Category: MP3s

This Week’s Finds: May 7-13 (Asobi Seksu, Tobias Fröberg, Be Your Own Pet)

“Thursday” – Asobi Seksu

Gorgeous gorgeous high-volume rock’n’roll—play it loud and feel your heart burst with pleasure and wonder. Yeah it’s pretty much that good (and be sure to go back after you’re done and re-listen to the quiet beginning; it’s there for a reason). While this talented NYC quartet owes some of its sonic foundation to Blondie’s indelible, pioneering sound, Asobi Seksu seem at the same time to have found something deep and moving within a place Debby Harry and company sought, mostly, irony and distance (not that there was anything wrong with that!). Lead vocalist Yuki sings with warmth and a sneaky range, moving seamlessly into a yearning, substantive falsetto for that great major-to-minor melody shift in the chorus. Her able bandmates both mirror and amplify her dynamic range—together, they’re not just loud, not just soft, not just pretty, not just noisy, but instead create a thoroughly engaging and skillful blend of different sounds, textures, and ideas. And while we may all yet get tired of the reverb-laced sound characterizing a lot of the best rock’n’roll of our new century, right now it keeps seeming to work, in this case contributing to a wash of heavenly sound out of which unfolds a gem that feels at once very familiar and, in its own way, pioneering. “Thursday” is a track from the band’s long-awaited (by me, at least!) second CD, Citrus, scheduled for release at the end of the month on Friendly Fire Recordings. The MP3 is available via Insound.


“So I” – Tobias Fröberg

While “Simon & Garfunkel meets Ron Sexsmith” might be a fast and reasonably valid way of summing up this song, I hesitate to offer it because I have heard a few too many bands or singer/songwriters over the past few years who have prompted comparisons to Simon & Garfunkel, typically based on the presence of delicate acoustic guitar picking and whispery harmonies. Too often however these musicians lack a crucial part of the S&G sound, which is (easier said than done, I know!) having memorable songs. To compare anyone to Simon & Garfunkel (or Ron Sexsmith, for that matter) who is singing a well-intentioned but (let’s be honest) boring song renders the comparison pretty much pointless. No worries here, however, as Fröberg manages first of all to be singing a memorable song–courtesy of its simple but appealing double-descending melody and a gratifying amount of subtle movement. I like too that Fröberg and collaborator Linus Larsson add some cool stuff of their own, like the forthright electric guitar used throughout as a sort of color commentator to the underlying drive of the acoustic picking. “So I” is a song from Fröberg’s CD For Elisabeth Wherever She Is (note S&G-related title!), released on Silence Records in Sweden late in 2004, and a winner of a national award for best singer/songwriter album in 2005. A new CD entitled Somewhere in the City will be released shortly in Scandanavia; apparently he has just been signed to Cheap Lullaby Records in the U.S., so we’ll see if that increases his profile here a bit as the year unfolds. Thanks to Hedvika at the recently renamed Getecho blog for the lead.


“Adventure” – Be Your Own Pet

Channeling Bow Wow Wow with great, vibrant, new-century spirit comes a group of teenagers from Nashville with the kind of glorious, in-the-moment song that proves absolutely nothing about their long-term talent or viability, nor should it. (Bow Wow Wow’s Annabella Lwin was herself 14 when that band broke; she’s 40 now, which is weird, but I digress.) Singer Jemina (yeah, -na) Pearl sings with the same sort of un-self-conscious abandon as Lwin back in the day, and apparently this song is reasonably tame for her. Not sure I’ll care much for the wilder, unrepressed punk-ish side of what these guys do, but in this case (am I repeating myself yet?) I’m hearing a really strong song underneath the okay-I-can-scream-and-curse bravado—an unexpectedly full and satisfying less-than-two-and-a-half-minute tornado of rhythmic hooks and gleefully slashing guitars. Beware, by the way, the dark energy of the hype/backlash cycle when it comes to Be Your Own Pet, which seems already to have swirled around and back if you spend too much time in the blogosphere (hint: don’t spend too much time in the blogosphere!); some part of their story has something to do with parents in the music industry, but me I just try as usual to listen with my ears, and my ears say: “Hey! Kinda cool!” Or they would if they had a mouth. “Adventure” is a song from the band’s self-titled debut CD, which was released in the U.K. in March on XL Recordings and is due out early next month in the U.S. on Universal (note the big record company, which certainly has something to do with the fury of the aforementioned hype/backlash cycle).

