Category: MP3s

“Victoria” – Unproductive

Rough-edged and melodic and maybe slightly unhinged

“Victoria” – Unproductive

A rough-edged stomper with appealing personality, “Victoria” carries on with a bit of a screw loose. The song’s simple, head-banging backbeat thuds out an intro that belies the playful nature of the melody and lyrics to follow. It’s a tale of woe, but an off-kilter one, which lead vocalist Declan Hills splutters out sounding only intermittently unhinged (in a good way). Pay attention to the words, which alternate between the bleak and the cheeky. At one point he sings–

Oh Victoria take your hand in mine
And we won’t let those white collar criminals
Make off with those reduced mortgage primes

–which is one of the more unorthodox ways to say “We’ll be great together” that I can think of. But the aforementioned Victoria is neither an easy catch nor necessarily a healthy one for our narrator, who, later, sings: Don’t make me compromise/My morality for hydrated skin. It’s that kind of relationship.

The lyrics call for and reward attention due to the song’s unconfined melodicism, featuring leaping and descending intervals, and spurts of (at least) double-timed lines to accommodate the garrulous declarations of the song’s narrator. And despite its vaguely manic ambiance, the song’s structure is rock solid, with verses that lead logically into the distinct but complementary chorus, and a chorus that both frays at the edges and resolves with clarity. Oh and be sure to tune into the squalling guitar break, starting at 1:51, which epitomizes the song’s half-crazed gusto.

Unproductive is a quartet based in Saskatoon, comprised of Hills singing and playing guitar, Nathan Henry on percussion, Steven Adams on bass, keyboards, and backing vocals, and the surname-free Zoë on keyboards. “Victoria” is the lead track off the band’s debut EP, released this month, which is, according to Hills, either actually untitled or titled Untitled; they’ve been leaving it open to discussion. You can check it out, and buy it for any price you’d like, over on Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

“Anna Madonna” – Max Blansjaar

Perky yet melancholy

“Anna Madonna” – Max Blansjaar

Crisply mixed and brightly melodic, “Anna Madonna” offers just enough major- to minor-key transitions to read as bittersweet, despite its foot-tapping vibe. Blansjaar’s voice is particularly clear in the mix, which steadily acquires layers of sound–first just a muted guitar, then some snappy drum (machine) beats, later a glistening keyboard, all leading into a kazoo-like synthesizer solo halfway through this perky yet melancholy composition.

“Anna Madonna” turns out to be coincidentally related to the Waxahatchee song likewise featured this month, being another tune about the value of holding onto a long-term relationship. Mature thinking for a 21-year-old, but singer/songwriter/multi-instrumentalist Blansjaar is nothing if not precocious, having begun performing and recording at 15.

Born in Amsterdam and raised in Oxford in the UK, he released two self-recorded and self-performed EPs of lo-fi indie pop in the late 2010s. For his first full-length album, he worked with Katie Von Schleicher, a singer/songwriter/producer with her own recording studio in Brooklyn, along with her frequent producing partner Nate Mendelsohn. The producers have done a spiffy job maintaining Blansjaar’s quirky energy while adding some shrewd dynamics to his repertoire, such as the stripped-down moment we get at 1:42. (Von Schleicher by the way was featured on Fingertips back in 2013.)

“Anna Madonna” is a track from the forthcoming album False Comforts, due out in June.

“Mirrors” – Babel

MInimalist synth pop

“Mirrors” – Babel

Introduced over a series of delicately fingered piano chords, “Mirrors” begins as a minimalist, moody ballad before refashioning into a sprightly piece of (still) minimalist synth-pop. It’s a lucid, appealing song start to finish, with slowly accumulating parts and no sound wasted or out of place. What holds everything together, to my ears, is the recurring sidestep the melody takes, a motif first heard at 1:00 when vocalist Karin Mäkiranta sings the phrase “where nothing goes wrong.” This quiet but potent musical moment seems both to resolve and not resolve at the same time, and weaves through the piece like a shy friend.

While the piano continues underneath, the synthesizers move to the center of the song beginning at 1:23, when an electronic tone with the feel of a plucked string provides a syncopated pulse that picks up the pace. At 2:00 a synth wash begins to fill the back of the mix, while at 2:24 we get a descending synthesizer countermelody; both are elements that keep the vibe electronic but also light-footed. An extra payoff arrives at 2:55, when Mäkiranta begins cooing a wordless vocal line, which continues underneath the song’s coda-like final verses.

Babel is the duo of Mäkiranta and Mikko Pykäri, who are based in Helsinki. Each of them have been involved with other musical projects; this is their second release as a twosome. “Mirrors” is the title track to an EP that came out back in August. You can check it out, and buy it, over on Bandcamp.

