jeremyfingertips

Free and legal MP3: EP’s Trailer Park (nostalgic sing-along from Sweden)

An airy, agile flute line sets the tone early, launching “Cynical Lover” into a partly-sunny haze of nostalgic piano chords, swaying melodies, and rich harmonies.

“Cynical Lover” – EP’s Trailer Park

An easy-going sing-along with the air of the ’70s about it. And no banjo or pedal steel at all, as those instruments were banned before the recording started. It was one of 12 “dogmatic rules” the band posted in advance, and apparently obeyed. The list is too good not to reproduce here:

1. A ban on all things Beatles
2. A ban on Pedal steel, banjo and mandolin
3. Vocals is the finest instrument
4. No alcohol or sweets in the studio
5. Acoustic instruments should go before electric
6. No guest singers or duets
7. The drums should sound like drums
8. The vocals will be sung shirtless
9. The coffee should be taken on Mellqvists and lunch at Rosen
10. Short songs should go before long songs
11. Beautiful is good
12. At least one murder ballad

An airy, agile flute line sets the tone early here, launching “Cynical Lover” into a partly-sunny haze of nostalgic piano chords, swaying melodies, and rich harmonies. Front man Eric Palmqwist sings with a fragile kind of assertiveness (I hear Rick Danko in this somewhere), and while his unschooled tenor is not the kind of voice one expects to hearing backed by close, invigorating harmonies, it all seems to work, and definitely urges all but the most impassive listeners to join in on the chorus.

Palmqwist started up EP’s Trailer Park in 1999 after his previous band, Monostar, called it quits. This new effort was designed as a kind of revolving-door ensemble, with a variety of musicians passing through the “trailer park” over the years, including Tobias Fröberg (previously featured here) and Björn Yttling from Peter, Bjorn & John. Two of Palmqwist’s three sidemen this time around remain from the last EP’s Trailer Park album, in 2010. “Cynical Lover” is from the outfit’s fourth album, which is self-titled, and was released in Sweden at the beginning of the year; the song was released as a single last month. You can listen to the full album on SoundCloud.

Fingertips Flashback:Flotation Toy Warning (from October 2005)

Various events well beyond the control of one small human being have made this a difficult week. A new update should wander online by Monday or Tuesday. So it seems a good time to go back to the archives, for another edition of the “Fingertips Flashback.” We reach back to the oddly long-ago year of 2005 for this one.

“Popstar Researching Oblivion” – Flotation Toy Warning

[from October 10, 2005]

“Popstar Researching Oblivion” has the sort of fully-realized ecstatic sonic goofiness that MP3 collectors like to link to the Flaming Lips but harkens more firmly back to the likes of 10cc, Genesis (yes, they actually had a sense of humor), and Queen. One of the things this quintet from London does with much aplomb is present a straightforward melody via a crazy quilt of sounds—a neat effect not unlike the more widely acknowledged pop effect of singing sad lyrics to happy music. In this case, the end result is a satisfying confusion: the ear hears complexity and simplicity overlappingly, which somehow resolves the polarity. First, the song’s basic, recurring melody, a line of lullaby-like gentleness, is introduced via a searing guitar solo (itself an interesting juxtaposition). The same melody is then re-delivered via layers of soaring and diving sounds, some vocal and some electronic and some created by who-knows-what, weaving and interacting in ways that are specifically elusive and yet link in the ear as an organic whole. Singer Donald Drusky’s earnest British tenor, recalling a somewhat huskier version of Robert Wyatt, is the perfect vocal instrument for the dreamy loopiness of it all; the homely yet graceful horns arriving to mingle with the electronics during the second half of this strangely haunting number are yet more perfect. “Popstar Researching Oblivion” comes from the band’s debut CD, Bluffer’s Guide to the Flight Deck, released in the U.S. in August on Misra Records (the CD was originally released last year in the U.K. on Pointy Records). The MP3 is available on the Misra site.

