MP3s – Page 49 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Lonely Drifter Karen

Prickly-smooth allure, in 6/4 time

“Comet” – Lonely Drifter Karen

A peculiar allure is in the air here. “Comet” is at once prickly and smooth, at once funky and not-funky, at once familiar and unfamiliar. Small details matter. It’s not just the spidery guitar line in the introduction that creates the mood but the squeaky, metallic echoes in the background; it’s not just the fitful piano fills in the verse (note that the keyboard spends more time not playing than playing) but the eerie synthesizer flourishes underneath (half ghost, half singing saw).

Larger details matter too, most of all the song’s 6/4 time. I am something of an uncommon-time-signature devotee, always appreciative of bands willing to trot something other than 4/4 time out for our ears. 6/4 is a particularly attractive option, as it both allows a consistent beat and contributes to a subtle sense of oddness, if only because our ears–whether naturally or by training, who knows–default towards a feeling of four-ness. Six-ness is still regular, you can still dance to it, but something slightly interesting and unexpected is happening. And then there is the matter of singer/guitarist Tanja Frinta, who commands attention with her flexible, vaguely Kate Bush-like soprano–earthy and keen in the verse, breathy-airy in the multi-layered but mostly one-word chorus.

Begun as a solo project for the Austrian-born Frinta while she was living in Sweden in 2003, Lonely Drifter Karen has been through a variety of incarnations, locations, and band-member nationalities over the years. Now based in Brussels, Lonely Drifter Karen currently features Frinta, Spanish keyboardist/arranger Marc Melià Sobrevias, and French guitarist/multi-instrumentalist Clément Marionare (France). “Comet” is a song from the album Poles, the band’s third, released on the Belgian label Crammed Discs, either in February, March, April, or June of this year, depending on which online source one consults.

Free and legal MP3: Poor Moon (Fleet Foxes side project, w/ beauty & heft)

Dreamy song with with an intriguing sonic palette, elusive roots, lovely melodies, and an uncanny arrangement.

“Birds” – Poor Moon

Last week I featured a song from the band Time Travelers, and noted its resemblance to music made by Fleet Foxes. This week, at the risk of redundancy, I offer up a song from the band Poor Moon and will likewise note its resemblance to music made by Fleet Foxes, with this additional footnote: Christian Wargo and Casey Wescott, two of the four gentlemen in Poor Moon, are themselves also in Fleet Foxes. So that explains that.

This is not Fleet Foxes 2.0, however. “Birds” is a dreamy song with with an intriguing sonic palette, elusive roots, lovely melodies, and an uncanny arrangement. There is something vaguely Mexican, or at least faux-Mexican, in the air here, both in the rhythm and the instrumentation, but that is merely an entry point into this music, not the end point. Sounds are used with great care, in particular those emanating from the marimba and the rest of the sensitive, idiosyncratic percussion section (tiny example: the random, exquisitely timed marimba note struck at 2:29). Chord progressions are lovingly crafted—don’t miss the heavenly, Brian Wilson-y end of the introduction (0:27-0:32), and the chorus’s lovely series of shifts (1:35-2:01, but check out 1:49 in particular). The group harmonies surely bring FF to mind, but Wargo’s lead vocal has a casual, dusky quality that blends beautifully with the warm, clackety arrangement. This is a winner that keeps on growing with repeated listens.

Wargo and Wescott have long been friends and musical associates; prior to Fleet Foxes, they played together in the bands Pedro the Lion and Crystal Skulls. The other two members are brothers Ian and Peter Murray, who otherwise play in a band called The Christmas Cards. “Birds” is the tenth of ten tracks on the band’s debut full-length release, self-titled, which will be out next week on Sub Pop Records. MP3 via Sub Pop. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Time Travelers (gentle, brisk, w/ Fleet Foxes affinity)

It’s okay if this sounds somewhat like the Fleet Foxes. Still a really good song.

“Minnow” – Time Travelers

Already the silvery vibe and agile beat bring to mind a Fleet Foxes song, and then Edward Sturtevant opens his mouth and Robin Pecknold all but tumbles out. But you know what? Doesn’t matter. A band sounding like another band is no sin. First of all, removing ourselves from the bubble of musical over-exposure, a lot of the time, what seems an obvious resemblance to us may not register on other ears. Second, and more important, the only thing that need offend the ears, as far as I’m concerned, is a bad song; good songs, on the contrary, are entirely welcome in whatever guise they choose to arrive. “Minnow” is a wonderful song.

