MP3s – Page 74 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: The Fresh and Onlys (R.E.M. meets the National, out West)

“Waterfall” – The Fresh and Onlys

An inscrutable blend of the retro and the up to date, “Waterfall” combines a galloping, lonesome-Western feel with a bit of garage-rock psychedelia, a touch of present-day indie-rock earnestness, and the tumbly muddiness of an early R.E.M. song (aided by “Waterfall”‘s “Driver 8”-like bassline; and we’re in the same key here too). And yet those influences/attributes aren’t really as separate as listing them out makes them seem, because here in rock’n’roll-land, all the good and true musical strains intermingle and cross-breed and overlap as bands continue to combine them in interesting ways.

Singer Tim Cohen sells this one with his portentous baritone, bringing the National’s Matt Berninger at least a little to mind. And I think the words he sings, almost incants, have a lot to do with this song’s appeal, even as they are rather deliberately unfathomable—an unstoppable torrent of pronouncements playing the words “TV” and “radio” off one another in a way that makes more sense aurally than literally. But in the midst of the semi-nonsensical flow there is one central, striking comment, smack in the middle of the song: “The TV said that you can’t believe every little thing that you see/But you and I know from the radio that’s what we believe.” Suddenly we’re talking politics again (see above); so never mind.

The Fresh and Onlys are a quartet from San Francisco, together in one form or another since 2004. “Waterfall” is from the band’s third full-length album Play It Strange, due out next month on In The Red Records.

Free and legal MP3: Justin Townes Earle (jaunty suicide note, w/ subtext)

“Harlem River Blues” – Justin Townes Earle

A nice, chugging bit of country-like indie rock, and right away one of the fun things is that we’re talking about New York City here. The juxtaposition is purposeful, and while Earle’s dad Steve has done a bit of this, the senior Earle has been less inclined to make out-and-out country music since moving to Manhattan in the mid ’00s. The son however is clearly on a mission to give listeners a good helping of cognitive dissonance as he deals, on his new album, with rivers and trains and other country-music-like subjects in the context of a gritty, crowded urban landscape.

Another point of dissonance: this chipper-sounding toe-tapper tale is a tale of someone apparently planning his suicide, jumping into the aforementioned Harlem River. Earle, with an agreeable, textured voice, gives himself a huge choir to back up his declaration and, not to make light of it, but if you’ve gotta go, that’s the way to go. Maybe the narrator is so beaten down by life he’s charged up by the idea of ending it, or maybe he’s finding a renewed interest in living via his specific ideas about where he wants to die, but he’s got style either way. Another layer at work here is that Townes Van Zandt, the revered but troubled songwriter after whom the younger Earle is named, had a long flirtation with suicide himself. Yet more subtext: Earle, still just 28, has a previous history of drug addiction, like his father.

“Harlem River Blues” is the title track to Earle’s fourth album, released this month on Bloodshot Records. MP3 via Bloodshot; thanks to Largehearted Boy once more for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: John Vanderslice (brisk, concise, minor-key tale)

John Vanderslice songs often resemble dark, elusive short stories; something is happening here, but you don’t know what it is. We’re typically in the middle of something very specific, but with the large-scale details omitted in favor of tiny observations that simultaneously add atmosphere and blur the narrative.

“I’ll Never Live Up to You” – John Vanderslice

Even when JV gives us the premise with an explanatory note ahead of the lyrics this time (“A father so domineering and imperious, he’s even intimidating on the embalming slab”), we get history only hinted at, emotional short-cuts that bypass the details of what this father wanted and why the son didn’t or couldn’t do what was expected of him. “If they would believe me/I would tell them all the truth about you,” the son sings. What truth? Who are “they”?

The lyrics are, as usual, supported by music as concise as possible; check out, right away, that eight-second intro, and how even there, the instrumental line is a melody, not a vamp. “I’ll Never Live Up to You” offers, generally, a brisk, minor-key setting but also an ongoing font of specific moments that contribute to the whole—it’s almost as if you could take a slice of any point along the way, an aural biopsy if you will, and discern the song’s larger intent and meaning. And how on earth did he decide to use saxophones here? Anchored at the bottom of the mix, they emerge only as the song unfolds, grounding it in an organic foundation, despite the synthesized ambiance, representing the almost-buried nature of the narrator’s referenced but unspoken truth. And it was surely a conscious choice for Vanderslice to sing the song mostly in vocal layers with himself, with the melody led by an almost whispery upper register voice. We only hear his regular singing voice at one specific time in the chorus, when he repeats the words “about you” (first heard at 0:56)—a subtle but telling way to illustrate how this unfortunate son remains bound and tied to his long-dead father.