ADDENDUM: Flotation Toy Warning is not a band in a hurry. They have been in existence since 2001. Their debut album, as mentioned above, was released in 2004 in the U.K., 2005 in the U.S. Their next release was a two-sided single that came out in 2011, featuring the songs “When the Boat Comes Inside Your House” and “A Season Underground.” At the time it was reported that the band was working on its second album, to be called The Machine That Made Us. As of last June the band reported it had eleven new songs. They remain not in a hurry; the album has yet to be released.

Free and legal MP3: Monophona (acoustic electronica, w/ elusive melodies)

Claudine Muno sings with persuasive sweetness, providing a strong handhold for the song’s inconstant melody lines.

“Give Up” – Monophona

With an acoustic heart and a blippy-trippy soul, “Give Up” moves with a purposeful stammer, creating dynamic momentum out of some intimate, creative percussion and an evasive, uneven melody. I am enchanted for reasons which remain unclear.

Things begin in a gentle swing, with singer Claudine Muno emerging out of muffled distortion. At 0:38, the track slides into place, but remains noncommittal, blurry in intent however crisp and engaging the sound. Muno sings with persuasive sweetness, providing a strong handhold for the song’s inconstant melody lines, which are abetted by her overlapping vocals. The layered percussion pounds and twitters as she purrs and mumbles, coming occasionally to the forefront with a trenchant phrase—when she sings, now in harmony and unison, “Stop pulling at yourself” (1:21), the song locks in with unexpected force, one of those moments you long to hear again, suspecting however that it’s not coming back (it doesn’t).

Monophona is a Portishead-ish trio from Luxembourg featuring Muno, DJ/producer Phillippe Shirrer (who goes by Chook), and drummer Jorsch Kass. Muno previously fronted a folk-pop band called Claudine Muno & the Luna Boots, which released five albums between 2004 and 2011. Muno is also an author (she has published seven books to date, in four different languages) and a teacher. Schirrer has previously released one album, called The Cocoon, in 2010; a subsequent single called “You Are All You Have,” released two years ago, featured Muno on vocals—if you listen you can sense what Muno brought to the table for the collaboration on Monophona. Kass was previously in a Luxembourg band called Zap Zoo. “Give Up” is from Monophona debut album, The Spy, which was released in Europe in November. You can download the song as usual by right-clicking the title above, or by going to the SoundCloud page. And while you’re at it, you can listen to the whole album, and buy it, via Bandcamp.

photo credit: Joël Nepper

Free and legal MP3: Glenn Jones (Fahey-esque acoustic instrumental)

Rich, warm acoustic guitar instrumental, in the spirit of John Fahey.

“Bergen County Farewell” – Glenn Jones

I’ve never been too excited by the inarguably impressive work done by the late, legendary guitarist John Fahey, for any number of not very good reasons, most prominent among them my aversion to twanginess. Some of the twanginess I hear in Fahey’s guitar-playing—which can seem brittle and unforgiving to my ears—is simply part and parcel of his so-called “American Primitive” style, but some of it has also to do with older recording limitations. This may explain why I feel more attached to the Fahey-inspired work of Leo Kottke—his recordings, especially beginning in the later ’80s, are suffused with a warmth (not to mention humor) that I haven’t discerned in Fahey.

Which brings us to Glenn Jones, whose “Bergen County Farewell” is as rich and warm as a finger-picked Fahey-esque song is ever likely to be. Brisk without feeling rushed, dynamic without any ostentation, “Bergen County Farewell” covers its bittersweet core with a jolly-ish skin—melodies skirt up through the bright and kindly higher strings but always fall downward towards the buttery lower strings. Jones’s impeccable preciseness is tempered by a lovely touch with what I think are called “rolls”—when the fingers are playing a chord, but in a slightly staggered fashion (simple examples at 0:22, 0:31, 0:34, et al; more complicated instances at 1:43, 1:54, and 2:37 among others). The song alternates two basic tunes, each of which offers up one musical twist (tune one: 0:14; tune two: 0:52), and each of which leads into the same resolution (first heard at 0:21). This “resolution” section feels much less like a chorus than a closing out of a musical thought, and is a lovely thing an instrumental can do that a song with lyrics maybe can’t.

