jeremyfingertips

Free and legal MP3: Erin Costelo (minimalist retro-soul from Canada)

At the center of this satisfying, reimagined retro-soul nugget is Costelo’s voice, a forceful instrument with both a booming timbre and a delicate vibrato.

“Oh Me Oh My” – Erin Costelo

At once short and expansive, “Oh Me Oh My” flaunts the open spaces offered up by both its downtempo flair and its minimalist arrangement. A firm, slow beat is established with neither fuss nor volume. Then see how the classic, early-’60s melody is partially deconstructed by the sparse setting—note, for instance, the unexpected harmony the first wordless backing vocals provide at 0:20. And then note how stingily this fetching backing vocal is used in the whole song.

At the center of this satisfying, reimagined retro-soul nugget is Costelo’s voice, a forceful instrument with both a booming timbre and a delicate vibrato. She struts through the slow, economically presented verse, expands with the double-time melody in the chorus, and never over-sings. In her upper range, her voice acquires a silvery power that smartly recalls bygone soul singers in some inscrutable—or, at least, indescribable—way. Music is difficult enough to turn into concrete description, but describing voices is pretty much impossible. I keep thinking, next time, next time I’ll nail it. But the point, ultimately, is to say: listen, listen to this voice, you’ll hear something potent in it. Your soul will be stirred.

“Oh Me Oh My” is the lead track on Costelo’s third album, We Can Get Over, which is set to arrive in early October. The album represents a stylistic culmination for the Halifax-based singer/songwriter. On The Trouble and the Truth, her 2008 debut, she presented herself as a relatively straightforward jazz singer. For her second album, 2009’s Fire and Fuss, Costelo moved more towards pop, while retaining some of her jazz-oriented inclinations. This time around, from the sound of it, she’s left overt jazz behind while exploring the elusive place at which ’60s soul and girl-group music commingles. Seems like a good idea to me.

Free and legal MP3: The Ampersands (buzzy, stompy indie pop)

Our week of incisive songs (all under 3:35) wraps up with this buzzy, stompy bit of off-kilter indie pop.

“Try This” – The Ampersands

Our week of incisive songs (all under 3:35) wraps up with this buzzy, stompy bit of off-kilter indie pop. The sing-songy, Nintendo-y keyboard riff that opens things up is no mistake—it is based, says the group, on a mis-memory of an old video game musical theme (Munchlax’s Berry Bonanza, if you must know, which is a mini-game within the Pokemon universe). And the song indeed seems at one level to be about playing video games. The processed vocals add a Game Boy-like ambiance to be sure. But there is a larger point as well, having to do not only with the repeated chorus (“Why don’t you try this or you’ll never know”) but with the key lyrical line—which the band uses as their album title—“This is your adventure too.” We must stay open-minded, and present, and perhaps, somehow, even video games can help us get there. Or, also, not.

Meanwhile, the music has a smartly-built air about it, not to mention a sneaky undercurrent of Fountains of Wayne-like power pop. (Listen to the transition from the first to the second line—from “…observing the maze” to “Keep a close eye…”; that’s a lovely, FOW-like progression.) Funny thing about the Fountains—they’re still out there making good records, but they’ve also been around long enough to be a foundational band for a new generation of indie rockers. I don’t know if that’s the case here but I’ve been hearing their influence in a few places recently so I’m floating it as a theory.

The Ampersands (clever name for a twosome, no?) are multi-instrumentalist Aaron McQuade and guitarist Jim Pace. Both sing and write the songs. They have employed some “satellite members” both in the studio and in live performance, including vocalist Evie Nagy, whom you hear here in the chorus, but the band is officially just the two of them. Aaron is based in NYC, Jim in Providence, where they originally started. This Is Your Adventure Too is the band’s second album, and is slated for release at the end of October. Do yourself a favor and check out the album’s web site, where you can not only hear the whole thing, but get a lot of engaging, liner-note-like information and graphics.

Free and legal MP3: Lux Lisbon

Soulful, w/ 4-part harmonies

“Get Some Scars” – Lux Lisbon

With its vocal-heavy arrangement and its conspicuous soulfulness, “Get Some Scars” not only sounds like little you hear in the air in the 21st century’s second decade, it sounds like a protest against a musical age known more for its robotic technological frills and hype-oriented gimmickry than for passionate musical prowess. And let me quickly add that there are of course many independent musicians today who with equal passion and prowess stand in opposition to the horror of today’s auto-tuned top 40 and its pea-brained lyrical concerns. But what stands out here is the unabashed effort to make inclusive, crowd-friendly music. And what a relief it is to remember that inclusive, crowd-friendly music can at least sometimes, still, sound so easy and so affecting. “Get Some Scars” is big without being loud, simple without being insipid, smooth without being formulaic.