This Week’s Finds: April 30-May 6 (Marykate O’Neil, A Passing Feeling, Camera Obscura)

“Stay” – Marykate O’Neil

There have been at least four excellent songs with the same one-word title in modern pop history (I’m partial to Bowie’s, and the Blue Nile’s); it takes a bit of nervy self-assurance to offer up yet another, but as I listen to O’Neil’s voice, its rich tone equal parts passion and nonchalance, I’m thinking that here’s a singer/songwriter not lacking in nervy self-assurance. (I mean that as a compliment, by the way.) And why not another “Stay”?—the word, come to think of it, is one of the English language’s more emotionally resonant verbs, a four-letter subtext festival laden with implied connection, desire, and conflict. In any case, O’Neil’s “Stay” has the crisp, instantly likable propulsiveness of a classic pop hit, its sparkly, syncopated rhythm ably accented by a jangly guitar and, later on, an almost demonic violin. There’s something in the slightly nasally roundness of her voice that brings Aimee Mann to mind, which isn’t a bad thing; an even better thing is that the song has more open-hearted spirit than a lot of Mann’s able but same-sounding output has managed in recent years. “Stay” can be found on O’Neil’s new CD, 1-800-Bankruptcy, which will be released electronically tomorrow on Nettwerk Records, and physically on O’Neil’s own 71 Recordings imprint. The MP3 is available via O’Neil’s web site.

“Book of Matches” – A Passing Feeling

As the original punk era ricocheted into the original new wave era, this was the sort of song that was in the air: a short, triumphant bit of sweat and booze and bluster. My heart will ever have a big sloppy soft spot for songs with two separate hooks; that this NYC-based foursome delivers two great hooks in a song not even two and a half minutes long is all but insane. The first hook, 18 seconds in, starting with the words “So in taking you back to the scene of the crime,” has something of the unbridled melodicism of early Elvis Costello, fully utilizing all seven notes of the scale in a delightful four-measure outburst. (Think in contrast to how many pop hits of recent decades employ often as few as three or four discrete notes in their hooks, if you can call them hooks.) On the heels of hook number one, singer Brian Miltenberg spits out the second hook in the glorious chorus, which is, rather delightfully, a throwback melody straight from the ’50s, but sped up and thrashed through, as if the Ramones had attacked doo-wop instead of the Brill Building with their black-leather buzzsaw. For all of this song’s brevity there’s something monumental brewing in its sonic onslaught; I sure hope someone somewhere is blaring this out a dorm window on a blue, flowery day this spring. “Book of Matches” is one of five songs on A Passing Feeling’s self-titled debut EP, released back in December on 75 or Less Records. The MP3 is courtesy of the band’s site.

“Let’s Get Out of This Country” – Camera Obscura

While new bands are always a kick to discover, there’s something to be said for not-new-anymore bands as well. The Scottish sextet Camera Obscura has been around since 1996, and there’s nothing like a history together to give a band’s sound genuine weight and substance. “Let’s Get Out of This Country” wraps its arms around me with a winning combination of spaciousness and intimacy—the sound is ever so large, with those bashing drumbeats and sweeping waves of strings, all bathed in glossy reverb, and yet listen to how each melodic line ends with that introspective descending third, and listen too to the soft pretty ache in Tracyanne Campbell’s lilting voice. She sounds like someone spinning gently in her room, humming to herself. Often the swelling strings compete with her words—you know she’s there but aren’t quite privy to what she’s saying. Then, at a point when we might expect a bridge (from about 1:35 to 1:50), the music pulls back and we hear Campbell singing more or less alone against the drumbeat; the effect is particularly magical and melancholy. “Let’s Get Out of This Country” is the title track of the band’s forthcoming CD, due out in June on Merge Records.

This Week’s Finds: April 23-29 (Daylight’s For the Birds, The Hot IQs, Jolie Holland)

“To No One” – Daylight’s for the Birds

Lush, swirly, airy noise in service to melody—call it shoegaze if we must (must we??), but I’d much rather dig into the sound than attach that odd (if apparently indelible) label to a sonic reality this deep and rich. The aural palette favored by this NYC-based quartet lends an immediate tension to the amorphous introduction, as two predominant sounds emerge, vibrate, and grow through the first drum-free, beat-free 45 seconds—one sounding like a synth-enhanced guitar, metallic and pulsing, the other a choral wash of keyboard. Listen carefully for two things arising from that: a submerged melody line by something that sounds like a faraway organ, and a flute-like synthesizer sound that flutters into being from the noise and eventually takes up the melody begun by the “organ.” I really like this flute-y thing, which seems so unexpected and yet weaves so organically into the ongoing texture (the storied “no lead guitar” sound characteristic of whatever we want to call this genre). The way the drummer drums skippingly around the beat through the verse is another indelible part of the airy soundscape, along with singer Amanda Garrett’s surprisingly strong voice: in lieu of the wispier vocal stylings often heard in this environment, Garrett sings with pop-like heft and character, even when she’s mixed back into the whorl of it all. Daylight’s for the Birds is a NYC-based quartet that features, among others, Phillip Wann, formerly of On!Air!Library! (which disbanded last year). The MP3 is available via the Deli, a fine online publication about the NYC rock scene.

“Firecracker” – the Hot IQs

Without frills or warmup, a stark, meaty guitar lashes out one of music’s most compelling progressions: a major chord alternating with the minor chord one-half step down. Laurie Anderson famously wrote a long, strange, avant-garde pop song (“O Superman”) that featured only this progression and nothing else; the contemporary composer John Adams has displayed his own recurring fascination with this simple, resonant interval. Pretensions to great art aside, these two simple chords sound just fine, thank you, when churned out by an actual rock band; the fact that the Denver-based Hot IQs are even a power trio (guitar, bass, drums) seems even more fitting. Let the minimalists seek meaning in inexorable repetition; me I’m happy that the song discovers a few other chords (I particularly like the Nirvana-ish progressions in the bridge, beginning around 1:35) and some incisive melodies as well. Singer/guitarist Eli Mishkin has a pleasing semi-nasal voice that rounds out nicely in its lower register, while drummer Elaine Acosta, refreshingly uninterested in pounding us into submission, has a marvelous way of letting the slashing guitar inhabit the bottom of the sound. As for bass player Bryan Feuchtinger, well, I don’t have much to say, but I didn’t want to leave him out. “Firecracker” comes from the Hot IQs’ debut CD, An Argument Between the Brain and Feet, which was released on a small Denver label late in 2004, and given a national digital re-release last week on SpinArt Records. MP3 via Better Propaganda.

“Springtime Can Kill You” – Jolie Holland

Rather than killing you I believe that spring is the perfect time of year for, among other things, a song this ripe and unhinged. Sounding like a lounge-based, accent-free Björk, Holland skates, slides, and flutters through the tune, all but deconstructing its wonderful melody—and making it all the Tom Waits-ishly more wonderful in the process. Holland by the way is actually making the opposite point her title implies, itself a neat songwriting trick: “If you don’t go get what you need/Something’s going to break on the inside”; springtime kills the part of you that needs to be killed, in other words; in other words, the blossoms and colors and scents and breezes force you to be as alive as you actually are all the time without realizing it, or at least try. The song, the title track on her new CD (released last week on Anti Records) features an upright bass, baritone horn, and Holland’s fun-house whistle, and it’s all crazy perfect. The MP3 is available via Better Propaganda. “So get out get out of your house,” she purrs. So saying, I will.

This Week’s Finds: April 16-22 (Peter Walker, Hacia Dos Veranos, Spiral Beach)

“What Do I Know” – Peter Walker

Sharp and assured, this song is enlivened by the juxtaposition of a tight beat and a relaxed melody. Despite a stark and itchy guitar-and-drum backdrop straight out of, I don’t know, an early Joe Jackson record maybe, Walker sings with a cool, deft calm that really centers this short song—he seems in fact to be singing perpetually off the beat; combined with how the lyrics tend to clump into three-syllable groups, Walker creates a sense of unexpected space in a rigorously marked 4/4 environment (each beat itself often slashed out by double-time rhythm guitar eighth notes). And in a song that’s not much more than two and a half minutes, I wouldn’t expect a kick-out-the-jams guitar solo, but I’m impressed by the sonorous and genuinely interesting 25-second turn Walker takes on his instrument, from which he gets a neat bagpipe-y sort of droniness. “What Do I Know” is the last song on Young Gravity, Walker’s second CD, which was released last week on Dangerbird Records. The MP3 is via Walker’s web site.

“Preludio” – Hacia Dos Veranos

Every now and then my non-instrumental-oriented ears glom onto an instrumental that they decide they like, at which point my brain has to kind of catch up and figure out why. Usually to no avail. All I can say here is that I find the combination of the mellow, vaguely Latin-sounding electric guitar and haunted-mansion organ unaccountably fetching. Every time the organ takes center stage—the riff first heard around 0:59—and then begins to sound maybe more like a haunted merry-go-round, I feel like smiling. When music makes me smile, I know I’m liking it, but usually, again, in a way my brain isn’t necessarily contributing to. And then, okay, just when I think I’m sinking into this brisk, semi-wacky vibe, along comes an organ sustain, at around 2:43, telling me something’s up, something new. When the organ finally releases its chord, almost a full minute later, what do we get? Crazy-loud-strident guitars, that’s what. Cool! Hacia Dos Veranos (“Towards Two Summers”) is a trio from Argentina; their debut EP, called Fragmentos de una tarde somnolienta (Fragments of a sleepy afternoon, perhaps?), was released was released in South America in 2005 on Muy Moderna Records and then in the U.K. in January 2006 on I Wish I Was Unpopular, an archly-named division of Unpopular Records. The MP3 is available courtesy of the band.