“Bergen County Farewell” is a song from Jones’s new album, My Garden State, which was written under somewhat unusual circumstances. Jones’s aging mother was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s and he and his older sister began taking turns caring for her for a few months at a time, in the house the family had moved into in Bergen County, New Jersey back in 1966. Jones wrote the songs that became My Garden State while taking his caretaker turn. He has said that he sees the album as “a corrective to Bruce Springsteen’s Jersey”—a musical vision of beauty and serenity which does not at all resemble the image many people have of the Garden State. The album is Jones’s fifth solo release, following seven studio albums released with the instrumental band Cul de Sac (one of which, 1997’s The Epiphany of Glenn Jones, was recorded with John Fahey himself).

My Garden State was released last month on Thrill Jockey Records. Thanks to
Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: AM & Shawn Lee (sublime summertime groove)

“The instruments are played, the vocals are sung, and the songs are written.”

“All the Love” – AM & Shawn Lee

Too early to nominate the Song of the Summer? Probably. But this one should stay in consideration, not only for its slinky, slidy beat, which patrols the razor’s edge between funk and disco, but for its honest, dare I say organic soundscape. These guys may construct songs while thousands of miles apart—AM is a singer/songwriter in Los Angeles, Shawn Lee a London-based multi-instrumentalist and producer—but they’re building from genuine components; as their press material puts it: “The instruments are played, the vocals are sung, and the songs are written.” It’s a tough job but someone’s got to do it.

The physical nature of the construction gives “All the Love” a resplendence difficult to generate digitally. Unlike our ubiquitous 21st-century beats, this is first and foremost a bass-and-guitar-driven groove. And listen to how spare and disciplined the guitar riffs are! Lesson number one: when the song is written, the players don’t have to show off, they just have to show up. Listen too to the instrumental break beginning at 2:15: you can hear the space between the bass and the drums and how the retro, space-agey synthesizer squiggles vertically down through it. And let’s not overlook what is almost always overlooked in any kind of funked-up setting: the melodies, which here are wonderfully concise and well-conceived—the verse with its carefully considered intervals, the chorus with its chugging, uphill, double-time hook.

“All the Love” is from the album La Musique Numérique, released in May on Park The Van Records. This one follows the duo’s 2011 debut Celestial Electric. Download above or via SoundCloud, which allows you to comment directly to the band, and spares me a bit of bandwidth in the process.

Free and legal MP3: Eddie Spaghetti (ramshackle Americana)

“The Value of Nothing” glows with the energy of something unfussed over.

“The Value of Nothing” – Eddie Spaghetti

With his throwaway stage name and kick-ass growl, Tucson-born, Seattle-based Eddie Spaghetti is not quite the rock’n’roller you’d expect to be writing a song based on an Oscar Wilde quotation he had just read (“What is a cynic? A man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”) But I surely will not discourage serendipitous cultural intermingling; that’s kind of all I do here week after week.

Spaghetti reports that he read the quote while in Australia, knew it was a song, then wrote the thing back in his hotel room in about 20 minutes. “The Value of Nothing” glows with the energy of something unfussed over—uncomplicated on the one hand, highlighted on the other by the supplemental, unaffected touches that can happen when a creator isn’t over-thinking things. The song launches off a lonesome-prairie vibe produced by adding harmonica flourishes to a prog-rock-y electric guitar; after this, the ramshackle vigor is generated largely by a hoedown style acoustic guitar and dry, snare-filled drumming. (I like the little yelp that gets things going at 0:50.) Accentuating the itchy drive are lyrics sung largely in between the beats. But check out the chorus, and how he empowers offhanded phrases by now re-aligning with the beat:

You know the price of everything, don’t you honey
But it ain’t about, it ain’t about the money

I find something slippery attractive in the rhyming of the tossed-off half of these lines. One more sneaky-good thing here is how the electric guitar insinuates itself back into the song, culminating in a snaky solo (2:08) that feels like we’ve wandered into a trippy Outlaws song.

