MP3s – Page 38 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Monster Rally (found-sound assemblage, w/ a tropical groove)

Unlike almost any other electronic creation I have heard to date, “Orchids” sounds like something that might have been conceived in three dimensions and played in real time and real space.

“Orchids” – Monster Rally

An instrumental of pure invention and relentless groove, “Orchids” is an unusually cogent example of 21st-century song-as-assemblage. Monster Rally master mind Ted Fleighan mines sounds from old records, re-imagining them into sonic environments with their own logic, momentum, and—this is the strange part—organic vitality.

Listen here to the two main interacting motifs—a jazz-guitar-y lead riff, with its syncopated flair (heard first at 0:31 and repeated throughout), answered by a downward melody (0:34 et al.) described by the jittery strumming of some exotic stringed instrument or another (I’m afraid I’m not entirely schooled in exotic stringed instruments). Theirs is a simple but intriguing conversation, accompanied by the easygoing percussive sounds of a tropical lounge combo; add the recurring “conclusion” of sorts (0:47 et al.) from the jazz guitar, subtly undergirded by strings, and this is our whole song. A fan neither of mash-ups nor claustrophobic laptop rock, I find myself unaccountably charmed by the alternative acoustic reality created by Feighan’s unfathomable fabrications. Unlike almost any other electronic creation I have heard to date, “Orchids” sounds like something that might have been conceived in three dimensions and played in real time and real space, and while some might consider it a failure of imagination on my part to admire this condition, I consider it a failure of humanity to overlook it. We remain flesh and blood, despite the wires and wavelengths that connect us.

Feighan is from Ohio but is now based in Los Angeles. “Orchids” is the first available track from Return to Paradise, the third Monster Rally full-length release, due at the end of October on Gold Robot Records. You can download via the link above, as usual, or via SoundCloud.

Free and legal MP3: Mascott

Succinct pop rock, nicely sung

“Cost/Amount” – Mascott

We begin with an emphatic one-two punch: an itchy guitar line borrowed from 1979 and a lead vocal of heart-melting purity. Kendall Jane Meade has one of those voices that makes me stop in my tracks—all the more so because she doesn’t stop in hers; she sings with a fetching matter-of-factness I much prefer to the vocal preening we often get from people who know they have a good voice.

The entire song is a wonderfully matter-of-fact exercise, in fact: verse-chorus-verse, with an instrumental break, all finished in little over two minutes. It’s a tight little package of a song, with a pop-rock heart that feels either anachronistic or timeless here in 2013 (it’s a fine line sometimes), but it is Meade most assuredly who holds it together. In the right frame of listening mind, small moments of phrasing can be thrilling; me, I love how Meade ever so slightly delays the word “pity” (0:21), I love how plumply she manages to sing the not-easily-singable word “cost” (first at 0:35), and I love the one time she lets her voice unleash a tiny bit, in the phrase “clearer to me” (0:51), and how that moment highlights the clarity of words to follow like “wrong” (0:59) and “song” (1:01). It can be the small, small moments that turn a small song into something deep and delightful.

“Cost/Amount” is one of four songs on the Cost/Amount EP, released this week on Kiam Records, the New York-based label founded and run by singer/songwriter Jennifer O’Connor. Meade has been performing as Mascott since back in 1998, and has worked additionally with lots of other folks, including Sparklehorse, the Spinanes, and Helium. One interesting bit of music industry trivia is that Meade herself used to run Red Panda Records and once upon a time (okay, in 2005) released a Jennifer O’Connor album there. (Bonus trivia: a song from that album was featured here at the time; we come full circle, sort of.) The Cost/Amount EP by the way features three other songs, one of which is a fetching cover of “They Don’t Know,” one of Kirsty MacColl’s lasting gifts to the world.

photo credit: Debora Francis

Free and legal MP3: Dinosaur Bones (crunchy & unresolved)

We are agitated from the start, but in a way that hooks you, like a cliffhanger in a plot line.

