February 2012 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Your 33 Black Angels (rock’n’roll at once rough-hewn & precise)

At once precise and rough-hewn—like something Ron Sexsmith would write if he were in a band with Neil Young.

“Patient Love” – Your 33 Black Angels

I’ve got a news flash. Rock’n’roll is not dead. Enough with that already. No it’s not what it used to be, no it’s not at the center of the pop cultural universe but can we stop with the witless headlines that arise pretty much every year about rock being dead, or indie rock being dead, or whatever preferred “death of the month” is being declared. I mean sheesh. It is a meaningless and idiotic editorial trope and any editor who runs it is lazy and any writer who writes it is a narcissist. There. I said it.

Rock’n’roll is not dead because there are still rock bands making it, and if you are one of those people who need your rock music to be revolutionary and without precedent well boy have you come to the wrong genre in the first place. Rock bands have been reworking the classics since before Led Zeppelin was ripping off Willie Dixon. So, okay, here’s Brooklyn’s Your 33 Black Angels, and this one just kills it: the vibe is terrific, the guitar riff insistent, the lyrics slippery but compelling, and the organ fills are perfect. (Do not underestimate the organ in the rock’n’roll bag of tricks.) And then there are the little, unutterable things. One example: early in the song (0:26), when the singer sings, “I was just reminded,” and there’s that long and perfect pause between “just” and “reminded,” and it’s exactly the kind of thing you do if you really know how to write songs. In the end there is something so precise and exquisite about this seemingly rough-hewn song. It sounds like something Ron Sexsmith would write if he were in a band with Neil Young.

Your 33 Black Angels is an elusive and idiosyncratic crew, encompassing at least eight musicians, who prefer to go by names like JW, D. Zots, and (my favorite) J. O! (exclamation point included), while apparently utilizing the additional services of “countless others.” “Patient Love” is a song from their fourth album, Moon and Morning Star, which was self-released last week. The band was previously featured here in October 2008. MP3 via the music site Consequence of Sound, and although the link looks generic and sketchy, this was an official premiere so it’s all above board.

Free and legal MP3: Emily Jane White (hypnotic, acoustic, reverbed)

The insistent yet elusive “Black Silk” pulls you into a magical past that somehow blends the Victorian and the medieval.

“Black Silk” – Emily Jane White

At once insistent and elusive, “Black Silk” unfolds in a reverbed acoustic setting that evokes a sense of bygone remoteness; we feel immediately pulled into a magical past that somehow blends the Victorian and the medieval. And yet this sound is likewise very 2010s. Go figure.

At the center of the song is White’s spacious, slightly smoky alto. She sings as if to hypnotize you. The music assists, as she backs her soothing, folk-like melody with a river of double-time finger-picked arpeggios that lull us so with their diligence that we almost don’t notice the rather threatening entrance of the electric guitar about midway through. The song’s very structure, in fact, leads us along as if spellbound, lacking a true chorus while flowing through a mostly unrepeated series of interrelated pieces. The listener can feel both lost and dizzy by the time we get to the climactic clearing. At which point, all White has to say is “oh oh oh,” as you’ll see.

Born in California, White ended up launching her solo music career while living in France in the ’00s, and still has a larger following overseas than in the U.S. “Black Silk” is from Ode To Sentience, her third album, which was released on the Talitres label in France last year. The American release is slated for May on Antenna Farm Records. White was previously featured on Fingertips last March.

Free and legal MP3: The Pharmacy (garage rock, w/ aspirations)

“Dig Your Grave” packs an unusual amount of variety into a two-minute song that might at least partially pass for garage rock.

“Dig Your Grave” – The Pharmacy

This is almost not a song. A scant two minutes to start with, “Dig Your Grave” uses the first 40 seconds on its three-part introduction. Then we hear an engaging, They Might Be Giants-esque verse and a very concise chorus (the words “Dig your grave” repeated three times) before returning to 20 or so more seconds of instrumental; we finish up with the chorus repeated a couple of times. So this thing is two minutes long and fully half of it doesn’t involve singing, and a good part of the singing that exists consists of just three words.

If it all manages to work—and I think it does, particularly in the context of this week’s three songs, as a follow-up to “Black Silk“—it does so on its ability to pack an unusual amount of variety into a narrow time frame. Most short songs, perhaps too aware of their shortness, don’t invest in introductions and instrumental breaks because there seems no time to fiddle with such frivolities. The Pharmacy does the opposite, honing the song down to one verse—although it may be two, sung back to back—so that the rest of the song still has space to breathe and develop. The “frivolities,” it turns out, offer a lot substance. Another way the song seems to expand beyond its clock time is through its rather distinctive mashing together of a very garage-rock-y vibe, complete with lo-fi-seeming vocal distortion, and a more aspirational sort of musicality. The keyboard motif that opens “Dig Your Grave” does not in any way shout “garage rock” at us, and neither does the song’s multifarious construction. And yet the chorus certainly does.

