Month: May 2014

Free and legal MP3: The Van Doos (new rock’n’roll inspired by the old)

Combining melodies that gaze back towards the ’50s with the structural intricacies of 21st-century indie rock and the crowd-pleasing sing-along-iness of timeless pop.

The Van Doos

“Airborne” – The Van Doos

Long-time readers may be familiar with my affection for new rock’n’roll that tips its hat to the old while still standing with its feet planted in the here and now. This is my sweet spot, unabashedly so. The Van Doos pretty much knock the ball out of the park in this regard, combining melodies that gaze back towards the ’50s with the structural intricacies of 21st-century indie rock and the crowd-pleasing sing-along-iness of timeless pop. Instrumentation is rooted in classic rock, but listen closely and enjoy the disciplined crunch of the guitars, the delightfully elastic bass line, and the strategic use of castanets, among other things. I do love the strategic use of castanets.

(Now then, some might claim that any band using merely traditional rock’n’roll instruments, as opposed to laptops and digital manipulations and such, is by definition not standing with its feet planted in the here and now. I scoff at such short-sightedness and ask time to referee this battle. Come back in 30 years and we’ll see how things stand.)

Another wonderful aspect of “Airborne” is how much of a journey the song takes us on, in under four minutes, while still feeling easy to absorb rather than obtuse. The band employs an array of subtle flourishes to add depth while remaining approachable, from the sparse arrangement of the opening verse to the unexpected, simultaneous rhythm and key change at 1:00 to the offbeat structure of a song that seems not to have a chorus but a really enticing secondary verse, heard once (beginning at 1:05), immediately repeated, and then abandoned for the accumulating momentum of the rest of the song. Cool stuff, truly.

The Van Doos are a relatively new quartet from North Yorkshire, in the U.K. “Airborne” is a song from their forthcoming debut album, perspicaciously entitled Fingertips.

Free and legal MP3: Orenda Fink (unhurried and mysterious)

Smoky with simmering passion, “Ace of Cups” is a minimal yet enticing brew of contradictions.

Orenda Fink

“Ace of Cups” – Orenda Fink

Smoky with simmering passion, “Ace of Cups” is a minimal yet alluring brew of contradictions, beginning with the way this clearly articulated song of precise, simple words and sentences adds nevertheless up to an oracular mystery. The “you” addressed in the lyrics is at one point a man, another point a woman. The ocean and/or sea seems at once a place that beckons and threatens. Likewise love is sung about as a force at one moment dangerous, another moment redemptive. Finally, Fink herself sings with a calm lucidity even while delivering the repeated lyric in the chorus, “You can fill up my cup/I’ll take it cool, I’ll take you rough.”

The music, meanwhile, is unhurried and contained, its gentle sheen contradicted subtly by two separate varieties of fuzzed-up keyboards—the soft, blurry sound you can hear at the end of the lines in the verses, and then the harsher, higher-pitched, buzzier synth that punctuates the chorus. Even the guitar solo (2:51) implies more than it reveals; a repeating III interval, its minimalist yearning continues into the rest of the song, adding a pining solidity to the chorus’s final repetition.

Some knowledge of the titular tarot card clarifies a little, but not much. The Ace of Cups is a card associated with emotional expression, including the possibility of love and intimacy, but typically with spiritual undertones. The love we are ultimately opened to with the Ace of Cups is love in the broadest sense, rooted in love of self and extending into love of life in all its facets. But, just as tarot cards themselves resist one easy interpretation, so too this “Ace of Cups.”

You’ll find the song on Fink’s forthcoming album Blue Dream, to be released in August on Saddle Creek Records, where it is now available for pre-order on CD and on vinyl. This is Fink’s third solo album. She remains best known as half of the duo Azure Ray, but on her own has been a Fingertips favorite over the years, featured here in 2005 (for the still-stirring song, “Bloodline“) and again in 2009, and also as half of the duo O+S, who were likewise featured in 2009. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

photo credit: Bill Sitzmann

Free and legal MP3: Sam Roberts Band (quasi-funky neo-psychedelia)

An assured piece of quasi-funky neo-psychedelia, complete with ear-grabbing guitar licks and a brain-sticking chorus.

Sam Roberts Band

“We’re All In This Together” – Sam Roberts Band

I would understand if Sam Roberts feels he was born in the wrong time and place. His accessible, smartly-produced, effortlessly melodic brand of rock’n’roll would’ve been all over the radio 40 years ago. Today, such music struggles for air. And it’s not like SRB is selling nostalgia; their songs have as crisp and contemporary a sound as music can have in 2014 while making no effort to pander to the EDM crowd. Good thing these guys happen to be from Canada, where they have a good strong following, and where popular taste remains admirably catholic, at least compared to what goes on here in the U.S.

