MP3s – Page 29 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Blind Lake (comfy, unhurried)

Comfy like a roomy old leather reading chair, “Lately” glides with offhanded purpose and resonant charm.

“Lately” – Blind Lake

Comfy like a roomy old leather reading chair, “Lately” glides with offhanded purpose and resonant charm. Fueled by crisp acoustic strumming, the song’s instrumental palette is craftily expanded by a melodic bass line, tasteful electric guitar accents, and some good old “oo-oos” in the background. No one is in a hurry here, but the song still feels sharp and essential.

At the center of it all is the underutilized trick of synchronized lead vocals, as the duo of
Lotta Wenglén and Måns Wieslander both sing the entire song, often without harmonizing. And there is something about their cumulative effort, leading to the climactic lyric “I’ve got myself a pair of slippery hands/And nothing to hold onto” that turns “Lately” from merely comfy to downright moving without my quite knowing how it happened.

Blind Lake is based in Böste, Sweden; they take their name from a 2003 sci-fi novel by American-Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson. In their press material, the band claims that “Lately” is “best played while driving on a slightly wet road on a late summer’s night while deep thinking.” Have yet to try it but I won’t argue.

You’ll find the song on the album On Earth, released earlier this month. Thanks again to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Thanks (minor-key rocker w/ appealing swagger)

While rock’n’roll may be past the point of reinventability, there is the occasional band that comes along and gives it a good ride.

“Bad Tattoos” – Thanks

There’s something intriguingly old-school about “Bad Tattoos”—the hand-constructed beat, with its slightly fuzzy and very insistent bass line; those penny-whistle synth bursts; and a female lead singer full of soul and swagger, who happens to perform with the name Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, the song’s sonic landscape and general drive feels entirely of our 21st-century moment. While rock’n’roll may be past the point of reinventability, there is the occasional band that comes along and gives it a good ride. The Portland sextet Thanks appears to be one of these bands. If nothing else, how often, I am realizing as I listen to this, do you hear a stompy, minor-key rocker these days? Not very often, I assure you.

I like too how embedded and cloaked the guitar work is here; more than a minute passes before you hear the guitar, and it arrives with such muted self-assurance (1:04) that it immediately seems as if it had already been here and you just weren’t paying attention. Through most of the rest of the song, the metallic, low-register splendor of Andrew Hanna’s guitar provides both motion and density to a song with a gratifying number of moving parts. By the time the recurring guitar line coalesces into a bit of a solo (2:50), you will have thoroughly forgotten that this song was ever anything but a guitar rave-up. But go back and listen to the beginning; surprise!

“Bad Tattoos” is a track from the annual and always engaging PDX Pop Now! Compilation, the 2015 version of which was released in early June, in advance of the PDX Pop Now! music festival, scheduled for later this month in Portland. More information about the 42-track album is available here. “Bad Tattoos” is also slated to appear on Thanks’ next release, No Mercy in the Mountain, their second full-length, and an album they are at this moment raising money for on Kickstarter.

Free and legal MP3: Heidi Gluck (rapid-pulsed acoustic confessional)

“One of Us Should Go” – Heidi Gluck

A breath of frictionless fresh air, “One of Us Should Go” is a rapid-pulsed acoustic confessional, and if it initially sounds like just another “girl with a guitar” song I invite you to listen more carefully. The instrumentation is simple but rich: in fact, there’s not a moment in this three-minute heart-breaker that doesn’t reveal itself to be exquisitely conceived and executed, from thoughtful electric guitar contributions to well-timed piano accents and creative electronics. Gluck’s plain-spoken vocals, which achieve the difficult trick of sounding like talking even while singing, add to the subtle interpersonal drama on display.

And the extra awesome part is how beautifully the song’s sound and structure intertwines with its content: this is a stunning breakup song, in which the music’s very feel echoes the inertia of a relationship that has outlived its spark, and the words of the chorus betray the difficulty of breaking the passivity with actual action:

I’m sure it’s nice out there
I’m sure there’s beauty everywhere
A wide open road
And one of us should go

Gluck is Canadian by birth, but has been living and working in the US midwest for a length of time that eludes internet research; I do know that she spent some years in Indiana, and has been in Lawrence, Kansas for about the past eight. Careful readers of liner notes (yes, such people still exist!; I have faith) may recognize her name from her session work with Juliana Hatfield and Margot & The Nuclear So and Sos, among others; she was also a member of the well-regarded Indiana band The Pieces in the early ’00s. “One of Us Should Go” is a track from Gluck’s first release as a solo artist, an EP called The Only Girl in the Room, which was released at the end of April on Lotuspool Records. You can stream the whole thing via SoundCloud. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. The EP is the first of a planned series of four; work begins on the next one this summer.