“Sleepsick” – Dinosaur Bones

Longtime visitors here may be aware of the soft spot I have for suspended and unresolved chords. To oversimplify matters, both of these types of chords just don’t sound settled when you hear them—a suspended chord because it replaces one of the “right” notes in the chord with a “wrong” note, an unresolved chord because it is leading the ear to a subsequent chord that ends up not arriving. This song’s driving, crunching introduction is especially drive-y crunchy because it’s all about suspended and unresolved chords. We are agitated from the start, but in a way that hooks you, like a cliffhanger in a plot line.

In “Sleepsick,” resolution is kept at bay, not just through the introduction but through the entire two-part verse, all 30-plus seconds of which unfold over one suspended chord. This is pretty fine songwriting right there: the melody is full of interesting intervals and effective drama, but it’s all on top of that one itchy chord. The slight processing applied to the lead vocals amplifies the claustrophobia somehow. When the chord finally shifts, at 0:48, all nearby ears break into applause—almost anything would sound like a resolution by now, but this anthemic round of alternating major/minor chords seems particularly gratifying. And yet we get just one iteration of the chorus and we are back without fuss (1:04) to the fretful world of the verse. Only when the chorus comes back, at 1:37, do we feel more fully resolved, as it is now allowed to repeat, which it really needed to the first time but didn’t. Note near 1:59 the subtle change of chord in the second line of the chorus during the repeat, on the line “Hiding from the light outside”—an almost indiscernible happening that adds elusive richness, especially in a song as stingy and purposeful with its chords as this one is. And, speaking of purposeful chords, don’t miss the song’s final gesture: the ominous (and unresolved) chord on which the song ends, with a long fade-out, beginning at 3:13.

Dinosaur Bones is a five-piece band from Toronto. “Sleepsick” is from their second album, Shaky Dream, released last month on Dine Alone Records. You can download the track from the link above, as usual, or via SoundCloud. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Cate Le Bon (portentous melancholy)

The musical atmosphere is both minimal and somehow off-kilter, the rock instruments here played with a mixture of restraint and resolve, as if they’d been told to pretend they were a jazz combo, without playing any jazz.

“I Think I Knew” – Cate Le Bon

No introduction, literally, prepares us for the woozy “I Think I Knew”—the song begins right on the words “There’s no talking to him,” but you quickly have to wonder: is it really his fault? It’s hard to make heads or tails out of the woman lodging this particular complaint; lyrics fade in and out of comprehension, due partly to Le Bon’s singular accent (she is Welsh), partly to her unforthcoming diction, and partly to the strangeness of the words themselves. The musical atmosphere, meanwhile, is both minimal and somehow off-kilter, the rock instruments here (bass, drum, electric guitar, keyboards) played with a mixture of restraint and resolve, as if they’d been told to pretend they were a jazz combo, without playing any jazz.

The song’s central motif is both its strongest and strangest: the repetition, in the chorus, of the line “I wish I knew.” She sings it six times in a row, never once quite aligned with the beat, and phrased continually as if blurting an idle thought rather than singing a lyric. (Only later in the song do we get the additional, titular phrase “I think I knew.”) Around the repeated words dances a flute-like synthesizer, which gives us the song’s instrumental hook (that descending scale first heard around 0:59), and then also kind of just scoots away with an abrupt, naive heedlessness.

In the second verse the song becomes a duet, featuring the Seattle-based singer/songwriter Mark Hadreas, who performs as Perfume Genius, and sings with enough fragile/mysterious affect himself that his opening line, too, becomes one of the only lyrically clear moments. Some relationship has taken an unhappy turn, to be sure, but how much more wonderful to listen to such a story when the words fade into a disoriented haze of regret and second thought rather than detail a concrete narrative of blame and/or self-pity. It can be no accident that the song rises above comprehensibility only at the beginning of verses and then at the end, when the duo sings together, with portentous melancholy, “This one to cut the heart in two, the other one to choose.”