“Day OK” – Spiral Beach

Slinky spunky and skewed, “Day OK” sounds like no sort of music we might, pop-culturally, expect from four teenagers, even if they are from the musically advanced nation of Canada; but then again, I think teenagers in the 21st century have a whole other thing going on than either a) teenagers did in previous notable generations (i.e. baby boomer teens) or b) the current cultural stereotype (i.e. multi-tasking, iPod-addled techno-zombies) would have you believe. I love the ghostly, accordion-like keyboard riff that sets the jaunty tone, I love the gleeful syncopation, and I love the effortlessly quirky hook in the chorus, the repeated words bouncing what sounds like a minor third back and forth in a major setting, somehow. Singer Maddy Wilde has more depth of character in her voice than one often hears in singers quite literally twice her age (she’s got a great name, too). Whether this is a lucky early-career home run or indication of eventual superstardom–well, to quote Peter Walker from above, what do I know. The song is great, however. It can be found on the band’s new 10-song self-titled, self-released CD. The MP3 is available via the band’s site. Thanks to the very hard-working Largehearted Boy for the lead.

This Week’s Finds: April 2-8 (The Playwrights, Matt Costa, Starlight Mints)

“Dislocated (London Version)” – the Playwrights

A splendid, dense, and affecting 21st-century amalgam of the Gang of Four and the Jam from an intense young British quintet. It’s the melodica, to begin with, that has me paying attention, playing its wistful refrain in the intro underneath the slashing siren-like guitar dissonance that everyone like to call “angular.” After that the song belongs to vocalist Aaron Dewey, a singer with a somewhat one-dimensional tone and not necessarily a great range but an arresting presence, at once matter of fact and disconcerting. Dewey doesn’t quite sing what it sounds like he’s singing, and doesn’t quite say what he’s actually saying (I strongly suggest you head to the band’s web site, click on “lyrics,” and follow the words as he sings; it really changes the experience of listening to the song). “Dislocated” has a closed-in melody, with one note rarely moving more than a step or two away from the previous note, and yet look at what Dewey does with it: in the chorus, for instance, when he sings “I am feeling”—it sounds like some great leap he’s taking between “am” and “feeling” and yet it’s just one full step. I’m fascinated by stuff like that. While music this urgent and serious-sounding can readily bog down in its own dire potency, the Playwrights save themselves by the poignancy they mix into the stark, slashing drive. (“This is what happens when people open their hearts,” Dewey sings at the end.) “Dislocated” was a song previously released on a CD single, and re-recorded (thus the “London version”) for the band’s first full-fledged, widely-released CD, English Self Storage, which came out in March on Sink & Stove Records in the U.K., and is set for release in the U.S. later this month.

“Cold December” – Matt Costa

Sweet-voiced Southern California-based singer/songwriter Matt Costa has done here what I had previously considered impossible: he’s taken today’s (overly) prevalent jam-band-fed, laid-back-singer-songwriter vibe and made a good song out of it. Nothing against jam-band-fed, laid-back-singer-songwriters (or their fans), mind you; they’re all (by and large) pleasant fellows (they’re all fellows) making pleasant sounds. But they tend not to write songs, according to what my ears want and need. They seem instead ever-so-groovily content to combine aimless melodies and a few sturdy chords while they do their whispery-lazy, just-loping-around act or their hyper-wordy-and-rhythmic act. Costa sounds cut from the same cloth, but he’s got a lot more going for him, in my opinion. I hear it right from the start: over an itchy acoustic guitar he’s singing a real melody, and he even lets the melodic line end in an unresolved chord. Next thing we know, the song shifts, and we get a full-fledged pop hook, bright and emphatic and redolent of some old ’70s AM radio hit or another. And yet we’re not even at the chorus, leaving some unnamed complexity in the air. When we get there, the song actually folds in on itself introspectively–another unexpected, song-conscious touch. “Cold December” is the first track on Costa’s new CD, Songs We Sing, released last week on (uh-oh! Jack Johnson’s label!) Brushfire Records. The MP3 is via his site.

“Inside of Me” – Starlight Mints

That opening cascade on the piano tells you a lot of what you need to know here. It comes at you from all sides, sounds like four people trying to do one glissando and half knocking the drummer off his stool in the process. It’s a great intro to a stompy, glam-infected rocker that maintains a slightly crazy edge throughout. I love it when a band that can get truly weird–as Starlight Mints can—choose to keep it more or less under wraps and offer up their version of a straightforward pop song; the weirdness still seeps out through the seams. That’s a good thing. I like in particular the portentous reverb-y guitar that rings out every so often, and those loopy ELO harmonies that kick in around 3:00. The lyrics raise an eyebrow as well, as much as I can make them out (“So come inside and be my skin and bones”?). What’s in the water out there in Norman, Oklahoma anyway? The Flaming Lips are from the same town as these folks. “Inside of Me” is a track off the band’s new CD, called Drowaton, which is due out later this month on Barsuk Records. The MP3 is hosted on the Barsuk site<.