Free and legal MP3: Fabryka (adroit mix of dream and drive, from Italy)

Not often do you hear inventive bass-playing and inventive drumming intertwining so smartly while still allowing a coherent song to be built on top.

“The Unheard”- Fabryka

Check out the rhythm section on this one: not often do you hear inventive bass-playing and inventive drumming intertwining so smartly while still allowing a coherent song to be built on top. And what a coherent and engaging song it turns out to be—astutely arranged and structurally sound, “The Unheard” is a marvelous slice of 21st-century rock’n’roll, coming to us from the seemingly unlikely source of Bari, Italy, down there at the top of the heel of Italy’s “boot.”

I like how busy and determined this is even while cloaking itself in a bit of shoegazey mist. There’s that rhythmic pulse at the bottom driving things, but it’s that ongoing, canny employment of both electric guitars and synthesizers that ultimately gives the ear a lot to chew on—so much, in fact, that what appears to be the song’s chorus (first heard at 1:31) feels like a dreamy breather between purposeful building blocks. Both the guitars and the synths each get a motif-like theme to express—the former a hard-charging, syncopated riff (first heard at 0:55), the latter a chimy noodle (1:21) that shares a similar sense of syncopation. The more I listen, the more I am impressed with the song’s construction, and the more I think I hear something genuinely timeless in its mix of drive and dream. Give good credit to singer Tiziana Felle, whose voice can penetrate or levitate, depending on the need.

“The Unheard” is a song from the band’s new EP, Sparkles, which comes out in Italy next week. This will be the band’s third release, following an EP in 2012 and a full-length album, Echo, in 2013.

Free and legal MP3: Star Tropics

Seasonally evocative power pop

“Summer Rain” – Star Tropics

Urging itself into our lives at the ever-wonderful nexus of dream pop and power pop, “Summer Rain” features a ringing, evocative guitar line, a reverby backwash, a brisk backbeat, and a breath-filled, sweet-voiced lead singer. You don’t need any more description than that, right?

Well, okay, I’ll talk a little. First I am taken with how all but onomatopoetic the song is, with the aforementioned ringing guitar line deftly mimicking rainfall, and with the aforementioned sweet-voiced lead singer (Nikki; no last name provided) creating, for me, somehow, the sound-picture of a warm, grey-green landscape moistened by a gentle but persistent shower (note the summer rain evoked here is of the comforting old-school variety, not the terrifying climate-change-driven monsoons of the 2010s). Next I am oddly intrigued by the brief, willowy instrumental break two-thirds of the way through the song (2:22); when songs are this assured and on-point, I’m always interested in what they are going to do with a bit of leisure time, as it were. Here we get meander-y 25 seconds that begins with the guitar kind of refusing the spotlight that was seemingly aimed at it—rather than the confident chiminess of the intro we get unassertive arpeggios and, most intriguing of all, the distant sound of repeated notes played high up on the neck. The guitar is joined by a particularly low-tech kind of synthesizer, pushing out a wistful, air-toned melody that comes from an entirely different world than Planet Dream Pop but is all but heart-breaking and perfect.

Star Tropics is a Chicago-based four-piece with one previous 7-inch release to their name. “Summer Rain” is part of double-sided single released in March. MP3 via Insomnia Radio.

Free and legal MP3: deeB (evocative, trip-hoppy instrumental)

Such is the aural buffet launching the song that the listener is hard-pressed to be impatient at the music’s unhurried unfolding.

“Call It a Day” – deeB

The nostalgia floating through “Call It A Day” is mutli-layered, irresistible, all but unfair: containing within it both the stylized noir-ish-ness of ’60s soundtracks and the elegant trip hop of three decades later, which had itself found inspiration in those evocative spy-movie sounds in the first place. And now that’s 20 years ago at this point, so here we are again. The phrase “what goes around comes around” seems especially apt, given the itchy, circular ambiance of this canny, constructed, cinematic instrumental.