“We’re All In This Together,” in any case, is an assured piece of quasi-funky neo-psychedelia, complete with ear-grabbing guitar licks, a brain-sticking chorus, and the buoyant vibe of a quintet still happy to be playing together. (I love, as one example, how the spiffy lyric “It’s a phenomenon/That goes on and on” [1:23] is so casually offered and moved on from; this is a band used to having tricks up its sleeve.) While the verses sound like a sped-up retake of David Essex’s “Rock On” (not a bad thing!), the song breaks open on the unexpectedly aspirational chorus, which—neat trick—encourages joining in both literally and figuratively, working as an almost touching reminder in our hyper-partisan times. I mean sheesh, yes. We are: in this together. How oblivious or narcissistic do you have to be to disregard this most basic truth? And sorry. Didn’t mean to get all soapboxy. It’s just a pop song. Have fun.

“We’re All In This Together” comes from the fifth Sam Roberts Band album, entitled Lo-Fantasy, which was released in February on Paper Bag Records, but lacked any free and legal downloads until recently. You can grab the song above, as usual, or download it via SoundCloud. The band was featured previously on Fingertips in 2006.

I was sure until they asked me

Eclectic Playlist Series, Vol. 6 – May 2014

Eclectic-Vol-6

Welcome back to the Fingertips Eclectic Playlist Series, my ongoing attempt to make sense of 50-plus years of rock’n’roll music. It’s a tough job but somebody has to do it. Or not, perhaps—look, after all, at the strictly segregated way music tends to be presented online, broken almost always into playlists devoted to specific genres and/or specific decades. Isn’t it just a tiny bit more interesting, not to mention aurally enlightening, to hear late-’80s Paul Kelly segueing into current Arctic Monkeys banging loudly into a fierce piece of early ’90s singer/songwriter goodness from Brenda Kahn? Isn’t it more interesting to hear a track you might have forgotten (“Jeannette”) from a band you might not have forgotten? Not to mention a cool-sounding song you might never have heard in the first place? (I’m thinking “Iron for the Iron” is this time the most obscure number, especially as it remains unavailable on Spotify; see further discussion below.) I know such eclecticism is not for everyone but I also know that “the public wants what the public gets,” so some of this is just a matter of going against the grain and figuring that increasing numbers of people will catch on over time. Or not, and I’ll still have fun.

Note that as of this month, I will be anchoring the playlists on Mixcloud rather than Spotify. Spotify users will still find the lists available there, but, to be blunt, the Spotify lists are just not as good as the Mixcloud ones, and haven’t been from the start. The main reason Mixcloud is better is that each time I make one of these lists, I end up selecting one or two songs that are not available on Spotify. I try to make substitutions in these cases, but I’m not happy about it. On Mixcloud, I am physically uploading the playlist so all songs remain the same.

As a bonus, the playlists on Mixcloud have genuine, radio-like segues rather than randomly different amounts of dead air.

I encourage you to listen via Mixcloud, which is as easy to do as clicking the button below. You don’t have to visit the site, you don’t have to sign up for anything, and proper licensing fees are being paid. The track listing is available simply by scrolling within the Mixcloud widget, here:

This playlist also exists on Spotify, but in a bastardized version. Two songs come up missing on Spotify: the awesome cover of “You Can Call Me Al” by the band Chamberlin, from 2012, and the largely forgotten new-wave-era single “Iron for the Iron,” from the British band the Planets, which was released in 1980. I replaced the Chamberlin track with a song from the band Zeus but the Planets song I just left out. The Spotify playlist has 19 songs instead of the usual 20.

But if Spotify is your thing, here you are:

Free and legal MP3: Armand Margjeka (brisk pace, laid-back vibe)

Combining a brisk pace with a laid-back vibe, “Hummingbird” likewise merges a warm acoustic aura with electronic effects.

Armand Margjeka

“Hummingbird” – Armand Margjeka

Combining a brisk pace with a laid-back vibe, “Hummingbird” likewise merges a warm acoustic aura with electronic effects. Margjeka processes his voice in a megaphone-y way that manages to bridge all these polarities: he sounds at once urgent and relaxed, confessional and remote.

Ultimately it is the narrator’s brain being compared to the titular creature here, which explains the song’s rapid pulse and the jittery guitar sound that first surfaces in the background at 0:52 and comes back, in the foreground, around 3:10. As motion-oriented as the song is, there’s also a kind of serenity about its focused, recycling melodies and its deliberately placed sounds—again a kind of echo of the hummingbird, which flutters its wings faster than the eye can see even while floating carefully in one place. I am especially drawn to the insistent verse melody and its upturned conclusion, the ongoing repetitions of which accumulate in my awareness with an edgy kind of poignancy.

Margjeka was born in Albania, and was schooled in the basics of rock’n’roll, not to mention English itself, through recordings and videos that made their way into the country in the post-Wall ’90s. At 18, he emigrated to the U.S. and eventually settled in Birmingham, Alabama. After recording two EPs with an alt-country band called Buffalo Black, Margjeka released the solo album Margo Margo in 2011. “Hummingbird” is the title track to his sophomore release, coming out next month via both PIPEANDGUN and Communicating Vessels. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: La Sera (unrestrained, guitar-driven rock’n’roll)

With the succinct, thunderous drive of mid-career Blondie, “Losing to the Dark” is catchy, unrestrained, guitar-driven rock’n’roll the likes of which are not often heard here in 2014.