At the root of it is one of those juxtapositions that pop songs can, when they want to, manage so well. The often-discussed pop-song juxtaposition is happy music with sad lyrics, but there are other, subtler ways to juxtapose countervailing moods. In “Minnow” we get a brisk 4/4 beat paired with a mild, bittersweet demeanor—a gentle-but-fast amalgam that creates a distinctive sense of urgency, an urgency that gives itself up to you rather than pushes itself onto you, if that makes sense. And within the consistent, fast-moving framework, the song offers us two differentiated approaches to the beat: the expansive verse, with a swaying feel fostered by an accentuated third beat; and the seemingly faster-moving (but not) chorus, with its double-time rhythm section. Through it all, Sturtevant is almost disconcertingly affecting; he sings with an ache but entirely without the histrionics that generally plague 21st-century American vocalists whenever they try to emote (thank you, yet again, “American Idol”). He is assisted by an able-bodied melody that is at once assertive and evasive, with lines that begin emphatically but end, often, by veering away from resolution.

Time Travelers formed while the foursome were sophomores at Bates College in 2008. They moved (where else?) to Brooklyn, last year. “Minnow” is a song from Vacationland, the band’s second EP, which was released at the beginning of this year but only recently brought to my attention. You can listen to it and/or buy it (for a price of your choosing) via Bandcamp. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

photo credit: Liz Rowley

Free and legal MP3: Jennah Barry

Singer/songwriter with depth & allure

“The Coast” – Jennah Barry

“The Coast” opens in a relative hush, and in 6/8 time, just Barry’s voice and a barely articulated guitar. The pithy rhythm section kicks in at 0:37, the unstable momentum of the uncommon time signature pairing oddly well with the singer’s sweet vocal presence, and the sing-songy melody she offers. The production is crisp, the arrangement both minimal and assured, and Barry sings without affectation or artifice. Already this feels like a strong antidote to the ungated arrivals thronging through the internet music scene, with their mud and trickery and self-absorption. Sometimes all I’m looking for is a little easy know-how, a little unselfconscious musical ability.

At 1:02, almost like a wave hitting the shore, 4/4 time arrives with the chorus, and it’s the shift here that is almost, somehow, the song’s hook. Sometimes, I realize, it’s not the unexpected time signature that boosts a song’s resonance as much as how a more common beat is at some point woven into the musical story. The 4/4 chorus smacks the song in the middle of a 6/8 measure, and dances with its own quirky rhythm, the drummer giving us the first and fourth beats but skipping the others. Barry sings more forcefully in the chorus, with a bit of Kathleen Edwards’ honeyed urgency, and yet somehow still keeps her gist hidden, allowing us to hear phrases more easily than sentences. I find the elusiveness refreshing.

“The Coast” is the lead track from Barry’s debut album, Young Men. Nova Scotia born and raised, Barry moved to Toronto in 2006 for college, where she studied jazz. She joined the indie pop orchestral collective O’Darling, and also played with a roots/country band called The Long Haul, but never took to the big-city thing. Returning with relief to Nova Scotia after graduation, she hooked up with producer/engineer Diego Medina, and recorded Young Men at his home studio, bringing some O’Darling compatriots in for the session. The album was released in May; you can check it out and, perhaps, purchase it via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: Suit of Lights (melodic, idiosyncratic, apocalyptic)

Combining a Fountains-of-Wayne-ish gift for melody with an idiosyncratic sense of presentation.

“The Human Beings” – Suit of Lights

As homely as it is endearing, “The Human Beings” combines a Fountains-of-Wayne-ish gift for melody with an idiosyncratic sense of presentation. Over an assemblage of woodwinds huffy-puffy-ing in the background, front man Joe Darone offers up what appears to be a pathos-free elegy to the planetary tragedy that is human civilization. But, hey, at least you can sing along—well, part of the way. The verse and the chorus are as pithy and tuneful as can be; the entire lyrical section—verse/chorus/verse/chorus/bridge/verse/chorus—wraps up in 1:40. The song plays out from there as an instrumental at once plucky and ominous, woodwinds interspersed with a muted sort of churning menace. As with the lyrics—“So they blacken the earth and blacken the ground/Now you’re not gonna find one of them around”—the music doesn’t end assuringly. My advice is to enjoy the unbridled melodicism, and find a bit of hope in a human creative urge so relentless as to feel compelled to dress up the apocalypse in such an appealing package.

Billing itself as “an indie rock manifestation,” Suit of Lights is a loose collective fronted by Joe Darone, operating out of New York City. Darone began his musical career as a teenager in the New Jersey punk band The Fiendz in the late ’80s. His Suit of Lights project began life in 2003. “The Human Beings” is a song from Shine On Forever, the third Suit of Lights album, released last month on Visiting Hours Records. You can check the whole thing out on Bandcamp, and buy it there as well. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Everest (mellow facade hides sharply constructed song)

Can a song be immediately engaging and sustainably appealing with neither a hook nor a discernible story? Apparently, yes.

“Raking Me Over the Coals” – Everest

Can a song be immediately engaging and sustainably appealing with neither a hook nor a discernible story? Apparently, yes.

