MP3s – Page 61 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: The Middle East

Odd tale w/ inscrutable appeal

The Middle East

“Jesus Came to My Birthday Party” – The Middle East

After a tuning-up kind of introduction, “Jesus Came to My Birthday Party” launches with an extended melody line sung in tandem by male and female vocalists. And we have to stop here now and think about this. A 16-measure melody is hard enough to come by; to hear one delivered via male/female octave harmony is highly unusual if not unique. And yet it doesn’t draw any attention to itself, as neither of those two characteristics—the extended melody, the male/female joint lead—in and of itself sounds strange or unusual.

Couple the music now with the lyrics—themselves, too, at once strange and straightforward—and the appeal deepens. Mostly what we get is a repeated insistence by the narrator that “Jesus came to my birthday party/When I was seventeen.” The circumstances are otherwise sketchy in the extreme; we are only told that the narrator thought it was a dream, but knows he/she saw him “standing there,” and that Jesus had long hair. The song pivots on the second verse, the second and last time we hear the full 16-measure melody, when the narrator, recalling this “long ago” time when Jesus was at the birthday party, suddenly thinks he/she has seen Jesus again, but this time not actually in the flesh but “in the eyes of the strangers that pass,” and “in the eyes of the poor.”

As a plain narrative this song leaves so much unsaid as to be inscrutable. But there’s something in the repetition, the vibe, the rugged persistence of the male-female lead vocal line, and the eventual blending of acoustic rhythm guitar with a stirring electric lead guitar that prompts reflection, and opens the song up to its fuller meaning—which by the way, to me, has nothing whatever to do with anybody’s one religion, in case you’re worried.

And now comes the odd news that The Middle East, an Australian collective with an expanding and contracting roster, has unfortunately called it quits. Based in Townsville, Queensland, the band released its last album, I Want That You Are Always Happy, back in April in Australia, and played its last show at the end of July. The album was released in the U.S. in July, on Missing Piece Records. The band was previously featured on Fingertips in April 2010.

Free and legal MP3: Louise Burns (Boss-inspired girl-group rock)

Former teen-pop star Louise Burns reorients her career by channeling early ’60s girl groups via Bruce Springsteen’s further explorations of that same sound. Convincing and just plain cool.

Louise Burns

“Drop Names Not Bombs” – Louise Burns

You never know which way a 25-year-old former teen-pop star is going to go. So many potential avenues are open to her. The one labeled “Springsteen-inspired homages to late ’50s and early ’60s pop” is not the expected one, however. Give Louise Burns props for creatively re-imagining her career trajectory. Better yet, give her props for a fine song, and consider it a great instance of making lemonade from lemons, as “Drop Names Not Bombs” draws upon past bad experience from her days as bass player in the teenybopper Canadian band Lillix.

Now as much as people are impelled to talk “girl group” when they hear Burns’ solo debut, Mellow Drama, there’s more to it than strict revivalism. Springsteen himself is grounded in that late ’50s/early-’60s sound, and Burns here is clearly channeling the girl-group thing via the Boss—I hear it in the chimey, piano-driven backbeat, in the organ flourishes, and most of all in the melodic resolution (check out 0:55, around the lyric “I’ll be buying them drinks all night”). As Bruce drew (and continues to draw) so much from the girl-group sound, it’s a lovely counterpoint to hear a female musician double back and tap into that same spring via his subsequent language. That the mezzo-ranged Burns sings with a hint of Ronnie Spector angst lends an extra charge to the proceedings.