La Sera

<a href="https://s3.amazonaws.com/fingertips-free-legal-mp3s/2014/La_Sera-Losing_to_the_Dark.mp3&quot; – La Sera

With the succinct, thunderous drive of mid-career Blondie, “Losing to the Dark” is catchy, unrestrained, guitar-driven rock’n’roll the likes of which are not often heard here in 2014. From the feedback-friendly, multi-part introduction through the ear-catching major-minor shift in the pre-chorus and on into the fiery guitar solo, this one is three-plus minutes of adrenaline and purpose.

La Sera is the performing name of Katy Goodman, the bass player for the recently disbanded Vivian Girls, and while in the past looking to the ’50s and early ’60s for melodic inspiration, Goodman leaves the dreaminess behind for a shot of unblinking, contemporary reality. The title scans precisely to the Adele hit “Rolling in the Deep,” and as such (it’s a stretch but bear with me) I can’t help viewing this as a punked-up bookend to that song. Both singers mourn a failed relationship. While Adele is defiant to the point of vengeful, focused on the potential that has been cast aside, Goodman sees the loss as a morality play. Her erstwhile lover consumed by bad behavior, she starts sarcastic (“How ’bout you have another drink/So you can pass out in the back seat of my car?”), offers the faux sympathy of “What a pain it must be/To have to only be with me” at the song’s emotional and melodic fulcrum (first heard at 0:48), and then just lashes out at the real enemy, which isn’t the guy at all but human frailty itself. Adele is done with her lover because she’s better than him; in this song, the narrator is just as pissed off but also, in a weird way, more understanding. There’s a feeling of “There but for the grace of God go I” in here, which makes me think that maybe it’s Katy Goodman who is actually rolling in the deep.

“Losing to the Dark” is the lead track from the third La Sera album, entitled Hour of the Dawn, which comes out next week on Hardly Art. La Sera was featured previously on Fingertips in November 2010.

Free and legal MP3: Papercuts (rich, delicate, orchestral)

The richly delicate “Life Among the Savages” hints at what Brian Wilson might sound like if he were a 21st-century indie rocker.

Papercuts

“Life Among the Savages” – Papercuts

The richly delicate “Life Among the Savages” hints at what Brian Wilson might sound like if he were a 21st-century indie rocker. Not that Papercuts front man and general mastermind Jason Robert Quever has quite as many idiosyncratic tools at his disposal as Wilson, but surely there is something Pet Sounds-y in the orchestral-minded, melodic yearning on display.

The opening verse melody, to begin with, is a concise gem of descending sweetness (0:06-0:09), and is itself part of a beautifully constructed eight-measure melody that seems simultaneously to resolve and retain suspense two or three different times. The melody is so well-developed that the song does without full-fledged instrumentation until the first iteration of the chorus at 1:08, and while the pulsing string arrangement distracts us from missing the band, when the sound does kick in, something in the ear relaxes. Combine that with a subtle uptick in vocal urgency here (listen to all the hard “c” sounds Quever hits between 1:16 and 1:22), and “Life Among the Savages” is pretty much all delight from this point onward—the verse the second time through now fully accompanied, the chorus getting an unexpected instrumental lead-in and an extra repetition, and the whole thing capped off by a tidy, dramatic coda.

The San Francisco-based Quever has been recording as Papercuts since 2004. “Life Among the Savages” is the title track to his fifth album, released earlier this month on the new L.A. label Easy Sound in the U.S., and via the London-based Memphis Industries label in the U.K. Papercuts was previously featured on Fingertips in 2011. Thanks again to Lauren Laverne at BBC 6 for the head’s up.

Playlist: Power Pop, Vol. 2

A second Spotify playlist of power pop gems.

connells-ring

Close readers here may remember my initial journey into PowerPopLand, via my Power Pop, Vol. 1 playlist. The very name, of course, implied that there would have to be a sequel, and at long last the thing takes flight.

Check out the previous post for some of the underlying philosophical musings, which this unique not-exactly-a-genre genre seems effortlessly to prompt, at least in me. This time around, the list veers even further from the generally acknowledged power pop standards, in part because I mixed in a good number of 21st-century examples, and in part because I sought to include a larger spectrum of power pop’s musical coverage, which ranges from the impeccable melodic gloss of songs like “Slackjawed” to the Byrds-ian jangle of “When Things Go Wrong” to the peppy pseudo-reggae of “Second Choice” to the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it crunch of “All-Nighter.” While I may take some extra liberties here and there—some people might consider the Ramones beyond the genre’s boundaries, even as quite a few of their songs are spot-on power pop, if you really just listen; and Sarah Harmer has probably never before shown up on anyone’s power pop playlist, but from the itchy, new-wave-y bass line to the subtly glorious chorus, I’m on board here, and encourage you to join me. I do manage to bring things home with “Shake Some Action,” which is on just about everyone’s top 10 list. And if you listen to only one song, make it the one right at the top, as Translator’s “Un-Alone” is surely one of the great lost power pop gems of the 20th century. Everything that band ever did was overshadowed by its first-album college-rock classic “Everywhere That I’m Not,” a fine tune itself but nothing like power pop. And as at least some of us are convinced, there is nothing like power pop.

direct Spotify link: