MP3s – Page 37 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Kim Taylor (crisp, heartfelt acoustic stomp)

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence.

“Like a Woman Can” – Kim Taylor

Equal parts stomp and grace, “Like a Woman Can” spiders its way into your body with its minimal urgings and dusky vibe. I think it’s that hollowed-out stamping sound, kicking in around 0:32, that really hooks me and makes me engage in a bit of office dancing. To show you how centrally the song is organized around that elusive effect, which sounds kind of like clapping hands crossed with marching feet, see how the sound moves from background to foreground at 1:36, and how this is when everything begins to make perfect sense.

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence. In “Like a Woman Can,” she has come back to us with something of particular importance to say; in interviews, she has called it nothing less than a “protest song,” penned by someone not merely tired of the persistence of garden-variety misogyny but aware of how much we have to gain by getting past it already. It’s 2013, people.

Taylor was first featured here back in December 2005 and then again in August 2010. “Like a Woman Can” is a song from her fourth studio album, Love’s a Dog, which she recorded with drummer Devon Ashley and producer/multi-instrumentalist, and long-time musical associate, Jimi Zhivago. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. The album, funded via Kickstarter, was self-released earlier this month. You can listen to it, and buy it if you’d like, from Kim’s web site.

Free and legal MP3: Blurry Lines (power pop from Charleston SC)

Not all power pop songs are good, by any means, but every good power pop song, to my ears, is almost inescapably great.

“The Hunted” – Blurry Lines

The persistence of power pop well into the 21st century is something of a musical mystery. Even in its relative heyday, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, power pop never captured any kind of mainstream attention for itself. Small wonder—the genre is too elusive and difficult to describe for mass acceptance; it seems perversely fitting that some of the genre’s most definitive songs pre-date its actual existence (yeah, it’s complicated), and equally perversely fitting that the biggest hits associated with it are songs that I, at least, don’t consider power pop at all (I’m looking at you, “My Sharona” and “What I Like About You”). And yet, 30-some-odd years later, there are still new bands pointing themselves in this star-crossed direction. I have my own theories about this, but I’ve digressed enough for now. The bottom line is I’m a melody guy and this is a melodic genre. Not all power pop songs are good, by any means, but every good power pop song, to my ears, is almost inescapably great.

“The Hunted” is very good indeed, so you do the math. We get the ringing guitar line and a pounding 4/4 drumbeat; we get the sweet-voiced lead singer; we get a couple of different, indelible melodies; and we get it all in three minutes and twenty-six seconds. What seals something as power pop to me is an abiding tunefulness that feels both majestic and pining; there’s almost always an ache buried in a good power pop song, and the fact that it comes in a candy wrapping is no doubt a big part of the allure. I hear this grand bittersweetness right in the opening salvo (0:17), as Randall Cox sings, “I took a shoebox full of poems written ABAB style” and even as the melody resolves we are denied the underlying resolving chords, which now makes me realize something new about power pop: that a lot of its vitality comes the pre-resolution moment. Here, for instance, the melody that gets us from “full of poems” through “written ABAB” is what pulls me in and has me falling hard for this song. Likewise in the chorus, the “ran through the woods” part (0:55) seems more the heart of the melody than the actual climax. And if you think I am overanalyzing, try this: I believe these guys are paying homage to the greatest proto-power-pop song of all time in the bridge (2:17) when Cox sings, twice, “We’re going all the way.” Coincidence? I think not. Even if they didn’t do it on purpose.

Based in Charleston, South Carolina, Blurry Lines is a duo featuring Cox on lead vocals and keys and Richard Hussey on guitar, bass, and backup vocals. “The Hunted” is from the debut Blurry Lines release, an EP entitled Minor Works in Major Keys, Vol. 1, released in September and produced by Josh Kaler, who plays drums on three of the tracks, including this one. A Volume 2 is due out before year’s end.

Free and legal MP3: Cameron McGill (Newman-esque piano ballad, w/ soulful flair)

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s.

“American Health Insurance” – Cameron McGill

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s. McGill is exactly the kind of durable, skillful singer/songwriter who might’ve made a solid name for himself back in those halcyon days. Instead, in the 2010s, he joins the legions who release good music to an indifferent world, not actually as propped up by the endless supply of free digital music as proponents keep telling us is going to happen, any day now, just wait and see. And okay, so I’m especially disgruntled because I just today saw someone still passing along Cory Doctorow’s idiotic “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity” meme with a straight face, as if being merely one of a zillion artists throwing free content onto the web isn’t being dreadfully obscure in a whole new way.