This Week’s Finds: Mar. 26-Apr. 1 (Jeremy Warmsley, The Stills, All Mighty Whispers)

“5 Verses” – Jeremy Warmsley

One part noodly-introspective bedroom rock, one part expansive pure pop, knitted together with fuzzy 21st-century beats, “Five Verses” wins me over more for its unfettered vitality and than for its closely-told boy-meets-girl story. (I’ll readily admit that I had to get past the “They met in a karoake bar…” opening; and yet I like to think that the singer/songwriter is more or less daring us to stick with him after that one.) Warmsley is a half-French, half-English troubadour, based in London, with a winning mixture of humility and cheek; his web site tells us that he “makes electronica with songs in them,” which is as brilliant a self-description as I’ve seen from a musician in quite a while. For me it’s the great swooping melody that rules this one–the steady dip down, the giddy leap up at the end of a couple of lines in each verse. And don’t miss the wacky little wordless bridge in the middle (around 1:40)–it’s literally an “ooh” and an “ahh” but what a great chord change that is. The song comes from Warmsley’s 5 Interesting Lies EP, released in November on Transgressive Records in the U.K. The MP3 is available via his site, thanks to a head’s up from Hedvika at the excellent Echo blog.


“In the Beginning” – the Stills

An exceedingly likable and well put-together song from this fine Montreal band. First we get one itchy electric guitar scratching out a gallopy one-two beat, the inherent tension of the sound accentuated by the background happenings–shimmery cymbals marking the beat while keyboards and guitars gather, seem ready to burst forward yet holding back in a drone-y, almost tuning-up sort of way. Then, at 0:39, bam: we get a focused, quickly memorable instrumental melody, the song now crackling with a great, swelling energy that I’m tempted to call “wholesome” for reasons I can’t quite pinpoint (perhaps because it sounds so organic, owing more somehow to folk music than rock’n’roll). I am particularly smitten with the section that links the verse to the simple chorus: first heard at 1:26, it couples the percussive guitar of the intro to a melody so friendly it’s actually rather inspiring; listen for the Hammond organ flourishes that add to the chewy texture. Note too how the false ending leads to an “outro” that nicely mirrors the intro. “In the Beginning” will appear on the Stills’ forthcoming CD Without Feathers, due for release in early May on Vice Records.



“Love Revolution” – All Mighty Whispers

Another song with a vibe at once friendly and polished, this one wrapping itself in an ineffable sort of groovy-’60s wash: the effortless melody, the bassline hook, the head-bobbingly agreeable beat (complete with real drums), and the busy but unidentifiable background fill combine to ooze an unbearable nostalgia for a past that never quite existed. On top of it all comes singer Peter Hill’s voice, a pleasantly reedy instrument given a wonderful double-tracked substance that helps make “Love Revolution” sound both as light as air and as solid as a big comfy chair. I can’t always identify a producer’s impact–and often his or her job is to sound like no one was producing it at all–but in this case I tip my metaphorical hat in the direction of Grzegorz Czachor, the Polish producer enlisted to create this spiffy piece of expert pop, and to the Norwich (U.K.) trio behind the music for enlisting him. “Love Revolution” is the title track of the band’s self-titled debut CD, released in Februrary. The MP3 is available via the band’s site.

This Week’s Finds: March 19-25 (Sinéad O’Connor, Midlake, Spider)

“Y Mas Gan” – Sinéad O’Connor

Make no mistake: Sinéad O’Connor is a magical singer; the various twists and turns her career have taken, many of them controversial, have maybe blinded us to how deeply talented she really is. We were given another chance to figure this out last year, in the most unexpected of ways, as the often hair-free Irish singer recorded an album of roots reggae covers entitled Throw Down Your Arms (self-released in October on a label she calls That’s Why There’s Chocolate and Vanilla). It was the kind of well-intentioned but confusing-to-the-mass-media effort that was destined to look like a sort of stunt and fade away. I pretty much missed it, telling myself “Well, I’m not really much of a reggae fan anyway” and leaving it at that. Then I stumbled last week upon this MP3 atmusic.download.com and I realize I may have missed a treasure. This song has great musical character from the get-go, revolving around the mischievous dialogue between a melodic bass line and sly horn chart that unfolds against the familiar loping reggae beat. O’Connor’s voice has an incredible purity at its center, and she has learned to sing with a stunning sort of restraint, almost as if she were able to whisper with her mouth wide open. Listen for her overdubbed, upper-register harmonies, which offer a series of brilliant, unanticipated intervals in the service of the melody and the message. O’Connor traveled to Jamaica to record the CD in Bob Marley’s Tuff Gong recording studio, with the help of master reggae rhythm section/producers Sly and Robbie; she even went so far as to use at least one musician on each track who played on the original. Here she sings a song recorded first by the Abyssinians in 1972. Most of the words are not in English; she may or may not be playing entirely by whatever rules that practitioners and/or fans believe may govern the genre; all I know is that the end result is not only beautiful but distinctly inspiring.

