Category: MP3s

Free and legal MP3: Wheat (slippery song from an elusive band)

“House of Kiss” gives off a bright, circular vibe, and is probably as catchy as a song can be that so little resembles anything we might picture as a “hit song.”

Wheat

“House of Kiss” – Wheat

Oddly engaging anti-pop pop from the eclectic, reclusive, semi-beloved Boston band Wheat. “House of Kiss” gives off a bright, circular vibe, and is probably as catchy as a song can be that so little resembles anything we might picture as a “hit song.” The structure is slippery at best. The song centers around an insistent, run-on lyric in which the narrator assures his partner or lover that he’s paying attention, really and truly. This seems neither like a verse nor a chorus, and it repeats, through the song, a total of seven times in just over three minutes. At first listen this “Don’t think twice” lyric seems all that makes an impression; the accompanying instrumentation appears unremarkable on the surface—guitars, bass, drum, mostly—and everything unfolds in 4/4 time.

But there are these in-between sections that trouble the flow of the song, some instrumental, some vocal, featuring melodies that lag well behind the beat. Keep an ear on the bass, which plays deft, fluid lines underneath the repeating “Don’t think twice” section but constricts itself during the slow sections. Eventually a sense of intertwining between the song’s vague parts emerges, most notably when one of the slower melodies is used underneath the main theme as a kind of counter-melody at 1:58. We eventually hear something resembling strings; and then a perky synthesizer riff. But for all its vagaries, the overall feeling is of a song marching on, of a magnet-like return to the “Don’t think twice” lyric. Eventually it occurs to me what a strong backbeat (i.e., emphasis on the second and fourth beats) there is and yet how the lyrical flow pays no attention to it. And this—the repetition over the ignored backbeat—may be what in the end lends “House of Kiss” an amusement-park-ride-like sense of flying around in a grand but yet almost dizzying circle. You get off a little wobbly but you kind of want to go back and have another ride.

A band since 1996, Wheat is neither prolific nor forthcoming, but the duo of Brendan Harney and Scott Levesque has appeared abruptly back on the scene late in 2011 with a “double a-side” single featuring “House of Kiss” and “The Used 2 Be In Love Blues.” Note that there is now an official third member of the band, multi-instrumentalist Luke Hebert. Two more double a-sides are due out in the reasonably near future, while the band’s sixth full-length album is moving somewhat more slowly towards a 2012 release, maybe. Wheat was previously featured here on Fingertips way back in 2004 (around the time of their one sort-of-hit, “I Met a Girl”) and also in 2007. Thanks to the band for the MP3 here.

Free and legal MP3: Narrow Sparrow (fuzzy, buzzy, busy piece of off-kilter pop)

A buzzy blend of the melodious and the cacophonous, “Joe Meek’s Dream” fuses retro-futuristic synthesizers to folk-singer strumming. Wait; what?

Narrow Sparrow

“Joe Meek’s Dream” – Narrow Sparrow

If “Joe Meek’s Dream”‘s baroque, overprocessed ambiance and obscure lyrical content brings Neutral Milk Hotel to mind, the song’s particular fusing of retro-futuristic electronics to folk-singer strumming doesn’t sound like anything anyone has managed to think of before. At the same time, if the space-age synthesizer melody sounds vaguely familiar, that’s because Joe Meek was the eccentric Brit who wrote and produced the song “Telstar,” a 1962 hit by the Tornados that surely inspired the Star Trek theme music a few years later. More on all that in a minute.

In the meantime, consider this song’s rollicking momentum, which wants you to love it, and its lack of definable structure, which wants you to be disoriented. There is no real hook here; I don’t think there are even any verses or chorus. But, aha, there is instead a recurring melodic moment that feels to me like the song’s musical heart—first heard at 0:59, there supporting the lyrics “I fall asleep and think of other things.” On the one hand it’s just the simple, time-honored progression from the IV to the V chord (F major to G major here), with the melody quite literally sketching out each chord in arpeggio form; on the other hand, coming in the midst of a fuzzy, buzzy, busy piece of off-kilter pop, this modest melodic motif resounds with a homemade kind of glory. We move quickly on, and are never actually quite sure where in the song we are, but that’s the moment that, to me, allows everything else not only to happen but to make sense. It comes back just one more time, at 1:42, with different lyrics, but because the chord progression cycles regularly through the song, your mind starts filling the melody in even when it’s not really there.