“I Wish I Knew” is from Le Bon’s forthcoming album Mug Museum, slated for release in November on Wichita Recordings. The album was recorded in Los Angeles, where Le Bon relocated earlier this year. She has been featured once before on Fingertip, in January 2012. Thanks again to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Suntrapp (simple/deep UK folk rock)

I can’t quite tell if “All the Seas” is a simple song that feels deep or a deep song that feels simple.

“All the Seas” – Suntrapp

I can’t quite tell if “All the Seas” is a simple song that feels deep or a deep song that feels simple. It is in any case a song that casts indirect aspersions, through both beauty and sturdiness, on many current efforts at so-called “indie folk rock.”

The simple/deep enigma is driven by a few factors. First, the lyrics strike a nice balance between personal reflection and grander philosophizing. Note that that latter kind of pondering, in a pop song, can easily become ponderous (pun intended). “All the Seas” hits the mark from the opening line, which asserts a universal truth from a first-person position:

I’d rather stare into an eye
Than into a sea or into a sky, my my

Simple words, personal declaration, but a rather substantive point being made at the same time. Next, the music itself, as straightforward as it seems, provides subtle richness in the interaction of the turbulent rhythm—established by the intricate finger-picking that opens the song—and the lovely, folk-like melody that is hung on top of it. That the song sways to an underlying one-two beat is partially hidden until the chorus, and is not fully felt until the second time the chorus visits, when it is fleshed out by three extra lines, all sung, unlike most of the verse, directly on the beat. I’m finding the song’s dramatic peak at the third line in the expanded chorus (1:55; “So pay no mind…”), not only for the crisp wording but for the thoughtful melodic turns the line takes as it descends.

And then, whether done consciously or not, the fact that front man Jacob Houlsby swallows the lyric that would be the song’s primary teaching moment is another, rather charming way we not only avoid pretentiousness but also cultivate depth. “All the seas, all the seas, have been”—what: “seen”? “sailed”? I can’t make it out. (Do feel free to let me know what you think he’s saying.) And yet clarity here not only doesn’t seem to matter, it somehow softens me to the song by sending me into my own imagination, accompanied by the churning, oceanic rhythm.

Houlsby is from Newcastle in the UK; Suntrapp is a project poised in a Bon Iver-like way between being a one-man project and a full-out band. “All the Seas” is the first release, and will be found on an upcoming EP called Yannina. Thanks to The Mad Mackeral for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Johnny Delaware

Boss-like bravura meets New Romantic ardor

“Primitive Style” – Johnny Delaware

“Primitive Style” arrives to us fully grown, independent of time and place; it seems not to have been written at all—it just is. Lacking the semblance of novelty that tends to entice the hive mind, “Primitive Style” will likely attract no particular blog buzz but is in fact a deeply satisfying rock’n’roll song, a wondrous commingling of Springsteen-esque bravado and New Romantic ardor, complete with engaging dynamic shifts, well-placed suspended chords, and a killer chorus.

Tying it all together is Delaware himself, whose voice all but croons, successfully, in the softer verses while opening comfortably into full-fledged rocker mode during the chorus. He sounds like someone with something to say, which in rock’n’roll is really more than half the battle. And pay attention if you would to the deft switch to 6/4 in the fifth measure of the chorus (heard for the first time in and around 1:04, on the word “primitive”). The best songs, to my ear, find some way to tweak the relative simplicity of the pop music form, and in so doing aim for the possibility of depth and resonance while remaining accessible to the ear.

Delaware (his real name? seems unlikely) was born in South Dakota and spent time in Nashville, Albuquerque, and Austin before landing in Charleston to partner with producer Wolfgang Zimmerman (himself last heard around these parts as part of the awesome band Brave Baby, featured in December 2012). “Primitive Style” is from Delaware’s debut album, Secret Wave, set for official release in October—but you can already listen to it in full on Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: Legs (indie dance pop w/ musical flair)

Spotless, grin-inducing 21st-century indie dance pop with more musical flair than whole playlists full of electronic dance music.

