jeremyfingertips

Free and legal MP3: Shearwater (exquisitely crafted drama)

Another dramatic, exquisitely crafted song from the Austin-based Shearwater, whose latest album will be released on Sub Pop next week.

“You As You Were” – Shearwater

When you have a voice like Jonathan Meiburg’s—a sad, echoed-out tenor that registers high but resonates deep—there is no sense avoiding drama. The voice announces it, needs it, revels in it. And his songs do tend effortlessly to convey drama, via a combination of careful unfolding, subtle evocation, and urgent unleashing.

“You As You Were” beings with one note—a D# on the keyboard, repeated rapidly by the right hand for 5 seconds before stepping down to a C# as the left hand begins to sketch out a thoughtful melody under the ongoing hammering of the dominant hand’s single note. A quiet bass drum has added a pulse but maybe you don’t even notice. The rest of the band lays back until past the 40-second point. Somewhere in here the singing has started. And yet the song doesn’t feel as if it has truly kicked in until 1:24, when the drums finally give us a backbeat. And even so there’s a sense of restraint, something being held back, and finally we see what it was when one of the earlier melodies returns with a variation that leads us to a previously unheard three-note descent starting at 2:28 that features the song’s highest notes and its clearest (if still vague) sense of climax. Note that the song seems all verse, with a couple of related melodies, each of which go through some variations; there is no obvious lyrical repetition even as some key words and images recur—river, blood, mountains, weather. The song seems to be about both the damage and the promise of a personal epiphany. The combination of music and poetry here is exquisite, and well worth close, repeated listens to get to the bottom of the drama.

“You As You Were” is a song from the album Animal Joy, coming out next week on Sub Pop Records. This is Shearwater’s seventh full-length (not counting the experimental, instrumental, self-released Shearwater Is Enron album from 2010). It is the band’s first album for Sub Pop; they have recorded previously for both Matador Records and Misra Records. The MP3 is available via Sub Pop, and note that if you click on the first Sub Pop mention in this paragraph, you’ll find another free and legal MP3 from the album that is also available, and also worth hearing.

Shearwater has been previously featured on Fingertips in May 2005, March 2008, and December 2009

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.

Free and legal MP3: Cate Le Bon (Welsh singer/songwriter w/ Nico-like air)

Unhurried and untidy, “Puts Me To Work” saunters along in its own universe of sound, with a mid-tempo beat that seems uninterested in quite coalescing.

“Puts Me To Work” – Cate Le Bon

Unhurried and untidy, “Puts Me To Work” saunters along in its own universe of sound, with a mid-tempo beat that seems uninterested in quite coalescing. Le Bon admits to playing an out of tune piano here but to me the more salient and interesting feature is the instrument’s idiosyncratic resistance to the imperative of meter. Listen carefully to the introduction and notice how the piano chords lag ever so slightly behind the beat—or, perhaps, the beat itself moves past the piano. In any case, it’s a delightfully anomalous effect.

Everything about this song seems to lag and withhold. We don’t hear the chorus until a minute in, and we don’t hear the pay-off, titular line (“It puts me to work”) until the second and final time the chorus comes around, two-thirds of the way through the song.

And okay, once Le Bon starts singing, it’s all that a rock writer can do, it seems, to keep the name “Nico” from spontaneously emerging from his or her computer keyboard. As much as I tried to resist the urge, there is too much in Le Bon’s disaffected mezzo that recalls the one-time “Warhol Superstar.” And it’s not just the voice, and the dainty accent (Le Bon is from Wales)—it’s the world-weary vibe that combines sing-songy simplicity with some kind of instinctive but unutterable wisdom. What nails both the Nico comparison and the song is the cagey hook, which happens when the melody takes her voice to the beginning of the upper part of her range, on the lyrics “And I know you won’t remember” (first heard at 1:01). Right there it feels like the late ’60s all over again, but with better coffee.

“Puts Me to Work” is from Le Bon’s new album, CYRK, which was released this week on The Control Group. This is her second full-length release; she has also released a Welsh-language EP. MP3 via The Control Group, an indie label based in New York City.

Free and legal MP3: Team Me (vibrant, smartly-textured Norwegian pop)

Resplendent indie pop for people who might think that they’ve gotten a bit tired of resplendent indie pop.

“Show Me” – Team Me

Resplendent indie pop for people who might think that they’ve gotten a bit tired of resplendent indie pop. So that once and for all we might all realize that it’s not a type of music that gets tiresome, it’s boring or uninspired music that gets tiresome. Not a genre, not a type, not a style.

But I digress. “Show Me,” from the new-ish Norwegian sextet Team Me, has a marvelous momentum to it, rooted in its smooth chord progressions and its unexpected grounding in a 12-measure verse melody. I’m not saying there’s any other connection but I will note that 12-measure melodies are uncommon in pop while of course being the prototypical construction for the blues (thus the phrase “12-bar blues”; a bar is another word for a measure). “Show Me” is not the blues, by any means. But the unfolding of a melody through 12 measures is something we tend to experience, whether we even recognize it or not, in a blues setting. And here instead is this vibrant, smartly-textured, hopeful-sounding (but not necessarily hopeful) song. I’m not sure what this means but felt it worth noting. Oh and of course in a blues setting, the melody is spare, ritualized, all but preordained, and sung by one voice, while Team Me here serves up a swooping, involved melody with harmonies, double-tracking, and the occasional gang shout. And yet, too, there is a seriousness hiding here in the ebullient flow and playful vibe. Could this be what 12 bars does? Nope, probably not. But it’s fun to consider.