And okay, now for the back story. An innovator in the studio who did unprecedented things with distortion and compression and echo, Joe Meek was interested in electronics, outer space, and the occult. Over time he became obsessed with Buddy Holly, whom Meek believed was guiding his career from the afterlife. Meek sadly fell into debt and depression, and ended up killing his landlady and himself on the eighth anniversary of Holly’s death, in 1967. Among the many tragedies here was the fact that Meek never made a dime off “Telstar,” which was (good trivia question) the first song from England to be #1 on the U.S. charts. The royalties were held up for years in an apparently wrongful lawsuit; it was finally settled three weeks after he died. How much of any of this is directly dealt with in the song here is impossible to say, as the lyrics are largely lost in the mix. But the general atmosphere of fuzzed electrical overcharge prevails.

“Joe Meek’s Dream” is from the debut Narrow Sparrow EP, entitled Synthworks, which was self-released earlier this month and is available for free via this new, and promising, Chicago-based band. Vinyl is due out next month.

Free and legal MP3: Marvelous Darlings (Buzzcocks style power pop)

It’s loud and muscular but it’s an honest-to-goodness song, with a primitive, ear-catching riff, nostalgic melodies, and any number of musical moments one might almost call graceful except for the general head-bangy ambiance.

Marvelous Darlings

“I Don’t Wanna Go To The Party” – Marvelous Darlings

I’ve never had an ear for the harsher, DIY-fueled end of the punk spectrum. But neither have I found the more blatantly commercial “punk-pop” genre very satisfying. My sweet spot is for the sort of punk or punk-like music made by folks who may be angry, or alienated, or otherwise fed up but still manage to have their musical wits about them. My opinion is that if you’re too angry to be bothered to learn exactly how to write and perform music, maybe you should just leave the music out of it entirely? One man’s perhaps unreasonable idea.

Anyway, with stuff like this, whether in its original, Buzzcocks-y incarnation or when trotted out in the new(ish) century by a crew like Marvelous Darlings, I’m all in. It’s loud and muscular but it’s an honest-to-goodness song, with a primitive, ear-catching riff, nostalgic melodies, and any number of musical moments one might almost call graceful except for the general head-bangy ambiance. There is, for instance, that place in the relentless, mostly two-note melody when singer Ben Cook takes a fifth-interval downward dive (0:36), and it’s just exactly right. And you kind of wait for it to come back and it doesn’t, and it doesn’t, until finally very close to the end, it does (2:08). This more than makes up for Cook’s decision to add an over-the-top British affectation to the word “party,” which is probably in any case a private joke of some kind.

An additional moment of odd grace: how the interwoven repetition of the basic theme (“I don’t want to go”) we hear at 1:04 resolves into a syncopated, falsetto release at 1:11. The song hammers us unflaggingly with a classic rock’n’roll backbeat and yet offers us a few moments like this one that dance away from it. Another is the brief but dandy guitar solo (1:44-1:54).

Marvelous Darlings is a Toronto band featuring Cook and Matt Delong, who were co-founders of the Canadian hardcore band No Warning; Cook, who also performs under the name Young Governor, is best known these days as a member of the Toronto band Fucked Up, which somewhat unexpectedly won Canada’s Polaris Prize in 2009 for best Canadian album. “I Don’t Wanna Go To The Party” is the lead track on Single Life, an album comprised of previously released 7-inch vinyl singles, put out this week by the Canadian label Deranged Records. MP3 via Deranged. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Laura Gibson (galloping, mysterious old-timey shuffle)

An old-timey shuffle, all whip and ghost and gallop, rendered yet old-timier by Gibson’s throwback voice and a variety of sounds and effects that conjure a 78 RPM vibe.

Laura Gibson

“La Grande” – Laura Gibson

An old-timey shuffle, all whip and ghost and gallop, rendered yet old-timier by Gibson’s throwback voice and a variety of sounds and effects that conjure a 78 RPM vibe.

But the song moves, and the words spill out, concrete and inscrutable, and we seem to be nowhere as much as in last night’s dream—fresh and spirited and beyond the reach of conscious scrutiny. Maybe it’s the rolling tom-tom beat, which has the air of something at once visceral and hypnotic; we feel both out on a dusty plain and somewhere beyond literal sight. Gibson is singing about “the old sugar mill” and the “bone-white clay” and boots and spurs and burning sage and somehow the more nouns with which she constructs her songscape the less we have to grab onto. It’s a marvelous effect I’ve never been able to figure out whenever encountering songwriters who employ it, and this may be less because it is literally mysterious than figuratively so. That is to say, I could probably stop and puzzle the song out but it really doesn’t seem to want us to. At its best, music enters us through our non-thinking centers, and occasionally we meet songs that remind us, via sidelong glances and echoey absences, that we do not have to understand them.