“Roscoe” – Midlake

After a chuggy bit of Fleetwood Mac-ish keyboard vamping, we find ourselves abruptly in the middle of an unfathomable tale involving stonecutters, mountaineers, and an odd sense of displacement in both time and space. As difficult as it is to get grounded here lyrically, I feel myself completely embraced musically, and this is I believe one of pop music’s most wondrous gifts: the capacity to juxtapose accessible music with mysterious lyrics (just as powerful a combination, I think, as the more often discussed idea of setting sad lyrics to happy music). Too often it seems bands feel the need to push into obscurity both musically and lyrically, and while this no doubt can have its own rewards, it rarely works that well for the uninitiated listener, or for anyone seeking great pop music, which requires some amount of listenability by definition. Longtime Fingertips visitors may recall Midlake for the majestic “Balloon Maker,” a stylish piece of Brit-inflected neo-progressive pop from the band’s debut CD in 2004. “Roscoe” sounds almost nothing like that, its Stevie Nicks groove transforming singer/songwriter Tim Smith’s voice into that guy from Bread this time, although his Thom Yorke-ish tone is still pleasantly apparent. A five-piece band from Denton, Texas, Midlake will release its second CD, entitled (unfathomably enough) The Trials of Van Occupanther, on Bella Unionin July.

“Don’t Be Afraid, I’ve Just Come to Say Goodbye (The Ballad of Clementine Jones)” – Spider

Sometimes this song pulls the listener in to such a whispery-quiet place it seems I can hear not merely the acoustic guitar but the very act of strings being plucked and the guitar’s body shifting on the thighs of the guitar player. We’re talking intimate sound here, and yet what’s so bracing and engaging is how much else is going on even in this very personal setting: a wistful flute comes and goes, as does a french horn, a lonely yet precise wood block, and, even, some backward-sounding electric guitar lines, everything coming and going with so much gentleness that you don’t realize something has been until it’s not again. At the center of everything is Jane Herships, doing musical business as Spider, and it is her semi-trembly yet articulate voice that anchors the effort and keeps it from veering off into some sort of lo-fi abyss. If you think it’s easy to sing this closely and precisely and unwaveringly in pitch, you haven’t tried; and if you think it doesn’t make a difference, you haven’t heard enough singers who can’t do it. “Don’t Be Afraid…” is from Spider’s eight-song CD, The Way to Bitter Lake, which was released earlier this year.

This Week’s Finds: March 12-18 (SXSW edition: Pieta Brown, Oppenheimer, Nicolai Dunger)

The massive music orgy otherwise known as SXSW gets underway in Texas this week: more than 1,300 artists from around the world performing at a crazy variety of venues in Austin over a five-day stretch (you do the math–that’s 260+ acts a day). In salute of this ear-boggling enterprise, all three picks this week come from the really worthwhile storehouse of more than 700 MP3s the SXSW folks have amassed on their website. Here are three of the best ones I’ve come across so far (in addition to the ones featured over the past couple of weeks–namely, Editors and Guillemots).


#807 – Pieta Brown

With great offhand authority, Pieta Brown sounds like Kathleen Edwards taught by Rickie Lee Jones to stand in for Tom Waits; “#807” is all sturdy melody and slinky atmospherics, delivered with a dusky, jazzy sort of smolder. Words are carressed, slightly slurred, Brown’s voice alternating between soft and broken, and yet (here’s the impressive thing) never overwhelming the musical movement. I love the combination of intent and spaciousness created by the interplay between the understated drumming and the forlorn electric guitar (hat’s off to guitarist and co-producer Bo Ramsey), and how Brown lays herself in among them, rather than seek attention histrionically, as so many singers these days appear taught to do. I’m not a fan of generic bluesy-folksy stuff, but the minute I hear a song with a strong sense of its own center like this, I feel rivetted. Daughter of singer/songwriter Greg Brown, Pieta (pronounced pee-ETT-uh) has recorded three CDs to date; “#807” is from her latest, In The Cool, released in September 2005 on Valley Entertainment.


“Breakfast in NYC” – Oppenheimer

Mid-tempo synth-pop enlivened by its splendid juxtaposition of a heavy, drone-propelled beat and sweet soaring vocals. Subtract the synthesizers–both the fuzzy, deep one and the dingly high one–and the song is revealed at its core to be Beach-Boys pure (the very first word, even, is “Summer”), its Brian Wilson-y sing-song verse setting up a heart-bursting hook in the chorus. It’s a hook that packs a grand wallop for almost no apparent reason: the melody takes what sound like joyful leaps both upward and downward that all turn out to be that most pedestrian of intervals, the third. A third is the basic building block of music; all chords are based on thirds. And yet here the interval sounds towering, revelatory–probably due to both the singer’s immaculate tone and the irresistible use of echo harmonies as the thirds alternate achingly between major and minor chords. Ahhhh–just brilliant. Oppenheimer is a duo, first names Shaun and Rocky, from Belfast, Northern Ireland; they are thus far keeping information about themselves close to the vest. I can’t discover, for instance, which one is the lead singer, but I do know that the band’s debut CD is expected out in June on Bar/None Records.