Spaghetti was born Edward Carlyle Daly III, and has been known previously as front man for the cowpunky garage rock band the Supersuckers. “The Value of Nothing” is the title track of his fourth solo album, but first album featuring all original songs. The new album is coming in mid-June on Bloodshot Records. You can download the song via the link above or over at SoundCloud. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Francis and the Lights

Soulful postmodern funk

“ETC” – Francis and the Lights

Wow, just listen to how little is required to create a deeply satisfying groove: keyboard, bass, drum. It helps that the keyboard is tracing a series of elegant, Stevie Wonder-ish chords and that the bass and drum are so tightly locked as to sound like one mysterious instrument, but still, I would send anyone who thinks music is about “making beats” to the first 22 seconds of “ETC.” Music is about making music.

That said, Francis and the Lights are a special case to begin with—an elusive ensemble trafficking in soulful postmodern minimalist funk, masterminded by Francis Farewell Starlite, about which not much more is known. Lots of musicians say they want their music to speak for itself but Starlite walks the walk. He doesn’t aim to be mysterious as much as straightforward, influenced, he has been happy to admit, by the classic writer’s guide The Elements of Style; in the spirit of “omitting needless words,” Starlite does not offer an online bio nor talk much about himself because he feels it comes across as “begging.”

Of course if more artists could manage Starlite’s singular style of succinct, emotive, genre-bending music, they too might find promotional talk unnecessary. As in previous visits here in 2008, Francis and the Lights spin a compelling song out of odd, ambiguous elements: verses like overheard inner arguments, hypnotic and diaphanous; a two-part, unresolved chorus linking a throaty question (“What will we do from here?”) with a soaring, inconclusive Beach Boys reference (“And will we be happy?”). One must be a gifted vocalist and songwriter to evoke Marvin Gaye and Brian Wilson within the span of one musical breath.

“ETC” is a single, as yet unconnected to a larger release. Thanks to Francis for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Tele Novella

Melodic, intricate, deeply appealing

“No Excalibur” – Tele Novella

A lopey, quirky, walk-in-the-meadow kind of tune, “No Excalibur” is all meandering melody and intriguing metaphor and if by the end you haven’t been charmed out of your socks you probably just aren’t wearing socks.

Lacking an introduction, the song opens with front woman Natalie Gordon singing a teetering tune over a purposefully clunky, vaguely old-fashioned backbeat. The first hint of the robust adventure to come is in the unexpected chord progression that accompanies the end of the opening lyric (“crying so softly in this quiet,” 0:16). And then, when a normal song would go into a standard second verse, we get a variation and an offbeat hook on a new, repeating lyric (“Oh, I have known so many nights like this,” 0:18), after which arrives a series of linked motifs, one more interesting than the next, leading to the song’s central metaphor (“I’m no Excalibur/I’ll get out on my own”), which serves as the titular phrase but is not a chorus—we don’t hear it again.

The song’s first 50 seconds repeat musically, but not lyrically. And now Tele Novella is only getting started. The increasing melodic richness of what follows from here is matched by its intricacy—there are all sorts of juicy but not sing-along-y passages, sold with snowballing certainty by Gordon’s plainspoken, ever so slightly husky voice. I was hooked for good when she gets to the lyric “I can feel it rise/It brings tears to my eyes” (2:03), which, when it reemerges triumphantly at 2:56, after a second Excalibur reference, feels almost goosebumpy in its lyrical and musical rightness. That Gordon rhymes rhododendrons with tendons somewhere along the way is icing on the cake.

Tele Novella is a new band from Austin, with a personnel chart only somewhat less intricate than their music. In addition to singer/guitarist Gordon, formerly of Agent Ribbons, the band consists of ex-Voxtrot members Jason Chronis (bass) and Matt Simon (drums), and keyboardist Cari Palazollo, of the band Belaire, which also includes Chronis and Simon. “No Excalibur” is one of the first two songs the band has recorded and released. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3:Debbie Neigher and Tidelands (break-up song w/ fatigued grandeur)

Launched off the ambiguity of suspended chords, “Atoms” has a fatigued grandeur to it, with its resonant strumming, keenly placed piano fills, and superb male-female vocals.