And okay, while I don’t want to bog down in the Lillix story, it’s too central to ignore. Formed in Cranbrook, B.C. as a four-girl band when Burns all of 11, Lillix (originally named Tigerlily) was four years later signed by Madonna’s Time Warner-funded Maverick Records imprint. This was 2001. Fed to the star-maker machinery, they got a name change (there was a preexisting Tigerlily), were handed over to mercenary producers and songwriters (the girls had previously written their own music), and forced into pandering marketing efforts (two were sent to weight-loss camp). An early breakthrough: a cover of the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” was used by the 2002 WB sitcom of the same name. After two years of major-label fussing, the first Lillix album emerged in 2003, to mixed reviews at best; it cracked the Billboard 200, barely. In 2004, Madonna, an early booster, was driven from the label in a flurry of lawsuits. A 2006 follow-up album did well in Japan, and nowhere else, and Maverick, itself foundering, dropped the foursome while they were touring. Burns left the band and started over, diving into the Vancouver music scene and embracing noisy, experimental material as an effort to overcome both her teen-pop history and her music-industry bruises. Landing for a while in a goth-y trio called the Blue Violets, she has seemingly come to accept that she is a popster at heart. But sensitivity about her past remains. In a June interview, a couple of months after her solo debut was released in Canada, Burns said, poignantly, “It’s nice that people are giving it a chance despite my background.”

I’m giving her a good good chance. Mellow Drama was long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize in June; her label, Vancouver-based Light Organ Records, released the album in the U.S. this week. MP3 via Rolling Stone.

Free and legal MP3: The Weather Station

Banjo-driven, but w/ nuance and grace

Tamara Lindeman

“Everything I Saw” – The Weather Station

Truth be told, I don’t tend to be too happy with the banjo. Oh, I don’t mind it as a one-off, informal means of entertainment; in someone’s living room, a banjo can be likable enough, if the banjo player doesn’t overstay his or her welcome. On a recording, in the context of other instruments—that’s when I get the banjo willies. So right away I’d say Tamara Lindeman, who does musical business as the Weather Station, has to me accomplished something wonderful indeed simply by recording a banjo song that I really like.

Part of this has to do with how she manages to tame the instrument’s tinny-twangier voice (which I realize many people may well enjoy!), playing instead in a tone and bearing that intertwines with rather than muffles the folk-style acoustic guitar that shares the instrumental stage here. I also think that Lindeman’s subtle subversion of banjo music convention further tempers the instrument’s tendency to dominate. (Which isn’t all the banjo’s fault, having little to any capacity for dynamic range.) With Daniel Romano playing guitar and, intermittently, singing alongside Lindeman, the song on the one hand utilizes a familiar sort of duet singing characteristic of bluegrass, yet, as with the banjo-playing, ratchets back the brassiness of tone as well as the formal rhythmic lockstep that seems intrinsic to songs driven by banjos. Here, the melodic structure itself undermines the song’s banjo-iness: listen to how, in the chorus-like section, first heard around 1:00, the duet singing coincides with a thoroughly asymmetrical section of the song: a higher, upward-reaching melody tails off downward, followed by a lower melody that ventures upward but then into an unresolved minor key before properly resolving in the major; note too how we first get two lyrical lines (the aforementioned higher melody) leading into the “All of it is mine” refrain (the lower melody), but three lines leading into it the second time. More complex to describe than to listen to; the end result, almost magically, is a banjo song with nuance and grace.

“Everything I Saw” is the quasi-title track to the second Weather Station album, All Of It Was Mine, which was released in mid-August on Ontario’s You’ve Changed Records. You can listen to the whole thing for free, and/or buy it via The Weather Station’s Bandcamp page. Lindeman is also a relatively new part of the eclectic Canadian ensemble Bruce Peninsula, itself due for a new album come October.

Free and legal MP3: Folklore (clattery, melodic lo-fi rocker, w/ a back story)

With its Neutral Milk Hotel echoes, “The Party” is a squeaky bouncy clattery lo-fi rocker, full of momentum and noise, and an appealing melodic through-line.

Folklore

“The Party” – Folklore

There is a hyper-obscure element that has been unleashed upon the musical landscape by the internet. It’s not often commented upon because by nature, the hyper-obscure is either ignored or it’s totally embraced, and the two groups involved—the many who ignore it, the few who embrace it—never much talk to each other. By hyper-obscure I mean music that is so far down its own hole musically or lyrically (or both) that it doesn’t begin to try to explain itself to an outsider. Pre-internet record labels, whether major or independent, were rarely in the business of releasing the hyper-obscure, if only because such projects never look to be brisk sellers. Now that a) traditional gatekeepers are no longer needed to produce and distribute music, and b) musicians aren’t even necessarily trying to sell anything, the ground is fertile for the hyper-obscure. To which I say: yikes.

