Category: MP3s

“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.

“The Town Where I’m Livin Now” – Grandaddy

Bittersweet ode

“The Town Where I’m Livin Now” – Grandaddy

Grandaddy is a venerable band with a dedicated following and a knack for creating quirky, spacey, melodic indie rock; at the center of the sound is the sweet, sometimes high-pitched tenor of front man Jason Lytle. They’ve been around, with at least one notable hiatus, since 1992; their catalog is worth exploring, and isn’t as extensive as you might assume, given the on-and-off longevity–there have only been six original studio albums to date. Live albums and compilation albums are another matter. Case in point: Sumday: Excess Baggage, a B-side and rarities collection spun off the 2003 album Sumday and released digitally in August. “The Town Where I’m Livin Now” is a song that’s been around for years, but without an official studio release until it landed on this 2023 album.

The song is a swaying, bittersweet ode to, let’s face it, a surreal hellhole of a town. I assume that’s part of the joke and/or statement: we all of us here on planet Earth live among all sorts of unpleasantness and disaster, and–if we’re lucky–life goes on. Lytle, as he does, can sound a bit like Neil Young’s mischievous younger brother; the voice is high and winsome and seems to come with a baked-in wink or maybe just a shrug. And if this hits the ear at first like a simple, waltz-time acoustic strummer, keep listening. To begin with, there’s a burbling sound living at the bottom of the mix that doesn’t go away, you just kind of get used to it. Cascading piano arpeggios are buttressed by some looney-bin electronics. And the liturgical way Lytle presents these wacko lyrics is a central part of the not-actually-very-funny joke.

You can check out the whole album on Bandcamp. MP3 via KEXP.

“Gray Apples” – Sarah Morrison

Meditative, idiosyncratic, approachable

“Gray Apples” – Sarah Morrison

“Gray Apples” is the kind of artful, meditative, idiosyncratic yet approachable song one rarely hears here in the algorithm-choked 2020s. A direct spiritual descendant of the ’80s and ’90s work of the great Canadian singer/songwriter Jane Siberry, “Gray Apples” offers metaphysical musings within the container of a three-and-a-half minute pop song, held together by Sarah Morrison’s airy and elastic voice.

Similar to Siberry at her finest, Morrison deals in unorthodox musical and lyrical interruptions, such as what first happens between 1:00 and 1:16, when the heartbeat pulse of the verse stops, the time signature disappears, and Morrison’s lyrics take on a spontaneous, spoken-poetry feel. And not to drive the Siberry comparison too far into the ground, but I’m even noting specific words here that directly call back Siberry songs (apples and Bessie, to name two), and likewise see Morrison’s evocation of what she calls “The Holy Comforter–indifference” as an echo of Siberry’s discussion of “The Great Leveler” in her epic “Mimi on the Beach.”

That all said, you don’t have to be familiar with any of this to appreciate “Gray Apples,” but if you happen to know Jane’s work you’ll get an extra kick out of what’s in store for you here. In drawing consciously or not (I’m betting consciously) on the work of an underappreciated luminary in the history of singer/songwriter music, Morrison has composed and recorded something with a subtle sparkle all its own.

“Gray Apples” is a song from Morrison’s debut album, Attachment Figure, which is coming out next month on Ramp Local Records. Morrison is based in Tallahassee, and has previously been the live keyboardist for Locate S,1, playing there alongside Clayton Rychlik and Ross Brand, who are also in the band Of Montreal. Rychlik and Brand play with Morrison on Attachment Figure, and co-produced the album with her. You can check out one other song and pre-order the album over on Bandcamp.

photo credit: Chris Cameron

“Conquering Kangaroo” – Aaron Hunter Dennis

Arcane but good-natured

“Conquering Kangaroo” – Aaron Hunter Dennis

With its acoustic groove and delightfully arcane lyrics, “Conquering Kangaroo” nestles into an agreeable Guided By Voices meets Sufjan Stevens vibe, with a perhaps unexpected nod in the direction of Lindsey Buckingham. The song has two strong, competing characteristics: Aaron Hunter Dennis’s good-natured story-telling voice, and lyrics that tell no discernible story whatsoever. Many songs succeed either because of or in spite of unintelligible story lines; this is an especially successful one, a few tart phrases standing in for narrative clarity: “baseball cap but no team name”; “the pills have been helping, too”; “a company run by brutes.”