Gibson is a singer/songwriter from Portland, Oregon. “La Grande” is the title track to her fifth album, due out in January on Barsuk Records. La Grande is also the name of a small town in northeastern Oregon, along I-84, and which for inscrutable reasons seems to have served as an inspiration for the album. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3: The Grenadines

Sultry groove, and then some

The Grenadines

“Shake” – The Grenadines

This is one of the first songs I’ve heard urging us to “shake” that strikes me as actually sexy. We begin with an itchy disco riff that might be a cliche except that this is really not a disco tune at all when you pay closer attention. There’s a thoroughgoing blurriness at work here–disco but not disco, indie but not indie, retro but not retro–and this, to me, is the achievement and the allure. It’s an expert blend, not a single malt. What comes through most of all, beyond questions of labels and genres, is the unifying force of music being created through the palpable efforts of human beings in physical space. There is no trace of electronics or loops or anything that creates sound without physical movement–and not that there’s anything wrong with all that under many different circumstances. But here you can feel the movement that music, an ancient force, is founded upon: vibrating vocal cords (and not one but two vocalists), fingers on strings, sticks and mallets on drum skins. Shake, indeed.

And it’s done with such a sultry touch, at once as casual as a glance in a bar and as purposeful as the instinctive movement the leads here are singing about. Husband and wife Michael and Lauren Shackelford bring something arresting to the alternating boy-girl vocal thing, he with his nasally charm, she with the lower, breathier magnetism. Listen in particular to how the last verse is presented, as the singers still alternate the lead while now singing together–until the last, repeated line, when each claims, alone: “I found your weakness.” Ooh, baby. Anyone who found a lot to like in Rilo Kiley’s unfairly maligned Under the Blacklight album will likely connect to this without hesitation. The rest of you should listen, too.

The Grenadines are based in Birmingham, Alabama, and in addition to the Shackelfords employ the very capable David Swatzell on guitar and the equally praiseworthy Jesse Phillips on bass. “Shake” is the lead song on a special 7-inch vinyl release, from Birmingham-based Communicating Vessels, one of a series featuring so-called “secret songwriters from the Southeast.” Rightfully, the Grenadines may not need to be such a secret moving forward.

Free and legal MP3: Cass McCombs (potent, determined, minimally arranged)

There is over the long haul an emerging sense of Cass McCombs-iness about what the man does—a spectral mix of melody and atmosphere, eloquence and elusiveness.

Cass McCombs

“The Same Thing” – Cass McCombs

Cass McCombs is one mysterious dude. He grew up in Northern California but since then hasn’t managed to live in any one place in particular. He doesn’t do interviews. His web site uses a font that’s a 1/2-inch tall; you can only see about eight lines on the screen at a time. Maybe strangest of all, he has now released two albums this year.

The music he makes doesn’t sound entirely the same from album to album. (He has been featured here twice previously, in 2005 and 2007.) And yet there is over the longer haul an emerging sense of Cass McCombs-iness about what he does—a spectral mix of melody and atmosphere, eloquence and elusiveness. His doggedly echoed voice, alternating between a buzzy whisper and an adenoidal croon, has been with us long enough to be its own thing by just about now, although it won’t sound entirely unfamiliar to fans of either Lloyd Cole or T Bone Burnett. And “The Same Thing,” surely, is a potent song, the determined gait of its minimally-arranged verse underscoring the repeating thematic observation about pain and love being indeed “the same thing.” McCombs draws you in with his words but also dodges your inquiries, as he commonly sings just below the level of aural comprehension, a fact aggravated by his tendency here to sing lyrical lines that don’t scan well with the music. Normally I’m not thrilled with that but when a real wordsmith does it I feel there must be some good reason involved and in this case I suspect further elusiveness.

As for the unexpected, keyboard-induced jauntiness of the song’s bridge-like chorus, I will simply note that those are some of the least happy-go-lucky “la-la-las” in rock’n’roll history. From the enigmatic Mr. McCombs, it seems a satisfying par for the course.

“The Same Thing” is from Humor Risk, the aforementioned second 2011 release for the 34-year-old singer/songwriter, which came out earlier this month; Wit’s End was delivered back in April. These are his fifth and sixth full-length albums, and both arrived via Domino Records. Thanks to Seattle’s mighty KEXP for the MP3, as part of the KEXP blog “Song of the Day” series.

