MP3s – Page 42 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Aly Tadros and Ben Balmer (sweet, effective singer/songwriter duet)

A singer/songwriter duet that’s as sturdy, genuine, and endearing a song as can be.

“Whim” – Aly Tadros and Ben Balmer

An easy-going singer/songwriter duet, “Whim” has all the makings of the kind of thing they will play too often on your local adult-alternative station (if you happen to have a local adult-alternative station), and therefore, alas, all the makings of a song I will not like very much: the acoustic guitars, the male-female vocals, the folk-based melody. Not that I have anything against any of those things per se, at all; I’ve just been negatively trained in recent years to expect only the most tiresome and ersatz material of this ilk based on what tends to get pushed for concentrated radio play. And yet “Whim” turns out to be as sturdy, genuine, and endearing a song as can be. Go figure.

The voices are good, to begin with. Not showy, but with impressive character. Balmer, an Austin-based musician, opens the piece, and right away I am charmed by his plainspoken tone. I often enjoy singers who sing with such clarity and ease that it sounds almost as if they are still talking; it’s a characteristic I find more often with women singers than men so here it’s especially engaging. Tadros, on the other hand, sings with unaffected richness; her first solo words here are “I was singing my song/When a man came along/Said he liked the sound of my voice,” and because as a listener I was coming to that same conclusion just as she sang it, the effect is powerful. I am won over. The stories each singer sings—simplified, but with well-chosen words—are parallel but dissimilar tales of asymmetrical relationships: in his case, the woman was in for a brief kick, then left; in her case, the man keeps her as a trophy, with no heart connection. Both of them take turns singing the same chorus: “I’m a whim, I’m a whim/Just a passing thought/In the mind of the girl (man) I love.” Note when Tadros takes the lead, the chorus’s melody slips into the space between their harmonies, a move perhaps too subtle for heavy-rotation radio play. The chorus ends with a lyric both unassuming and brilliant: “I ain’t much/When push comes to shove”—spot-on both as character self-commentary and as lyrics that scan with impeccable grace.

Tadros is an American singer/songwriter with an unusual interest in international music, prompted in part by her father’s Egyptian heritage. She was born in Laredo, got started as a musician in Austin, and now lives in Brooklyn. She released her second album, The Fits, in January. Balmer was born in Michigan and lives in Austin; his debut album, Dug In, came out in October 2012. They wrote the song together in a couple of sessions while at music festivals they were each playing.

Free and legal MP3: Magic Arm (string-enhanced pop from Manchester)

Singer/songwriter Marc Rigelsford plays all the instruments, and while our 21st-century ears are fine with that in a setting of layered electronics and guitars, a one-person project is somehow the last thing one suspects when hearing two stringed instruments playing together.

“Put Your Collar Up” – Magic Arm

As a violin and cello play a mournful duet for 30 seconds, we are lifted out of time and context: what type of music this may be and when in the last 120 years or so it was written both seem up for grabs. This is pretty charming in and of itself; here’s a musician willing either to trust that listeners can hang in there for a half-minute of uncertainty or to be uninterested in those who can’t—a friend of mine in either case. The other nifty thing this pre-introduction string duet does is deflect attention away from the reality that Magic Arm is a one-man band. Singer/songwriter Marc Rigelsford plays all the instruments, and while our 21st-century ears are fine with that in a setting of layered electronics and guitars, a one-person project is somehow the last thing one suspects when hearing two stringed instruments playing together.

Following the string pre-introduction, the song acquires a nostalgic pulse when the piano and percussion join in at 0:30 (you may hear some “Eleanor Rigby” in this, and maybe some “Alone Again Or”), and achieves liftoff with the arrival of the bass at 0:51 (a textbook example of how significant the bottom that the bass provides can be in a rock song). Rigelsford sings the verse with a thin, slightly processed voice, somewhere in that gray area pop singers have staked out between tenor and baritone. The melody moves at half the song’s rate and feels snippetty as it tracks generally downward. With the chorus (1:17), things change subtly but resolutely—the melody doubles its pace and Rigelsford’s voice, at a slightly higher register, seems rounder and warmer (as he sings “Is this the right way now?”). I can’t really describe it or explain it, can’t put my finger exactly on the hook, but it’s definitely in here; this is where the song fully sells itself to me. Listen to how the strings nuzzle their way back into the mix at this point; listen too to the synthesizer loops and see if you can figure out exactly how Rigelsford has so deftly combined acoustic and electronic sounds here. Hat tip also to the Herb Alpert-y trumpet lines (1:49), which take a turn towards the Bacharachian when they reemerge in the instrumental coda (4:00).

“Put Your Collar Up” originally came out on an EP Magic Arm released in August, but is making the rounds as a free and legal download now in advance of the album Images Rolling, Magic Arm’s second full-length release, due out in June. You can download it here, or go to the SoundCloud page and spare me a wee bit of bandwidth.

Free and legal MP3: Mincer Ray (multinational trio, crunchy neo-alt-rock)

The sound is rough and dirty, with that air of tumbled-together crunchiness and ramshackle singing that we often get in this particular sonic arena.

“Franki Jo” – Mincer Ray

One of the coolest things the original “alternative rock” movement of the middle ’80s did was link the DIY ethics and lo-fi sound of garage rock with hi-fi artistic pretensions introduced to rock’n’roll by the Beatles, the Beach Boys, and (let’s not leave them out, as too many do) the Kinks. It’s a tricky balancing act—music of this nature can become too precious and/or too muddy for its own good—but an engaging enough aspiration to remain alive lo these 30 years later. At its best, this lineage has given birth to bands with an impressive, maybe even unprecedented breadth to their sound (think Yo La Tengo, perhaps the proto-band of whatever you actually want to call this stuff), because the foundational idea was never about one particular kind of song in the first place, and the attachment to sonic basics never actually required shoddy recording standards.

Enter “Franki Jo,” from the trio Mincer Ray, whose very name clues us in to the band’s ancestry (“Mincer Ray” is a song from Guided By Voices’ alt-rock classic Bee Thousand). The sound is rough and dirty, with that air of tumbled-together crunchiness and ramshackle singing that we often get in this particular sonic arena. But the song is hardly as slapdash as the vibe suggests. This is in truth a well-crafted song, with touches that are engaging and, often, slyly humorous—from the the heard-only-once pre-chorus (0:45) to the shifting verse melody (i.e., the second verse is not precisely the same as the first) to the extended “oo”-ing in the background in the second verse to the satisfying, two-part coda (2:48, 3:11). The song’s underlying riff (what we hear first at 0:04) is at once primal and slightly complicated, with its rushed, four-note descent, climaxing off the main beat; and after it asserts itself, it doesn’t overstay its welcome, if only because there is so much more going on from start to finish. (Think how different those old garage-rock songs were, which were often all riff, and little song.) Don’t miss as well the appearance of some spiffy chords and unexpected chord changes along the way.

Mincer Ray is a Berlin-based band of expats, comprised of Americans Graham McCarthy and Sean Anderson and Brazilian Acácio Do Conto, known as Cate (pronounced Ka-Chee). Ray Mincer, the debut full-length, came out last year. “Franki Jo” is the lead track on the EP A Magnate’s Reach, officially coming out at the end of May. You can listen and purchase via Bandcamp. Note also that if you download the song via SoundCloud, you can have the song as a .wav file, if you like higher-quality downloads.

Free and legal MP3: Graham MacRae (ambling ballad w/ bygone air)

The atmosphere of the song implies pronouncement, but the words themselves offer mostly bewilderment.

“Wait” – Graham MacRae

An ambling ballad, seemingly from another era, with something simultaneously assertive and vulnerable about it. The Los Angeles-based MacRae has a resonant if trembly baritone; singing about a breakdown of communication, his lyrics sound more like things that are spoken than are sung, an impression amplified by the erratic way the lines sometimes scan with the melody. The accompaniment is simple, almost homely, but forceful—a strummed acoustic guitar, a bottom-heavy drum kit, a finger-picked electric guitar. The message here is: I am a plainspoken man, singing a plainspoken song.

Well, if only. Listen carefully and see how the words unfold with the faulty momentum of a heat-of-the-moment exchange. The atmosphere of the song implies pronouncement, but the words themselves offer mostly bewilderment. First, it’s: “Wait/I’m coming this way/With one thing left to say to you”; soon, it’s: “Wait/You can’t leave on that note/Why must you speak in constant code?”; in conclusion it’s “Hey/I don’t know/These are age-old questions.” Those three lines together are so much the crux of the song that rest of the words are basically false trails, communicating foundering without focus. Any spurned lover impelled to use the word “egregious” in a sentence—never mind a song!—has his head spun around too much to be convincing.