From Seattle, the trio The Pharmacy has been doing its lo-fi, neo-garage-rock thing for 10 years now. They have three albums to show for it and, in keeping with its lo-fi street cred, a bunch of 7-inch singles, a split cassette, and a demo CD-R. “Dig Your Grave” is the lead track from its latest 7-inch, which, at four songs, is more of an EP than a single. It comes to us from Kind Turkey Records, and they’re the ones offering up the MP3 as well.

There’s Always Someone Looking At You:The Two-Way Mirror of Music Industry Email

Most emails that are sent by companies are two-way communication tools disguised as one-way communication tools. And as a result, they are really less like two-way communication tools and more like two-way mirrors, with recipients sitting here on the exposed side, not realizing there are people watching what we’re doing.

I received an email recently from a music promoter that began by thanking me for checking out a song that he had sent as an MP3 link in a previous email.

Maybe I was having a bad day but his email set off little alarms in my brain. He was thanking me for checking it out? Meaning, he knew that I had downloaded the song and listened to it?

He said it so casually. I was not supposed to be perturbed. I was supposed to realize that of course promoters know when you’re downloading their material.

And yet I felt spied on. I emailed him back, not (oops) as politely as I might have, and he answered, a bit irritated, but we kept going and ended up with a friendly and productive dialogue. My eyes were opened to something that they were perhaps rather willfully closed to in the past. Which is this:

Many if not most emails that are sent by companies are not one-way but two-way communication tools. Information is sent to you, and you send information back to the sender. This is standard operating procedure.

And there’s only one little thing wrong with it.

With very few exceptions, these two-way communication tools are disguising themselves as one-way tools. And so they are really less like two-way communication tools and more like two-way mirrors, with recipients sitting here on the exposed side, not realizing there are people watching what we’re doing.

Some may shrug and wonder what the big deal is. I’m a music blogger, people are sending me links, of course they are going to want to know what I’m clicking on.

But you see the issue isn’t that they know what I’m clicking on. It’s that they know but aren’t telling me. If these companies were to state in clear terms at the top of their emails that any link you click on in the email is traceable and trackable, then everything’s cool. I may choose not to click links as a result, or I may choose to. This is my fully-informed decision.

But tracking your behavior without telling you is a breach of privacy. You are being watched and you don’t realize it. Wiretaps are illegal for the same reason.

This is why (now I get it) the links in music industry emails often arrive with extra code attached. The intention at the sender’s end is to be able to know whether each individual recipient has clicked on a link, without specifically telling the recipient that this is happening.

Ironically enough, the promoter who sent me the email that initially alerted me to this problem does in fact let recipients know, at the very end of the email, that the downloads are “monitored.” It’s a fine-print statement that is not very informative and yet this is more than almost anyone else bothers to do who is sending behavior-tracking email.

I can see why this has developed but I can’t see why it’s right.

I’m raising a fuss here because the concept of simple human privacy is taking a beating in the Facebook Age. Despite the self-serving pronouncements of Mark Zuckerberg it is not true that we have collectively changed, on a dime, our views of privacy. They are being changed for us by companies that will profit mightily from this change while arrogantly believing that no one will either bother to or be able to do anything about it. It is disingenuous of Zuckerberg to proclaim some vast sociological insight, based on absolutely zero expertise and 100 percent vested interest.

No, make that: it’s positively scummy of him.

His hubris on the matter will bring him down in the end, without question. He thinks human nature has magically changed in just a few years and yet, ha, the ancient Greeks knew things that he has yet to fathom. I’ve seen the plays, and they don’t turn out well for those who send the needles into the red zone on the hubris-o-meter.

But the problem right now is that Facebook and Google—equally guilty of positioning privacy violation as 21st-century “normal”—appear to be controlling the conversation about privacy. We have to start asserting otherwise. And I begin here in this small way to call out the deceptive, privacy-violating practice of emails that track your behavior without informing you.

In some ways, these emails are even more troubling than the privacy violation going on at Facebook, because by now, as the diagram above indicates, most of us should be pretty aware that any interaction you have with a web site or an app is inherently non-private.