And while I mentioned the “acoustic groove,” careful listeners will note there’s more going on here than strummy acoustic guitars. There are scratchy high-necked guitar accents, wordless vocal flourishes, and a chorus in 7/4 time; the abstract (and sometimes unintelligible) lyrics further disrupt any idea of this being just a mellow toe-tapper. Probably my favorite recurring moment is the lovely way the verse melody resolves into the end-of-verse rhyme (first heard around 0:22) only to partially disconcert the ear with those 7/4 measures that follow in the chorus. Keeping the ear off-balance is a potent maneuver if a song likewise delivers some counter-balancing comfort. A parallel tactic: Dennis gives the cryptic lyrics an intelligible, if idiosyncratic, structure, in which the last word of each verse all rhyme (or slant-rhyme, to be more precise). This also underlines the idea that the songwriter knows exactly what he’s doing, even if the listener remains slightly bamboozled.

As for what the phrase “conquering kangaroo” means or refers to, all that pops in my head is a cartoon concept of a kangaroo with boxing gloves on. Is this a metaphor for the human condition, us poor souls stuck fighting battles we shouldn’t even be involved with? Your guess is as good as mine.

Aaron Hunter Dennis is a singer/songwriter based in San Diego. “Conquering Kangaroo” is his first single as a solo artist. He was previously in the 2010s band Tan Sister Radio, which had a song of theirs placed on the Showtime series Shameless; the royalty check funded a makeshift studio for Dennis, who there began to record his own material. Thanks to the artist for the MP3, which came courtesy of Tennessee Kamanski. Kamanski is half of the engaging duo of Allen LeRoy Hug, who have been featured here both in review and playlist. Kamanski and Dennis are engaged to be married. He’s played and recorded with Allen LeRoy Hug, she’s now helping with promotion, and so sent me the song, and here you are. Occasionally it’s that easy.

“Francine” – Brandon De La Cruz

Hushed and minimal

“Francine” – Brandon De La Cruz

Fingertips veteran Brandon De La Cruz returns with another of his intimate and tremulous gems. Possessing a whispery, minimalist style that can veer in an ill-fated direction in less capable hands, De La Cruz quietly mesmerizes, transcending the seemingly straightforward setting.

“Francine” launches off a classic folk-guitar riff, swinging gently into a subdued tale of (I think) long-distance love. De La Cruz’s minimalism extends to his storytelling: he’s short on concrete details, long on suggestive phrases. And, as I can’t help but continue to mention, the man is a master of using simple words to skip at the surface of deep meaning; here, the entire song, besides the name “Francine” and two exceptions (“between” and “apart”), is composed of one-syllable words. This is not as easy as it may look, and works with the gentle music to create a trance-like vibe. (De La Cruz’s Bandcamp bio notes an interest in Japanese haiku, which makes sense.) One telling, self-referential line comes near the beginning: “Words don’t say what I mean.” And yet they’re all we have to go on, to quote Tom Stoppard.

In and around the hushed and humble setting you may notice some stray sounds in the background. Towards the beginning, underneath the finger-picked guitar, an echoey string effect (0:12) hints at the tweaks to the audioscape that De La Cruz uses to ever so subtly distort the vibe. Throughout most of the song, if you listen for it you’ll hear a low ambient rumble that gives the impression of his playing in an empty warehouse or maybe an amphitheater. There’s a sound resembling a backward guitar loop beginning around 0:54 and continuing softly from there. Later, a couple of unexpected voices, with a “found sound” character, float in and out of the mix. De La Cruz reports that his inspiration in this case is rooted in his time working part-time at Mississippi Records in Portland, which puts out a lot of folk and country reissues; he sees the sampling as a creative way to collaborate with artists who are long gone from the world. The end result to my ears has the collage-like feel of something you might encounter in an art gallery.