On the one hand, I admire musicians so committed to their own visions that they just create this stuff, independent of efforts to explain themselves. On the other hand, far too often, either the music or the lyrics (or both) frustrate any outside effort to approach it. Which is a nice way of saying this stuff is typically unlistenable. The payoff can be big—look to the (pre-MP3) brilliance of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for a powerful example. But, I fear, most musicians drawn down that path are not quite so brilliant.

I don’t equate “The Party” to Aeroplane (although NMH fans will hear some resonance here), but its squeaky bouncy clattery presence, full of lo-fi momentum and noise, combines with a melodic through-line that proves irresistible to me. So irresistible, in fact, that I ignored/didn’t hear lyrics such as “There’s someone at the party getting everyone pregnant/Then mutating his shape and being impregnated.” “The Party,” it turns out, is from a concept album called Home Church Road, which, according to press material, tells “the epic story of a future Earth after human extinction.” We are urged to listen to it in its entirety but here’s an abiding conundrum of hyper-obscure music: it requires a commitment of time and attention prior to the musician having proved him- or herself worthy of said time and attention. Front man and Folklore mastermind Jimmy Hughes—more well-known as a member of the Elephant 6-rooted Athens band Elf Power—has a fertile imagination to be sure, but so do a lot of us. I’m more sold on his musical muscle than his storytelling but I will admit I have yet to listen to the album straight through. That’s another conundrum of the age: all of this music unleashed upon us and still (last I checked) only 24 hours in a day.

This song, however, is definitely worth three minutes or so of your time. Home Church Road was released in June on Single Girl Married Girl Records. Folklore, by the way, while born in Athens, has become a Philadelphia-based “mini-orchestra,” with seven joining Hughes in its northern iteration, and six others still on the roster down in Georgia.

Free and legal MP3: Sunbeam (assured ensemble pop from Portland septet)

Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow.

Sunbeam

“Bulldogs” – Sunbeam

By all appearances breezy and unassuming, “Bulldogs” has a rock-solid core. A new band from Portland, Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow. Six people in a band sounds like a lot on the one hand, but many rock songs do indeed feature at least six distinct instrumental sounds: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, and percussion. For practical and logistical reasons, most bands make do with three to five members, doubling up on instruments (typically of course the drummer plays percussion too) and/or bringing in outside players.

So the larger band does not require a larger or more complicated sound, but it does change the vibe in elusive but meaningful ways. A song can, as here, feel at once brisk and relaxed, as it makes room not simply for its sounds but for the people who make the sounds. Separating the drummer from the percussionist has a notable impact. I also like the purposeful way the electric guitar is used—not as a background noise producer but as quiet foreground texture. And then there are horns (oops! a seventh sound, and eighth: two horns), which blend into the fabric of the song without any “now listen to the cool horn part” posturing. (Horns are both played here by an outsider, but the band has since added a trumpet player to the fold.) In the end, for all the extraverted appearance of being played by a larger ensemble, “Bulldogs” has an appealing introversion about it, which is embodied in Brian Hall’s sweetly yearning vocal style but plays out too in the restraint of the arrangement and, even, in the recurring wordless vocal/keyboard hook that in the intro sounded like a throwaway but as it returns acquires a lovely centrality, and will probably be the thing that sticks in your head most of all.

“Bulldogs” is fifth on the band’s 10-track debut album, Sunbeam & the Lovely Ghost, which was self-released earlier this month. You can buy it for a price of your choosing at Sunbeam’s Bandcamp page. MP3 via the band.

Free and legal MP3: Meshell Ndegeocello (genre-crossing minimalism, w/ conviction)

A steely conviction running through the center of this rhythmic, genre-crossing song.

Meshell Ndegeocello

“Dirty World” – Meshell Ndegeocello

After 16 seconds of indistinct, ambient background noise, we get a bass line, and a funky snaky ear-grabbing bass line it is. This is Meshell Ndegeocello; she plays bass; and this is how she plays. She had me at hello.

