Category: MP3s

“Fire Sign” – S.G. Goodman

Strong personality and drive

“Fire Sign” – S.G. Goodman

Alternating between a dusty stomp and a keening incantation, “Fire Sign” finds S.G. Goodman sounding weary yet self-possessed. At the song’s heart, the Western Kentucky singer/songwriter changes vocal registers to persistently pose the question “Who’ll put the fire out?” The repetition, lyrically and musically, takes on an aspect of supplication. Is part of her wondering what it’ll take to extinguish her inner drive? Why is she assuming it can/will in fact be extinguished? Unless she’s pondering the permanent extinguishment that awaits us all. Her press material does report that this song was written in the aftermath of the deaths of both her dog and a good friend and mentor while Goodman was out on a grueling tour. Meanwhile, why is it a “who” versus a “what”? (Note that in the same material she answers the question directly: “The only person who can put my fire out is myself.”)

Astrologically speaking, fire signs are characterized by their strong personalities and drive. This song has both. Goodman’s knack for the offbeat turn of phrase–“Shapeshifting through the night of life’s turn rows”? “No curling in the daylight”?–is buttressed by the music’s durable framework. We don’t hear anything but bass and drum under her cold-open vocals until 36 seconds in. The only addition we get at first is a thoughtful, resonant guitar, describing phrases that lag behind the song’s rhythmic center. Halfway through (1:12) we hear a keyboard that’s just as thoughtful and restrained, adding almost subliminally to the hand-wrought texture, moving to the front of the mix only at the tail end of the coda. What the song may ultimately lack in development it makes up for in potency. No one’s putting Goodman’s fire out just yet.

“Fire Sign” is a song from Goodman’s forthcoming album, Planting By the Signs, which will be arriving in June. She was previously featured on Fingertips in August 2020.

“Wherever” – Jonas Carping

Steady melodies, resonant vocals

“Wherever” – Jonas Carping

There’s something about the central descending melody delivered by Jonas Carping’s rich baritone that feels especially satisfying here. Perhaps all the more so because of how Carping teasingly withholds the crucial chord progression that underpins the melody the first time he takes us through it (0:12-0:22). As a listener I feel both intrigued and a little “huh?” at that point. But the context is corrected immediately thereafter (listen for that first, greatly anticipated chord change at 0:27), and throughout the rest of the song.

The other attractive thing about “Wherever” is the way its aural space subtly shifts as the song unfolds. For the first 50 seconds we’re in an unmoored, vacant lot of a space, with vague background sounds accompanying a heartbeat drumbeat. Things solidify slightly at 0:49 as a full drum kit kicks in while a droning electric guitar ringingly expands the landscape. A brief but incisive drum fill at 1:12 flips a sonic switch and we lose the muted fogginess of the opening third. As things progress the song’s simple, steady melodies acquire a sort of august resonance, amplified by Carping’s sonorous vocals. While the song stays mostly within his lower register, the couple of times in the last minute that he reaches slightly higher are each a mini-highlight.

Jonas Carping is a singer/songwriter based in Lund, in the south of Sweden. Interesting story: Carping has been submitting his music to Fingertips since 2012–enough times to be an inbox regular, not enough times to be an annoyance. I’ve always liked his songs but they each time seemed to fall just a little short, due no doubt to my own idiosyncrasies as a listener. “Wherever,” for whatever reason, hits the mark for me; so here, at long last, is Jonas Carping. “Wherever” is a song from an upcoming EP. MP3 via the artist.

“Consequences” – The Spectacular Fantastic

Semi-lo-fi semi-power-pop

“Consequences” – The Spectacular Fantastic

An early-era Fingertips favorite returns for the second time in, oh, 20 years. The Spectacular Fantastic are still up to their semi-lo-fi, semi-power-poppy ways, guitars and fuzz and melodies at the ready. Clocking in at a pop-rock perfect 3:33, “Consequences” is adeptly built, with a solid underlying chug that gives the incisive guitar work time to stretch out. Frontman Mike Detmer sings in a tone that sounds one part irritated and one part wounded; it’s a fine line sometimes. There are even some loud-soft and fast-slow dynamics at play here, a perhaps unusual touch for such a homegrown enterprise.