Anyway. McGill does a nice job here, coming across as simultaneously weary and engaged, while the song smartly transforms from an ambling piano ballad into something more soulful, complete with spiffy horn charts. The title alone prompts a bit of a surprised smile, but despite the opening line, McGill himself has noted that the song is not actually about health insurance, but about how it feels to be an American in this insecure moment in history. And while that may not actually feel too good, I can’t help but be buoyed by McGill’s subtly spirited performance. He’s got one of those rounded voices that can get a little blurry if too reverbed, but we get a good balance in the mix, which stays generally crisp (horn charts will do that for you), and gives him a chance to stretch a bit—I like both his falsetto reaches and then, in particular, that stirring tone he achieves on the lyrics “when the house was on fire” at 1:42. I think we sometimes forget that half of a singer/songwriter’s job is singing, and maybe sometimes some of them forget that too. Not Mr. McGill.

“American Health Insurance” is from the album Gallows Etiquette, released a couple of weeks ago, its title taken from a Charles Simic poem. This is McGill’s sixth album, and his first after a trio of releases with him fronting a band called What Army. He was featured in that time frame here on Fingertips back in October 2009, for the wonderful song “Madeline, Every Girl.” Note that the Chicago-based McGill is also a member of the band Margot & the Nuclear So-and-So’s. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Fé (graceful, melodic, brilliant)

Now this is the kind of graceful, melodic, idiosyncratic-yet-accessible music that hits me right in my sweet spot—the kind of song Fingertips pretty much exists for.

“She Came – Fé

Now this is the kind of graceful, melodic, idiosyncratic-yet-accessible music that hits me right in my sweet spot—the kind of song Fingertips pretty much exists for. I instantly love the sense of movement and the distant ringing guitars in the introduction. And then the lyrics!; in which we are treated to a new classic opening line:

West London women have no passion
Sadness to them is just another word

Surely there is something Smiths-like in “She Came”‘s fluid, minor-key lamentation, but this is no knock-off; it bursts with a rigorous core of its own device. The melody’s brilliant development, combined with the sly harmonic and rhythmic jiggles that give it continual life, actually bring Steely Dan to mind, and that’s kind of an odd thing because this doesn’t sound at all like Steely Dan. But maybe a few of you will hear what I’m hearing. And if the opening lyrical salvo isn’t enough, there’s the chorus’s closing lines to ponder, which not only nail some kind of beautiful, aphoristic ambiguity, but arrive with an offhanded musical resolution that sneaks in and knocks my socks off:

A weaker man may not have tried
A stronger man may have survived

Fé is the London-based duo of Ben Moorhouse and Leo Duncan, new enough to the scene that they still, apparently, ride the Underground and regale commuters with skiffle-like takes on early rock’n’roll songs. These guys may well be going places that you have to get out of the Tube to arrive at.

Free and legal MP3: Son Lux (dramatic, oddly arranged)

This is a 21st-century tone poem, in a rather literal sense, as the song unfolds as an intersecting of tones: deep tones and high tones, tinkly tones and wobbly tones, soft tones and hard tones, musical tones and mechanical tones, vocal tones and instrumental tones.

“Easy” – Son Lux

Slow and sparse, “Easy” is likewise dramatic and oddly arranged, creating a sense of organic space despite (or, maybe, somehow, because of) the disconcerting, palpable electronic ambiance. This is a 21st-century tone poem, in a rather literal sense, as the song unfolds as an intersecting of tones: deep tones and high tones, tinkly tones and wobbly tones, soft tones and hard tones, musical tones and mechanical tones, vocal tones and instrumental tones. The most apparently natural tones in the song—the voice, the horn sounds, the hand claps—feel processed and edgy, while the most artificial of the tones—some of the machine-like background washes, for instance—come across as intimate and three-dimensional.

Nothing moves too fast to avoid scrutiny. Often there is little more than one sound going on at a time. Yet there remains something consistently evasive about the whole endeavor, probably epitomized by the unwieldy yet compelling “horns” (I assume not actual horns) that barge in at 0:57 to oppose the very idea of “easy” even as they offer an ongoing rejoinder to that lyric. Repeat listenings seem more to augment the mystery rather than resolve it, while continuing to yield moments that the ear missed during earlier plays, such as the weird, occult-ish vocal effect at 1:38, or, of all things, the perfectly normal-sounding guitar that glides in at 3:07.

Son Lux is the performing name of Ryan Lott, a composer and producer who has worked across an impressive range of genres, from indie rock to hip hop to contemporary classical. Among his past collaborators are Sufjan Stevens, Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), Peter Silberman (The Antlers), Nico Muhly, and the quartet ETHEL. “Easy” comes from the third full-length Son Lux album, Lanterns, coming later this month on Joyful Noise Recordings.