Dundrearies is MacRae’s second full-length album, following up his 2008 self-titled debut. The word dundrearies, you might not know, refers to a style of long, bushy sideburns or muttonchop whiskers and is taken from the character Lord Dundreary in a 19th-century play called Our American Cousin, best known to history as the play Abraham Lincoln was watching when assassinated in 1865.

Free and legal MP3: Björk (for those who overlooked Biophilia)

A slightly unruly swell of female voices provides the ether in which this song expands, while the lyrics offer an endearing sequence of creation stories, the Big Bang merely one among them.

“Cosmogony” – Björk

I’ll admit, I overlooked Biophilia too, when initially released. I didn’t have an iPad at the time (2011), and have always been so wary of “mix it yourself” scenarios (I pay to hear the artist’s work, not my own) that I let myself forget that underneath this grand interactive/multimedia project was still a new Björk album. Finally, I went and listened to it late last year, and, well…wow. Not easy listening, but incredible listening—although as a full album experience, probably not for everyone (example: three of the songs are in 17/8 time). To my ears, she has bridged the worlds of “composition” and “pop” with singular mastery, unifying the worlds of the electronic and the organic in the process. So unique, creative, and determined an artist is Björk she even oversaw the invention of new instruments for the album.

While hardly a standard pop song, “Cosmogony” is one of the lovelier, more immediately welcoming pieces on the album. A slightly unruly swell of female voices provides the ether in which this song expands, while the lyrics offer an endearing sequence of creation stories, the Big Bang merely one among them. Through some alchemical combination of music and voice and lyric and sound, Björk manages to draw a large enough circle of life with this song to contain even the apparent polarities of science and magic, giving simultaneous context both to the limits of our knowledge and to the beauty of our spirits. The song moves me so deeply I feel unequipped to tease it apart, but for three tiny instructions/clarifications. First, what she’s saying at the beginning of each verse (and there is no chorus) is: “Heaven, heaven’s bodies/Whirl around me/Make me wonder.” When listening, I could not discern the word “bodies” in there; I finally looked up the lyrics. Second, listen to how she pronounces the word “egg” at 1:46. Lastly, I love her voice so much I even love how she breathes (see 1:05, after “cunning mate”). When Björk is on her game, as here, her song/compositions are so ripe with vitality that they burst with pleasure both vertically (listening to how, at any given moment, the layers interact and communicate to us) and horizontally—listening to how any one of these layers is itself a rich experience (as, for instance, are the aforementioned backing vocals; likewise the evocative, nearly miraculous bass playing).

“Cosmogony” is one of many viscerally artful and luminous songs on the underrated Biophilia. I eventually did get an iPad, and the Biophilia app, but nothing I could do while interacting with it introduced me to the glory of the music better than simply sitting and listening to it. Which, stupidly, I didn’t do for a long time. I mean to take nothing away from Björk’s impressive vision—the original Biophilia project encompassed not just the song/apps, but also a web site, a documentary, and a series of live performances, including educational workshops for kids. But I kind of recommend just listening to the thing. I’m not exactly sure when this “Cosmogony” free and legal MP3 went online at Epitonic, but I only recently discovered it there, and so, better late than never, here you are.

Free and legal MP3: Young Hunting (moody & dramatic, w/ potent drumming)

Minor-key gravitas and powerfully succinct drumming drive us all the way home.

“Baby’s First Steps” – Young Hunting

Pretty great introduction to this one, yes? Some songs just wrap you up in them right away. Bonus points here for brevity: we get the tightly coordinated, rhythmic interplay between lower-register, minor-key guitar arpeggios and a pulse-like tom tom for all of about 10 seconds; then come the vocals. All too many songs hang onto notably less interesting instrumental motifs for a lot longer before deciding to get started.

“Baby’s First Steps” is a nicely dramatic song in general, with its minor-key gravitas and apparently chorus-free structure—we get a wordless vocal section in between each verse until, after the third verse, we are finally delivered the chorus. (Delayed gratification is an under-utilized pop music tool.) But what lies at the heart of the song’s drama is the drumming, which is minimal, atmospheric, and potent. Launched on the juxtaposition of a steady yet stuttering rhythm, the song somehow seems to move faster than its own beat, if that makes any sense (it might not). This central sonic paradox feeds a number of related contradictions: the song feels at once smooth and itchy, calm and ominous, moody and defiant. The drumming is incredibly succinct; most of the drum kit remains unused for most of the song—we get one cymbal bash at 1:02, another at 1:13, but then we’re back to the tom, now with a purposeful shaker of some sort anchoring the relentless beat. Cymbals don’t enter regularly until the two-minute mark, when the drummer finally opens up a bit, but we still don’t get anything that feels like “normal” rock’n’roll drumming until two-thirds of the way through the song. This is also when the guitars move at last towards the front of the mix, but we have to wait even longer, until the last 30 seconds, for the (very effective) guitar solo. That’s discipline, baby.

