MP3s – Page 69 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Matt Longo

Sweet, melancholy, concise

“The Night” – Matt Longo

Sweet, melancholy, and concise, “The Night” is half ballad, half lullaby, with a lovely, organic melody that links the verse and chorus so seamlessly that it sounds like one long outpouring of thought, breath, desire, regret. Longo’s light, expressive tenor works equally well with the simple guitar accompaniment that begins the piece and the string- and drum-enhanced arrangement in the middle.

The song sounds like something you might stumble upon at a late-night party, where a guy with a guitar breaks into an easy, heartfelt tune, is joined by a couple of other friends with instruments, while a quiet roomful of people nod their heads in musical sympathy. There’s nothing complicated about it except its power to move you without being complicated. To kind of go meta on you for a moment.

“The Night” is one of seven songs on Longo’s debut album, Alexandria, which was released in November and available for free via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: The District Attorneys (rag-tag barroom stomper)

You can just about hear the pints being raised during this rag-tag, barroom stomper.

The District Attorneys

“Splitsville” – the District Attorneys

You can just about hear the pints being raised during this rag-tag, barroom stomper. And yet it’s an easy-going barroom stomper, if there can be such a thing—no full-out, Replacements-style aggressive sloppiness for this relatively new Atlanta quintet. You can tell right away from the banjo and harmonica which make their presence known early on. These are not kick-ass instruments; they’re serious ones. So, yeah, there are gang-style sing-alongs and shout-alongs, a chugging, Stones-like rhythm guitar line, and a general feeling of lazy looseness, but something tells me these guys don’t just stumble into their songs. They work for them, and polish them, and in this case what they want to polish was something rough-hewn and loose-limbed. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Take the rousing chorus, for example, which, starting the second time we hear it, offers up not one but two separate sing-along sections—two hooks for the price of one, basically. And yet singer/songwriter Drew Beskin was crafty enough to make us wait for it, to give us one run-through without the second part. There’s a related moment at 2:12, when the end of the first verse is repeated but this time with a couple of extra lyrical lines. It’s a small thing, doesn’t necessarily register to most listeners consciously, but it speaks to the care with which the song was created, even as it flaunts its ramshackle vibe.

“Splitsville” is from the band’s debut seven-song album, Orders From…, which was self-released digitally in June 2010 but is being given a full-fledged national release next month. The whole thing remains free at the band’s Bandcamp page.

Free and legal MP3: Wye Oak (alterna-folky noise pop, kind of)

Sneaky great single from this increasingly impressive Baltimore duo—an elusive mix of alterna-folk and noise pop, using timelessness to unleash volume on a fulcrum of suspense. Or something like that.

“Civilian” – Wye Oak

“Civilian” has a simple structure: there are four two-line verses, with a repeating instrumental break between them. There is no chorus, even as the song directly implies one. Within this simplicity, however, admirable musical drama unfolds. From the outset, we get the foot-tapping rhythm and guitar-picking backbone of an old folk song, juxtaposed with smoky-voiced Jenn Wasner’s teasingly blurred phrasing; she has mastered the Stipean trick of allowing us to discern intermittent words but few extended thoughts. The impression of ancient folkiness is deepened by the steady recurrence of one particular three-note descending guitar line that we first hear at 0:10. There is something timeless and troubadoury in this motif, which repeats every 10 seconds or so for the better part of the song. When it comes missing at around 1:02 is in fact when we know that something is up, the moment pretty much coinciding with the recognition that the open-ended verses may not be leading us to a chorus after all. The three-note motif is here replaced with a more suspenseful, more electric guitar riff that doesn’t end up transforming anything but the volume, which cranks up a few notches at 1:19, thanks to the influx of fuzzy guitars and Andy Stack’s abruptly fuller-bodied drumbeat. Any chance we had previously to decipher Wasner is gone; Stack clearly doesn’t want us to hear her now.

Meanwhile the unresolved verses keep the ear waiting, vaguely, expectantly. And who knew? What we were waiting for, arriving at 2:36, is a squealing squalling outbreak of Wasner’s guitar, which obliterates the three-note motif and pretty much everything else in its path. She returns the favor to her partner, as guitar now pretty much manhandles the rhythm section in what surely will remain one of 2011’s best solos.