And yes, I have a hard time resisting the urge to call any instrumental “cinematic,” if only because of the way sounds skittering across a lyric-free aural landscape to my ears almost automatically conjure some kind of wide-open, wordless screen scene or another. But this one all but demands the label, with its three-dimensional distances, footsteppy echoes, and suggestive detail. Such is the aural buffet launching the song that the listener is hard-pressed to be impatient at the music’s unhurried unfolding, which is hung on a framework of unresolved chords, intriguing noodles of sound, and an unpretentious beat. We don’t get even the barest melody until 30 seconds in, and from there the main theme is evaded and implied but not heard until 1:25—and, even at that point it sounds more like an afterthought at first than the star of the show. It is restated at 1:38 but still sounds like throat-clearing. Finally, at 1:52, the theme emerges with confidence but only at 1:59 do we get the first full iteration—and we see now that previously we had been hearing only the theme’s second half. United with its partner, the sparse but purposeful theme feels rich and heady, bolstered by regular visits from a whale-ish trombone sound, ghostly guitar lines, and the drumbeat’s unfrazzled shuffle.

The man calling himself deeB here is Danny van den Hoek, a Dutch producer/beatmaker who is aligned with a collective called Phonophanatic in the Netherlands. “Call It A Day” is a track from the eight-song EP A Day in a City, released in January on the netlabel Dusted Wax Kingdom, based in Bulgaria. MP3 courtesy of Insomnia Radio. You can download the whole album for free at http://dustedwax.org/dwk296.html; if you like the sound of this one song, I recommend the rest.

Free and legal MP3: Dot Dash

Hard-edged power pop, w/ melodic lead guitar

“Rainclouds” – Dot Dash

Concise, hard-edged power pop that puts the humble electric guitar at the center of the melodic action. It’s rare enough to hear an electric guitar front and center here in the 2010s, never mind a guitar playing an actual melody, and really never mind a guitar playing a melody that does not echo or mirror any of vocal melodies otherwise in the song. Songs that manage this are usually well-built and worthwhile.

So there’s a good amount going on in this punchy nugget of a tune, which clocks in at a nifty 2:43 (the same clock time as Big Star’s “Thirteen” and ABBA’s “Waterloo,” among other pithy classics). One way that “Rainclouds” saves time is by only employing one verse: it opens the song, after the intro, and is never heard from again. The chorus, meanwhile, is an intricate construct featuring one sweetly satisfying melody (the part culminating in “…put the blame on me,” heard first at 0:45) that seems to have been planted in the song just so you’ll wait for it to come back. Which it then doesn’t do quite as often as you want it to. Speaking of which, when the verse is scheduled to return, it doesn’t, and instead we get the aforementioned guitar melody in full force—at 1:09, and repeated on the spot at 1:23. The hint we get that this has replaced the verse comes from the unexpected return of the verse’s wordless backing vocals during the repeat (1:29). This strikes me as kind of unusual, hearing “ah-ah-ahs” underneath a guitar melody rather than a vocal melody. Someone has surely done it somewhere before but I can’t bring anything to mind.

Dot Dash is a D.C.-based quartet that took its name from a song by the seminal British punk/art band Wire (dot dash is the letter “A” in Morse code). Front man Terry Banks and bassist Hunter Bennett were previously together in the band Julie Ocean. “Rainclouds” is from the album Earthquakes & Tidal Waves, the band’s fourth, released last month by The Beautiful Music, a label in Ottawa. The album was produced by the semi-legendary Mitch Easter, best known for his work on R.E.M.’s early albums, at his studio in North Carolina. You can listen to it as well as purchase it via Bandcamp. MP3 once again via Insomnia Radio.

Free and legal MP3: Rumble (minor key, faux-’60s romp)

Effortlessly delightful, “Nvr Surrender” is a chewy concoction of retro-y goodness.

“Nvr Surrender” – Rumble

Effortlessly delightful, “Nvr Surrender” is a chewy concoction of retro-y goodness, from the reverbed guitar effect in the intro through the assertive minor-key backbeat the song settles itself into and, perhaps most of all, front woman Kaylie Schiff’s layered, affect-free soprano. Schiff embraces this faux-’60s romp with an astute blend of earnestness and nonchalance—while the music itself is wrapped in a more or less compulsory shell of irony, she never lets irony seep into her tone. This seems important to me all of a sudden.

Also important: the subtle vibrancy of the arrangement. It’s easy to think, oh, it’s a retro thing, they’re just following the dots, but no not really. To begin with: that oddly hesitant piano descent that opens the song—what exactly is that? Its idiosyncrasy is compelling. And listen for the horns (or, horn-like sounds) that color the background in a variety of ways. They sound unexpectedly inventive. Likewise the string (or string-like sounds), which get kind of crazy here and there, but without being showy about it. And those chimes!: how perfectly restrained. And the wind! (The wind?) Holding it all together is the sturdiness of the melody, which proceeds with expert inevitability. Quite a spiffy tune, top to bottom.