Listen to the mincemeat she makes of the 4/4 time signature, without ever actually leaving it. How could someone conceive of this particular rhythm, never mind add an edgy drumbeat to it, never mind write a song around it? Surely she is not singing while she’s playing here, though I guess you never know. Her smooth round voice floats, unhurried, over the knotty instrumentation of the verse, with a breathy loveliness that belies the venom of the lyrics. With the chorus, everything changes: the beat normalizes, her voice acquires first a plaintive sting and, at the end, as a kicker, plunges into a gruff lower register. As the title suggests, she isn’t singing about rainbows and flowers. There’s a steely conviction running through the center of this song.

Look, too, at how she accomplishes so much with so little. Much of the song is just bass and drums and voice. Guitar and keyboard are not an assumed part of the proceedings but are added only when deemed necessary. The chorus is not much more than the two words, “dirty world,” repeated; the substance comes from the rhythm—specifically, the subtle but definitive shift in emphasis from stressing only the word “world,” the first three times, to additionally stressing the first syllable of “dirty” the fourth time around.

Genre-crossing minimalism has been Ndegeocello’s trademark since Plantation Lullabies, her 1993 debut. “Dirty World” is a track from Weather, her ninth album, due in November on Naïve Records.

Free and legal MP3: Gringo Star (old school, updated, w/ Beatley flair)

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other.

Gringo Star

“Shadow” – Gringo Star

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other. As suggested by the name, this Atlanta quartet traffics in a certain amount of Beatlesque-iness, and the best kind, in my mind: a nod to the Fab Four that brings the sound further along, rather than remaining stuck in rigid homage.

So the nostalgia here suffuses the sound without actually being pinpoint-able. The scratchy guitar that rasps out the introductory line has a vaguely retrospective sound, but the specific riff doesn’t conjure any particular place or time. I like the immediate juxtaposition of the rapidly hammered guitar and the laid-back tempo, which takes the classic rock’n’roll backbeat (emphasis on the second and fourth beats of the measure) and offers it up in half-time. The occasional background nuttiness is partially psychedelic, partially just nutty. And the chorus is plain wonderful—a heart-warming descending melody, covering six full whole steps, that resolves through a chord progression so sturdy and steady that your ear barely registers some of the shifts, although it will thoroughly enjoy the glide through the relative minor around 0:53.

Gringo Star is made up of brothers Peter and Nick Furgiuele, along with Pete DeLorenzo and Chris Kaufmann. All four can play guitar and sing, both Petes can drum, and all but Pete F. will play bass. “With the swapping around of the lineup, we end up being actually 10 different bands,” Nick has been quoted as saying. A pretty cool concept, it seems to me.”Shadow” is the lead track on the band’s second album Count Yer Lucky Stars, which is due out in October on Gigantic Records. The album was produced by Ben Allen, who has worked with Gnarls Barkley and Animal Collective, among others. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (succinct & jittery, w/ a power pop heart)

This time around, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah exhibits a Cars-like capacity for wrapping an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

“Maniac” – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Succinct and jittery, “Maniac” does its best to disguise its power pop roots with multifaceted synthesizers and vocal effects (and affects) but the thing about power pop is in the end there’s no hiding it. The chorus gives it away pretty much by definition. So there it is, at 1:09, the power-pop heart of this otherwise anxious-seeming song.

And yes I realize that it’s anxious-seeming in good part because Alex Ounsworth, with his strangled, nasally tenor, makes David Byrne sound almost relaxed. CYHSY have in fact drawn a lot of Talking Heads comparisons in the past, for clear enough reasons, but this time around I find some unexpected linkage to a different band that arose in late-’70s New England—the Cars. “Maniac” doesn’t sound like the Cars as much as it behaves like them, for its successful wrapping of an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism. Though, on second thought, this may likewise sound more like the Cars than it might initially seem. Segue “Maniac” into “Gimme Some Slack” (Spotify users: give it a try) and you will find some wonderful resonance—not an exact fit by any means, but the echoes are there. I direct your ears in particular to the deep guitar line at 2:07, which introduces what works as a kind of an alternate chorus here, and is both very Cars-like and a beautiful power pop device. That’s really where everything comes together in this one.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a five-man band from Brooklyn with a bit of internet history that you either know already or don’t need to know. Seriously. Forget about it. Let’s just listen to the music, sports fans. “Maniac” is a track from their upcoming album, Hysterical, which the band will self-release next month. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Dark Dark Dark (warm & wistful, w/ captivating piano line)