“I’ll Never Live Up to You” is one of six songs on a new, free digital EP, released last week. You can download the whole thing at his web site, complete with artwork, lyrics, and credits, or you can download individual songs.

Free and legal MP3: Jared Mees & the Grown Children (homespun hoedown w/ cosmopolitan concerns)

Engaging, homespun hoedown, with a loose, swift sense of purpose about it. But for all its back-porch, fiddle-fronted ambiance, note how the song has no obvious lyrical connection to dirt roads and rustic living beyond its title image; we hear instead contemporary words and phrases like television, red ink, lead actor, tragicomedy.

“Cockleburrs and Hay” – Jared Mees & the Grown Children

This ongoing tension between the song’s cosmopolitan concerns and its rural sound is a good part of the charm. The ensemble’s spirited, toe-tapping energy pretty much takes care of the rest. Exactly who the Grown Children are at any one time has not been made clear, it being a name for, basically, whomever shows up and plays with Mees at any given time (more than 20 players are identified, by first name, on the MySpace page). The informality of the gathering, combined with the quality of the musicianship, is, I think, what lends this song its particular flair—it doesn’t sound painstakingly rehearsed as much as spontaneously combusted.

The Portland, Ore.-based Mees originally recorded “Cockleburrs and Hay” (minus one “r”) for his 2007 solo album If You Want to Swim With the Sharks; this is a new and improved version of the song, recorded during a recent studio session and not yet on any album. The group’s first album, Caffeine, Alcohol, Sunshine, Money, was released in 2008 on Tender Loving Empire.

Free and legal MP3: Liam Singer (elegiac, piano-based, canon-like)

“Winter Weeds” – Liam Singer

Solemn, piano-based composition with a whiff of the Renaissance about it. Liam Singer has a plaintive, Elliott Smith-like tenor, and pairs himself vocally here with Wendy Allen, of Boxharp, who sings an intricate counter-melody with the airy, earnest bearing of a traditional folk singer. The song they create together is both deliberate and hypnotic, with a canon-like melody that climbs and descends and circles and fits back together with itself without any apparent starting or end point, and no sense of chorus or verse.

The overall feel is elegiac; the lyrics are inscrutable but there is a strong sense of lament here, accentuated by the centuries-old sensibility working its way through this contemporary recording. The ear is not necessarily surprised, then, when a harpsichord joins in at 1:54. But my ear, in any case, is delighted by the wondrous series of slightly cockeyed ascending lines the instrument plays. The dusty, tinkly sound Baroque composers demanded of the instrument is summarily dismissed, and the world breathes a sigh of relief.

Born in Portland, Oregon and now living in Brooklyn, Singer studied musical composition at Kenyon College; his primary instrument was, yes, the harpsichord. He plays in a band called Devil Be Gone with Rob Hampton (formerly of Band of Horses) and also tours on keyboards with the Brooklyn-based Slow Six. “Winter Weeds” is from Singer’s third album, Dislocatia, to be released next month on Hidden Shoal Recordings, based in Perth, Australia. MP3 via Hidden Shoal.

Free and legal MP3: Sufjan Stevens (electronics-driven poignancy)

“I Walked” – Sufjan Stevens

While Sufjan Stevens was having his indie moment in the mid-’00s, I stood aside. I appreciated his intelligence and sensitivity and creativity but just wasn’t connecting to the music. It was more interesting than engaging to me, more constructed than heartfelt. Clearly I was in the minority at the time, and whether he’s changed in the interim or I have, the upshot is that this offering from his upcoming album strikes me as deep and rich and true. That he’s done this by replacing the acoustic orchestral instruments he favored in the past with electronic glitchiness is one of the song’s marvelous mysteries.

