost homely electric guitar, alternately picked and strummed, with a slightly fuzzy tone but without the slightest bit of fuss or drama. I realize as I listen how inherently histrionic so much rock’n’roll guitar playing is. This moodier, more shadowy sound is deep and enticing.

And then there’s Simone’s singing voice, the other clear source of the song’s power. She blends a breathy intimacy with an assertive upper range in a way that recalls Sinead O’Connor; like O’Connor, Simone has something of the force of nature about her. And yet still the operative word remains restraint. While there is a second guitar and a bass in the mix, they are in service of the primary guitar and the drums, in a setting that’s full enough to feel textured yet sparse enough to let us hear each instrument distinctly. Nothing feels automatic, not even the drumbeat, which rumbles and stutters, all tom and bass, no snare or cymbal. A cello arrives as if through the back door, finding its mournful place. The song feels at once primitive and elegant.

Simone is a Ukraine-born, Boston-bred musician now ensconced in Brooklyn. Her parents were political refugees, but Simone went back in 2004 to live in Siberia for six months. Her second full-length album, released in 2008, was in Russian, covering the songs of the underground punk-poet Yanka Dyagileva. “Beautiful Machine” is the lead track to her self-released third album, Make Your Own Danger, which came out at the end of May. Simone is now a published writer as well—her book of essays, You Must Go and Win, came out in June on Faber & Faber, and is in part about the travails of the indie musician in the 21st century. MP3 via Simone’s site.

Free and legal MP3: Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies (’60s-inspired summer nostalgia)

Philadelphia’s Steve Goldberg has become the indie bard of summer nostalgia.

Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies

“July” – Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies

Philadelphia’s Steve Goldberg has become the indie bard of summer nostalgia. We first heard him here on Fingertips in September 2007, brooding sweetly and chamber-pop-ishly about summer’s end. He returned in 2010 for a bittersweet, horn-festooned ode to suburban living that was not specifically summer oriented but trafficked in a similar watching-your-life-go-by brand of pensiveness. He returns in full summer mode here in 2011 with “July,” which, despite its title, works as a soundtrack to August as well.

What begins like the Beach Boys gone twee, via Fountains of Wayne, develops a resilient core beneath its veneer of exuberant nostalgia. Despite its backward glancing—the verse in particular sports a perky, early-’60s complexion—the music seems very present, very real, thanks in no small part to Goldberg’s wholesome, somewhat nerdy (in a good way!) tenor, which complements the innocent imagery but likewise seems to comment on it. His ability to meet the music on its own terms is what makes this more than kitsch or pastiche. I like in particular how his seamless falsetto veers in the second half of each verse into the harmony line even though no one else is singing the melody. He’s kind of inviting us to sing along; and then the chorus, taking a turn towards the power pop, pretty much demands it. Do not by the way miss the grand, old-fashioned guitar solo (1:58)—a thoughtful, retro-y creation stretching out the length of an entire verse, articulated against an increasingly insistent string section (three violins, viola, and cello, for the record).

“July” is the first song to be ready and available from a five-song EP, entitled The Flood, that Goldberg is readying for release. He in fact requires a bit more capital to get the thing produced and distributed, and is in the middle of a fundraising effort towards that end, via IndieGoGo.