Free and legal MP3: Big Deal (simple, compelling rock’n’roll)

There’s something grand and achy in the big sound of the London duo Big Deal—even as it bursts with movement and purpose, I feel an undercurrent of delicious melancholy here.

“Swapping Spit” – Big Deal

There’s something grand and achy in the big sound of the London duo Big Deal—it bursts with movement and purpose on the one hand, serves up an undercurrent of delicious melancholy on the other. This may be rooted in something as simple and structural as the song-length use of octave male-female harmonies/lead vocals. My love for octave harmonies (i.e., the same note sung an octave apart) is long established; when they come in the guise of a lead vocal shared by a man and a woman, it’s a yummy treat times two (or three, or four; not sure math works here, actually). The fact that the harmonies culminate in the repeated line, each time the chorus comes around, “I will, I will” seals the deal: I can’t follow the song lyrically, but that “I will, I will” is an arresting aural paradox—hopeful on the surface, desperate below.

And give me a simple song, tightly conceived, over a sprawling complexity any day of the week. Or, at least, some days. “Swapping Spit” has so much happening within its apparent rock’n’roll simplicity that I listen to it over and over without tiring. The male-female octave harmonies turn out to be a perfect metaphor for the effectiveness of the entire song—it’s the same note being sung (simple) but an octave apart (complication) and by opposing genders (further complication). And so do we also in “Swapping Spit” get: a verse that has two different versions (a lower melody the first time [0:16], a higher melody the second time [1:19], and boy do I love the character of both voices in their combined upper ranges); a chorus that first of all has a pre-chorus and then, the second time around, has expanded versions of both the pre-chorus and the regular chorus; and then, slyly, a song that places its title into the extended part of the chorus. And as for that title, it too offers up compelling equivocation, as Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood sing words—“All the lovers swapping spit/I’ll get used to it”—that mess with our heads. Love (good thing? bad thing?) comes up as one more arresting paradox.

“Swapping Spit” is a new single upcoming from Big Deal’s second album, June Gloom, which was in fact released back in June, on Mute Records.

Free and legal MP3: Sundara Karma (young British band w/ expansive sound)

This swaggering, open-hearted song is not something I’m expecting from four teenagers in the year 2013.

“Freshbloom” – Sundara Karma

So the four guys in this band are 17 years old. Combine that with how expansive and assured and un-gimmicky a song this is and there is hardly anything more to say. It is a strange and beautiful world.

Or, in any case, this swaggering, open-hearted song is not something I’m expecting from four teenagers in the year 2013. I like how confidently “Freshbloom” bases itself in one chord, as the entire introduction and then nearly the entire verse unfolds without a chord change. This is easy to do in a bad song but difficult to do in a good song; melodic fortitude is required. When the chord change finally happens, at 0:50, we then get an extra lyrical line that is either an addendum to the verse or a precursor to the chorus but is in any case a cool thing—an unusual songwriting twist that manages to catch the ear and yet not draw undue attention to itself at the same time. Delivering everything to us in fine fettle is singer Oscar Pollock (alternatively listed online as Oscar Lulu), and while I really didn’t want to dwell on how not-17 he sounds, I can’t help myself—in tone, in phrasing, in sheer presence, the guy is a pro, already. And his bandmates are right with him—I am especially enjoying guitarist Ally Baty’s ringing tones, which straddle a nifty line between majestic and matter-of-fact. Bonus points for the dreamy instrumental break during which the song first comes to an almost complete stop at 2:17 before gathering around a lean and powerful new guitar riff, adding some compelling wordless vocals, and generally succeeding in impressing the hell out of me.

“Freshbloom” is the first song released into the world by Sundara Karma. I hope it is not the last. Originally available to download via SoundCloud, now you’ve got to get it here or nowhere.

Free and legal MP3: Lemonade (melodically engaging dance music)

That rare rock’n’roll bird: melodically engaging dance music.

“Skyballer” – Lemonade

Are bands just not interested in creating melodically engaging dance music or is such music just kind of difficult to make? I am honestly not sure. All I know is that after the seminal work of New Order, not a whole lot of bands have come along in the rock world to carry this particular torch. It is a specialized niche, to be sure. If the aim is to keep the trance going on the dance floor, melody may not only be superfluous but downright distracting. On the other hand, if one sees a purpose to music in one’s life beyond the confines of the club scene, music that engages the mind as well as the body isn’t a bad goal.