Dark Dark Dark

“Daydreaming” – Dark Dark Dark

With its tender, ear-opening piano motif and graceful, ruminative momentum, “Daydreaming” is fully engaging throughout its almost five-minute length, which is a relative rarity in 21st-century rock’n’roll. (When aiming for some kind of pop, few songs of this length manage without some dead spots.) Singer/pianist Nona Marie Invie is front and center from the start, her haunted voice offering up plaintive phrases, surrounded by warm acoustic instrumentation.

What exactly we are hearing in the background becomes a bit of a mystery, however, as the song progresses. Beyond the piano and the percussion there’s an accordion involved, and, according to promotional material, a banjo (that could be what we hear briefly at around 0:20); band members are also known to play clarinet and trumpet, but I’m not sure either of those account for that sound we get for a moment or two at 1:17. Invie’s repeating piano refrain, with its recurring blue notes, remains at the song’s backbone, but listen to how the accompaniment grows increasingly tense and solid after the three-minute mark. Her singing is nearly overwhelmed by the ghostly wash of noise—a clamor that is tamed only by the second round of her incisive, swooping “oo-oo”s as the song draws to its wistful close with one more half-iteration of the captivating piano line.

“Daydreaming” is not a new song, but it has arrived newly in my inbox. It comes from the Minneapolis ensemble’s second full-length album, Wild Go, which was released on Supply and Demand Records in October 2010, and then in Europe and the UK in April 2011 on Melodic Records. Featuring as many as seven members at certain times, Dark Dark Dark is currently touring in a five-person format.

Free and legal MP3: Firs of Prey (odd but lovable)

Eccentric vocalizing, offbeat song structure, unorthodox instrumentation—“What You Say” has it going on, oddball-wise.

Firs of Prey

“What You Say” – Firs of Prey

Eccentric vocalizing, offbeat song structure, unorthodox instrumentation—“What You Say” has it going on, oddball-wise. Long before the trombones descend (that would be around 1:53), this song has little that might be identifiable as “normal,” little that sounds like a hook, and yet, go figure, it manages to grab the ear quickly and hangs on for dear life. There really is, even after all these years, much more that people might be doing with what is loosely called rock’n’roll than people tend to do.

Of course it’s easy enough simply to be odd. I hear plenty of odd, day to day. To my particular kind of musical preference, oddness, however potentially enticing, is never enough by itself; as a matter of fact, oddness is a special kind of attractive characteristic in that it is inherently not attractive at all. Once committing to being odd, a song has to double back on actual goodness to be worth one’s time as a listener, it seems to me. Andrew Miller, the low-profile mastermind behind Firs of Prey, doubles back and then some. The minimalist soundscape he creates sets the stage—a deep, unadorned tribal drumbeat combining with a wordless vocal melody, layered in wacky harmony is not your everyday intro. New elements are eventually woven in: the aforementioned trombones, delightfully off the beat; a layer of lower-register vocal harmonies; a pulsing, bubbling keyboard down below; and a suddenly appearing electric guitar, speaking with splendid clarity in this otherwise guitar-free zone.

Firs of Prey, based in Portland, has released one EP to date, 2009’s Keep the Lions Asleep. “He is known for doing things like being tall, speaking really loud and hugging people too hard,” Miller says, of himself, on the sparsely informative Firs of Prey site. “He hopes to one day live in a Lighthouse.” Miller is also in the band Datura Blues, which has a marginally better web presence than his solo project. “What You Say” is a song from a compilation album with the fetching title of Well, I Don’t See Why Not Vol. 3, featuring independent musicians from the Northwest. It is indeed the third in a series, all of which have been offered up by Ms. Valerie Park Distro, a self-described “small distributor of independently-created things,” based in Olympia. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead, and thanks to MVPD for permission to host the MP3 here.