MP3s – Page 87 – Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Sea Wolf (agile, subtly orchestrated)

“Wicked Blood” – Sea Wolf

A dreamy wash of tingly synthesizers leads us into an agile, subtly orchestrated tune with a mixed-down piano vamp (itself intriguing; mostly when someone is pounding a piano, it’s just about all you can hear) and a hint of portentousness. When Alex Brown Church starts singing (and hm, we have two solo performers this week who record using an animal name), that sense of something impending, even prophetic, in the air is further accentuated both by his slightly husky but resonant baritone–it is a voice ready to pronounce something–and by the elusive stream of words he sings. The words resist a narrative throughline but are full of concrete images: veils and curls and mountains and chandeliers and waterfalls and such. Ever since Dylan went electric, this has been a surefire way to sow intrigue and anticipation in a pop song: give us lots of good nouns. We don’t know how that ember got in those rafters, or where the rafters even are, but we emotionally respond to the threat.

Church first gained indie notice as a member of the LA band Irving, which formed back in 1998. As he began writing songs that didn’t seem like Irving songs, he started performing on his own, as Sea Wolf, in 2003. (So you know, Irving has spawned at least one other side project–Afternoons, who were featured here last year; Irving itself is on hiatus at this point.) “Wicked Blood” is the lead track off White Water, White Bloom, the second Sea Wolf album, which came out last week on Dangerbird Records. MP3 via the good folks at Better Propaganda.

Free and legal MP3: Basia Bulat (charming shot of rustic exuberance)

“Gold Rush” – Basia Bulat

Eager youth and venerable tradition is a compelling combination, and a perpetual argument against sourpusses who rise with foolish predictability, in every generation, to proclaim that good music ended at some lamented moment in the receding past. Good music never stops arriving; good listening frequently grinds to a halt, however.

“Gold Rush” is a particularly charming amalgam of the old and the new. The old registers in the exuberant, rustic vibe embodied by a stringed managerie that includes fiddles and Bulat’s signature autoharp; the new is all in the song’s energy: in Bulat’s freewheeling vocals, in the galloping percussion, and maybe best of all in her innate sense of drama. This young Canadian knows just when to pull back and when to let loose–listen to how well, for instance, the song’s rollicking momentum is set up by the opening section, with its deliberate series of staccato fiddle chords; check out, also, how she clears space for those out-of-the-blue but abruptly perfect harmony vocals in the bridge (1:42). And she wraps up this spirited rollercoaster ride in a nifty three and a half minutes.

“Gold Rush” is the first song made available from Bulat’s upcoming Heart Of My Own, her second album, scheduled for release in January on Rough Trade/Beggars. MP3 via the Beggars Group.

Free and legal MP3: Land of Talk (powerful return of Fingertips fave)

“May You Never” – Land of Talk

Another song with an introduction that’s sparser and slower than the song it introduces, “May You Never” starts with spacey/chimey sounds, a semi-pentatonic piano riff, and some ultra echoey vocals from smudgy-voiced Lizzie Powell over a doleful kettle drum. It sounds all indie-mystical, but at 0:51 the beat kicks in, and the guitar grabs the piano’s motif so effectively that you see you’ve been set up all along. The song is sharp and powerful, and driven by Powell’s mysterious way with a melodic refrain.

This is Land of Talk’s third time on Fingertips, and it is apparently impossible for me to talk about them without mentioning Powell’s crazy-delicious guitar playing, so here I am again, telling you not only to tune in for the short but sizzling solo (at 2:00) but to keep your ears on what she’s up to in and around the rest of the song, including how she starts the coda with a literal bang (3:30) and ends it (if you listen carefully) with an echo of the song’s very first notes.

“May You Never” will be one of four tracks on the band’s forthcoming Fun and Laughter EP, slated to arrive next month via Saddle Creek. The band is meager with bio info, so I’m not sure how many people are playing with Powell at this point; the bigger news in any case is that she appears to be fully recovered from vocal cord surgery in January that sidelined her just when the band was geared up to promote their last CD. MP3 courtesy of Saddle Creek.

Free and legal MP3: Buffalo Killers(indie rock w/ classic rock aura)

“Huma Bird” – Buffalo Killers

Any 21st-century indie band that can this successfully channel their inner Joe Walsh is a friend of mine. Not that I’m a particular Joe Walsh fan; it’s more the principal of the thing. This is not a sound I expect to come out of my MP3 player in the year 2009. It’s a simple, grounded sound, a mid-tempo loper with a light acoustic rhythm at the front of the mix, sometimes messing playfully with the beat, with a heavy bass line underneath and a resonant electric guitar that interjects kind of whenever you’ve forgotten there’s an electric guitar hanging around.

And then there’s no avoiding that voice. This Cincinnati trio features brothers Andrew and Zachary Gabbard on lead guitar and bass, respectively, and both sing, so I’m not sure who is who here, but whoever is offering up that achy, upward-straining, and yet decidedly masculine tenor is paying uncanny homage to James Gang-era Walsh. But this is no lifeless imitation; “Huma Bird,” while completely relaxed, manages to soar with confidence and verve. Only fitting, as a huma bird, by the way, is a mythological creature, from a Sufi fable, which was said to live stratospherically high above the earth and never in its life touch the ground or even a tree. The bird laid its egg from so high up that the baby could grow inside, peck its way out, and manage to learn to use its wings just before the egg smashed to the ground. Some might find a metaphor in this. (Weird side note, not necessarily metaphorical: the song starts fading, for no apparent reason, 50 seconds before its official ending, and leaves us with a good 12 seconds of complete silence.)