“Civilian” is the title track to Wye Oak’s forthcoming album, slated for a March release on Merge Records. MP3 via Merge. Wye Oak has previously appeared on Fingertips in both 2008 and 2009.

Free and legal MP3: The Ericksons

Singing sisters, w/ guitars, & unaffected vibe

“Box of Letters” – the Ericksons

There’s something ever, ever so slightly unhinged about the Erickson sisters’ basic Indigo Girls-ishness that I find immediately fetching. First, the obligatory acoustic-guitar-strumming intro itself is a bit off-kilter, aligning insistently with the in-between beat (i.e. the “and” in the “one-and-two-and-three…”). When the singing starts, it’s not yet the sweet, harmony-laced offering one might expect from singing sisters with guitars but rather a blurted, conversational, idiosyncratically-phrased vocal from Bethany. And when she’s finally joined by her sister Jennifer, the first harmony we get is actually dissonant (check out the “oo”-ing at about 0:27). Even the chorus, with its delightful, light-stepping, drum-brushed momentum, has a vaguely off-center feel, thanks to how the melody lags friskily behind the song’s driving beat.

And yet the Ericksons are not actively quirky in the manner of, say, Ani DiFranco, or, for that matter, any of the so-called “freak folk” crowd. If anything, the cumulative effect of the peppy “Box of Letters” is of two performers who are, simply, loose and unaffected. The song’s quiet eccentricities–many of which have to do with vocal phrasing–seem organic rather than mannered, and each delivers a pleasant little surprise when encountered. I particularly like the crazy little flourish the women give to their “oo-oos” around 1:54, and the way the song ends with the instruments fading away while the sung note is held maybe a tad longer than expected.

“Box of Letters” is from the album Don’t Be Scared, Don’t Be Alarmed, the duo’s second, released this past fall. Thanks to Robbie at Girlysounds for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Arches (spacious music, w/ swing & hesitation)

“This Isn’t a Good Night For Walking” – Arches

One more twosome in what has inadvertently turned out to be “duo week” here. Of the three, Philadelphia’s Arches may be the least-likely-sounding band-that’s-only-two-people of all, because of how spacious this music is. The song is long by Fingertips’ standards—six and a half minutes—but hang with it. The length is part of the space. So of course is the reverb. But there’s more to it than that; the time the song takes to unfold and the echoey ambiance don’t create the space as much as model it. There’s something large and unhurried in the air here, a sense that the music needs the time it’s taking, if that makes any sense.

A concrete symbol of this need for space is the band’s use of hesitation throughout the song, both figuratively and literally. What I mean by “figurative” hesitation you can hear right away in the back-and-forth guitar chords employed in the introduction (and throughout), which pivot on one whole-step interval. On a piano this would be played by your index and middle finger, alternating in an even rhythm—which, if you think about what that looks like, is a gesture of waiting (the idle, or sometimes impatient, tapping of those two fingers). The sound sounds like it. Literal hesitation otherwise suffuses “This Isn’t A Good Night For Walking,” in everything from how the keyboards swing slightly behind the beat to the subtle way the back-and-forth chords get microscopically delayed as the song develops (say, at around 1:38), to how the five-note keyboard motif we hear in the foreground at 4:07 gets held up maybe a split second with each recurring statement. And then there’s the grandest hesitation of all: the way the lyrics disappear just past the halfway point, only after which the song takes us to its musical climax: a dramatic, strangely satisfying guitar-led iteration of the song’s verse.

“This Isn’t A Good Night For Walking” is the first available song from a forthcoming, yet-untitled album that Arches hopes to release before year’s end. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3: N’T (concise & chuggy electro-glam[?])

“Good Karma” – N’T

A concise, chuggy piece of electro-glam (or some such thing), “Good Karma” is one of those songs with a moment—a precise juncture at which the ear surrenders to the music, and everything is okay with the world. An effective moment, repeated each time it comes up (typically in a chorus but not always), extends its blessing both forward and backward, granting a kind of giddy grace to an entire song.