Free and legal MP3: Abbie Barrett & The Last Date (zippy, asymmetrical rocker)

A straightforward, Kathleen Edwards-like rocker with the added zest of insistent asymmetry.

Abbie Barrett and The Last Date

“Here to Stay” – Abbie Barrett & The Last Date

Straightforward, Kathleen Edwards-like rocker with the added zest of insistent asymmetry. To begin with, listen to how the first lyric (0:13), “Build a house, they tear it down,” ends in a melodically unresolved place, which makes your ear kind of expect two full measures of instrumental counter-balance against the length of the lyric. But we only get one. Hm. This feels odd enough that it almost seems as if there’s a time signature change going on, although there isn’t. It’s asymmetrical; our ears ache for symmetry. Then, after the next lyric (“Run you to the edge of town”), we do get the full two measures of instrumental “response,” but listen now to how the drummer intrudes on the second measure (0:22) and confuses the beat for us. What’d he do that for? Even the symmetry feels asymmetrical at this point.

I could go on but it’s going to get as boring to read about as it is not-boring to listen to. One other thing to note: the verse is a rather odd 20 measures long. For reasons, again, of aural symmetry, a verse is typically eight measures long, occasionally 16. If it’s 20, they’re just messing with us. The edgy word repetition that tricks out the end of the melody, itself asymmetrical, probably had something to do with it, and in any case is an ear-catching way to finish out a verse—one of those unaccountable songwriting tricks that sounds great but you wonder how someone thought to write it that way.

“Here to Stay” has more going for it than its asymmetry, of course. I like Barrett’s voice a lot; she’s got one of those plain-spoken ways of singing that almost doesn’t sound like singing. And yet there is also, if you listen closely, a lot of oomph to her tone—a good thing, since all of those lyrical lines that end unresolved (itself another sort of asymmetry) require an unswerving voice to pull it off. I also like how the bridge takes us, around 2:40, to a tranquil clearing with an almost fugue-like ambiance, and how we then charge full-steam back into the song’s abiding stomp, without one time-signature shift. All in all this is one of those songs that might pass your ears by if you don’t stop to enter its world but is kind of a bright, tough little nugget of goodness if you give it its due.

“Here to Stay” comes from The Triples: Volume 1, released earlier this month, which is the first of three scheduled three-song EPs that Barrett and her band are set to release in relatively quick succession—an interesting alternative to a more standard full-length album. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Jennifer O’Connor (melodic, unadorned guitar rock)

Anyone who misses the gruff, melodic, unadorned guitar rock that Liz Phair used to make before she (let us say) found other things to do might want to give Jennifer O’Connor a few listens.

Jennifer O'Connor

“Already Gone” – Jennifer O’Connor

Anyone who misses the gruff, melodic, unadorned guitar rock that Liz Phair used to make before she (let us say) found other things to do might want to give Jennifer O’Connor a few listens. And lord knows O’Connor is probably tired of the Liz Phair comparisons already, and truth be told, as O’Connor by now has a longer history of sounding like this than Phair herself does, we’ve probably got it backwards. But Phair surely laid the groundwork, and to date made a bigger name for herself (let’s not count Jennifer out yet, however!), so I guess she’s stuck with it at least a while longer.

In “Already Gone,” the classic-rock chug is produced merely by a droning electric guitar, a relentless, double-time bass line, and a drum kit so simplified it sounds like little more than a snare (and okay there seems to be a tambourine in the intro, briefly). In a song this minimally formulated, small gestures loom large. Take, for instance, the way the bass punctuates the end of the verse by momentarily abandoning its persistent staccato foundation to play a quick, descending melody (first heard around 0:40). Consider it the aural equivalent of the way a well-chosen spice can add depth to a simple recipe. The harmony O’Connor sings with herself Amy Bezunartea adds along the way is another artful touch that exists almost below the level of conscious attention. Even O’Connor’s purposeful guitar solo, which begins at 1:45, is a delightful albeit subtle articulation (and, okay, sorry for one more Phair reference, and an obscure one at that, but the solo here recalls rather wonderfully Phair’s discerning solo in “Love Is Nothing,” from the overlooked Whitechocolatespaceegg).

“Already Gone” is from O’Connor’s fifth album, I Want What You Want, which was released this week on Kiam Records, a label that she founded and runs—an honest-to-goodness label, not just a name attached to self-releases. Some quick, relevant background: O’Connor’s two previous albums had been for indie powerhouse Matador Records, but she and they separated in 2009. O’Connor was at that point exhausted and broke and unsure of her musical future, working at a grab bag of odd jobs during much of 2009 and 2010. But eventually her music called her back and she’s got the new album, released on her birthday, to show for it. MP3 via Rolling Stone.

