February 2012 – Page 2

Free and legal MP3: Mike O’Neill (easy-going shuffle w/ deeper complexity)

Spiffy little shuffle with more going on than might initially meet the ear.

“Henry” – Mike O’Neill

Spiffy little shuffle with more going on than might initially meet the ear. The musical feel is old-fashioned in a Beatle-y kind of way (think “Martha My Dear”), a sensation accentuated by the vintage-sounding “doo-doo-doo” backing vocals; everything seems so immediately comfy and solid. But go ahead and try to sing along with this one. I’ll wait.

Yeah, it’s oddly difficult to follow even as it’s oh so easy to listen to. That’s because as amiable as “Henry” sounds, the music is decidedly off-kilter. If you go ahead and tap out the four-beated measures as they roll by you’ll see that hardly any of the music lines up with the song’s structural rhythm. It’s an intriguing effect. The drummer first plays forcefully between the beats in the introduction (which sounds purposeful and flippant), and then merely implies the 1-2-3-4 without at all playing on the beat. The melody hurries and hesitates in idiosyncratic ways that relate more to how words are spoken than how they are usually sung. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. The beat partially reasserts itself in the chorus, at which point the off-kilter part is that the chorus doesn’t have any words—O’Neill makes do, somehow, with those scratchy wordless “doo-doo-doo” vocals, which themselves are still not sketching out a particularly straightforward path. Note that the second time we hear the chorus, the background vocals are supplemented by a second wordless melody (more “da-da-da” this time) that intertwines with the first in a way that sounds almost like a complete mish-mash and yet isn’t at all. And everything wraps up in 2:25. What’s not to like?

Mike O’Neill was one-half of the Canadian bass-and-drums duo The Inbreds (he was the bass), which had a run of college-radio-oriented success in the ’90s. After switching to guitar and releasing solo albums in 2000 and 2004, O’Neill landed a job composing music for the popular Canadian cooking show, French Food at Home, which ran from 2007 to 2010 and no doubt provided a much-appreciated steady paycheck. He even won a Gemini (a Canadian TV award) for his work. Now the Halifax resident is back at the singer/songwriter life, and at last about to release an album he begun working on back in 2007. It’s coming out later this month, it’s called Wild Lines, and that’s where you’ll find “Henry,” and 11 other songs.

Free and legal MP3: Liz Green

Windswept, blues-ish & precise, w/ tuba

“Hey Joe” – Liz Green

An interesting and/or amusing playlist might be made of songs with the same title as a much more famous song, but which are new songs, not covers of the famous ones. “Hey Joe” goes right on that playlist, as this is assuredly not the Jimi Hendrix song of the same name.

What we have instead is a windswept, precisely orchestrated bit of minimalist pseudo-blues. Featuring lonesome percussion, a cleanly picked acoustic guitar, and an offbeat, handpicked blend of brass and woodwind, “Hey Joe” swivels on the lyrical structure of traditional blues, with its repeating lines, but veers into idiosyncratic territory when it comes to chord progressions and instrumentation. The more I listen, the more taken I am by the accompanying quartet of tuba, trumpet, trombone, and tenor sax that enters around 1:26 and oom-pahs and croons its way across this “simple bitter tale of love,” as Green herself has described the song. I can almost believe that the musical accompaniment somehow preceded the song itself, that Green concocted her words and melodies specifically to hang on the weighty, unorthodox foursome who give testimony from a deeper place. Cool song.

A self-proclaimed “tragi-comic pop clown” (so she says on her Twitter page), Liz Green is a singer/songwriter from Manchester, England who came into the public eye in the UK when she won the Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2007, which is apparently a pretty big deal. She released a 7-inch single in 2008 and then just kind of disappeared. Until now. Her debut full-length album, O, Devotion!, came out in the UK late in 2011 and sees its American release next week, on the PIAS label.

Free and legal MP3: Uncle Roman’s Jetboat (well-built, from good parts)

“Fearless Like Yourself” – Uncle Roman’s Jetboat

Look at how many distinct moving parts “Fearless Like Yourself” puts immediately into motion: the whistle, the snaky bass line, the itchy guitar, the brisk stuttering drumbeat, the haunted-house organ, all before the singing starts. A lot of rock bands allow their collective sound to pretty much mush together, which can be its own kind of fun. But I always like it when the ear can distinguish the individual parts even as they coalesce into one compelling musical narrative, which is what is going on here quite marvelously.

Then Thomas Beecham starts singing and in this case, too, the ear is immediately hooked; he begins: “While you were out/I was going through your shit/to find something to stick on you.” A first line that surely keeps you listening. Beecham has something of Thom Yorke’s nasally twitchiness, but channels it here through a less arcane song structure than the mighty Radiohead tends these days to favor. The song moves, has hooks, and interesting sounds, and nicely connected segments. We are also treated—don’t miss it—to an honest-to-goodness guitar solo, beginning at 2:39, which is squonky and delicious.

Uncle Roman’s Jetboat is a new project that combines four-fifths of the defunct Seattle band The Kindness Kind with Beecham, who is British, and was formerly in the band The Raggedy Anns. “Fearless Like Yourself” is from the debut Uncle Roman’s Jetboat release, a six-song album entitled Floodlights in the Sunlight, which is arriving in March on Don’t Be A Lout Music. MP3 via Don’t Be A Lout. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: The Darcys

Iirregular, arresting Steely Dan cover

“Josie” – The Darcys

While the idea of doing a “cover album” versus a “cover song” is not completely new, neither has it ever much caught on. I guess there haven’t been too many artists with the fortitude, or mania, or funding, or whatever it takes, to go off and recreate a previously existing album track by track. Among the few and far between examples are Pussy Galore’s slapsdash, lo-fi 1986 cover of Exile on Main Street and the earnest live cover album released in 2002 by Mary Lee’s Corvette of Bob Dylan’s iconic Blood on the Tracks.

Now arrive a Toronto quartet called the Darcys with perhaps the most serious and most musically worthy cover album yet recorded—a smart, re-interpretive take on Steely Dan’s perfectionist 1977 album, Aja. While all recognizable, the seven songs are also each altered decisively. What was originally a glistening array of artful, jazz-inflected pop has become a brooding, arresting piece of business. Take “Josie,” which transforms a perky-but-complex song into a doleful-and-still-complex song. Note that they manage this without, really, a change in tempo. What the Darcys have done instead is eradicate the percussion, converting the song into a moody, reverbed brew of keyboards, guitars, and chanting-monk-like harmonies. What remains from the original—and what will always make Steely Dan songs Steely Dan songs—are the incomparably intricate chords, and their sometimes dazzling progressions. Hearing those chords and those progressions reanimated in this new setting is an unexpected treat.

The Darcys have one previous album, self-titled, which was released in October 2011. Although Aja was recorded in 2010—the band produced, arranged, and recorded it themselves—the album was just released late in January. ~~The MP3 here comes via Rolling Stone, but be aware that the band is giving away the entire Aja album on its web site, if you are willing to give them an email address.~~ They are also selling a limited-edition, 180-gram colored vinyl version. I recommend at least a listen, and would point you in the direction of “Peg” in particular.