“Touchtone” – Legs

Spotless, grin-inducing 21st-century indie dance pop with more musical flair than wide swaths of what passes for electronic dance music. Rubber-like and hopscotchy, “Touchtone” is the kind of song that reaffirms my faith not merely in music but in humanity, somehow. This is what we need more of, I think: bands that can manage to sound entirely of the moment without sacrificing intelligence and aptitude on the altar of myopic digital trendiness. When we collectively decide to look up from our screens someday, we will rub our eyes and stretch and want to dance to music just like this, with large smiles on our faces, because it is nice after all to be a human being.

Meanwhile, check out how “Touchtone” manages to sound so unhurried even as it makes you want to shake something. More like classic funk than 21st-century dance music, the song establishes a groove with no posturing harshness, and delivers both instrumental melodies and pleasing chord progressions where today we often get over-processed “beats.” Front man Tito Ramsey has a vibrant upper register, and balances his David Byrne-like jumpiness with something warmer and more grounded. I like too how easily he navigates between singing and what sounds more like chanting; it’s often his vocalizing as much as anything that accentuates the song’s wiggle-friendly rhythm.

Legs is a five-piece band based in Brooklyn. “Touchtone” is one of five songs on the group’s self-titled debut EP. You can listen to the whole thing, and download all the songs for free, via SoundCloud. Well worth checking out.

Free and legal MP3: Matt Pond (muscular yet sensitive uptempo rocker)

Muscular and sensitive in equal parts, “Hole In My Heart” smolders with a reflective kind of momentum.

“Hole In My Heart” – Matt Pond

Mining some of the same thumpy, quick-paced territory as the terrific “Love To Get Used” (featured here back in 2011), “Hole In My Heart” smolders with a reflective kind of momentum. It’s muscular and sensitive in equal parts, because rather than downplaying instrumentation in favor of straight-ahead energy (what most uptempo songs naturally do), this one is beautifully enhanced by distinct instrumental touches. First, there’s the cello that weaves its way through the rhythm section starting around 0:21. Then check out that somewhat old-fashioned synthesizer accent first heard pressing in on the action at 0:36—a distinctive tone that seems somehow air-driven, as an accordion. You’ll soon hear a banjo in the mix as well (around 0:52), which adds to the hand-sewn, almost hardscrabble ambiance.

Another old-fashioned touch is the balladic device of having the title emerge repeatedly at the end of lyrical lines. But rather than letting this hem him in melodically (often this tactic is employed in lieu of a chorus), Pond uses it as a springboard into what opens into a complex and beautiful chorus. I especially love the very Pond-ian turn of melody on the line “We waste a million woes” (first heard at 0:41). So gorgeous and so fleeting; when the chorus cycles next back to this moment, it’s not even there. We are instead (starting at 0:53) led gracefully and thoughtfully back to the titular phrase.

“Hole In My Heart,” originally on the Matt Pond album, The Lives Inside the Lines in Your Hand, has recently surfaced as a free and legal MP3 via the release of a three-song EP, which features the album version of the song that you hear here, plus an acoustic version, plus a cover of the Stevie Nicks song “Wild Heart.” You can hear it all and download all the songs for free via SoundCloud. The album itself was released back in February, and was the first album recorded by Matt Pond using his name alone, rather than the band name Matt Pond PA, under which moniker he released many albums and EPs between 1998 and 2011. Note that originally, the aforementioned song “Love to Get Used” was released on the Matt Pond PA EP Spring Fools, in 2011. (It was also, later, the number-one favorite free and legal MP3 of that year here.) It too found its way onto the excellent 2013 solo release.

Matt Pond PA was previously on Fingertips not just in 2011 but in 2010, 2008, 2004, and 2003 as well.

Free and legal MP3: Muralismo (complex, engaging chamber pop)

“Wild Eyed Friend” is the mysterious out-of-towner you see across the room at a party of familiar faces and invent intriguing stories about. When you finally meet him, he turns out to be less quirky and cryptic than anticipated, but also deeper and more sincere.

“Wild Eyed Friend” – Muralismo

More a multi-faceted adventure than a simple song, “Wild Eyed Friend” is the mysterious out-of-towner you see across the room at a party of familiar faces and invent intriguing stories about. When you finally meet him, he turns out to be less quirky and cryptic than anticipated, but also deeper and more sincere. You are glad he exists, even if you will never see him again.