“Consequences” grabs the ear with its opening line–“What I do when I do what I do/Is none of your business”; after that things get charmingly elusive in terms of both structure and content. The lyrics sound half defiant, half apologetic. Consciously or not, this appears to be reflected in a song that seems to operate in a middle ground between verse and chorus, somehow not possessing either thing fully. There is basically one eight-measure melody–it ascends, descends, and then sort of resolves and sort of doesn’t. While you’re left thinking about that, there is space for the guitar, in all its nicely articulated glory, its tone calling to us from another time and place. For variation, the main melody at one point gets delivered, stripped down, in half time. As for hooks, there is (kind of) one–the recurring, repeated lyrical phrase “I don’t care”–and yet its very concept is undermined, humorously (I think!), by the song’s title. The guy is braying about not caring and yet the song is called “Consequences.”

The Spectacular Fantastic is a loose-knit, intermittently gathered project fronted by Mike Detmer, whose day job for the past four years or so has him running a neighborhood coffee spot with his wife in Lawrenceburg, Indiana, on the western outskirts of the greater Cincinnati metro area. (It’s called Funny Farm Coffee, another hint at the sense of humor Detmer deploys.) “Consequences” is a track from TSF’s forthcoming album, Fantasy Clouds, coming out later in February. Thanks to Mike for the MP3. By the way, all of the band’s releases–eight previous LPs and four EPs–are uploaded on the Internet Archive and are available there for free.

For those keeping score at home, the Spectacular Fantastic have been featured here three previous times: twice in the innocent days of 2005, and once more in the substantially less innocent year of 2016.

“Stereo” – Kendall Jane Meade

Exquisite singing, memorable melody

“Stereo” – Kendall Jane Meade

What starts as a precise bit of acoustic singer/songwriter fare transforms itself in the chorus into a memorable mid-tempo rocker. What pulls the listener in and through is Kendall Jane Meade’s beguiling singing voice. Soft and silvery, it’s the kind of voice that makes you wonder why some other people even bother to sing. Equally important here is the strength of the melody in the chorus. With the verse, the ear gets it, sure, she has a pretty voice; when the chorus arrives, by some deep alchemy the thing leapfrogs to a new level. The instrumental bridge with the ringing, distorted electric guitar (1:37) is an unexpected bonus. “Stereo” is not very long; the chorus only comes around twice. I put the song on repeat and left it there for quite a while.

The song had its origins in news in 2023 about Madonna canceling tour dates due to a health scare. Like Madonna, Meade is from Detroit and had always felt a kinship with the so-called “queen of pop.” The thought of potentially losing this hometown icon put Meade in a reflective mood, and “Stereo” was the result.

Meade was previously featured on Fingertips back when she was recording as Mascott, in 2013. I was as smitten with her voice back then as I am here in 2025. “Stereo” is a song from Space, Meade’s first solo album released under her own name, coming out at the end of February on Mother West Records.

“Cut Stitch Scar” – CocoRosie

Expansive, idiosyncratic art rock

“Cut Stitch Scar” – CocoRosie

As adventurous and idiosyncratic as ever, the Casady sisters are back with their singular brand of expansive, inscrutable art rock. Alternately heavy and restrained, changing rhythms and tones at will, “Cut Stitch Scar” traffics in one of CocoRosie’s superpowers, which is the capacity to be experimental and accessible at the same time. Even as it takes a while to get one’s arms around this one as a whole experience, the song’s initial urgency brings the listener in without hesitation. Bianca Casady sings with that child-like warble of hers, but rather than hesitancy it conveys authority. The lyrics urge us to “Take a leap of faith,” and that’s just what listening to CocoRosie demands. You’re not going to know what they’re singing about, you’re not going to anticipate or necessarily vibe with all of their musical choices, but it’s so clear that they know what they’re doing that I see no reason not to jump in with them.

That said, this song maybe needs a few listens. It starts blippy and glitchy, quickly acquires a satisfying percussive groove, and starts, lyrically, in the middle of some sort of dramatic, dimly understood circumstance, perhaps a dream. The tempo, and much of the instrumentation, disappears at the tail end of the verse and into the chorus. Electronics mix with heavenly backing vocals. The lyrics, as ever with the Casadys, may often baffle but they always always scan. The groove returns, vanishes, returns. Rubbery synths are heard. Vocals get distorted. But we never get too far away from satisfying chords. That may be one of the things that keeps the song legible to the ear, however weird it gets: those satisfying chords.