“Monts et merveilles” – Le collage de France

Easy-going, wistful, French

“Monts et merveilles” – Le Collage de France

“Monts et merveilles” is an easy-going French-language head-bopper with an unhurried backbeat and a wistful undercurrent. While acoustic at its core, the song is enhanced by soft and knowing electric touches–a plucked guitar here, a chiming synthesizer chord there. The title is part of the French idiom promettre monts et merveilles, which literally means to promise mountains and marvels–in other words, to declare that you’re going to deliver something especially awesome to someone. If this is akin to the English expression about promising the moon, the phrase likely has a baked-in sense of disappointment about it: no one who promises the moon, after all, ever delivers the actual moon. In translation the song’s lyrics evade close explication, offering instead a general sense of resignation at the whims of the universe and the injustice of so-called civilized society. Front man and songwriter Rémi Nation tells me the song has to do with the failure of trickle-down economics as well as the more general failing of Western society in its relentless equation of success with wealth. Still, the more I listen to the music, the more I sense, maybe, an insouciant sort of fortitude in the overall vibe.

A highlight among the song’s charms is the sing-song-y chorus, which finds Nation backed by Marie Pierre singing in unison rather than harmony, an effect one doesn’t often hear, especially with a male-female combination. I also really like the guitar break (2:21 to 2:41), in particular the low-register solo that begins at 2:32. It’s from the “less is more” school to be sure, but the tone and character is precise and, in this day and age, quite refreshing.

Le collage de France is the latest musical project helmed by Nation, who delighted us here while leading the band Orouni, featured on Fingertips in January 2017. Le collage de France’s bio reveals love and politics and language, and the ambiguities inherent in all three intertwining arenas, as areas of focus for this intriguing endeavor. “Monts et marveilles” is a track from Le collage de France’s debut LP, Langage Ment (“Language lies”), which was released late last month. Check it out, and buy it in various formats, on Bandcamp.

“Beside You” – Magana

MIdtempo rocker w/ distortion & heart

“Beside You” – Magana

A bashy midtempo rocker with instant character, “Beside You” has a circular melody, a distorted wall of background sound, and the compelling voice of Jeni Magaña leading us through a very ’20s narrative of personal and cultural uncertainty. And while these are themes that could strike a listener as over-familiar, there is something about Magaña’s tone and resolve that grabs at the soul here. Give it a few listens and see if you don’t feel it too.

A central, potent feature is the juxtaposition of a double-time verse with a half-time chorus, the latter of which gives the song a recurring place of aural (and lyrical) solace to land. And take a listen to the variegated guitar work. First, there’s the ringing guitar line that provides the instrumental hook in the introduction; next we get some blurry guitar noise in the second half of the verse, contributing to the aforementioned wall of sound; we also get some high squawky notes livening the verses starting around 0:58, sounding nearly (but not nearly) like mistakes, and then, not to be outdone, some low buzzy accents rising up around 1:48.

Another of the song’s primary characteristics is its outpouring of lyrics in the double-time verse, which seems an of-the-moment singer/songwriter technique (an excellent model here is “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers). Magaña puts such tender heart into both the words and the performance that she finds the authentic core in a songwriting mode that can veer towards the stale or robotic in the wrong hands.

Jeni loses her first name, and her tilde, to perform as Magana. Originally from Bakersfield, and now in Los Angeles, via Brooklyn, she has most recently been on stage as the touring bassist with Mitski. She is also part of the intermittent duo pen pin, with Emily Moore. As a solo artist, she was previously featured on Fingertips in October 2016. “Beside You” is the lead track from her new album, Teeth, which comes out in a month on the Audio Antihero label (whose tagline, for the record, is “Specialists in Commercial Suicide”). You can check more of it out, and pre-order it, on Bandcamp.

“Bone Dry” – Blood

Short and craggy

“Bone Dry” – Blood

Chunky. guitar-driven, and intriguing, “Bone Dry”–song length, 1:44–ends before you can get your arms around its off-center rhythms and elusive declarations. Despite–or perhaps because of–the song’s evanescent idiosyncrasies, the thing is thoroughly appealing, to my ears.

As a composition at once short and knotty, “Bone Dry” may be similar in length to a certain amount of current pop, but is dissimilar in vibe and resolve. Short songs have become more common in the TikTok era, in which exposure to music often comes in sub-1:00 fragments; many pop hits of the current day clock in not only under three minutes but under 2:30, and some even under 2:00. The first thing jettisoned in these pithy songs is any sense of a bridge; another short-song strategy is to offer just one verse and then a short, repeated chorus. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, if artistic considerations drive the decisions. I suspect, however, that the shortening of songs is, mostly, happening via a death-circle feedback loop of streaming stats generated by our collective, information-overload-driven short attention spans.