Stevens here brings his fragile sensibility to the oft-told tale of the jilted lover, infusing the song with the hesitant bewilderment of the unexpectedly dumped. Everything from the music’s stuttery-crackly foundation to Stevens’ delicate, heartbreakingly polite, off-kilter phrasing serves the story, which is not actually recounted but reacted to. We don’t hear about the love affair, we don’t hear about what went wrong, we are left only with the stunned ex-boyfriend trying and failing to make sense of what doesn’t compute; he apparently bolted when he was told the news—thus, “I walked/’Cause you walked.” For a twitchy song, it develops with an unhurried and poignant elegance—a feeling fostered in part by how the verse and the chorus feature closely related melodies, both swelling and asymmetrical, reflecting the narrator’s charged but broken psyche. We don’t hear the chorus till 1:44, and don’t find ourselves at the chorus’s musical and lyrical climax till 1:59, as the melody takes echoing, upward leaps with an affirmation of the jilted lover’s paralyzing inability to face conflict (“I would not have run off/But I couldn’t bear that it’s me/It’s my fault”). It’s the sound of pure heartbreak, expressed through its non-expression.

“I Walked” is one of two new songs available as free and legal downloads via Stevens’ Bandcamp page; both are from his forthcoming album, The Age of Adz (pronounced “odds,” they’re telling us), to be released on Asthmatic Kitty Records next month. The album is loosely based on the so-called “outsider art” of an African-American sign-maker (and self-proclaimed prophet) named Royal Robertson, who died in Louisiana in 1997. Direct MP3 link courtesy of Better Propaganda. (Thanks to visitor Jon for the head’s up on the direct link.)

Free and legal MP3: Laura Veirs & Mount Analog (unexpected Led Zep cover)

“The Ocean” – Laura Veirs & Mount Analog

The most unlikely people can sound like Robert Plant, if they only try. Alterna-folkie Laura Veirs, known for her deft acoustic compositions and plain-spoken vocals, manages here to pull off a Led Zeppelin cover by sounding neither the same nor actually very different than usual. But check out her maybe slightly distorted vocals at 0:32 if you don’t believe she’s channeling something pretty cool here. (Oh and full disclosure: I once had a plant named Robert.)

It’s an odd thing, how Veirs retains the heavy feeling of this proto-heavy-metal song, while breathing something light and frisky into it. Off the bat we get a fuzzy, homemade-sounding lead guitar, tracing Jimmy Page’s famous original line, but also a sweet chimey thing (perhaps a glockenspiel?) playing along with it . It puts me in the mind of a jig, which I don’t think the original did. In any case, the tone is set—the music is being seriously considered, but Veirs & Co. will not be intimidated into either slavish recreation or wholesale re-invention. This is recognizably “The Ocean” and yet also somehow not. I especially like how she takes Plant’s rather goofy vocal break in the middle and gives it a lovely, layered setting—sounding less like drunken accident and more like an integral part of the piece. Credit must also be given to Mount Analog, which is actually a pre-existing, shape-shifting side project started by husband Tucker Martine (more well known now as a producer) back in 1997. Sounds like they’re having fun just rocking out a bit, which is not really what they are wont to do.

The song is part of a massive, brand-new, six-years-in-the-making tribute to Led Zeppelin by a bunch of relatively obscure indie bands and artists from the Northwest, but with a few ringers thrown in—M. Ward (playing the instrumental “Bron-Yr-Aur”), Chris Walla (doing a slow-burning “In The Evening”), and the redoubtable Ms. Veirs chief among them. The album is called From The Land of Ice And Snow: The Songs of Led Zeppelin and it’s coming out next month on the Portland-based Jealous Butcher Records. The MP3 is right now a Fingertips exclusive.

Note that the Houses of the Holy-inspired cover art, excerpted above, was done by Carson Ellis, who is best known for her ongoing collaboration as illustrator-in-residence with the Decemberists.

Free and legal MP3: Goodtimes Goodtimes (amiable, warmly sung, w/ ’70s scent)

“Fortune Teller Song” – Goodtimes Goodtimes

This one also features a pleasantly fuzzy guitar sound, coupled in this case with a tune so chuggily easy-going and warmly sung that it never once sounds like something you haven’t heard before. And I mean this as a compliment, most definitely—another reason why those who seek to criticize some music for “not being new” are, to me, so off the mark. I don’t think music needs to have an agenda like that.

Goodtimes Goodtimes is the performing name for the Italian-born British singer/songwriter Franc Cinelli, who appears to have a particular affinity for the amiable but often discarded music of the ’70s. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s a sturdy bygone feeling to “Fortune Teller Song” that has something to do with Gordon Lightfoot and Jim Croce and early Billy Joel and a bunch of others who strummed and crooned across our AM radio dials back in ancient times. And yet he does so with an organic rather than commercial touch; he isn’t trying to get on the radio, and it adds a grace to the proceedings that, to my ear, makes this song all the more appealing. The simple, character-based story also seems like a throwback, and Cinelli’s buzz-filled voice—nicely offset by the female backup singers in the chorus—makes me happy for no particular reason.