Bianca and Sierra–who identify as part Native American–had an unorthodox, peripatetic childhood, moving regularly, living in a variety of different states, and being exposed to a variety of bizarre, New Age-y experiences, some more disconcerting than others. Their history together as musicians is by now too long and involved to summarize, but you can read a little more about them via the three previous times they’ve been featured on Fingertips: in 2007, 2010, and 2017.

“Cut Stitch Scar” is a song from the forthcoming album Little Death Wishes, arriving at the end of March on Joyful Noise Records. It’s the duo’s eighth album, dating back to their 2004 debut.

photo credit: Kate Russell

Kufsat Shimurim – Afor Gashum

Urgent, atmospheric, post-punk-ish

“Kufsat Shimurim” – Afor Gashum

At once urgent and atmospheric, “Kufsat Shimurim” churns post-punk-ishly, augmented by the canny use of random sounds and sound effects. The song takes its time to unfold, as the instrumental palette–guitars, bass, drum, noise–marks out a series of chords presented in a clipped, persistent rhythm. When they start (0:43), lead singer Michal Sapir’s pure, high-ranging vocals, in Hebrew, offer an effective counterbalance to the murk and clangor in the background. At the song’s midway climax, the instrumental break transitions from the legible to the abstract, as various electronic tones interject atonally but compellingly. Even without understanding a word of what’s being said I get a very 2024-ish sense of light struggling for footing in the darkness.

Based in Tel Aviv, Afor Gashum is a trio that self-identifies as a “long-standing and prominent member of Israel’s underground dissident music scene.” After a well-regarded debut cassette in 1989, the band, going their separate ways, did not record another album until 2013, but have been intermittently releasing albums ever since. “Kufsat Shimurim” is a track from their fifth album, Temperature, released last month. According to the band, the song grew out of Sapir’s participation in something called the Noise Agency, which was an artist residency program in Tel Aviv dedicated, broadly, to the art of sound. Sapir was specifically involved in a project that involved sending people out to make “various sound interventions” in public urban spaces. The song itself, says the band, “examines the possibility of a group of sonic agitators to introduce a different voice, foreign and subversive.”

And because I cannot directly understand the song’s lyrics, I will leave you as well with what strikes me as a powerful mission statement for Temperature, via the album’s Bandcamp page:

At a time when the struggle for justice and equality for all feels more urgent than ever, Temperature sets out to explore unstable harmonic territories, possible science-fictional worlds and transformative emotions, in a bid to imagine a different future – more interconnected, responsible, equal and just.

“Two Feet Tall” – Ciao Malz

Bright and slightly woozy

“Two Feet Tall” – Ciao Malz

“Two Feet Tall” is brisk and bright and slightly woozy; between the pleasant warble of the guitars and the off-center time signature shifts, the music here effectively mirrors the uncertain state of mind the song appears to be concerned with. Malz has a feathery voice that sounds natural and matter-of-fact, one of those singing voices that, while definitely singing, sounds like talking. (This is a compliment.) The music hustles along in the verse then gets a little whiplashy with that half-time chorus. The lyrics address a certain sort of failure to communicate, epitomized by the recurring line “But I can never tell, quite tell you stuff.” As this line, repeating later, shortens to “I can never tell,” the connotation is smartly complicated. The overall vibe is friendly and cozy and slightly befuddled. This is also a compliment.

Keep an ear on the dizzy guitars all the way through, but note in particular the short warped solo that happens between 1:08 and 1:19. That’s my kind of detail. Another: the abrupt ending, after a final “I can never tell, quite tell you stuff,” which is one last way that form and content echo one another here.

Ciao Malz is the stage name adopted by the Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter Malia DelaCruz. “Two Feet Tall” is a track from her cleverly named EP Safe Then Sorry, released earlier this month on the Audio Antihero label. She had previously self-released an EP called To Go in 2020. Check the new one out over on Bandcamp.

photo credit: Alex SK Brown

“Candles” – Sunset Rubdown

Intricate and engaging

“Candles” – Sunset Rubdown

A dash of compositional complexity in an otherwise catchy song is my kind of good time. The Montreal band Sunset Rubdown, fronted by Wolf Parade’s Spencer Krug, emerges from a long hiatus to offer this syncopated bit of what sounds like prog pop, which is apparently a (minor) thing. It’s intricate, engaging, and does its business in just over three minutes. Prog pop!