Young Hunting is a five-piece band from Los Angeles. “Baby’s First Steps” is a song from the band’s debut full-length album, Hazel, slated for a June release on Oakland-based Gold Robot Records. The band previously put out a seven-inch single in 2010. Thanks to Gold Robot for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3: Standish/Carlyon (downtempo allure)

Throw Prince, Portishead, and Steely Dan in a blender and if you’re lucky you might get something like this.

“Gucci Mountain” – Standish/Carlyon

Throw Prince, Portishead, and Steely Dan in a blender and if you’re lucky you might get something like this. And while those are three not-too-similar artists the one thing they have in common is an exquisite attention to sonic detail. The Melbourne-based duo Standish/Carlyon are cut from the same cloth.

Here is one downtempo brooder that, to begin with, trusts in its own slowness. Listen to how even the bubbling synthesizer percolates slowly, and leaves a delicious amount of blank space in its wake. So quickly does it train us to anticipate restraint in fact that the one extra high note it hits at 0:36 gives the ear an unexpected frisson of excitement. The entire song is just that carefully and spaciously crafted. Important note: there are no hand-claps, synthesized or otherwise. (Pet peeve alert!: hand-claps in slow songs. They make no logical or aural sense. I could mention names but I won’t.) And while we are awash with reverb, the song still displays great clarity—a compelling combination. The bass, meanwhile, is played with painterly discretion, which may have something to do with the fact that vocalist Conrad Standish is also the bass player. In my listening experience, singing bassists approach their instruments differently. The best example of this song’s uncanny capacity to turn reticence into grandeur is how arresting the chorus is when it finally arrives, even as its melody is pretty much the same as the verse’s. The trick is that in the chorus, for the first time, we get the fulfillment of an uninterrupted musical line (suddenly, no blank space). Standish now flipping up into his falsetto doesn’t hurt. No idea what he’s singing about here (“I’m chewing bamboo off the coast of Casanova”?), and it’s still thrilling.

Standish and guitarist Tom Carlyon (who also handles the electronics) were previously in a trio called The Devastations, which released their last record in 2007. “Gucci Mountain” is a track from the duo’s forthcoming debut, entitled Deleted Scenes, arriving next month via Felte.

Free and legal MP3: Nick Jaina (measured jauntiness)

I have decided that composure is drastically underrated in the realm of rock’n’roll.

“Don’t Come to Me” – Nick Jaina

Ah if only all songs were as immediately interesting and engaging as “Don’t Come to Me.” This blog would write itself.

First we have the odd, sparse, toy-piano like pre-introduction, which folds itself underneath a descending guitar melody with a deceptively involved cadence—which, in turn, folds itself into a flowing yet syncopated arrangement with a vaguely islandy ambiance. The lyrics, starting up, have an affable, run-on quality even as they resist any kind of spilling-out feeling. All in all a measured jauntiness is in the air, and that’s what really delights me. Here is a song that bops with a spry bounce (it’s great to desk-dance to; try it!), yet with an abiding sense of control. I am deciding on the spot that composure is way underrated in the general realm of rock’n’roll. You can have most of those guttural screams and overheated guitar solos and such; me, I’m enchanted by restraint and discipline. And so naturally enough we end up here with a most disciplined and easy-going guitar solo (1:35) and a climax featuring nothing more or less than a serious of truly interesting chord changes (1:55). All this in service of a song with a chorus anchored by the lyric “Don’t come to me with your bullshit excuses.” I mean, isn’t control in this context deeper and more interesting than wild-ass bedlam? Maybe?

