jeremyfingertips

Fingertips Flashback: Juana Molina (from September 2008)

I’m going to nudge the weekly update into early next week from late this week, which, due to the vagaries of life, happens from time to time. But lord knows there’s any amount of old material on the site with which, I’m guessing, not everyone is entirely familiar. Thus the existence of the intermittent “Fingertips Flashback.” Here’s an oddly captivating song from 2008:

“Un Día” – Juana Molina

[from September 23, 2008]

I suggest giving yourself some time and space to take this one in. Being in an altered state might help, although this song, if you open yourself to it, might help you achieve one.

A long-time Fingertips favorite, Molina returns with a crazy, churning, ecstatic daze of a song. The Argentinian former sitcom star has, as a musician, pioneered an alluring if evasive sort of folktronica, with lots of loops and repetition. “Un Día” is some of that, but also something else entirely. Despite how rigorously plotted out and worked over this sort of song construction probably is, Molina here sounds almost nuttily spontaneous and expansive, both musically and vocally. Ecstatic, yes: there seems something nearly spiritual in the air as Molina all but chants—her voice sounds freer, more unrestrained than in the past—against a marvelously textured and continually varying undercurrent of voice, electronics, horns, sounds, and percussion. As usual, for English-speaking listeners, the language adds another element of incomprehensibility, but she appears to be aiming in that direction in any case; one of the lyrics here, translated, reads: “One day I will sing the songs with no lyrics and everyone can imagine for themselves if it’s about love, disappointment, banalities or about Plato.”

“Un Día” is the title track from Molina’s forthcoming album, her fifth, due out next month on Domino Records. Can’t wait to hear the whole thing. MP3 via Stereogum.

ADDENDUM: Un Día remains Molina’s most recent release. On her web site, three concerts are listed for February 2013; this is the first sign of life on the site since 2011, so maybe she is getting ready to reemerge. In looking around for news of what she’s been up to, I saw something on her Wikipedia page I hadn’t previously come across, or didn’t remember—that she provided the voice for Elastigirl (the Holly Hunter role) in the Argentine dub of the film The Incredibles. It does not appear that she has otherwise gone back to acting since her days starring in the huge hit Juana y sus hermanas, which she cancelled at the height of its popularity in 1994.

Free and legal MP3: Björk (for those who overlooked Biophilia)

A slightly unruly swell of female voices provides the ether in which this song expands, while the lyrics offer an endearing sequence of creation stories, the Big Bang merely one among them.

“Cosmogony” – Björk

I’ll admit, I overlooked Biophilia too, when initially released. I didn’t have an iPad at the time (2011), and have always been so wary of “mix it yourself” scenarios (I pay to hear the artist’s work, not my own) that I let myself forget that underneath this grand interactive/multimedia project was still a new Björk album. Finally, I went and listened to it late last year, and, well…wow. Not easy listening, but incredible listening—although as a full album experience, probably not for everyone (example: three of the songs are in 17/8 time). To my ears, she has bridged the worlds of “composition” and “pop” with singular mastery, unifying the worlds of the electronic and the organic in the process. So unique, creative, and determined an artist is Björk she even oversaw the invention of new instruments for the album.

While hardly a standard pop song, “Cosmogony” is one of the lovelier, more immediately welcoming pieces on the album. A slightly unruly swell of female voices provides the ether in which this song expands, while the lyrics offer an endearing sequence of creation stories, the Big Bang merely one among them. Through some alchemical combination of music and voice and lyric and sound, Björk manages to draw a large enough circle of life with this song to contain even the apparent polarities of science and magic, giving simultaneous context both to the limits of our knowledge and to the beauty of our spirits. The song moves me so deeply I feel unequipped to tease it apart, but for three tiny instructions/clarifications. First, what she’s saying at the beginning of each verse (and there is no chorus) is: “Heaven, heaven’s bodies/Whirl around me/Make me wonder.” When listening, I could not discern the word “bodies” in there; I finally looked up the lyrics. Second, listen to how she pronounces the word “egg” at 1:46. Lastly, I love her voice so much I even love how she breathes (see 1:05, after “cunning mate”). When Björk is on her game, as here, her song/compositions are so ripe with vitality that they burst with pleasure both vertically (listening to how, at any given moment, the layers interact and communicate to us) and horizontally—listening to how any one of these layers is itself a rich experience (as, for instance, are the aforementioned backing vocals; likewise the evocative, nearly miraculous bass playing).