“Francine” is a track from De La Cruz’s new album, Two Kilos of Blue, which was recorded in New Zealand in 2020, and released last month. De La Cruz was in New Zealand visiting friends when the pandemic broke out; he ended up stuck in there for a year. However inconvenient that might have been personally, it seems to have been amenable artistically–Two Kilos of Blue is the second album he recorded while marooned, and is a collection of songs he’d written over the previous ten years. De La Cruz is based in Portland; this is his third full-length album, coming after four previous EPs, the first recording dating back to 2010. He has been featured on Fingertips in 2011, 2013, and 2020.

“The Aaron Waters Show” – Midwestern Dirt

Instrumental-forward journey

“The Aaron Waters Show” – Midwestern Dirt

At once brisk and pensive, “The Aaron Waters Show” keeps a steady pulse even as it diverts through a series of instrumental breaks between verses, along with a one-plus-minute interlude between the third verse and the ensuing bridge, and a one-minute instrumental coda. The song has no chorus, which I think contributes to its restlessness, a sense of looking for something that isn’t arriving. The unusual amount of instrumental time does that too; the vocal sections, together, carry a purposeful undertone of wishing somehow they could do more than they get to do. And they don’t do anything that isn’t laid out first by an instrumental part.

The song’s main riff (first heard at 0:21)–a gently descending guitar line finished with a decisive two-note upturn, the piano and bass joining in–repeats four times in the introduction before it becomes the verse melody at 0:47. Patrick Kapp, reminiscent of Nils Lofgren (anyone?), sings sweetly, with character; he makes the most of the relatively limited time he has to sing. The instrumental breaks keep trying to upstage him–each break following a verse features a different guitar sound. And then comes the long instrumental break after the last verse, which delivers a subtle shift via a new chord pattern introduced between 2:35 and 2:47. It repeats once and then becomes the foundation for the bridge when the vocals resume at 3:02. The lyrics at this point slow down, aiming towards some kind of resolution, even as the background cadence remains, driven by a bass line grown increasingly hyperactive. The vocals wrap by 3:57, and the song proceeds for nearly another minute, finally relaxing the tempo for the last 30 seconds. There’s a strong sense of a journey coming to an end, or maybe at least some kind of adventure ride. Which maybe makes sense given the song’s provenance: the title is a pun on the annual Air and Water Show held every summer in Chicago. The song, says Kapp, was inspired by the way each summer he is initially unnerved by the war-like noise of the aerial practice that precedes the show, only each year to remember it’s only the show, everything is more or less okay.

Midwestern Dirt began as a studio project for Kapp while he was living in Brooklyn, with recordings fleshed out with the help of family and friends. After he returned to Chicago in 2019, and then after the worst of the pandemic, the project became a full five-piece band. “The Aaron Waters Show” is a song from the album Twilight at a Burning Hill, coming out next month.

“Sorry I Can’t Stay” – La Faute

Whispery vocals, echoey arpeggios

“Sorry I Can’t Stay” – La Faute

Echoey piano argeggios lead us into Peggy Messing’s up-close, whispery vocals and how can you not be captivated? The melodies are lovely, the mood bittersweet, reinforced by the repeated titular phrase in the chorus. As a series of words, “Sorry I can’t stay” is both strikingly conversational and evocatively ambivalent, the former accentuating the latter. When we talk we are rarely as conclusive as songwriters might often portray us to be.