The (now that I think about it) appropriately titled “Good Karma” has its moment beginning at around 1:01, in the second half of the chorus, when Scott French, N’T’s mastermind, sings, “Don’t freak out,” with the “out” stretched to three syllables, describing a descending line equivalent to sol-fa-mi in the familiar do-re-mi scale. This is a basic and eminently satisfying progression, but any effort I attempted (and now edited out) to explain why became quickly labored and complicated. Music is much simpler than words. Listen and smile.

French drums and writes songs for the Philadelphia band the Swimmers; as N’T—apparently we are to say “N apostrophe T”—he has issued an album called The Color Code, which he wrote, recorded, mixed, mastered, etc., by himself. It was self-released last month. You can download the album via his bandcamp page, for whatever price you’d like to pay. Thanks to Scott for letting me host this one.

Free and legal MP3: Braids

Engaging complexity, from Montreal

“Plath Heart” – Braids

Take a listen to the future of a certain kind of pop music. Not pop as in Billboard pop, which seems more than usually mired in robotic, sound-alike simplism here in 2011—I’m talking about pop as in electric-based music with vocals, organized into three- or four-minute songs, aimed at a contemporary audience. As a matter of fact, the more the current age drives robotic, sound-alike simplism through the mainstream, the more today’s rebels may want to study, practice, and begin making songs of engaging complexity and humanity. No point in punks doing the Auto-Tuned, three-chord thing if that’s what’s on the charts.

From the opening violin salvo, you know you’re in for a different ride here. Nothing about this song is straightforward or commonplace, and yet it is consistently engaging. (If the Dirty Projectors were less self-consciously prickly, they might sound something like this.) Electronics are used to create cascading, watery sounds over a jittery rhythm; guitars fill in sometimes like pinpricks, sometimes in a shivery flow of liquid. Singer Raphaelle Standelle-Preston has a theatrical voice that can both soar and particularize—listen for instance to how she ejects this incisive couplet about disconnected lovers, sung seemingly from the male point of view: “I poke and turn/You smoke and yearn.” Meanwhile, you will rarely hear a more precise, restrained drummer in a rock song than Austin Tufts, who plays here like another intertwining instrumentalist rather than a time-keeping basher.

And of course Braids are from Canada. They are in fact four youngsters (all in their early 20s) from Calgary, who met in junior high school, became a band in high school, and were so intent on developing musically that they delayed going to college to practice together for a year. Then, in 2008, they moved to Montreal. And the rest isn’t history yet but it might yet be. Keep an eye on these guys. “Plath Heart” is from the quartet’s debut, Native Speaker, which will be released later this month on Kanine Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3: Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

Humble, compelling, heartfelt

“My Heart Came to Rest” – Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

And yet let’s not write off simplicity entirely (see Braids entry, above). When combined with honest emotion, a sense of history, and that other thing that makes you feel rather than just hear music (not sure what that thing is, however), a simple song can wow you in its own reserved way. SoCal singer/songwriter Brandon Thomas De La Cruz has a comfortable, Bright Eyes-ish thing going here, but maybe with a warmer, less mannered vibe than Mr. Oberst. At once plaintive and gracious, “My Heart Came to Rest” doesn’t innovate or blow the mind; so much of what’s good and true here nestles merely in the unpolished tremor of De La Cruz’s voice, and I mean both his singing and his writing voice. The song’s lyrical lynchpin can be found here, as he sings these unadorned lines:

We’re silent without thought
In the place where we’ve been brought
We both had so much to say
But now we’ve both forgot

Note the march of humble words: 20 of 23 of them are just one syllable, including an astounding (and cumulatively compelling) 19 in a row. Whether done consciously or unconsciously, the craft is impressive. The particular rhythm of how and where the word “both” appears, twice, and the rubber-lipped way the word bubbles from his mouth each time is worth a bit of extra attention.

“My Heart Came to Rest” is from De La Cruz’s seven-song garage-recorded debut Everything Is New, self-released digitally in November. You can buy it via Bandcamp, where one other song is also available for free.

Favorite Free & Legal MP3s of 2010 (pt. 2)

For the last Fingertips post of the year (cue drum roll), here are my top 10 favorite free and legal MP3s of 2010.