But I digress. “Bone Dry” is in any case an example of a creatively satisfying short song: rather than present itself as a beat-forward, bridge-less, chorus-heavy earworm-wannabe, here’s a song that revels in its craggy folds and discrepancies. One consistent feature is a relentless avoidance of the first beat of a measure: neither the recurring guitar lick nor any of the lyrical lines start on the downbeat, which is traditionally the strongest beat of the measure and the foundation of a song’s rhythm and melody. That’s out the window here, which is what creates an ongoing sense of things being off-kilter, to the point where the time signature, while (I think) mostly a standard 4/4, feels ambiguous. Another way “Bone Dry” achieves its shortness without oversimplification is its elimination of anything resembling a coda; the ending is sudden, all but in mid-sentence.

Blood is a four-piece band based in Philadelphia that used to be a six-piece band based in Austin. “Bone Dry” is the latest of a handful of singles the group has released since 2019. You can check them all out on Bandcamp.

“When I’m Alone” – Rosa Mack

Appealing, slow-building scorcher

“When I’m Alone” – Rosa Mack

Slow-burning, slowly-swinging “When I’m Alone” is both a paragon of restraint and (if you wait for it) a let-it-all-hang-out scorcher. The song is steady and magnetic out of the gate, with its deliberate guitar lines and Rosa Mack’s beguiling tone and phrasing. Listen to how she sings “Well I can get used to just about anything” (0:29) as an elusive blend of singing and speaking, redolent of the implied physicality of lips and tongue and breath.

The accompanying instrumentation is precise and crafty, especially when it comes to the horns; check out, as an example, the way they start in one place (1:15) and head in unexpected directions (by 1:21). Then there’s the delicious, slowed-down punctuation these same horns provide at 2:04, a characteristic example here of less is more. The first guitar solo (2:13, with an immediate eight-second pause) presents another dose of fiery restraint.

But the star of the show is surely Mack herself, whose mighty presence is intimated in the song’s somewhat whispery beginnings and revealed increasingly as the song unfolds–first via Mack’s ongoingly deft singing and at last by way of unleashing her pent-up vocal power (from about 3:20 on). That upward glide her voice takes from 3:39 to 3:41 introduces a final climactic section of squalling guitars, foundational horn charts, and potent mostly wordless vocalizing.

“When I’m Alone” is the formidable debut single from the Brisbane-based singer/songwriter, released in November. I’ll be eager to hear more from her when she’s ready.

“Drum Machine” – Roman Ruins

Drummer singing about drumming

“Drum Machine” – Roman Ruins

The lifespan of a rock band in the 21st-century has grown stretchy and indistinct, given the long periods of recording inactivity that often characterizes life as an indie rocker. The band Death Cab for Cutie, now in their 28th year, have released but 10 albums; the Decemberists, 25 years in the game, have released just eight albums. The Kinks, by contrast, put out their 10th album in year eight of their existence. The music industry is obviously a very different animal in 2024 than it was in 1964, but the upshot is an ongoing sense of a time warp. For instance, here now is the New Orleans-based musician Graham LeDoux Hill, who does musical business as Roman Ruins, with a new single from a forthcoming album, and you turn around and see that his last album came out in 2014, while his previous visit to Fingertips was back in 2010. I can’t tell if this seems like ancient history or only yesterday. In any case, a simpler observation is that one can never be sure one has heard the last of any given indie enterprise at any given moment in time.

As for the latest from Roman Ruins, “Drum Machine” may seem a comfortable fit here in the 2020s, with its tight beat, carefully processed effects, and constrained but effective melody, but it also arrives as an homage of sorts to bygone music (and instrumentalists). There’s something warm and familiar about “Drum Machine”‘s laconic melodicism, and a ’70s-art-rock tinge to Hill’s blurry vocals (Eno in particular comes to mind). Meanwhile, you might catch the immediate lyrical reference to Mitch Mitchell, Charlie Watts, and Levon Helm, three classic rock drummers of high standing. And yet right away the contradiction: the song, after all, is called “Drum Machine” and the beat underlying the proceedings does initially sound automated. I am no percussion expert but my guess is that the drumming is actually unautomated, that Hill was initially imitating a drum machine; if I’m not imagining it there’s a subtle shift around 0:30 that suggests this.