Rumble is the Los Angeles-based duo of Kaylie Schiff and Richie Follin, who played previously together in the band Guards. “Nvr Surrender,” with its unexplained missing vowels, is the opening track of Rumble’s three-song EP, released in January. This is the band’s first recording, and seems to be called either Rumble or ep.1. You can listen via Bandcamp, and you can get the EP there for free if you hand over an email address.

Thanks to the band for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: The Fireworks (melodic three-chord headbanger)

A blistering, buzzy shot of punk-ish pop (or, perhaps, pop-ish punk).

“Runaround” – The Fireworks

A blistering, buzzy shot of punk-ish pop (or, perhaps, pop-ish punk), “Runaround” is a brazen reminder that digitalia only gets you so far in a world that still exists in three dimensions (so far). There’s a chunky permanence to the guitar-bass-drum attack of The Fireworks that renders the knob twiddling that dominates 21st-century pop music sound like a kind of quaint sideline. Music that does not depend upon physical vibrations of physical objects in the physical world is still music, of course, but that’s my ongoing point: there are different kinds of music, and engaging instances of all these different kinds can and must each be encouraged and celebrated, rather than one kind being dismissed as somehow “un-hip” while another kind experiences a bubble of over-production. Coming to a classic, melodic, three-chord headbanger from the vantage point of the year 2015, to my ears, automatically makes this new and different from whatever past bands you’d like to cite as progenitors of this style. (Me I hear a kind of Elastica-meets-Ramones vibe; what could be bad?)

The song’s simple, crowning achievement is the relentless downturn at the end of each verse line. Classic pop would often give us a downturn at the end of the first line, balanced by an upturn at the end of the second line. Here, the downturn at the end of the second line not only fools us by going down at all but goes down to kind of an off note (first heard at 0:18), surely not the note our ears were expecting. “Runaround” takes us three seven straight downturns (alternating four of the first kind and three of the second) before the last line of the verse becomes the beginning of the chorus, with the long-awaited upturn at the end of the word “Runaround.” Through it all, lead singer Emma Hall finds an effective middle ground between blasé and excited, letting the hugeness of the guitar sound swell her forward without giving her much pause. I always liked best the punks who weren’t too in love with their toughness; they were the ones to count on for melody. And still apparently are.

The Fireworks are a quartet from London. “Runaround” is the second track off the band’s debut album, Switch Me On, which was released last month on Shelflife Records. You can listen to it as well as buy it via Bandcamp.

MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Angharad Drake (simple setting, potent singing & songwriting)

Via the song’s soft, triplet-based accompaniment, you can just about sense the leg-pumping momentum, the giddy semi-dizziness of leaning straight back into the pendulum energy of an actual swing.

“Swing” – Angharad Drake

Lovely and unassuming, “Swing” acquires gentle power from its soft, triplet-based accompaniment, which as the song unfolds does indeed give the listener the sensation of being on a swing—you can just about sense the leg-pumping momentum, the giddy semi-dizziness of leaning straight back into the pendulum energy. Listen to the swing of the chorus—“If I could be anything/I’d be your darling”—in which Drake achieves the almost impossible trick of employing an awkward scan for both musical and metaphorical purpose: the “incorrect” emphasis amplifies the swinging sensation while also capturing the ambiguous command of one on a swing, where you are in control but also not really. And you are by necessity alone.

Through it all, “Swing” carries with it the force of Angharad Drake’s clear, tranquil voice, combining an intimate tone with unexpected potency when the moment calls for it. Young singer/songwriters don’t often write and sing with this much authority, and compound the problem by too obviously attempting to compensate. Drake glides easily into her simple sonic landscape of guitar and voice, drawing only as much attention to herself as is required, leaving us with the satisfying sense of having been visited more by a great song than a particular personality. This will serve her well in the long run. We grow far more easily weary of personalities than songs.

Drake is from Brisbane; her first name is not as difficult as it looks—accentuate the second syllable and it becomes pleasantly easy to say. “Swing” is the title track from an eight-song EP, her second, that she released in September. You can listen to and and buy it via Bandcamp. Thanks to Insomnia Radio for the head’s up.