“Fortune Teller Song” is from the second Goodtimes Goodtimes album, this one self-titled, and scheduled for release next month on London’s Definition Arts label. The debut, Glue, came out in 2007. Cinelli has made the MP3 available on his site for an email address, but has been kind enough to let me post it here directly.

Free and legal MP3: Eux Autres (lo-fi Springsteen, w/ charm & gusto)

The appealing, DIY-ish duo Eux Autres (say “ooz oh-tra”) have discovered an unexpected lo-fi core in the middle of this Bruce Springsteen rave-up.

“My Love Will Not Let You Down” – Eux Autres

The appealing, DIY-ish brother/sister duo Eux Autres have discovered an unexpected lo-fi core in the middle of this Bruce Springsteen rave-up. A fan-favorited cast-off from the Born in the USA sessions, “My Love Will Not Let You Down” is exuberant fun when Bruce does it but to my ears can’t help sounding like a bit of a retread; it’s almost too Bruce-y for its own good. Here, Heather and Nick Latimer strip out the brash “No Surrender” echoes and find a different kind of beating heart. The song still rushes along, but minus the well-oiled E Street guitar orchestra (note how the song fades rather than barges in); here we get a piano, an off-kilter, rumbly drum, and probably just one kind of guitar. And in place of Bruce’s throaty rasp we have Heather’s attractive but decidedly unschooled voice, which I urge you to listen to carefully. It’s not just that she aches rather than roars—the shift from male to female “narrator” is significant—but her tone is almost a miracle of reverbed, lo-fi sweetness, offering a shifting stream of heart-melting nuance that can’t possibly be thought out but boy does she have it going here from beginning to end.

Springsteen by the way is nearly alone among his classic-rock peers in combining three 21st-century accomplishments: 1) He continues to have active high school- and college-aged fans; 2) He has seriously influenced a number of important current bands; and 3) He still puts out meaningful records himself. It is just about a unique trifecta for someone of his generation here in 2010, but I guess they don’t call the guy The Boss for nothing. While there have been no shortage of indie bands covering his songs in concert, I haven’t heard too many noteworthy free and legal MP3 covers before this goodie caught my ear last month, via the Philadelphia-centric culture site Philebrity. It’s been out since 2009, actually, but any song is new if you haven’t heard it before, right?

Eux Autres was featured in Fingertips back in 2005, and have released two albums to date. Their next full-length release, Broken Bow, is due in November. The band’s name, as you might have been wondering, is pronounced “ooz oh-tra,” with the “oo” as in “good.”

Free and legal MP3: Jenny Wilson (idiosyncratic Swede)

“Hardships (Gospel Version)” – Jenny Wilson

I am a fan of strange songs with hooks, which no doubt explains my fondness for Tom Waits, Jane Siberry, and They Might Be Giants, among others. Knowing how to be both weird and catchy is rare gift—it requires both smarts and humor—and surely weeds out both the uninformed and the formulaic.

No stranger to idiosyncrasy—her first band’s first release was named “worst album of the year” by a major Swedish rock magazine, according to Allmusic.com—Jenny Wilson sings and arranges with whimsy and determination and little concern for convention. While grounding her songs somewhere within an R&B-like setting, Wilson has no apparent interest in creating either an Amy Winehouse-style homage or a Dirty Projectors-esque deconstruction. Lord knows where the marimba came from but it works, as does the back-and-forth tension between the semi-minimalist verse and the (almost) sing-along chorus. The chorus is in fact one big inscrutable delight, both sticking in your head and continually running from it: there’s the hook-y moment at the beginning, with the words “If I…,” but see how it tails off into lyrics that are difficult to follow and the musical equivalent of a run-on sentence. It’s very engaging somehow.

“Hardships!” is the name of Wilson’s first U.S. release, which came out in late August on her own Gold Medal Recordings label. (The album was previously released in Europe in 2009.) This so-called “gospel version” of the title track is the only free and legal MP3 available so far; it has a slightly different instrumental accompaniment than the original and augments her multi-tracked voice with forceful, gospel-choir-ish backing vocals that replace a prominent violin that is now nowhere to be heard. MP3 via IAMSOUND Records, which is distributing the album’s first single, “Like a Fading Rainbow” (good song too); “Hardships (Gospel Version)” is the b-side.