Nick Jaina is a Portland, Ore.-based musician, composer, and essayist. He has composed music for ballet, theater, and film. “Don’t Come to Me” is a song from his new album, Primary Reception, which will be released later this month on Fluff & Gravy Records, a record label and recording studio also based in Portland. It is his eighth album, not counting a release featuring music he wrote for the play Girl Who Drew Horses; all are available via Bandcamp, including an album of interesting covers he recorded that is available in its entirety for free. Another good song from the new album, “Strawberry Man,” is available as a free download from his web site. Jaina was previously featured on Fingertips in 2008

Free and legal MP3: Fantasmas (noisy guitars, put to good purpose)

While the guitars are given a lot of opportunity to go at it—there’s even a guitar break in the middle of the chorus somehow—the song still manages to give us a larger feeling of space than noisy guitars alone usually convey.

“No Soul” – Fantasmas

A blurry, spiky surge of noisy guitars powers this three-minute keeper from a young Brooklyn band calling themselves Fantasmas. Amidst the punk-ish ambiance I sense a great deal of poise. I like that particular juxtaposition, so here you are.

Note the long introduction (unusual for this kind of music), and note that it starts off the tonic—meaning, away from the key in which the the song is written. (Whatever that pulsating, semi-dissonant chord-like thing the guitars are slashing away at for 45 seconds is, it’s not the home chord.) This is a sneaky yet time-honored way to keep you listening, because our ears, bless their simple needs, just want to be brought home. At 0:45 (phew), we are shifted into the tonic, get 12 more seconds of slashing guitars, and only then we get to see what the song is really about. Which is pretty much more slashing guitars, but now they are sculpted around minimalist lyrics—eight pithy blurts per verse—delivered with indelible New York City-style blasé-ness by a vocalist identified only as Kam. (I especially like his nearly-spoken lines at 1:56.) While the guitars are given a lot of opportunity to go at it—there’s even a guitar break in the middle of the chorus somehow—the song still manages to give us a larger feeling of space than noisy guitars alone usually convey. Some of this probably has to do with how the guitars are dialed back during the sung parts of the chorus; we get much more tension than noise here, a seemingly small detail with a large impact on our listening experience.

Fantasmas are a relatively new quartet from Brooklyn. The name is Spanish for ghosts, and this new band is not to be confused with Fantasma (a cumbia band from Argentina) or Los Fantasmas, an obscure quintet from the Isle of Wight. “No Soul” is the second half of their debut two-sided seven-inch single, the first imprint served up by Low Life Inc., a Brooklyn-based music promotion firm that recently started a label. You can download the song as usual via the link on the title above, or via the record company’s SoundCloud page. The single came out in December, but I only recently came across it, thanks to The Mad Mackeral.

Free and legal MP3: Eleanor Friedberger (singular voice, brisk & word-centric song)

Friedberger’s sound is hurried and wordy, even when the music slows down.

“Stare at the Sun” – Eleanor Friedberger

Eleanor Friedberger has a sneaky sort of uniqueness to her sound. Listen casually and you might miss it—nothing sounds obviously revolutionary, she doesn’t whoop or yelp, she doesn’t deconstruct or make sound collages or mold digital files out of rhythm and electronics. She writes and sings relatively normal-sounding songs. And yet damned if she hasn’t arrived at something truly her own, even as she refuses to dumbfound us with quirkiness (which is, alas, just about the only way to get the blogosphere’s undivided attention).

And it’s actually kind of odd that her music isn’t stranger, given the pre-eminent idiosyncrasy of many of the songs she recorded as part of The Fiery Furnaces. But as a solo artist, Friedberger has slipped off the Furnaces’ strangeness like a worn-out layer of skin. Her voice hasn’t really changed, but the setting displays it in newly attractive ways, her edgy mezzo showing off a dusky, Carly Simon-esque roundness one might not have sensed back in Blueberry Boat days. “Stare at the Sun” is a brisk lyric-centric affair—Friedberger’s sound is hurried and wordy, even when the music slows down—propelled by a crisply-strummed guitar and a three-part chorus that gradually takes the song over from its verses. To my ears, the song’s central moment comes in the middle chorus section, on the line “I’ve been in exile so long,” and what makes the moment is how Friedberger shifts the momentum to emphasize the word “so,” breaking the song’s unrelenting forward motion, and giving us something inexplicably memorable in the process.

Friedberger recorded with her brother Matthew as The Fiery Furnaces from 2003 through 2009; the band is currently on hiatus. She released her first solo album in 2011; Fingertips featured the excellent “My Mistakes” from that album, as some may recall. “Stare at the Sun” is from her forthcoming album, Personal Record, due out in June on Merge Records. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.