But emails look and feel private. Do we have to adjust our perception there now too?

Look, I understand that sending out emails that track recipient behavior makes perfect sense to the promoters sending them. They can use this data to help them better target their campaigns. The data is also, obviously, helpful in terms of reporting back to clients (record companies and/or independent musicians) about how effectively a song or album has been disseminated.

I understand, furthermore, that some of what the promoters gain from the metrics doubles back as a benefit to us recipients. Promoters use their email management software to target us more effectively—so that, for instance, I only receive tour information related to Philadelphia, as one simple example. More complexly, they can also use my clicking behavior to help them understand what kind of music I tend to respond to, and send me more of that kind, and less of other kinds.

So, okay, the data is valuable. But why aren’t they up front about the nature of the data they are collecting? This is an affliction of the 21st-century online business world. They love the data they can access but would prefer not to admit they are accessing it.

And how ironic: it’s the Zuckerbergs and the Eric Schmidts who constantly assure us that everyone now has to be transparent, that we have to get used to sharing everything with everyone. Well, then: why are companies who collect our data so eager to hide what they are actually doing?

Please understand that I am not comparing most music promoters to privacy tramplers such as Zuckerberg and Schmidt. Music promoters tend not to be as Machiavellian about it. Many of these folks are good people who are simply trying to do a good job.

As such, it is my hope that the better souls out there in the industry begin to think twice about collecting this data without openly informing us. You want your data? Fine. Just tell us what you’re doing.

And not in fine print at the bottom, but in a clear and present statement in the email. Give us the option of giving you your data, or not.

I’m not holding my breath about this, however. The free market is notoriously disinclined to police itself.

This also raises the interesting issue of whether the data is itself only valuable, or in any case notably more valuable, when it is collected on the sly. It is likely truer that way, no question. But do we, as end users, somehow “owe” companies who are trying to sell us things all the information they would ideally like to have?

How you answer that question to yourself will determine how concerned you might want to be about the proliferation of email two-way mirrors and what if anything can be done about it.

Image Credit: Dave Makes

Free and legal MP3: Zeus (awesome retro rock, ’70s edition)

“Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” was made to be blaring out of your car radio, especially if you happen to be driving maybe a Buick Skylark.

“Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” – Zeus

Can a piece of music sound thoroughly retro and entirely of the moment at the same time? Not if you believe the premise of that Retromania book from last year, with all of its pop-culture-is-over hand-wringing. Let’s call out that foolish book once and for all, shall we? I mean, good lord: no one knows what the future will bring based on present circumstances. And there’s always a lot of less-than-terrific stuff floating around in pop-culture-land. To assume everything has now ground to a halt is the height of baby boomer narcissism.

In any case, no one could possibly convince me that a song as sharp and well-presented as “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” represents anything but pop culture at its finest. If the musical setting is all 1970s, if the lead singer even sounds oddly like the guy in Blues Image (“Ride Captain Ride,” anyone?), what of it? This is one groovy tune, from the fuzzy/flangey guitar to the stop-start melodic momentum to the (yes) cowbell to, what the heck, all the other guitar sounds as well. Special props go out to that connective, lower-register riff we hear in the chorus, first at 0:59; retro my ass, that thing is just timeless rock’n’roll, sports fans. This song was made to be blaring out of your car radio, especially if you happen to be driving maybe a Buick Skylark.

Zeus is a four-man band from Toronto that has otherwise in recent years been doing business as Jason Collett’s backing band. “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” is a track from their second full-length album, Busting Visions, which arrives next month on the Arts & Crafts label. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. For those interested—and who shouldn’t be?—Rolling Stone has a free & legal MP3 of another new Zeus song, here.

Free and legal MP3: Coast Jumper (engaging, unhurried drama)

An engaging, unhurried adventure in two minutes and forty seconds.

“Lawless” – Coast Jumper

Let us stop right away and appreciate the introduction to “Lawless,” which fades in on the distinctive but difficult to identify sound of water being churned or pumped, on top of which soon arrives an unhurried, elastic electric guitar. It’s 20 seconds of sound that is both intriguing and engaging. (A lot of music made in the 21st century, across all genres, from pop to classical, nails the “intriguing” side without bothering with the “engaging” part.) The guitar offers up an actual melody, and the lazy ambiance carries with it a clear sense of impending change and movement. Lots of introductions traffic in pretty much the same tempo and dynamic range of the song to come; something like this merely lets us know we are heading into an adventure.