The arpeggios, in constant motion, contribute to the song’s watery insistence, which in turn presents in conflict with lyrics that seem to reinforce the main phrase’s equivocation. Perhaps the most plaintive lyrical moment comes with this hushed request, in the delayed second verse: “I know what you always say/ But can you say it again?”

At 1:26 a semi-discordant synthesizer offers a slow-motion solo, laying bare the song’s hidden waltz rhythm, after which it haunts the soundscape with distant, roomy sounds; these become somewhat more audible and outer-space-y around 2:15. The synthesizer touches stand in for how, in general, Messing does so much with not a lot of different elements. She seems to like offering up moments that contribute so subtly they don’t necessarily even register, such as the vocal harmonies which delicately adorn the chorus. I can’t help but relate this to the incisive way she identifies, on social media, as “an undersharer and overthinker.” (Side note: there are more of us out here than people may realize.)

Messing, originally from Winnipeg, does musical business as La Faute (“the mistake”). A visual artist, multi-instrumentalist, and singer-songwriter, she released her debut album Blue Girl Nice Day towards the end of May. Check it out via Bandcamp and buy it if you like it, which is very possible. You might in particular want to check out her cover of Paul Simon’s indelible “The Only Living Boy in New York,” which closes the album.

“Let Me Know When It’s Yes” – Smug Brothers

Jangly, catchy, concise

“Let Me Know When It’s Yes” – Smug Brothers

Against the odds, power pop survives into the 2020s, often perpetuated by the kind of good-natured, low-drama outfits such as Ohio’s Smug Brothers, who have been plying their quirky wares since 2004. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” falls unmistakably into the classic power-pop soundscape, with its jangly guitars, catchy but bittersweet melodies, and concise song structure. Interestingly, what is concise for many bands is an extended track for Smug Brothers, since the majority of songs in their ample discography clock in not merely under three minutes but often under two minutes, or even one. Singer/songwriter Kyle Melton says the short songs are largely a side effect of the small notebooks he carries around to write down his ideas. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes,” by contrast, was written on a computer, with more room to spread out lyrically. Be that as it may, there are good songwriting instincts at work here, as super-short songs have a different structural logic to them than songs of a more standard length. “Let Me Know When It’s Yes” grounds itself in two succinct, interrelated melodies, a situation which counterintuitively requires more time to absorb as a listener than a more complex melody that you only get a passing chance to get your arms around.

Which is to say, with a super-short song, you don’t as a listener, consciously or not, expect something to seem familiar as it unfolds. The songwriter, consciously or not, might as well make it intricate because it’s not really going to sink in on first listen in any case. But it’s nice and short so you are theoretically being invited to listen a few times. A three-minute song, on the other hand, with a simpler, recurring melody scheme, allows the listener to get more readily comfortable, a comfort level enhanced, ideally, by potent motifs and a strong sense of resolution, both of which Smug Brothers smartly deliver. I’m half thinking that what might seem to be the chorus here may simply be the final, resolving line of the verse (“Give me a call and let me know when it’s yes”). This is a structure that pays homage to folk ballads and is, relatedly, a ploy Bob Dylan has often used (think “Come in, she said, I’ll give you shelter from the storm”). Tangentially, I wouldn’t call Kyle Melton’s voice Dylanesque per se, but he’s got something of Dylan acolytes Roger McGuinn and/or Tom Petty in his tone.

Smug Brothers have been through a variety of lineup changes over the years; founding members Melton (who also plays guitar) and Don Thrasher (drummer) remain at the core. Kyle Sowash (bass) and incoming lead guitarist Ryan Shaffer round out the quartet; two of the four are in Columbus, the other two in Dayton. Former lead guitarist Scott Tribble was with the band through the recording sessions for the latest album, which is called In the Book of Bad Ideas and is coming out in September. That’s where you’ll find “Let Me Know If It’s Yes.” You can check out the semi-voluminous Smug Brothers discography via Bandcamp. MP3 courtesy of the band. Note that Smug Brothers were previously featured on Fingertips in 2019.