With the lazy-brisk gait of a soft-rock classic, “Raking Me Over the Coals” has a winsome, timeless feeling. Russell Pollard’s easy-going tenor adds to the bygone vibe. And yet there’s a crispness in the air as well; beneath the mellow facade is a sharply constructed song, with persistent melody lines, an elusive chorus, and one well-placed, off-kilter chord change. That change—first heard at 0:43—leads both into and out of the expansive, unusual chorus section, which is comprised of two verse-like segments and finishes with a minor turn on the stand-alone title phrase. The chorus has a protracted, narrative-like feeling, so even as it does come up twice in the three-minute song, it’s hard to get a sense of repetition. This is no sing-along. A typical pop song gains its title from the most repeated word or phrase in the song, and that’s true here, but obliquely: we hear it first, idiosyncratically, at the end of the first section of the first verse (I kind of liked that, for some reason), and then the two more times in the chorus. Just three times in the whole song.

I said “narrative-like,” and I meant it: while the song has the ambling feel of a tale being told, I can decipher no through-line or event descriptions. Truth be told, the smooth and effortless-seeming music belies the title’s implication, and that’s part of the charm here too. Whomever or whatever is raking the narrator over the proverbial coals, he sounds pretty philosophical about it.

Pollard is a L.A.-based musician who has played with a number of notable indie bands over the years, including Sebadoh and Earlimart. “Raking Me Over the Coals” is a song from the band’s third album, Ownerless, which was released in June on ATO Records.

photo credit: Zoran Orlic

Free and legal MP3: North Atlantic Drift (moody, stately instrumental)

Combining the subtle flavors of electronic texture with the deep allure of simple melody. An instrumental, but no apparent relation to the old Fleetwood Mac instrumental with the same name.

“Albatross” – North Atlantic Drift

The musical fine line between dull and hypnotic is never as evident as when venturing into the uncharted territory of the rock’n’roll instrumental. With no words to guide us, an instrumental often makes no effort to engage the conscious mind at all; there are, indeed, any number of thriving sub-genres in which obvious melodic movement takes a big backseat to texture and ambiance. Such sub-genres, alas, do not typically register with me. My conscious mind is a demanding beast. I happily go about my life pretending that ambient music doesn’t really exist.

Every now and then, however, an odd hybrid slides into my field of awareness. Each of the two gentlemen in Toronto-based North Atlantic Drift has a background in electronic, “post-rock” music, and they surely love their processors and loops and all those digitally manipulative tools of the trade. They are not out here to thrill you with their intricate melodies. They are here to captivate you with mood and texture. And yet they bring a secret weapon: archetypal melody. “Albatross” is grounded in one three-note, minor-key descent, played on a reverbed guitar. Note how offhanded the melody’s entrance is, at 0:12, how it emerges shyly from the gently pulsing mist. Note too how slippery the middle note is, and will remain—we hear it only in slurred combination with the previous note. The song develops patiently from the ground of this slightly blurred three-note motif, itself just an inversion of the two-note bass line, with the middle note filled in. The motif is repeated four times, without hurry, before the a higher, slightly varied descent is heard, leading to one last repeat of the original melody. The song involves four repetitions of this “verse,” with three short interstitial sections in between. Subtle layers are added via percussion, guitar, and synthesizer. The whole thing passes like a dream, like a forgotten thought, like a stately idea; I find it hypnotic, never dull, and pin its success on the musicians’ willingness to combine the subtle flavors of electronic texture with the deep allure of simple melody. Your mileage may vary.

“Albatross” is from the debut North Atlantic Drift album, Canvas, which was released digitally in March, then with a limited run of CDs in June. It bears no obvious relation to the classic Fleetwood Mac instrumental of the same name, but perhaps there is a subtle connection nonetheless.

Free and legal MP3: Wildlife Control

Think the Records crossed with Phoenix

“Analog or Digital” – Wildlife Control

The pumpkin ale may be arriving on the beer shelves, but I hope it’s not too late to slip a great summer song into your music library. In “Analog or Digital,” pure power-pop adrenaline meets a nimble 21st-century sound palette—think the Records crossed with Phoenix—and all that’s missing are people still listening to their car radios with the windows open. Not to mention radio stations that would play this. But you get the idea.

This one hardly needs any annotation—it’s got a head-bopping one-note bass line, an infectious melody, is three minutes long, and is about listening to records (a subject that forms its own important splinter group in the kingdom of power pop). Bonus points for the chorus’s recurring lyric “It doesn’t matter if she’s analog or digital,” which seems instantly zeitgeist-y—a brilliant blend of the concrete and vague, simple to sing along with, while inviting more meaning than it actually offers.