“Show Me” is a track from Team Me’s debut full-length album, which came out in Norway in October and is due to arrive in the US in March on the Oslo-based label Propeller Recordings.

Free and legal MP3: Theresa Andersson (splendid, haunting amalgam)

What makes Andersson’s music so potent is that she has by now been living in New Orleans longer than she lived in her native country. She has absorbed both environments and is coming out swinging here. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

“What Comes Next” – Theresa Andersson

With its unconventional use of brass band and snare drum, “What Comes Next” quickly announces its boundary-free musical identity, blending traditional New Orleans sounds with an outlier sensibility that attentive listeners may just be able to link to Andersson’s home country of Sweden. Not that Sweden–with arguably the richest and most significant rock’n’roll history of any non-English-speaking country—has just one way of doing rock’n’roll. But from the outside looking in, one can hear generalized ideas and sensibilities that feel musically Swedish. What makes Andersson’s music so potent is that she has by now been living in New Orleans longer than she lived in her native country. She has absorbed both environments and is coming out swinging here. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

I love how she works the martial drum work into a song that glides and swings so smoothly. I love the eccentric punctuation provided by the loose/tight horn section (very NOLA). And I love the swaying hook of the romantic chorus, which sounds like nothing the introduction or the verse of this song has prepared us for, musically, and yet once heard, it’s exactly where we should be. Peter Moren, of Peter Bjorn and John, provides some multi-faceted backing vocals here, often of the fetching octave-harmony variety.

Andresson has been in New Orleans since 1991, when, at 18, she moved there to be with guitarist Anders Osborne both musically and personally. To date she is probably best known for the one-woman-band video she made for her song “Na Na Na,” which to me better shows off her appealing personality than her songwriting. You can add to the more than one million views it’s gotten if you haven’t already, below. (Note that she made the video for potential venues, so they would know what to expect from her loop-oriented performances. She was not trying to go viral.) “What Comes Next” is the first available song from Andersson’s forthcoming album, Street Parade, arriving in April on the New Orleans-based Basin Street Records.

Free and legal MP3: Ed Vallance (assured indie pop, w/ edgy grandeur)

I love the effortless ones—the songs that just lay themselves out there and do their thing, so securely and easily that there’s almost nothing to talk about. “Crystalline” is one of those.

“Crystalline” – Ed Vallance

I love the effortless ones—the songs that just lay themselves out there and do their thing, so securely and easily that there’s almost nothing to talk about. “Crystalline” is one of those.

Okay, but I’ll talk a little.

A lot of the power here comes, I think, from the delayed melody. In both the verse and the chorus, the melodic line begins after two beats go by. In the verse, this allows the scene to be set by a weighty, unhurried guitar chord, even as the rhythmic backbone of the song remains fleet and itchy. So there’s this built-in juxtaposition here between the purposeful rhythm and the thoughtful melody. In the chorus, the melodic delay is augmented by an instrumental countermelody (first heard at 0:54) that gives the song a subtle grandeur. And yet Vallance at the same time seems to be playing with some vocal distortion here, which lends an edge to the sound. In this case the juxtaposition becomes its own potent amalgam: edgy grandeur.

Vallance was born in London and lives and works now in Brooklyn. “Crystalline” is the lead track from his second album, Volcano, which arrives next month on Proof Records.

Free and legal MP3: The Zolas (a melodic adventure of a song)

Rather than offering up verses and a chorus, The Zolas here present a complex series of different, seamlessly integrated segments.

“Cultured Man” – The Zolas

As album releases slow down in late December and early January, I am at the beginning of each year given a bit of an opportunity to go back and make sure I didn’t miss anything worthwhile in the general hubbub of the holiday season.

So here’s one that’s been hanging around a while and finally nudged its way into my heart. More an adventure than a song, “Cultured Man” is melodic and easy to listen to but is at the same time an intriguingly complicated composition. Rather than offering up verses and a chorus, the song presents a complex series of different, seamlessly integrated segments. One section does appear to function, musically, as a chorus (first heard at 0:58, with the lyrics “Just to impress you”), but even that one arrives with different words the next time around. In addition to the melodically distinct segments, the song takes us through changes in tempo and dynamics, as well as three different instrumental breaks. All in just under five minutes.

What holds it all together, for me, is singer/guitarist Zachary Gray’s distinctive baritone. He sounds refreshingly like a grown-up, up front and without pretense, shedding inadvertent light on the muddy or whiny or grandiose voices that slightly overpopulate the 21st-century rock’n’roll scene.

“Cultured Man” first surfaced back in October, as half of a 7-inch split single recorded with the Liptonians. Gray and keyboardist Tom Dobrzanski are the core of the band, although additional players support them on stage. To date the Zolas have released one album—2009’s Tic Toc Tic, on Light Organ Records, which generally employed a more piano-focused sound than you’ll hear here. A new record is being wrapped up this month and could be released by March. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.