The first thing to notice is the stop-start-y keyboard lines, which both introduce and underpin the song. A heavy bass tone adds deep ground while the flowing, descending melody of the verse, working on top of and against the ascending keyboard figures, gives the song its signature feeling of compelling intricacy. Another feature that pits one characteristic against an oppositional counterpart are the backing vocals provided by keyboardist Camilla Wynne, which add warmth to Krug’s edgier tone. Just as you’re getting the hang of it, and perhaps noticing that there’s no guitar involved, the edifice pretty much breaks down halfway through (1:29) via a short, muddy bridge that makes a veiled reference to the pandemic. Order returns when the keyboard lines re-establish themselves (2:02) and accompany us to the end, with a cheeky few plinks on the piano seeing us out.

Spencer Krug first made his mark on the indie rock scene at the head of the band Wolf Parade, which launched back in 2003, and has been active as recently as 2022. He debuted Sunset Rubdown in 2005, initially as a solo project but soon enough as a band, only to put it to bed by 2009, despite critical acclaim for the three full-band albums. “Candles” was originally recorded in 2020 as a solo effort by Krug, but when the band found themselves reunited–minus a guitarist–they decided to give the song another go and this is what happened. “Candles” is the third track of nine on the band’s new album, Always Happy to Explode, which was released last month. You can listen to it, and buy it, on Bandcamp.

“Condensation” – Sports Team

Sloppy-tight vibe

“Condensation” – Sports Team

So here we’re back to a standard backbeat (see previous review for context)–although maybe not quite. The emphasis is on the two and the four, the very definition of a backbeat, but at the same time the beat also manages, somehow, to swing. I think this has to do with the way lead vocalist Alex Rice toys with the melody, regularly hitting his marks ever so slightly ahead of the actual beat. (Don’t try this at home; it’s harder to do than it seems.) Consider it part of the song’s sloppy-tight vibe–just like the lyrics themselves, in the verse, which spill out in something of a stream and yet, if you pay attention, scan perfectly with the energetic melody.

Somewhat unusually, Sports Team is a six-person band, and everyone is surely doing something here, in service of the crowd-friendly ambiance, although it’s difficult to know who’s doing what when. There are melodic leaps, horn charts, gang-style backing vocals, keyboard glissandos, you name it. (There’s even a reference to “fingertips,” which I can’t help hearing.) Enough is happening such that we only get the verse melody twice, as the song’s busy construction provides us with what sounds like not only a pre-chorus and a chorus but, potentially, either a two-part post-chorus (is that even a thing?) or a post-chorus and a bridge. We can leave the structural analysis to more exacting minds than mine; I’ll take the welcoming beat and agile melodicism and be quite happy.

Based in London, Sports Team was founded in 2016, when five of the six bandmates were studying at Cambridge University. “Condensation” is a track from their forthcoming third album, Boys These Days, slated to arrive in February.

“Broken Ceilings” – Morgan Swihart

Simmering with intention

“Broken Ceilings” – Morgan Swihart

Smoky and deliberate, “Broken Ceilings” simmers with intention, unfolding on top of a wide-ranging if elusive instrumental palette. The drums are front and center, the electric guitar occasionally steps forward, a piano vamps a bit and disappears; strings, too–or synthesized strings?–provide texture and drama; an athletic bass line lends subtle movement. Are there horns, actual or digital, in here too? No matter. It turns out to be far less about individual lines and more about how the amalgam produces a swelling, wall-of-sound feeling, of a sort you might get from putting a rock band into a blender with a small orchestra. (Don’t try that at home either.)

The song launches, minus introduction, straight into the verse’s melody, with its languorous ascent, Swihart’s resonant voice extending her notes out there on the borderline between shy and coy. You can sense from the start that the song is aiming in the direction of Big, and cumulatively, we get there, even as Swihart seems surely to be holding something back, in a good way. I’m an ongoing fan of restraint, and, counterintuitively, that’s what is ultimately on display here, despite the buildup, the eventual volume, the unbridled bashing of drums. You can hear it in the way the melody ongoingly steps down to resolve, in the spaces Swihart leaves from line to line, and, a closing touch, at the very end, in the way she modestly slides away.

Morgan Swihart is a singer/songwriter based in Brooklyn. “Broken Ceilings” is a song from her short, appealing album of the same name, released in June. You can check it out on Spotify. A previous album, The Grave, was released last year.