Wildlife Control is a duo comprised of brothers Neil and Sumul Shah. They grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania and are now bicoastal, with Neil in Brooklyn, Sumul in San Francisco. Their web site bio, which seems purposefully nebulous, notes that the brothers “collaborate on everything,” while offering no specifics on, say, who does the lead vocals, or who else helped them out in recording their album (“an ensemble of close friends” is the best we get). “Analog or Digital” has been running around the internet since December, in advance of the band’s first album, which was just self-released at the end of July. No worries about the anonymous-looking file name here, this one checks out as free and legal. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the original link.

Free and legal MP3: Wild Moccasins

Glistening, purposeful neo-’90s guitar rock

“Gag Reflections” – Wild Moccasins

With its glistening union of purposeful guitar rock and a mellifluous soprano, “Gag Reflections” gives off a welcome aroma of ’90s alternative rock (Belly, anybody? Tanya Donelly?), and okay, here’s something that the Retromania crowd refuses to understand: how brilliant it is that today’s bands have such wide-ranging, decades-spanning musical language by which to be inspired. Sure, it was cool when rock’n’roll was younger and new forms were emerging, but it is also cool now with nearly 60 years of rock’n’roll behind us for bands to comb through it all and decide what works as a platform for their own musical expression. For laughs, browse the blogosphere and note how often writers disparage a band for “not breaking any ground.” By which they mean that a given piece of music doesn’t seem to sound “new.” And yet to judge “newness” based entirely on whether it’s a new form is not only short-sighted (there’s way more to music than form, and always has been) but entirely misses the point of rock’n’roll in 2012. End of rant.

Both solidly built and subtly quirky, “Gag Reflections” begins with an odd but incisive prelude—first we hear a double-time riff, with an air of Morse-code urgency about it, then Zahira Gutierrez enters singing only the song’s title, the riff continuing, building tension, and releasing, now, into a proper intro. And quite an intro it is, with a satisfying, all but anthemic guitar line (0:22), the kind of guitar line, indeed, that rock’n’roll songs were made to be built around. And yet here, this superb guitar line feels a bit hidden—less central than slightly left-of-central, and soon overshadowed by Gutierrez’s fetching, elastic voice, which is simultaneously inviting and mysterious. She is one of those singers who can appear to sing clearly while still concealing most of the words she’s saying. And so you lean closer in. The payoff arrives at the end of the chorus, when she abandons words entirely for that angelic “oo-oo-oo” we first hear at 1:12. I love that the song’s most powerful hook is a fleeting moment, almost an afterthought, after the lyrics have ended. I also love the even higher “oo-oo-oo” Gutierrez unleashes later on (2:44), and, then, the brief but compelling guitar noise the band puts out shortly thereafter.

Wild Moccasins are a Houston-based quintet founded in 2007. Their debut album, Skin Collision Past, was self-released in 2010, and then re-released nationally in 2011 on New West Records. “Gag Reflections” is a single released in mid-July on New West.

Free and legal MP3: King of Spain (one-note melody, w/ power & style)

I don’t know if I’m a sucker for one-note melodies but I sure am fascinated by them.

“Motions” – King of Spain

I don’t know if I’m a sucker for one-note melodies but I sure am fascinated by them. Rock’n’roll has had a smattering of famous songs with extended one-note melodies (“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Pump It Up,” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” are the three that always come to mind) and yet consider the difference in feel between that trio of harangue-like tunes and this one-note wonder, which is smooth and cat-like in its unfolding. The arrangement, drony and hypnotic, pulls us with style and determination through such a silvery series of chords that the ear almost doesn’t hear how dogged a one-note melody this is—unlike its one-note companions from rock history, which veer now and then from the primary note, the melody in “Motions” is literally just one note for the entire length of the verse section, beginning at 0:39, until the very last note, which falls off on the last word of the phrase “This is the way that we fall.”

One-note melodies inescapably draw our attention to the lyrics, since our ears seek the source of complication in what they are listening to, in an effort to understand, and if the melody is all one note, the complication pretty much all comes from the words. The lyrics in a one-note melody carry an inescapable feeling of stream of consciousness; the lyrics of “Motions” take this one step further—they seem less a spontaneous litany of cool-sounding words than themselves a meaningful exploration of the inner workings of the mind. They pour out, demand contemplation, yet leave no time in which to contemplate. Focus if you can on the words and you’ll find the power of the song multiplies.

When the debut King of Spain album, Entropy, was released in 2007, the band was a solo project for Tampa singer/multi-instrumentalist Matt Slate. In 2009, King of Spain became a duo when bassist Daniel Wainright joined as a full-fledged member. “Motions” is from the forthcoming album All I Did Was Tell Them the Truth and They Thought It Was Hell, to be released at the end of August on New Grenada Records.

photo credit: Lucy Pearl Photography (http://www.lucy-pearl.com)