“Atoms” – Debbie Neigher and Tidelands

Pop songwriters, among all creative artists, have it easiest when titling their work. Novels and screenplays, sculptures and symphonies: these can be vexingly difficult to name. A song with lyrics, on the other hand, pretty much names itself by the time it’s finished. Find the word or phrase most often repeated and there’s your title—usually. But there are always some outliers—either because the song’s lyrics don’t deliver an obviously repeated phrase, or because the songwriter wants to mess with you a bit. In the case of “Atoms,” a bit of both may be going on. The chorus is heard only twice, and opens with a focus on one word so generic and over-employed that it kind of resists titlehood (“love”). So nothing super obvious suggests itself as a name although I’m thinking “Breaking Point” would have won out had Tidelands front man and songwriter Gabriel Leis been less interested in offering up a puzzle and/or contemplation.

Instead we get “Atoms,” which turns out to be a cunning title for this declarative yet melancholy piece, featuring singer/songwriter Debbie Neigher in duet with Leis. Paradoxical pests that they are, atoms comprise the solid world that we know without possessing any solidity of their own. When Leis sings, “I’m counting atoms,” in this graceful tale of lovers who can no longer communicate, his character’s self-righteousness and futility bleeds through. Meanwhile, launched off the ambiguity of suspended chords, the music has a fatigued grandeur, with its resonant strumming and keenly placed piano fills. Best of all, to my ears, are the vocals: Leis sings with a command that brings Colin Meloy to mind, minus the vocal quirks, and with a muscularity the Decemberists’ front man doesn’t offer; Neigher, brought in as a guest, adds a lovely, dusty edge to the female character’s point of view. The song was inspired, unfortunately, by the break-up of Leis’ marriage and was originally written for only the male narrator, the female part conveyed in third person.

“Atoms” is one side of a split single on white vinyl that Tidelands and Neigher released earlier this month on Redgummy Records, with Neigher’s song “Smile” on the other side. Check that one on Neigher’s web site, it’s also quite good. You can order the white vinyl via Bandcamp. Leis’s partner in Tidelands is drummer Mie Araki. All musicians involved here are based in the San Francisco area. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Matt Mays (frank, spirited rock’n’roll)

We have wailing guitars, we have a pounding keyboard, and most of all we have an upward-surging minor-key melody so succinct and irresistible that Mays builds both verse and chorus upon it.

“Take It On Faith” – Matt Mays

Could it be that popular music has been splintered and digitized and compressed and remixed and mashed up for so long now that the surest, freest sign of authenticity and revolt in 2013 is nothing more or less than a frank, spirited rock’n’roll song?

Well, okay, maybe not. But “Take It On Faith” is surely a frank and spirited rock’n’roll song, with old-school drive and new-school…something or another. Actually, I’m not quite sure what makes this sound current and alive but it does, to me, in that there is nothing nostalgic or pandering going on here. We have wailing guitars, we have a pounding keyboard, and most of all we have an upward-surging minor-key melody so succinct and irresistible that Mays builds both verse and chorus upon it. And while yes there is something Springsteen-esque in Mays’ scuffed-up baritone, the vibe here feels more nimble and quicksilver-like than a 60-something rock’n’roll deity can traffic in any longer. A particular favorite moment of mine here is how the chorus retreats after the second iteration of the words “take it on faith” (0:57), with Mays backing off the anthemic melody to grumble something low and indecipherable. It feels unexpected, real, and alluring.

“Take It On Faith” is from the album Coyote, which was released on Halifax-based Sonic Records back in September. This is Mays’ third effort as a solo artist; he also has two albums released under the name Matt Mays & El Torpedo, most recently in 2008. That was when he was previously featured here. This song just recently came to the attention of the folks at Magnet Magazine, and that’s where it even more recently came to my attention. MP3 (once more) via Magnet.

photo credit: Devin McLean