“Hunger” – Nicolai Dunger

A joyous re-working of Van Morrison’s classic sound (ah, if only Van the Man himself hadn’t forsaken this vibe so entirely in recent decades; I miss it, is all). “Hunger” is all free-wheeling drive and shake-it-out passion, complete with warm piano riffs, soulful organ lines, surf-guitar accents (!), and hot horn charts. The wonderful combination of Dunger’s no-holds-barred vocal style and the song’s tumbly energy makes me certain when I say: Give me good over “new” any day of the week. All too many rock music writers, online and otherwise, issue noisy disapproval when they hear “nothing new” in the music of this or that band, but since when is newness a categorical virtue? Quality is the only thing it seems to me we should be paying attention to, and previously unheard sounds do not have the corner market on quality, says me. But I digress. As for Dunger, he was once a promising soccer player on the Swedish national team who was discovered by a producer who happened to walk by as Dunger sang on the balcony of his apartment in the small city of PiteÃ¥, on the Gulf of Bothnia in northern Sweden. That’s their story and they’re sticking to it. Dunger has been recording CDs for European release since 1996; “Hunger” can be found on his latest, entitled Here’s My Song, You Can Have It…I Don’t Want It Anymore, to be released in the U.S. tomorrow on Zoe Records.

This Week’s Finds: March 5-11 (Guillemots, Gus Black, Envelopes)

“Who Left the Lights Off, Baby?” – Guillemots

“I don’t think there’s a greater art than writing a three-minute pop song that people can sing when they’re drunk,” says Guillemots’ singer and songwriter Fyfe Dangerfield (nee Hutchins). Okay, so this one’s five minutes; but who’s counting when it’s this good-natured, finger-snappy, and brimming with loose-limbed musicality. “Who Left the Lights Off, Baby?” harkens back to Dexy’s Midnight Runners (“Come On, Eileen,” anyone?) for some of its rollicking spirit, but seems to be operating in a universe entirely of its own. On the one hand effortlessly catchy, the song on the other hand has some unusual things going on in the background and around the edges, such as the wash of spacey keyboards that accompanies most of the way through, the beepy synthesizer outburst at 2:03, the crunchy guitar that slashes in off the beat at around 2:42 (sounding as if another song has accidentally starting playing on my MP3 player at the same time), and then that startlingly hot sax solo that closes things down. Some of the song’s ineffable originality may have to do with the multinationality of the band: while Dangerfield is from England, the guitarist is from Brazil, the drummer from Scotland, and the bass player is from Canada (she’s also a woman, and is actually playing the double bass). “Who Left the Lights Off, Baby?” is a song off From the Cliffs, the band’s eight-song EP due out next week on Fantastic Plastic. The MP3 is one of the hundreds of free and legal downloads available via the SXSW web site.


“Certain Kind of Light” – Gus Black

“Certain Kind of Light” is crisp, itchy, and immediately recognizable and appealing: recognizable because, yeah, the basic chord pattern is a well-well-worn path, appealing because, well, it’s an incredibly engaging shift to most people’s ears. Why else is “867-5309/Jenny” such an indelible part of rock’n’roll history? This time around L.A.-based singer/songwriter Gus Black takes on the classic progression, and the freshness here, to my ears, has to do with the song’s brisk, syncopated feel. Rather than take us on a straightforward, Tommy Tutone-ish 4/4 power pop rave-up, Black, with his potent, elastic tenor, delivers a delicious sense of tension via the rhythm and meter. (Extra points for him for doing so in under three minutes.) I can’t always decipher time signatures successfully, but something to do with three rather than four is happening here: note how the rhythm section lays out an urgent series of six beats, while you can simultaneously count a slower 1-2-3 under the basic melody. As far as the basic chord progression goes, I could start talking incoherently about relative minors and subdominants and all that, but in looking at a keyboard I noticed this: the chord pattern is rooted in the fact that any minor chord is converted to a major chord by simply taking its top note up a half step. There’s something powerful here, symbolically: just a half step separates minor from major in this instance. Light/dark, good/evil–supply your own metaphor. In the meantime we’ve all but forgotten about good old Gus Black, whose fourth CD, Autumn Days, is set for U.S. release March 21 on Cheap Lullaby Records; apparently it’s been out in Europe since last summer.


