Category: MP3s

“Right Back To It” – Waxahatchee (featuring MJ Lenderman)

Katie Crutchfield is operating in an impressive groove in recent years; everything she touches strikes me as some version of awesome. Even as she is working with new collaborators–including, as seen here, MJ Lenderman, from the band Wednesday–she sounds as herself as ever on this song from her new album.

The banjo here quickly conveys a country flavor, but the deliberate pace of the finger-picking runs counter to cliched expectations. There will be no hoedown today; the mood is pensive, the melody earnest, alternating between double time and half time, as Crutchfield ponders the forces at work in relationships, albeit allusively, as is her wont. (Like many gifted songwriters, she always gives the impression that she knows exactly what she’s talking about even if the words defy straightforward understanding.) One particularly brilliant line, presented off-handedly, is: I lose a bit of myself/laying out eggshells, which is an eye-opening way to acknowledge one’s own contribution to an unhealthy interpersonal dynamic.

Lenderman’s harmony vocals add poignant texture to the chorus, which resolves–typically a downward movement–via a repeating ascending melody line. This sounds natural on the one hand, but registers as somewhat unusual. Chalk it up to her aforementioned songwriting prowess.

Katie Crutchfield is a solo artist performing since 2010 as Waxahatchee, with a rotating supporting cast. “Right Back To It” is a track from her eagerly awaited new album Tigers Blood, coming out this week on Rough Trade. This is Katie’s first solo album since the brilliant Saint Cloud, a release that arrived, on March 27, 2020, as an oasis of tuneful thoughtfulness in the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic. I leaned on it heavily during the lockdown’s disconcerting first weeks and months, and still revisit it regularly. MP3 via KEXP.

Waxahatchee was previously featured on Fingertips in May 2017.

photo credit: Molly Matalon

“Victoria” – Unproductive

A rough-edged stomper with appealing personality, “Victoria” carries on with a bit of a screw loose. The song’s simple, head-banging backbeat thuds out an intro that belies the playful nature of the melody and lyrics to follow. It’s a tale of woe, but an off-kilter one, which lead vocalist Declan Hills splutters out sounding only intermittently unhinged (in a good way). Pay attention to the words, which alternate between the bleak and the cheeky. At one point he sings–

Oh Victoria take your hand in mine
And we won’t let those white collar criminals
Make off with those reduced mortgage primes

–which is one of the more unorthodox ways to say “We’ll be great together” that I can think of. But the aforementioned Victoria is neither an easy catch nor necessarily a healthy one for our narrator, who, later, sings: Don’t make me compromise/My morality for hydrated skin. It’s that kind of relationship.

The lyrics call for and reward attention due to the song’s unconfined melodicism, featuring leaping and descending intervals, and spurts of (at least) double-timed lines to accommodate the garrulous declarations of the song’s narrator. And despite its vaguely manic ambiance, the song’s structure is rock solid, with verses that lead logically into the distinct but complementary chorus, and a chorus that both frays at the edges and resolves with clarity. Oh and be sure to tune into the squalling guitar break, starting at 1:51, which epitomizes the song’s half-crazed gusto.

Unproductive is a quartet based in Saskatoon, comprised of Hills singing and playing guitar, Nathan Henry on percussion, Steven Adams on bass, keyboards, and backing vocals, and the surname-free Zoë on keyboards. “Victoria” is the lead track off the band’s debut EP, released this month, which is, according to Hills, either actually untitled or titled Untitled; they’ve been leaving it open to discussion. You can check it out, and buy it for any price you’d like, over on Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

“Anna Madonna” – Max Blansjaar

Crisply mixed and brightly melodic, “Anna Madonna” offers just enough major- to minor-key transitions to read as bittersweet, despite its foot-tapping vibe. Blansjaar’s voice is particularly clear in the mix, which steadily acquires layers of sound–first just a muted guitar, then some snappy drum (machine) beats, later a glistening keyboard, all leading into a kazoo-like synthesizer solo halfway through this perky yet melancholy composition.

“Anna Madonna” turns out to be coincidentally related to the Waxahatchee song likewise featured this month, being another tune about the value of holding onto a long-term relationship. Mature thinking for a 21-year-old, but singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Blansjaar is nothing if not precocious, having begun performing and recording at 15.

Born in Amsterdam and raised in Oxford in the UK, he released two self-recorded and self-performed EPs of lo-fi indie pop in the late 2010s. For his first full-length album, he worked with Katie Von Schleicher, a singer/songwriter/producer with her own recording studio in Brooklyn, along with her frequent producing partner Nate Mendelsohn. The producers have done a spiffy job maintaining Blansjaar’s quirky energy while adding some shrewd dynamics to his repertoire, such as the stripped-down moment we get at 1:42. (Von Schleicher by the way was featured on Fingertips back in 2013.)

“Anna Madonna” is a track from the forthcoming album False Comforts, due out in June.