For the last Fingertips post of the year (cue drum roll), here are my top 10 favorite free and legal MP3s of 2010. This follows up last week’s post, which contained my “second” top 10 (numbers 11 through 20).

All songs are still available as free and legal MP3s, so you can download them the usual way, or listen via the play button if you happen to be reading this directly on the Fingertips site. You can read the original reviews by clicking on the date next to each band name, which is the date of the original Fingertips post.

As with last week, I will run them down in reverse order. If you want them from 1 to 10, stand on your head:

10. “The Mermaid Parade” – Phosphorescent (May 12)
Laid-back, expansive, affecting tale of love gone awry.

9. “Down By The Water” – The Drums (August 3)
’50s melody set to a hymn-like march. Accrues gravity and pathos as it develops.

8. “Zebra” – Beach House (May 12)
A lovely, elusive dream of a song.

7. “Let The Record Go” – The Mynabirds (May 4)
Short fiery piece of retro pop (see also song #1).

6. “Zorbing” – Stornoway (July 28)
Bursting with melody and innocence.

5. “If You Wanna” – The Vaccines (August 24)
Catchy lo-fi greatness; Ramones meet Joy Division.

4. “I Walked” – Sufjan Stevens (September 15)
As poignant as an electronics-driven song is likely to get. Beautiful and majestic and heartbroken.

3. “My Heart is a Drummer” – Allo Darlin’ (October 7)
Bright smart pop with movement and charm.

2. “Hotel Lights” – Amy Cook (January 6)
Exquisite singer/songwriter fare, and a quiet argument against most other singer/songwriter fare.

1. “Numbers Don’t Lie” – The Mynabirds (January 26)
Neo-retro-gospel-pop at its finest, from one of 2010’s greatest unsung albums (see also song #7).

Favorite Free & Legal MP3s of 2010 (pt. 1)

With MP3 activity winding down with the end of the year, it’s time for the annual year-end “Fingertips Favorites” list, in which I, as tradition has it, bitch and moan about how hard it is to narrow down a year’s worth of really good songs into a top 10 list and as a result present a top 20 list.

Especially attentive Fingertips followers will know that the entire list has already been placed on the site, but for the sake of those whose regular access to Fingertips is either via email or RSS feed, I’ll spend these last two weeks of the year presenting the list—numbers 11 through 20 this week, and the top 10 next week.

All songs are still available as free and legal MP3s, so you can download them the usual way, or listen via the play button if you happen to be reading this directly on the Fingertips site. If my snappy one-sentence song summaries leave you wanting more, you can read the original reviews by clicking on the date next to each band name, which is the date of the original Fingertips post.

And now, in super-suspenseful reverse mode, here are Fingertips’ favorite free and legal downloads from 2010, part one:

20. “The Best Things in Life” – The Silver Seas (April 28)
Effortlessly enjoyable pop with a faux ’70s-soul sheen.

19. “Buy Me Presents” – Darren Hanlon (October 13)
Lovable, organic, speak-singing fun from an underappreciated Australian.

18. “Alouette!” – Tallest Trees (July 21)
Gleeful, skewed, and clattery; more good-humored than electronics-based songs usually manage to be.

17. “Icarus” – White Hinterland (January 13)
Propulsive and mysterious-sounding electro-pop with both beat and melody.

16. “Rio” – Hey Marseilles (May 4)
A sweetly rollicking neo sea shanty.

15. “Orange Yellow” – The Spires (June 30)
Smartly-written garage rock with a Velvet-y aura.

14. “The Kiss” – Pallers (May 18)
Graceful electronic dance-ballad that unfolds with a New Order-like majesty, minus the melodrama.

13. “Quarry Hymns” – Land Of Talk (August 24)
Gorgeous and expansive rock, with a Fleetwood Mac influence and a timeless feel.

12. “A Walk Around the Lake” – Lost in the Trees (July 28)
A poignant, introspective, and dramatic three minutes.

11. “Doubles” – Amy Bezunartea (September 29)
A swaying, mournful melody, beautifully sung, with short-story-like lyrics.

Okay, that’s the second ten. If you like surprises, tune in next week for the top 10; if you need it all right now, you can go here, although be warned: you don’t get the snappy one-sentence summaries over there. I have to leave something for next week.