The good thing, of course, is that you can go and listen to “Wild Eyed Friend” as often as you’d like. And I do recommend a number of repeats; there’s a lot to take in here—the slow, slowly developing pre-introduction, with its gentle, semi-dissonant air of an awakening meadow; the subtly wonderful blend of guitar and orchestral elements in the brisker “true” introduction (1:12); the engaging, concise verse (1:38), with its drum-driven appeal and no-nonsense segue into the non-chorus-y chorus (2:05), which grabs the ear with abrupt ease. It helps that front man Mark David Ashworth has a welcoming, semi-theatrical tone, his high-ranging baritone slightly roughened and rounded by something husky and knowing. It helps too that the ensemble doesn’t throw its orchestrality (a word?) in your face; I like how the winds and flutes and strings and such kind of just weave and evanesce through the landscape here without making a big deal of their presence; best of all, they let the most interesting instrument in the room be the drums—not typical of most things that have been labeled “chamber pop” to date. Drummer Shaun Lowecki (last seen around these parts in the band The Lawlands, in January) has an up-front way of staying in the background, of guiding the music through interesting places often because of his own patterns, without ever doing things that say “Hey, look at me! I’m the drummer!” Good stuff, repeatedly.

Muralismo is based in San Francisco. Ashworth has released a few solo albums previously; Muralismo coalesced as a group project in the 2007 to 2010 time frame, as players came on board, often synchronistically, and aligned themselves into the quintet they are today. “Wild Eyed Friend” is the lead track from the group’s self-titled, eight-song debut album, which the band self-released in LP, CD, and digital formats last month. The above Dropbox MP3 link comes directly from the band. You can listen to the whole album and buy it via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: WL (spacious, deliberate dirge)

How interesting to find “You’re Not Really Here” closing off an album as otherwise clamorous as WL’s debut, Hold.

“You’re Not Really Here” – WL

Spacious and oh so deliberate music from a band that happens to know a thing or two about dense noise and churning rhythm as well. Which of course, to me, makes the quiet, ruminative stuff all that more compelling—how interesting to find “You’re Not Really Here” closing off an album as otherwise clamorous as WL’s debut, Hold. It’s almost as if the ambient noises you can hear in the background at the beginning of the song are the band’s guitars cooling off, audibly, the way an automobile engine makes those clicks and clacks after you’ve shut it down.

And yet, interestingly, this song was the first thing the group ever wrote, when as yet a duo, and singer/bassist Misty Mary’s vocals on this track were recorded at that first meeting/rehearsal with guitarist Michael Yun. The din was yet to come. But it is very much Mary’s voice that seems to be the secret weapon tying the music’s dynamic range together. Airy but precise, it is a voice as much at home getting enveloped by harsh waves of distorted guitars as it is floating more vulnerably above the minimal backdrop presented on “You’re Not Really Here.” I like that she enunciates her consonants and doesn’t seem to lose her speaking voice in the process of singing; listen for instance to how she fully sings the “r” sound in the word “here,” in the titular phrase that closes each verse. There’s something dreamy about its concreteness, if that makes any sense at all.

Despite its skeletal start, “You’re Not Really Here” does in fact acquire some evocative instrumentation, most notably the organ sound that presses forward at 1:38 (is it actually an organ? a cool guitar effect? don’t know), which lends a magisterial, classic-rock aura to this meticulous and haunting dirge.

WL—which can be pronounced “well” or, simply, “double-you ell”; the band is noncommital—is Mary, Yun, and drummer Stevie Sparks, who has worked regularly for various Danger Mouse productions, and has drummed as well for Daniel Lanois and the Avett Brothers, among many others (often using his given name, Steven Nistor). Both Yun and Sparks are originally from Detroit, while Mary came to Portland from Big Sur. Hold was released digitally and on cassette last month. You can listen to the whole thing and purchase it via Bandcamp.