“Mirrors” – Babel

Introduced over a series of delicately fingered piano chords, “Mirrors” begins as a minimalist, moody ballad before refashioning into a sprightly piece of (still) minimalist synth-pop. It’s a lucid, appealing song start to finish, with slowly accumulating parts and no sound wasted or out of place. What holds everything together, to my ears, is the recurring sidestep the melody takes, a motif first heard at 1:00 when vocalist Karin Mäkiranta sings the phrase “where nothing goes wrong.” This quiet but potent musical moment seems both to resolve and not resolve at the same time, and weaves through the piece like a shy friend.

While the piano continues underneath, the synthesizers move to the center of the song beginning at 1:23, when an electronic tone with the feel of a plucked string provides a syncopated pulse that picks up the pace. At 2:00 a synth wash begins to fill the back of the mix, while at 2:24 we get a descending synthesizer countermelody; both are elements that keep the vibe electronic but also light-footed. An extra payoff arrives at 2:55, when Mäkiranta begins cooing a wordless vocal line, which continues underneath the song’s coda-like final verses.

Babel is the duo of Mäkiranta and Mikko Pykäri, who are based in Helsinki. Each of them have been involved with other musical projects; this is their second release as a twosome. “Mirrors” is the title track to an EP that came out back in August. You can check it out, and buy it, over on Bandcamp.

“Monts et merveilles” – Le Collage de France

“Monts et merveilles” is an easy-going French-language head-bopper with an unhurried backbeat and a wistful undercurrent. While acoustic at its core, the song is enhanced by soft and knowing electric touches–a plucked guitar here, a chiming synthesizer chord there. The title is part of the French idiom promettre monts et merveilles, which literally means to promise mountains and marvels–in other words, to declare that you’re going to deliver something especially awesome to someone. If this is akin to the English expression about promising the moon, the phrase likely has a baked-in sense of disappointment about it: no one who promises the moon, after all, ever delivers the actual moon. In translation the song’s lyrics evade close explication, offering instead a general sense of resignation at the whims of the universe and the injustice of so-called civilized society. Front man and songwriter Rémi Nation tells me the song has to do with the failure of trickle-down economics as well as the more general failing of Western society in its relentless equation of success with wealth. Still, the more I listen to the music, the more I sense, maybe, an insouciant sort of fortitude in the overall vibe.

A highlight among the song’s charms is the sing-song-y chorus, which finds Nation backed by Marie Pierre singing in unison rather than harmony, an effect one doesn’t often hear, especially with a male-female combination. I also really like the guitar break (2:21 to 2:41), in particular the low-register solo that begins at 2:32. It’s from the “less is more” school to be sure, but the tone and character is precise and, in this day and age, quite refreshing.

Le collage de France is the latest musical project helmed by Nation, who delighted us here while leading the band Orouni, featured on Fingertips in January 2017. Le collage de France’s bio reveals love and politics and language, and the ambiguities inherent in all three intertwining arenas, as areas of focus for this intriguing endeavor. “Monts et marveilles” is a track from Le collage de France’s debut LP, Langage Ment (“Language lies”), which was released late last month. Check it out, and buy it in various formats, on Bandcamp.

“Beside You” – Magana

A bashy midtempo rocker with instant character, “Beside You” has a circular melody, a distorted wall of background sound, and the compelling voice of Jeni Magaña leading us through a very ’20s narrative of personal and cultural uncertainty. And while these are themes that could strike a listener as over-familiar, there is something about Magaña’s tone and resolve that grabs at the soul here. Give it a few listens and see if you don’t feel it too.

A central, potent feature is the juxtaposition of a double-time verse with a half-time chorus, the latter of which gives the song a recurring place of aural (and lyrical) solace to land. And take a listen to the variegated guitar work. First, there’s the ringing guitar line that provides the instrumental hook in the introduction; next we get some blurry guitar noise in the second half of the verse, contributing to the aforementioned wall of sound; we also get some high squawky notes livening the verses starting around 0:58, sounding nearly (but not nearly) like mistakes, and then, not to be outdone, some low buzzy accents rising up around 1:48.

Another of the song’s primary characteristics is its outpouring of lyrics in the double-time verse, which seems an of-the-moment singer/songwriter technique (an excellent model here is “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers). Magaña puts such tender heart into both the words and the performance that she finds the authentic core in a songwriting mode that can veer towards the stale or robotic in the wrong hands.

Jeni loses her first name, and her tilde, to perform as Magana. Originally from Bakersfield, and now in Los Angeles, via Brooklyn, she has most recently been on stage as the touring bassist with Mitski. She is also part of the intermittent duo pen pin, with Emily Moore. As a solo artist, she was previously featured on Fingertips in October 2016. “Beside You” is the lead track from her new album, Teeth, which comes out in a month on the Audio Antihero label (whose tagline, for the record, is “Specialists in Commercial Suicide”). You can check more of it out, and pre-order it, on Bandcamp.