“Cosmogony” is one of many viscerally artful and luminous songs on the underrated Biophilia. I eventually did get an iPad, and the Biophilia app, but nothing I could do while interacting with it introduced me to the glory of the music better than simply sitting and listening to it. Which, stupidly, I didn’t do for a long time. I mean to take nothing away from Björk’s impressive vision—the original Biophilia project encompassed not just the song/apps, but also a web site, a documentary, and a series of live performances, including educational workshops for kids. But I kind of recommend just listening to the thing. I’m not exactly sure when this “Cosmogony” free and legal MP3 went online at Epitonic, but I only recently discovered it there, and so, better late than never, here you are.

Free and legal MP3: Young Hunting (moody & dramatic, w/ potent drumming)

Minor-key gravitas and powerfully succinct drumming drive us all the way home.

“Baby’s First Steps” – Young Hunting

Pretty great introduction to this one, yes? Some songs just wrap you up in them right away. Bonus points here for brevity: we get the tightly coordinated, rhythmic interplay between lower-register, minor-key guitar arpeggios and a pulse-like tom tom for all of about 10 seconds; then come the vocals. All too many songs hang onto notably less interesting instrumental motifs for a lot longer before deciding to get started.

“Baby’s First Steps” is a nicely dramatic song in general, with its minor-key gravitas and apparently chorus-free structure—we get a wordless vocal section in between each verse until, after the third verse, we are finally delivered the chorus. (Delayed gratification is an under-utilized pop music tool.) But what lies at the heart of the song’s drama is the drumming, which is minimal, atmospheric, and potent. Launched on the juxtaposition of a steady yet stuttering rhythm, the song somehow seems to move faster than its own beat, if that makes any sense (it might not). This central sonic paradox feeds a number of related contradictions: the song feels at once smooth and itchy, calm and ominous, moody and defiant. The drumming is incredibly succinct; most of the drum kit remains unused for most of the song—we get one cymbal bash at 1:02, another at 1:13, but then we’re back to the tom, now with a purposeful shaker of some sort anchoring the relentless beat. Cymbals don’t enter regularly until the two-minute mark, when the drummer finally opens up a bit, but we still don’t get anything that feels like “normal” rock’n’roll drumming until two-thirds of the way through the song. This is also when the guitars move at last towards the front of the mix, but we have to wait even longer, until the last 30 seconds, for the (very effective) guitar solo. That’s discipline, baby.

Young Hunting is a five-piece band from Los Angeles. “Baby’s First Steps” is a song from the band’s debut full-length album, Hazel, slated for a June release on Oakland-based Gold Robot Records. The band previously put out a seven-inch single in 2010. Thanks to Gold Robot for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Standish/Carlyon (downtempo allure)

Throw Prince, Portishead, and Steely Dan in a blender and if you’re lucky you might get something like this.

“Gucci Mountain” – Standish/Carlyon

Throw Prince, Portishead, and Steely Dan in a blender and if you’re lucky you might get something like this. And while those are three not-too-similar artists the one thing they have in common is an exquisite attention to sonic detail. The Melbourne-based duo Standish/Carlyon are cut from the same cloth.

Here is one downtempo brooder that, to begin with, trusts in its own slowness. Listen to how even the bubbling synthesizer percolates slowly, and leaves a delicious amount of blank space in its wake. So quickly does it train us to anticipate restraint in fact that the one extra high note it hits at 0:36 gives the ear an unexpected frisson of excitement. The entire song is just that carefully and spaciously crafted. Important note: there are no hand-claps, synthesized or otherwise. (Pet peeve alert!: hand-claps in slow songs. They make no logical or aural sense. I could mention names but I won’t.) And while we are awash with reverb, the song still displays great clarity—a compelling combination. The bass, meanwhile, is played with painterly discretion, which may have something to do with the fact that vocalist Conrad Standish is also the bass player. In my listening experience, singing bassists approach their instruments differently. The best example of this song’s uncanny capacity to turn reticence into grandeur is how arresting the chorus is when it finally arrives, even as its melody is pretty much the same as the verse’s. The trick is that in the chorus, for the first time, we get the fulfillment of an uninterrupted musical line (suddenly, no blank space). Standish now flipping up into his falsetto doesn’t hurt. No idea what he’s singing about here (“I’m chewing bamboo off the coast of Casanova”?), and it’s still thrilling.