So the singing starts and we’re still in the same instrumental place, but notice now how the verse melody proceeds in double time, and ends with that quirky repetition that kind of comes out of nowhere but sticks in your head (“time for bed, time for bed, time for bed”). The lyrics, meanwhile, have just alluded to the baby game of “This little piggy,” and are heading who knows where. Drum kicks in. The song both develops and yet seems to stay in a state of unresolved ambiguity. No chorus emerges, just the verse three times over. And by the third time things have somehow gotten pretty intense, thanks in part to the re-emergence of the introduction’s guitar line, soon sounding less dreamy and more vehement; a really effective use of backing vocals also adds to the potency. More than halfway into it, we are still not sure where it’s heading: one moment we are led into an a capella oasis (1:29), the next into an extended guitar frenzy (1:42). The song has a minute to go but we’ll hear no more words, as it eventually finishes off with an instrumental recapitulation of the primary theme. Somehow this multi-faceted, unrushed drama has come and gone in two minutes and forty seconds.

Coast Jumper is four high-school friends from New York, now living in San Francisco (coast jumper, see?), with a fifth guy now in the band. “Lawless” is from Grand Opening, the band’s aptly-titled debut. The 10-song self-released album is available in “name your price” mode at Bandcamp, and will be physically released in May.

Free and legal MP3: Gabriel & The Hounds (NYC rock, w/ strings & imponderables)

This is one of those mysterious little songs that works perfectly for no precise reason.

“The World Unfolds” – Gabriel & The Hounds

This is one of those mysterious little songs that works perfectly for no precise reason. The music has a chuggy, sloppy-tight New York City sound but lacks both a discernible chorus and, even, any kind of proper hook; melodies, meanwhile, kind of slide around in an elusive way, when words aren’t being out-and-out spoken-sung. Meanwhile, the lyrics, often a series of imponderable questions, twinkle with aphoristic charm but don’t seem to add up to any bigger picture narrative or statement. Through it all, Gabriel Levine flaunts a singing style that veers towards the neighborhood of off-key.

And it’s all a wonderful thing. It starts with some serious string playing, and even as the strings take a quick back seat to that Sweet-Jane-ish guitar riff and reverberant bass line, they’re always in the background, and the occasionally-heard cello fill is an atmospheric bonanza. (As often as we encounter strings in rock songs, we don’t often find a real rock’n’roll sound blended adroitly with individual stringed instruments.) The song seems to turn on the linchpin of the one line that’s clearly spoken (0:56): “You’ve been asking everyone to get out of your way/But there never was anyone in your way.” We don’t know who is talking to whom here but this line just kind of zings you with its unexpected magnetism. From there on in, Levine has firm command of this slippery, winsome tune (which also clocks in, as the previous song did, at 2:40, for all your song-time fans), and we are all better off because of it.

Levine is front man for the Brooklyn-based band Takka Takka; Gabriel & The Hounds is essentially a solo project, but one in which he called on the services of any number of locally-sourced musician friends. The project’s name was inspired by the classic Kate Bush album Hounds of Love, which is as worth being inspired by as, pretty much, anything yet recorded, if I may say so. The Gabriel & The Hounds album is called Kiss Full of Teeth and it is coming out at the end of the month on the Ernest Jenning Record Co., based in Brooklyn.

Fingertips Flashback: Doris Henson (from February 2005)

A free and legal MP3 from the now-defunct band Doris Henson, which was featured on Fingertips in 2005.

The first Flashback of 2012 has emerged from the swamp.

“Sidestepping” – Doris Henson

[from February 22, 2005]

From the largely ignored metropolis of Kansas City, Kansas comes this curiously named five-man band with a curious-sounding song. Over an itchy, bare-bones rhythm (drumbeat, erratically strummed guitar with some well-placed feedback), “Sidestepping” begins sketchily, singer Matthew Dunehoo’s airy, high-pitched voice kind of toying with the lyrics at first. There seems not to be a verse or chorus; instead, Dunehoo merely sings a lazy, descending melody in between instrumental breaks. But, hey: the volume and intensity of the accompaniment cranks up a notch at around 2:13 and as this subtly new soundscape unfolds, I am transfixed. Everything is the same but different: the lazy descending melody is stretched and hung now upon dramatic chord changes, and Dunehoo’s singing acquires an edgy substance that sounds appealingly to me like Brian Eno doing his best Ray Davies impersonation. “Sidestepping” comes from the band’s new CD, Give Me All Your Money, their second, which will be released later this month on Desoto Records.