The secret to its success is, I think, its groove. This is a serious groove, but an elusive one.The bass more often sings and sustains rather than plucks in the funky style often associated with grooves. Percussion takes a backseat to vocal harmonies. This is it seems a groove created and fed by the swinging, swaying momentum of the melody, and driven home by the vocal layers, as emphatic as they are organic. (The band recruited an extra singer to help front man Stuart Rook with the four-part harmonies.) My ear keeps telling me that the melodic interval that repeats, both in the verse and the chorus, somehow feeds the groove—it’s a major third, four semitones apart, and heard most clearly at the start of the chorus (1:27), with the words, “Oh while we’re young,” each syllable bouncing the interval top to bottom and back again, and with great swing, and all those harmonies. And right here is where the otherwise slippery lyrics solidify into a true moment, words and music coalescing into something larger than either:

Oh while we’re young, yeah, let’s go out and get some scars
‘Cause when we’re older we wear them to tell us apart

Lux Lisbon is a five-piece band founded in Nottingham and now based in London. The band’s name is one of the sisters in the Jeffrey Eugenides novel The Virgin Suicides. “Get Some Scars” is their latest single, released last month. You can listen to their debut album, released in January, via Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3. And in case this relates to any of your schedules this weekend, Lux Lisbon will be playing at the Bestival on the Isle of Wight, on Sunday night.

Free and legal MP3:The Hermit Crabs

Strummy, melancholy Glaswegian pop

“Stop This Now” – The Hermit Crabs

This is a lovely, crisp bit of strummy, melancholy indie pop, and if it reminds you of Camera Obscura and/or Belle & Sebastian, well, all hail from Glasgow, where apparently this type of strummy, melancholy indie pop is a prevailing musical dialect. But I encourage listening above and beyond the similarities, and tossing aside genre generalizations because, as I have said time and again, it’s far less important for a song to sound different than for it to be good. “Stop This Now” is deliciously good—so good in fact that it is different, if maybe in more subtle ways than can be summarized via pre-established labels.

Everything happens quickly here. The pace is light-footed, the verse concise—one melodic line, repeated twice, each time ending on an unresolved note. We’re at the chorus by 0:25, and yet see how we’re still not at any resolution. The pace stays fleet but the melody itself slows down, with front woman Melanie Whittle now singing fewer words per bar. It’s this opening part of the chorus that just nails the song for me—that lilting, deceptively simple triplet of lines (“And I know/And you know/We both know”) displaying both rueful wit and anguished charm, unfolding across those lovely chords that keep not resolving until we get to the twelfth bar (0:42). And even then we don’t feel full closure until the guitars strum their way through to the sixteenth measure, as we tend to need eight eight or sixteen measures for our ears to feel settled. The second trip through the verse is fortified by some dandy guitar work, the chorus’s follow-up enhanced with a winsome countermelody. Pay attention, however, or the thing will pass you by—it’s all over by 2:18 (the song actually ends before the MP3 does).

Founded by Whittle, the Hermit Crabs have recorded one full-length album to date, 2007’s Saw You Dancing. “Stop This Now” is from the band’s third EP, entitled Time Relentless, which is out this month on Matinee Recordings. MP3 via Matinee.

Free and legal MP3: Denver (country roots, both laid back & incisive)

With its ambling backbeat and lonesome pedal steel guitar,”The Way It Is” has the spacious, laid-back authority of some ’70s piece of pre-Americana.

“The Way It Is” – Denver

With its ambling backbeat and lonesome pedal steel guitar,”The Way It Is” has the spacious, laid-back authority of some ’70s piece of pre-Americana. Which we might as well just call country. At the same time, it manages an incisiveness that is almost unsettling; you just don’t expect a song with this kind of scruffy, dirty-booted ambiance to be focused enough to finish up under three minutes. Denver pulls off this magic trick by forsaking the instrumental break, and just sticking to the musical facts: melody, accompaniment, and weary, achy-hearted singing.

“The Way It Is” launches off an smooth, two-chord vamp, Neil Young-ish in character. As with the Hermit Crabs song above, the verse is a succinct two lines; in this case, however, it leads into a chorus that is fat with resolution, using a descending bass line to anchor a determined series of classic chords. The melody takes one solid step up and tumbles incrementally down a satisfying perfect fifth. The lyrics, meanwhile, blaze with unpretentious majesty, if I haven’t managed to coin a double or triple oxymoron: “There’s things in the world that I know nothing about,” laments the song’s narrator, without pity, “And that’s just the way it is.” You and me both, pal.