“Audrey in the Country” – Envelopes

I know, I know: she’s singing out of tune. But bear with me, and her, as together we try to make it okay anyway. Lead singer Audrey (yes) Pic gains some points back for her endearing, Parisian accent (many of us Americans find what we call “foreign accents” unaccountably endearing, for some reason). And maybe the accent somehow makes the pitch problems a little more bearable, but in the end chalk it up to one of pop music’s most mysterious (infuriating?) qualities–namely, that singing in tune is not a prerequisite for success. So stay with this quirky, bouncy little song and see if it doesn’t work for you too somehow. For me, when the band kicks in fully, at around 0:28, the swelling, bright blue joy of the melody and the perky, melodious accompaniment takes over and suddenly, life is bright and bouncy. The presence of what sounds like a Hammond B3 organ in the swirly mix definitely helps. No doubt this is some sort of quirky, autobiographical thing but I’m not spending a lot of time trying to figure it all out, I’m just enjoying the romping-through-the-meadows sound of the ensemble, which creates a sonic innocence in the context of which the off-key singing perhaps almost makes sense. Envelopes is (are? never sure how that works) a quintet featuring four guys from Sweden, and Audrey, from France; “Audrey in the Country” is a tune from the band’s first CD, entitled Demon, which was released last summer in Europe on the Psychotic Reaction label. The MP3 is available via the band’s web site.

This Week’s Finds: Feb. 26-March 4 (Editors, Shoot the Moon, Buried Beds)

“Munich” – Editors

All siren-like guitars and deep drive, “Munich” is an engaging puzzle. With a full-bodied bravado owing much to British forebears such as Ian McCulloch (Echo & the Bunnymen), vocalist Tom Smith repeats a limited number of minimalist phrases, sketching the sketchiest of stories, at the center of which is a terrific chorus that breaks one of my personal cardinal rules of songwriting: never force the singer to accent the wrong syllable for the sake of the music. And yet here’s Smith singing “People are fragile things, you should know by now/Be careful what you put them through,” the music forcing him to sing “fragile” unintelligibly, with equal accents on both syllables. But: so much for cardinal rules. Because of the song’s resplendent atmosphere, because of Smith’s engaging delivery, and, maybe most of all, because of the poignancy of the remark itself, it works. In fact I find myself half believing that the offbeat enunciation was purposeful, that to more effectively make the point he did not allow himself the vulnerability required to say what he’s saying clearly. In any case, “Munich” strikes me as a sharp new take on the sort of sound some British bands (Joy Division and Ultravox too, along with Echo) were exploring back in the early ’80s. Sure, you can ask: “Munich? Huh?” But to ask is to miss the point of a mystery rendered strong and true by the chiming guitars, the driving beat, the resonant lyrical fragments, and (my favorite touch) the ghostly minor seventh traced by what sounds like a synthesizer through the heart of the chorus. “Munich” is a song off the band’s debut CD, The Back Room, to be released in the U.S. in March on the Fader Label (it came out in the U.K. last year). The MP3 is one of the many new ones recently made available via the SXSW web site.

“Tales From the Sea” – Shoot the Moon

The rollicking charm of this homespun adventure is apparent from the get-go: the open-ocean piano/guitar vamp of the introduction, and then that immediate “hey, cool!” part when the phrase “captain of the ship” is ever so slightly delayed before the word “ship,” in a way that sounds like a wave breaking across the bow. While the loose-limbed, orchestral feel makes comparisons to Montreal’s more well-known export, the Arcade Fire, semi-inevitable, Shoot the Moon doesn’t ooze that band’s edgy anxiety even as there’s a certain sort of tumbly similarity to the sound. I’m finding it hard to follow exactly what’s going on (there are hints of all sorts of high-seas drama unfolding), but it’s all backdrop to the engaging music, with its oceanic ebbs and flows. Ever the sucker for octave harmonies, I particularly like the ones I’m hearing in what may be the chorus (the whole song is pretty loose-limbed, come to think of it) because it sounds, unusually, like female vocals on top (the band’s lead singer is actually Nadia Bashalani, but she takes a backseat on this song). Shoot the Moon is a three-man, three-woman band with one self-released CD under its belt—an eight-song EP called Where Stangers Live, which came out last year. The MP3 is available via their MySpace page.

“Camellia” – Buried Beds

The sparse, clunky-ish drumbeat that opens “Camellia” gives you no idea at all of the sultry, yearning song that follows. But a soft keyboard enters, and the hint of a slide guitar, and then Eliza Hardy opens her mouth. Ahh: she sings close in your ear, with a beautiful tone, but torn up just a bit. Really nice. Another way she engages me at the outset is the four-measure melody she starts with—it leads into the verse, and is heard only once more, at the very end. That’s an unusual touch; at the beginning it lengthens the melodic line almost mysteriously; at the end it provides an aching sort of closure. As alluring as Hardy’s voice is, she sounds maybe even better when joined in harmony by her original bandmate Brandon Beaver in the chorus (Buried Beds began as a duo, expanding since then to a quintet); of course this may also be because the chorus itself is gorgeous, with all the low-key assurance of a lost pop standard. Featuring an unusal array of instruments (including mandolin and viola), Buried Beds is a Philadelphia band that arose from something called the New Planet Art Collective, a community of writers, artists, and musicians not far from the University of Pennsylvania; “Camellia” is a song off the group’s debut CD, Empty Rooms, which has been available at band gigs since last year but has been more officially released last week. The MP3 is available via the band’s web site.