Standish and guitarist Tom Carlyon (who also handles the electronics) were previously in a trio called The Devastations, which released their last record in 2007. “Gucci Mountain” is a track from the duo’s forthcoming debut, entitled Deleted Scenes, arriving next month via Felte.

Free and legal MP3: Nick Jaina (measured jauntiness)

I have decided that composure is drastically underrated in the realm of rock’n’roll.

“Don’t Come to Me” – Nick Jaina

Ah if only all songs were as immediately interesting and engaging as “Don’t Come to Me.” This blog would write itself.

First we have the odd, sparse, toy-piano like pre-introduction, which folds itself underneath a descending guitar melody with a deceptively involved cadence—which, in turn, folds itself into a flowing yet syncopated arrangement with a vaguely islandy ambiance. The lyrics, starting up, have an affable, run-on quality even as they resist any kind of spilling-out feeling. All in all a measured jauntiness is in the air, and that’s what really delights me. Here is a song that bops with a spry bounce (it’s great to desk-dance to; try it!), yet with an abiding sense of control. I am deciding on the spot that composure is way underrated in the general realm of rock’n’roll. You can have most of those guttural screams and overheated guitar solos and such; me, I’m enchanted by restraint and discipline. And so naturally enough we end up here with a most disciplined and easy-going guitar solo (1:35) and a climax featuring nothing more or less than a serious of truly interesting chord changes (1:55). All this in service of a song with a chorus anchored by the lyric “Don’t come to me with your bullshit excuses.” I mean, isn’t control in this context deeper and more interesting than wild-ass bedlam? Maybe?

Nick Jaina is a Portland, Ore.-based musician, composer, and essayist. He has composed music for ballet, theater, and film. “Don’t Come to Me” is a song from his new album, Primary Reception, which will be released later this month on Fluff & Gravy Records, a record label and recording studio also based in Portland. It is his eighth album, not counting a release featuring music he wrote for the play Girl Who Drew Horses; all are available via Bandcamp, including an album of interesting covers he recorded that is available in its entirety for free. Another good song from the new album, “Strawberry Man,” is available as a free download from his web site. Jaina was previously featured on Fingertips in 2008

Free and legal MP3: Fantasmas (noisy guitars, put to good purpose)

While the guitars are given a lot of opportunity to go at it—there’s even a guitar break in the middle of the chorus somehow—the song still manages to give us a larger feeling of space than noisy guitars alone usually convey.

“No Soul” – Fantasmas

A blurry, spiky surge of noisy guitars powers this three-minute keeper from a young Brooklyn band calling themselves Fantasmas. Amidst the punk-ish ambiance I sense a great deal of poise. I like that particular juxtaposition, so here you are.

Note the long introduction (unusual for this kind of music), and note that it starts off the tonic—meaning, away from the key in which the the song is written. (Whatever that pulsating, semi-dissonant chord-like thing the guitars are slashing away at for 45 seconds is, it’s not the home chord.) This is a sneaky yet time-honored way to keep you listening, because our ears, bless their simple needs, just want to be brought home. At 0:45 (phew), we are shifted into the tonic, get 12 more seconds of slashing guitars, and only then we get to see what the song is really about. Which is pretty much more slashing guitars, but now they are sculpted around minimalist lyrics—eight pithy blurts per verse—delivered with indelible New York City-style blasé-ness by a vocalist identified only as Kam. (I especially like his nearly-spoken lines at 1:56.) While the guitars are given a lot of opportunity to go at it—there’s even a guitar break in the middle of the chorus somehow—the song still manages to give us a larger feeling of space than noisy guitars alone usually convey. Some of this probably has to do with how the guitars are dialed back during the sung parts of the chorus; we get much more tension than noise here, a seemingly small detail with a large impact on our listening experience.