Denver is named more for feeling than geography; the six-man band is actually based in Portland, and features three guys from Alela Diane’s band Wild Divine, including Diane’s husband Tom Bevitori and two from Blitzen Trapper. (Diane and band were featured together here in March 2011.) Five others are said to “rotate” through the lineup. The band’s debut album was recorded and engineered at the home of a friend’s mother—“Drums in the living room, singer in the bedroom, four-track cassette recorder, cases of beer, whiskey, sandwiches and a sunny porch,” is how band co-founder Birger Olsen has described it. The self-titled album was released in mid-August on Portland-based Mama Bird Recording Co.

Fingertips Flashback: Goldrush (from February 2007)

No new songs this week but here’s a Flashback featuring one of my favorite Fingertips selections of all time. Three new free and legal MP3s return after the Labor Day holiday here in the U.S.

“Every One of Us” – Goldrush

[from February 12, 2007]

We don’t seem at a loss here in the still-young year for brilliant, glistening rock songs. Here’s another, from the fine British band Goldrush. I love how the guitars add texture and tension to the song’s galloping beat, both the wavery synth-y line that arches like a siren above and the waves of skittery feedback-like chords that fade in and out below. But maybe the best thing on display here is Robin Bennett’s voice, which I find deeply affecting—a rubbery and slightly trembly tenor that at certain moments bring Ray Davies to mind (as, happily, do the melodies). And please listen to the words, which start out poignant and then turn transcendent, as the song makes that rare, exceptional link between the socio-political and the interpersonal. What begins as a moving statement on 21st-century alienation gains depth and spirit as the perspective angles in on a single human heart: “And if nothing is the way that it was/ Well there’s one thing you can be sure of, because/ We are not the way that we were/ She will forget about you/ So forget about her.” The title phrase proceeds to assume two competing, plaintive meanings. Nice nice work. “Every One of Us” is a song from the band’s new CD, The Heart is the Place, which is set for release next week in the U.K. on Truck Records, an impressively robust label run by Bennett and his brother Joe, who is also in Goldrush. The CD has been out since mid-January on City Slang, the band’s German label. No word yet on a U.S. release date. The MP3 is available via City Slang.

ADDENDUM: There is another band on the scene right now named Goldrush, from Richmond, Virginia. This is not them. As for the Goldrush featured here, The Heart is the Place remains their most recent album; the band seems no longer to exist. The most recent news I can find about Robin and Joe Bennett has to do with the popular Truck Festival, a music festival they ran in Oxford for 14 years. The Truck had a tough year in 2011, forcing the Bennetts to bow out. The Festival was taken over by new management and has continued.

New essay: “In Defense of Music” (off site)

A new Fingertips essay has been published by the Linn music blog.

The fine folks at the Linn music blog have published a new essay of mine. Linn is a high-end audio equipment company, based in the UK; as such, the title actually is “In Defence of Music.” I like British (i.e., original) spellings, so it’s nice to have a good excuse to use one every once in a while.

And so, here is “In Defence of Music,” via the Linn music blog.

Note that Fingertips is otherwise taking one more summer week off, while summer remains in effect. New free and legal MP3s will return early next week.

Free and legal MP3: Exquisite Corps (elegant, dynamic chamber pop)

Bass, drum, acoustic guitar, cello, two violins, so artfully put together that you would not suspect how otherwise difficult it is to merge these instruments into a cohesive presentation.

“Light as a Feather” – Exquisite Corps

Rock’n’roll in the internet age chews up and spits out trends and genres as fast as bloggers can make them up. If you haven’t realized it by now, our task here, together, is to ignore the churn and hype and just listen in peace, find the good stuff, and let it lift our spirits. Easy, right?

So, okay, chamber pop. Is it a good thing? A bad thing? A “that’s so 2006” thing? We don’t care, you and I. We listen to “Light as a Feather” and say, wow. This is one elegant and dynamic piece of music. Bass, drum, acoustic guitar, cello, two violins, so artfully put together that you would not suspect how otherwise difficult it is to merge these instruments into a cohesive presentation. The sticking point is usually figuring out how to blend the strings with the drums, as violins and cellos and such did not grow up around drum kits. Exquisite Corps does it so well they flaunt it: the strings are introduced with a bash of the drums at 1:09, and their first job is not to be sweeping or yearning but to be percussive; they join in here (and it may be the most ear-catching part of the song) as part of the rhythm section, and when first released on their own (1:30), stay in their lower registers and remain submerged to the drumbeat. Meanwhile, singer Bryan Valenzuela impresses at both ends of his dynamic range, his edgy, Lennon-meets-Corgan voice providing the glue that links the quieter and more intense sections of this song. By the time we hear the strings in all out string-section mode (2:45), they have been fully incorporated into this distinctive rock’n’roll song, chamber pop edition.