Free and legal MP3: Artery

Churning, post-punk alienation, authentically

Artery

“Standing Still” – Artery

If this one has the ring of a bygone era about it, there’s good reason for that: the band here, Artery, is a Sheffield-based unit that released three albums in the post-punk glory days of the early ’80s, then called it quits. Once upon a time championed by John Peel, they were unexpectedly nudged back into being by Jarvis Cocker, who wanted them for a festival he was curating in 2007. In 2009, the reanimated band put out an EP, their first recording since 1984.

Although they broke up (again) in 2010 when one member decided to leave (again), the band soon found a replacement and have soldiered on. And while there were too many lineup changes even in Artery’s original run to call any given configuration the definitive version of the band, this reunited ensemble is pretty authentic, featuring front man Mark Gouldthorpe and two other gents who had been in the band at one time or another back in the day.

To my ears, what they deliver is both captivating and fascinating. With its churning, old-school blend of guitars, synths, bombast, and alienation, “Standing Still” does not sound of this year, or century, even. But neither, somehow, does the song sound merely “old-fashioned” in the way a truly defunct style like, say, doo-wop does. This may relate to how much of the musical language of the new wave and post-punk eras are still spoken by rock bands in the year 2011. But I also believe Artery’s discontinued-but-vibrant sound has also to do with the fact that whoever these guys are and whatever they’ve been through, they are legitimately carrying on here in the here and now. Even as they know best the musical landscapes of early ’80s Northern Britain, they are aiming to make new music that says new things. Gouldthorpe scolds and warbles in full John Lydon mode as his mates play discernible instruments and chords—no loops or strange sampling for this crew, to be sure. It’s all rather bracing, with everything ultimately anchored by the chorus’s roiling, melodramatic chord progression, which provides the song with its unlikely instrumental hook.

“Standing Still” first surfaced on the “comeback” EP in 2009. This month, a full-fledged album arrived—Civilisation, on Twin Speed/Cherry Red Records. “Standing Still” can be found here too. MP3 originally via Artrocker Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Great Aunt Ida (homespun, escalating chamber pop)

Brilliant evidence that some songs truly need to be listened to for more than 30 seconds.

Ida Nilsen

“Romance” – Great Aunt Ida

Clearly, people, some songs must be listened to for more than 30 seconds. If, for instance, you give “Romance” only a half-minute or so, you might hear it as a sing-songy sort of DIY keyboard pop, veering maybe (maybe) towards the precious. Fortunately for you you have decided to give it more than 30 seconds. Bass and guitar have made minor appearances by 40 seconds; that helps. The drum kicks in around 48 seconds and that both stabilizes and reorients the song. Now we’re kind of bounding in an open space, freed from the potentially claustrophobic feeling of the opening section. Even though melodically the song has merely repeated its verse, everything feels different. What sounded nearly cloying with just the keyboard (check out 0:33 to 0:39, specifically) sounds engaging with the drum and the guitar added (compare now 1:04 to 1:10).

And Ida Nilsen is just yet getting started. We finally arrive at the chorus at 1:20, and its half-time, upward-yearning melody, with the gentle male backing vocal, is just…well, wow. I didn’t see it coming, this is nothing the first 30 seconds telegraphed, and yet it makes perfect sense, and she’s got me now for good. And if that weren’t enough, she throws in a kind of chorus coda there at 1:50, another lovely and unanticipated turn of events. Then: we get horns, and a wonderful array of them. Someone thought this out quite carefully, which horn is doing what where, and after a brief keyboard solo (did the horns already go away?), the horns come back (nope!), in satisfying conversation with both the melody and one another.

Through it all, Nilsen maintains an even-keeled presence. In the muted opening—which in retrospect now sounds rather fetchingly Carole King-ish; not cloying at all, in fact—her voice has a bit of an unaffected wobble, giving her the air of Laura Veirs’ small-town cousin. But as the song escalates into its full power, so does Nilsen’s vocal presence, which without really changing acquires something of the plainspoken, breathy authority of Suzanne Vega. Not sure how she does that either.

“Romance” is from the album Nuclearize Me, the third Great Aunt Ida album, but the first since Nilsen moved from Vancouver to Toronto, and the first in which she is operating without a defined band around her. The album arrives in early December on the Zunior label. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.