Fantasmas are a relatively new quartet from Brooklyn. The name is Spanish for ghosts, and this new band is not to be confused with Fantasma (a cumbia band from Argentina) or Los Fantasmas, an obscure quintet from the Isle of Wight. “No Soul” is the second half of their debut two-sided seven-inch single, the first imprint served up by Low Life Inc., a Brooklyn-based music promotion firm that recently started a label. You can download the song as usual via the link on the title above, or via the record company’s SoundCloud page. The single came out in December, but I only recently came across it, thanks to The Mad Mackeral.

Free and legal MP3: Eleanor Friedberger (singular voice, brisk & word-centric song)

Friedberger’s sound is hurried and wordy, even when the music slows down.

“Stare at the Sun” – Eleanor Friedberger

Eleanor Friedberger has a sneaky sort of uniqueness to her sound. Listen casually and you might miss it—nothing sounds obviously revolutionary, she doesn’t whoop or yelp, she doesn’t deconstruct or make sound collages or mold digital files out of rhythm and electronics. She writes and sings relatively normal-sounding songs. And yet damned if she hasn’t arrived at something truly her own, even as she refuses to dumbfound us with quirkiness (which is, alas, just about the only way to get the blogosphere’s undivided attention).

And it’s actually kind of odd that her music isn’t stranger, given the pre-eminent idiosyncrasy of many of the songs she recorded as part of The Fiery Furnaces. But as a solo artist, Friedberger has slipped off the Furnaces’ strangeness like a worn-out layer of skin. Her voice hasn’t really changed, but the setting displays it in newly attractive ways, her edgy mezzo showing off a dusky, Carly Simon-esque roundness one might not have sensed back in Blueberry Boat days. “Stare at the Sun” is a brisk lyric-centric affair—Friedberger’s sound is hurried and wordy, even when the music slows down—propelled by a crisply-strummed guitar and a three-part chorus that gradually takes the song over from its verses. To my ears, the song’s central moment comes in the middle chorus section, on the line “I’ve been in exile so long,” and what makes the moment is how Friedberger shifts the momentum to emphasize the word “so,” breaking the song’s unrelenting forward motion, and giving us something inexplicably memorable in the process.

Friedberger recorded with her brother Matthew as The Fiery Furnaces from 2003 through 2009; the band is currently on hiatus. She released her first solo album in 2011; Fingertips featured the excellent “My Mistakes” from that album, as some may recall. “Stare at the Sun” is from her forthcoming album, Personal Record, due out in June on Merge Records. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Lower Plenty

Relaxed wonderfulness, from Australia

“Nullarbor” – Lower Plenty

Can I tell you why some slow-ish songs bore with their lethargic pace and underdeveloped ideas while others beguile with their relaxed know-how? I don’t think I can. Can I tell you what Nullarbor means? That’s easier. The Nullarbor Plain is huge, semi-arid stretch of remote countryside in southern Australia. The name comes from the Latin meaning “no trees.” (For a sense of the scrubby flat endless-road landscape, check out the video, below.)

“Nullarbor” the song, meanwhile, presents the listener with a long, ambling introduction—not semi-arid per se but entirely without either vocals or, even, the sense that vocals are planning to arrive. A guitar strums, another guitar noodles an imprecise melody, a brushed snare keeps a gentle beat, and the world seems a serene if slightly baggy kind of place. I find myself in no hurry to get anywhere with this introduction, and maybe that’s what a slow song that’s beguiling rather than boring does most of all: it slows you down so that you join its world, rather than feeling like an annoying drag on your world. The singing, when it starts, is worth the wait: Al Montfort speak-sings with offhanded, oddly affecting aplomb, often letting the guitar lines suggest the melody he’s not quite articulating. All in all, the concise tale told here of a love gone missing has the quizzical, haphazard feel of a Basement Tapes song, but with a warmer, more personal air about it. I could listen to this all night, and might just yet.