In any case, here’s “Skyballer,” which, for all its ear-candy trappings and dance-floor length, plunks a simple/great melody into the proceedings and everything makes sense. And while the sonic palette isn’t exactly the same, there is something rather New Order-y going on here in both the band’s commitment to grounding dance music in melody, and the particular kind of straightforward but compelling melody employed. The rest of the song stretches out in a cloud of falsetto, programming, and traffic whistles, with the strategic, if limited, use of guitars. Just when I think I may begin to be exasperated by the song’s clubbiness, I pick up another endearing little detail in the mix (I did not see that incisive acoustic guitar line at 3:57 coming), and then the repeat button brings the melody back and I am some odd kind of putty in its hands.

Born in the Bay Area in 2005 and based in Brooklyn since 2008, Lemonade has two full-length albums to its name, the most recent, Diver, coming in 2012. The band was featured here in March of that year for the song “Neptune.” “Skyballer” is a single released in August, as yet unconnected to a longer release. MP3 via the good folks at Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Dead Meadow (assured, midtempo psychedelia)

Sometimes, against all reason, ploddy muddy songs just sound so good—the blurry vocals, the minor-key prudence, it’s all communicating something, all the more so when you don’t actually know what the singer is singing about, which you usually don’t in these kinds of songs.

“Yesterday’s Blowin’ Back” – Dead Meadow

And because I don’t know what the singer is singing about, and because today is October 1, a day smart people someday will look back on with incredulity (provided there are any smart people left someday), I’m going to hear “Yesterday’s Blowin’ Back,” without any actual evidence, as a blistering indictment of the dangerous idiocy of extremist politicians. Just because I can. And just because we should.

“All your dark thoughts, they bring this on…” Indeed. So: you don’t like a law, you represent at best 18 percent of the U.S. population, and you shut down the government? Contrary to many reports, this is not a partisan issue. No reasonable person in a democratic country believes that hijacking the government is a valid oppositional strategy. Perhaps we will at some point begin the climb back towards civilization by reintroducing ourselves to the idea that news coverage is supposed to help us discover facts and truth, not simply report on what people say. People say all kinds of stupid shit nowadays, and in the strangest places (the Senate floor, for instance). And hm I guess by day’s end I am not in much mood for music analysis, which is too bad, since this assured piece of midtempo psychedelia by the veteran D.C. trio Dead Meadow is rich with musical pleasure. If only the dignified ache of the chorus—or, perhaps, the extended, intertwining guitar solos that begin at 3:22—could make me forget the despicable egotism of the cowards who shamefully scuttle the integrity of our fine country; but, alas, they don’t quite. Maybe if I just keep listening…

“Yesterday’s Blowin’ Back” is from Warble Womb, Dead Meadow’s seventh studio album, arriving later this month. This album features the return of drummer Mark Laughlin after 11 years away from band mates Jason Simon and Steve Kille. Dead Meadow was previously featured on Fingertips in December 2004. MP3 via Rolling Stone.

Free and legal MP3: Son of Stan (smartly, smoothly crafted out of lo-fi parts)

Like a magician knowingly guiding our attention away from a trick’s “secret,” Richardson uses the sound of his song to distract us from its bewildering framework.

“Corsica” – Son of Stan

The familiar but unplaceable instrumental sound that introduces and accompanies “Corsica” is not just an instantly engaging sound—its tone resembling a cross between a guitar and a human voice, maybe—but a strong, melodic riff that works as the song’s predominant hook. While I am not any kind of a gear geek (the “obscure and antiquated pedals” used to create the sound don’t intrigue me), I am a sucker for instrumental hooks, which have never been all that common in rock’n’roll, and have gone almost entirely MIA in 21st-century indie rock. While most songwriters prefer to put words to their hookiest melodies, I find that an instrumental melody line or motif at the song’s core adds richness that is at once notable—you can’t help hearing it—and elusive, since you can’t easily sing along to it. Making it that much more notable, says me.

While the hook pretty much carries the song, Jordan Richardson’s vocals are a complementary piece of the puzzle. A purposefully low-quality mic may have generated the thin, overmodulated sound, but check out how effectively this vocal presentation is installed within its aural habitat. Like a magician knowingly guiding our attention away from a trick’s “secret,” Richardson uses the sound of his song to distract us from its bewildering framework: there are verses, and alternate verses, and two related one-line segments of which one or the other may or may not be the chorus, and instrumental breaks, and unnameable extra sections. The two reliable unifying elements are the instrumental riff/hook and Richardson’s oddly processed voice, and they see us nicely through, and make me happy to listen again.

“Corsica” is from Divorce Pop, Richardson’s debut album as Son of Stan. He plays all the instruments on the album, but will tour with a live band. Originally from Fort Worth, Richardson, a drummer by trade, is based in Los Angeles, and has worked with Ben Harper and Ringo Starr, among others. Divorce Pop is slated for release next month on Wizardvision Records, which appears to be Richardson’s imprint.