ADDENDUM: Despite good material and good press, Doris Henson was through as a band by 2006. Front man Matthew Dunehoo ended up relocating to Brooklyn and putting a new band together, called Baby Teardrops. The lineup has changed once or twice but it at least temporarily solidified as a trio and released its first album, X Is For Love, in April 2011. Note that the Doris Henson MP3 has moved around over the years but it’s still up these days on The Pitch, a Kansas City alternative paper.

Free and legal MP3: Marie Lalá (smoothly integrated Spector beat)

A splendid little song, incorporating the seminal Spector beat, that’s somehow both more and less quirky than it might at first seem. Yeah I don’t know how that works either.

“Mrs. Sleepyhead” – Marie Lalá

I must first confess, or re-confess, that I am an absolute sucker for the Phil Spector beat, in just about any way it can sneak into a song. As is often the case, we hear it here right away, as the drum and bass in unison begin “Mrs. Sleepyhead” with that unmistakable rhythm: DUM! dum-dum; BOOM (or however one can best write that out; just think of the opening to “Be My Baby” and you’re there). It’s a mystery, where it came from, why it’s so perpetually affecting, and what on earth the world must have been like without it. All those thousands of years, without that beat. Staggers the imagination.

Anyway, so here we go again (DUM! dum-dum; BOOM) and in this case not ensconced in echoey melodrama, and therefore more intriguingly absorbed and defused as the song requires. The first shift happens at 0:20 when the bass breaks rank from the drumbeat, going on a little run that leads straight into the entrance of the electric guitar, the distinctively picked arpeggios of which distract the ear from the precise moment when the Spector beat gives way. As it clearly has by the chorus. The prickly guitar line remains but now the song around it swings and sways in a most luscious way, thanks to how the melody keeps waiting for the fourth beat in the measure to complete itself. The chorus is a marvel of smooth motion—me, I can’t keep my body still when I’m listening to it. All in all a splendid little song that’s somehow both more and less quirky than it might at first seem. Yeah I don’t know how that works either.

Marie Lalá (unused last name: Nilsson) is a Swedish singer/songwriter pretty much brand new to the world at large. According to her bio, she “is a former aerialist who now works with rope access on oil rigs in the North Sea.” Could be true, could be parody; we have so often rubbed out the fine line separating the two that I mostly give up trying to differentiate. “Mrs. Sleepyhead” is a track from her forthcoming debut EP, Search of Sound, which will be released next month via Platform of Joy.

Free and legal MP3: Shearwater (exquisitely crafted drama)

Another dramatic, exquisitely crafted song from the Austin-based Shearwater, whose latest album will be released on Sub Pop next week.

“You As You Were” – Shearwater

When you have a voice like Jonathan Meiburg’s—a sad, echoed-out tenor that registers high but resonates deep—there is no sense avoiding drama. The voice announces it, needs it, revels in it. And his songs do tend effortlessly to convey drama, via a combination of careful unfolding, subtle evocation, and urgent unleashing.

“You As You Were” beings with one note—a D# on the keyboard, repeated rapidly by the right hand for 5 seconds before stepping down to a C# as the left hand begins to sketch out a thoughtful melody under the ongoing hammering of the dominant hand’s single note. A quiet bass drum has added a pulse but maybe you don’t even notice. The rest of the band lays back until past the 40-second point. Somewhere in here the singing has started. And yet the song doesn’t feel as if it has truly kicked in until 1:24, when the drums finally give us a backbeat. And even so there’s a sense of restraint, something being held back, and finally we see what it was when one of the earlier melodies returns with a variation that leads us to a previously unheard three-note descent starting at 2:28 that features the song’s highest notes and its clearest (if still vague) sense of climax. Note that the song seems all verse, with a couple of related melodies, each of which go through some variations; there is no obvious lyrical repetition even as some key words and images recur—river, blood, mountains, weather. The song seems to be about both the damage and the promise of a personal epiphany. The combination of music and poetry here is exquisite, and well worth close, repeated listens to get to the bottom of the drama.

“You As You Were” is a song from the album Animal Joy, coming out next week on Sub Pop Records. This is Shearwater’s seventh full-length (not counting the experimental, instrumental, self-released Shearwater Is Enron album from 2010). It is the band’s first album for Sub Pop; they have recorded previously for both Matador Records and Misra Records. The MP3 is available via Sub Pop, and note that if you click on the first Sub Pop mention in this paragraph, you’ll find another free and legal MP3 from the album that is also available, and also worth hearing.

Shearwater has been previously featured on Fingertips in May 2005, March 2008, and December 2009