Lower Plenty is a quartet from Melbourne, and also the name of a Melbourne suburb. “Nullarbor” is one of nine shorts songs on the band’s debut album, Hard Rubbish. The song’s wonderfully spontaneous sound has a lot to do with the fact that the album was recorded onto eight-track, reel-to-reel tape, often in one take. Hard Rubbish was released last year in Australia; it comes out next month here on Fire Records. You can download the MP3 via the link above, or through the SoundCloud page. Thanks to the indomitable Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Seaweed Meadows

Minor-key Swedish power pop

“Ruins” – Seaweed Meadows

With its earnest, minor-key urgency and old-school instrumental melody, “Ruins” is a brisk slice of timeless power pop. Although that’s redundant, isn’t it?: “timeless power pop”? Power pop by definition is timeless. I mean, listen to “Starry Eyes.” Even when it sounds dated, power pop is timeless. Go figure.

One of the essential properties of pure power pop is a fluid melody line—melodies that either flow through a lot of adjacent notes, or describe gratifying chords. Having a sweet but not too sugary tenor lead singer (in this case, one Matthias Johansson) is a plus. Economy of expression in the process is also prized—not too many notes, just exactly the right amount—and that may be why the chorus here is so gladdening: its opening phrases (“Bite your tongue/Close your eyes”) feature a simple, half-step descending melody, the most basic descent you can make. In fact, very little about the actual music in a power pop song is remotely mysterious; the melodies are easy to understand, the song structure uncomplicated. But there is one lingering, central mystery to the entire genre, and that is this: why songs this catchy and well-executed are rarely very popular. Power pop aches to be widely loved, yet languishes as a sideshow genre, missing the commercial mark, again and again and again. I truly hope this is not the case for Seaweed Meadows and that they get all sorts of blog love and real-world success. But I’m not holding my breath.

Seaweed Meadows, a six-piece band, is based in Gothenburg, Sweden (though can’t we jettison the Anglicized name for the real one, Göteborg? how did that become “Gothenburg”? doesn’t look or sound right; but I digress). “Ruins” is the first single to be made available from the band’s forthcoming debut, Echoes of an Avalanche, which does not yet have a release date. Download the MP3 from the link above, or via SoundCloud if you would like to ease my bandwidth burden.

Free and legal MP3: Hockey (bass-heavy electro-pop, w/ character)

Inside of a rubbery, minimalist soundscape front man Ben Wyeth offers a sad and soulful tune with a recycling kind of momentum.

“Defeat on the Double Bass Line” – Hockey

So we’ve hit the indie-rock geographical trifecta this week, hopping from Melbourne to Göteborg to, now, Brooklyn in a matter of screen-inches. Bonus points for the fact that the two guys in the band Hockey are originally from Portland.

Under the spotlight this time is a bass-heavy slab of melancholy electro pop. Inside of a rubbery, minimalist soundscape front man Ben Wyeth offers a sad and soulful tune with a recycling kind of momentum. Two related things, I think, help to create the song’s wistful flow. First, we are in the unrelenting presence of the mighty I-V-vi-IV chord progression, one of pop’s most inevitable-sounding patterns. The verse melody may be slightly differentiated from the chorus melody (although not much), but the I-V-vi-IV structure remains rock solid, bordering on hypnotic, from beginning to end. But: then, the second thing about the song’s alluring movement is that even while working with this most steadfast of chord patterns, the band keeps things twitchy and unsettled, mostly via Jerm Reynolds’ acrobatic bass work. We keep anticipating the right chords in our heads, while often bumping into what feels false or incomplete resolutions; and this, I’m thinking, drives the piece more memorably than a more straightforward unfolding might have. One final thing to notice are those lyrical “echoes” that Wyeth begins offering at 2:19, the last word of each line repeated, in lockstep; the effect is at once edgy and comforting.

Although expanded to a quartet for a time, Hockey has reverted to its roots as a duo, featuring
Wyeth (previously known by his given name, Grubin) and Reynolds. “Defeat on the Double Bass Line” is from the band’s forthcoming album, the curiously named Wyeth IS, which will be self-released digitally in May. As with the other songs this week, you can download the MP3 via the link above, or via SoundCloud.