The song, it turns out, reads in part as autobiographical; Hill is in fact a drummer, and has notably performed as the touring drummer for the bands Beach House and Papercuts–he even references the Papercuts song “Future Primitive” in the lyrics, which seem replete with elusive references and inside jokes. Hill sings with a lax authority, often behind the beat, which becomes its own sort of inside joke based on the song’s recurring refrain that “timing is everything.” The point he is making by the repeated phrase “I’ll be the drum machine”? Not sure. Perhaps it has to do with his experience drumming on tour for bands that are normally not full bands (Beach House: a duo; Papercuts: a solo project); on their records they likely use drum machines, but on stage they present a human drummer. “I’ll be the drum machine” may be Hill’s ongoing quip. And whether this is the story behind the song or not, there may well also be some metaphorical resonance to the concept. The all-too-human desire to achieve impossible perfection? Our impending status as second-class citizens to the robots? There’s probably also a story behind the song’s prominent, human-generated bass line, the playing of which is credited to Paul Provosty. But, like much about this agreeable song, this remains unrevealed.

“Drum Machine” is an initial release from the Roman Ruins album Isotropes, coming out next month. You can read more about it, and listen to one other song, over on Bandcamp.

“How High” – The Usual Boys

Distinctive character, with guitars

“How High” – The Usual Boys

“How High” is a nifty, left-of-center rocker, pairing a sophisticated riff motif with a disco-derived bass line and hoping for the best. Which turns out to be pretty darn good. While the song doesn’t sound all that much like the Smiths, I sense a bit of a Smiths-like vibe here in terms of the idiosyncratic structure and distinctive character–and, more concretely, the central, lead-like role of the rhythm guitar. Who does this anymore? Probably a good number of people, you just don’t get a lot of them from the algoritihm.

The song takes its time establishing itself, but rather than this involving some sort of slow and/or repetitive vamping (a pet peeve of mine!), this is an introduction that introduces us, properly, to the variety of rhythm guitar refrains upon which the song is constructed. Front man Aleksi Oksanen enters at around 32 seconds, his resonant, slightly distorted baritone delivering a patter of nearly spoken lyrics with charismatic dexterity. The funked up bass line and itchy percussive touches add unanticipated texture, then step away as the chorus (1:03) reprises two of the riffs we heard at the outset: the first slowing down to half time (the “You say, ‘Jump!'” part), the second reasserting the pace (after the “I say, ‘How high?'” part) with a tumble of unresolved chords.

“How High” is a concise song, wrapping up in under three minutes, but still offers a sense of development, partially due to the unfolding guitar work, and partially due to production details that add appeal along the way, including a siren-like guitar heard first around 1:36, and an extra instrumental sound–a synthesizer, or some sort of processed guitar?–that chimes in at 2:20. These are small flourishes but I always appreciate it when someone is continuing to think about and play with a song’s sound from beginning to end, rather than recycling the early parts as is.

The Usual Boys are an international foursome (Finland, Scotland, England, Sweden) based in Germany and playing together since 2017. Released in October, “How High” is the third single to date released by the band from the as-yet forthcoming debut album. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

“Buddy” – Eileen Allway

Subtle power

“Buddy” – Eileen Allway

Deliberate and engaging, “Buddy” has an air of casual accomplishment about it. Everything seems just so, from the short, no-time-signature introduction to the easy, well-built melody of the verse, and then, best of all, the way the song opens up and out in the subtly brilliant chorus. Note too the different vocal ranges and aspects: in the verse, Allway employs a low tone, her voice nearly speaking as much as singing; while in the chorus her voice soars to a powerful upper range. And even here we get two iterations–the airy voice that takes us through the affecting chord change in the first line (starting at 0:51), and the stronger, yearning tone we get in the second line (starting at 0:57). There’s something almost Kate-Bushian in the air here.

The accompaniment feels at once minimal and well-rounded, a deft mix of acoustic and electric guitars. The slide guitar accents heard throughout communicate knowingly, in particular the upward-reaching note that leads into the chorus (first heard at 0:37): simple, striking, perfect. Meanwhile, also in the chorus, the prickly high notes that offer moody fill between the lines of lyrics deliver entirely different but equally canny enhancement. The second time the chorus comes around, lower-register guitar lines add to the carefully crafted atmosphere. Speaking of which, while the lyrics are somewhat hard to decipher, there’s one clear, telling moment, which is at the end of the chorus, when Allway sings, with a pang, “I want to make you fall in love.” Notice how the words pull up short of music here; how much an added “…with me” is implied but unstated. That’s devious in a good way.

Not outlasting its welcome, the song disintegrates at 2:10 with some initial noise, then fading slowly in a mush of distant, repeating vocals, quivering instrumentation, and, near the end, an ominous line of descending, Beatlesque strings, which happen to echo the opening notes of the introduction–another sign of the attentive craft involved in putting “Buddy” together.

Eileen Allway is a singer/songwriter based in the Los Angeles area. “Buddy” is her latest single, released last month. You can (and should!) check out her music on Bandcamp. Thanks to Eileen for the MP3.