Exquisite Corps (get it? no “e”) began life in Sacramento in early ’09 as a cello/acoustic guitar duo with Valenzuela and cellist Krystyna Taylor. Two violinists were brought in for a special performance the band was doing with a local ballet company, and stuck; before long, the bass player and drummer from Valenzuela’s old band Call Me Ishmael came on board. “Light as a Feather” is a song from the quintet’s self-titled seven-track debut album, released last month. You can listen, and buy it, on the band’s Bandcamp page.

Free and legal MP3: Lonely Drifter Karen

Prickly-smooth allure, in 6/4 time

“Comet” – Lonely Drifter Karen

A peculiar allure is in the air here. “Comet” is at once prickly and smooth, at once funky and not-funky, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Small details matter. It’s not just the spidery guitar line in the introduction that creates the mood but the squeaky, metallic echoes in the background; it’s not just the fitful piano fills in the verse (note that the keyboard spends more time not playing than playing) but the eerie synthesizer flourishes underneath (half ghost, half singing saw).

Larger details matter too, most of all the song’s 6/4 time. I am something of an uncommon-time-signature devotee, always appreciative of bands willing to trot something other than 4/4 time out for our ears. 6/4 is a particularly attractive option, as it both allows a consistent beat and contributes to a subtle sense of oddness, if only because our ears–whether naturally or by training, who knows–default towards a feeling of four-ness. Six-ness is still regular, you can still dance to it, but something slightly interesting and unexpected is happening. And then there is the matter of singer/guitarist Tanja Frinta, who commands attention with her flexible, vaguely Kate Bush-like soprano–earthy and keen in the verse, breathy-airy in the multi-layered but mostly one-word chorus.

Begun as a solo project for the Austrian-born Frinta while she was living in Sweden in 2003, Lonely Drifter Karen has been through a variety of incarnations, locations, and band-member nationalities over the years. Now based in Brussels, Lonely Drifter Karen currently features Frinta, Spanish keyboardist/arranger Marc Melià Sobrevias, and French guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Clément Marionare (France). “Comet” is a song from the album Poles, the band’s third, released on the Belgian label Crammed Discs, either in February, March, April, or June of this year, depending on which online source one consults.

Free and legal MP3: Poor Moon (Fleet Foxes side project, w/ beauty & heft)

Dreamy song with with an intriguing sonic palette, elusive roots, lovely melodies, and an uncanny arrangement.

“Birds” – Poor Moon

Last week I featured a song from the band Time Travelers, and noted its resemblance to music made by Fleet Foxes. This week, at the risk of redundancy, I offer up a song from the band Poor Moon and will likewise note its resemblance to music made by Fleet Foxes, with this additional footnote: Christian Wargo and Casey Wescott, two of the four gentlemen in Poor Moon, are themselves also in Fleet Foxes. So that explains that.

This is not Fleet Foxes 2.0, however. “Birds” is a dreamy song with with an intriguing sonic palette, elusive roots, lovely melodies, and an uncanny arrangement. There is something vaguely Mexican, or at least faux-Mexican, in the air here, both in the rhythm and the instrumentation, but that is merely an entry point into this music, not the end point. Sounds are used with great care, in particular those emanating from the marimba and the rest of the sensitive, idiosyncratic percussion section (tiny example: the random, exquisitely timed marimba note struck at 2:29). Chord progressions are lovingly crafted—don’t miss the heavenly, Brian Wilson-y end of the introduction (0:27-0:32), and the chorus’s lovely series of shifts (1:35-2:01, but check out 1:49 in particular). The group harmonies surely bring FF to mind, but Wargo’s lead vocal has a casual, dusky quality that blends beautifully with the warm, clackety arrangement. This is a winner that keeps on growing with repeated listens.

Wargo and Wescott have long been friends and musical associates; prior to Fleet Foxes, they played together in the bands Pedro the Lion and Crystal Skulls. The other two members are brothers Ian and Peter Murray, who otherwise play in a band called The Christmas Cards. “Birds” is the tenth of ten tracks on the band’s debut full-length release, self-titled, which will be out next week on Sub Pop Records. MP3 via Sub Pop. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.