“Huma Bird” is a new song, not yet on an album. The band’s last CD was Let It Ride, which came out in July 2008 on Alive Records. MP3 via the band’s site. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Wildbirds & Peacedrums (quirky, affecting; voice & drums)

“My Heart” – Wildbirds & Peacedrums

For a voice and percussion duo, Mariam Wallentin and Andreas Werliin create music with great texture and charm. It’s still pretty idiosyncratic–okay, very idiosyncratic–but you don’t listen to “My Heart” and think, “Geez, where are all the real instruments?” because Werliin does a beautiful, canny job finding not just beats but notes and motifs in a variety of things that are struck with a stick or a mallet. Wallentin in fact sounds like she’s being accompanied by a small, quizzical orchestra, not just a drummer.

The song’s many and varied structural and compositional and artistic quirks may well be why a listener’s ear is distracted from the basic instrumental peculiarity at the core of the duo’s sound. There’s the stop-start-y melody (I dare you to sing along for very long); the shifting rhythmic foundation (the same melody happens over drastically different percussive backgrounds at different points in the song); the art-song-meets-pop-song sense of development (note for example that odd, extended interstitial moment–beginning at 0:49–of being neither in verse nor chorus); and, payoff, the unexpected but brilliant choral finish.

“My Heart” is a song from The Snake, the band’s second album, which came out in Sweden in 2008 and was released earlier this year in the UK on the Leaf Label, and finally also in the US last month by the Control Group. MP3 via NME.

Free and legal MP3: Los Campesinos!

Large-scale, dynamic indie rock

“The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future” – Los Campesinos!

Like the rare actor who can pull off comedy and drama with equal aplomb (I’m looking at you, Meryl Streep), the Cardiff septet Los Campesinos! herein announce that they are capable of steering their large-scale, unfettered, exclamation-pointed sound in the direction of serious fare just as knowingly as they have engaged in good-natured mayhem.

In both cases they utilize the full dynamic range of music–soft to loud, uncluttered to cluttered, solo vocals and gang singing–and an inventive sense of drama and production. This time around the band produces an almost industrial racket in service of the somber, subtly seafaring mood, and yet it’s also somewhere within that noisier-than-you-realize ambiance (check out that odd, squawking sound that punctuates the rhythm at the outset of the second verse, for instance) that something redemptive emerges. Sad, but redemptive. Maybe. The lyrics seem to have to do with the singer trying to make sense of a troubled woman he probably loves. The song isn’t fun but it’s powerful, and all but demands repeated listens for full effect.

“The Sea Is A Good Place To Think Of The Future” is a song from the band’s forthcoming CD, We Are Beautiful, We Are Damned, set for an October release on Witchita Recordings.

Free and legal MP3: Secondstar (meditative, wistful, harmony-laced)

“Tied to the Mast” – Secondstar

Meditative, wistful, harmony-laced, and lacking any introduction whatsoever, “Tied to the Mast” (sea theme continues, inadvertently) envelops us instantly in its welcoming vocal layers. While reminiscent, clearly, of the sorts of harmonizing that Fleet Foxes abruptly brought back to rock’n’roll last year, what you’ll hear here has a smaller-scale and less architected feeling. Liam Carey, the Brooklyn-based driving force behind Secondstar, uses an accumulation of fragile vocal tracks to create something decidedly unfragile, anchoring it all on a simple acoustic rhythm guitar and some oceanic percussion, nicely evocative of the “ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea,” to quote a landmark poem that comes to mind as I’m listening to this. The guitar, by the way, may be uncomplicated but the chords are so hospitable, the sound so warm and plush that I am newly reminded that complication isn’t everything.

“Tied to the Mast” is one of five songs on Secondstar’s Teeth EP, self-released this summer. A follow-up EP is due some time this fall, says Carey. Note that the link is via Bandcamp, and is not direct. Follow instructions from the link above and you’ll have the MP3 in no time.

Free and legal MP3: Hopewell (throbbing, neo-psychedelic lullaby)

“Stranger” – Hopewell

A noisy, disciplined exercise in 21st-century genre-bending, this throbbing, neo-psychedelic lullaby probably kills in concert. Even on a recording, concisely churned and pummeled into three and a half minutes, even with Jason Russo’s restrained, whispery tenor, “Stranger” is a bracing, vehement number. The instrumental parts have an almost feral quality, even as the overall vibe is tight as a drum; when the five guys in this Brooklyn-based band crank up the volume, one gets the feeling that while any one of them may not know exactly what he’s going to play next, the other four always do. That’s what you get when you’ve been together for more than a decade. (Okay, there’s me again, singing the praises of experience over “hot-new-thing-iness.” It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.)

Oh and then, after all that unfettered intensity, check out how the song ends, with that one homely, lonely gong-like cymbal. Unexpectedly smile-inducing.

Hopewell was featured on Fingertips in 2007 for the song “Tree.” “Stranger” is the latest MP3 available from the band’s Good Good Desperation CD, their sixth, released in May on Tee Pee Records. MP3 via Tee Pee.

Free and legal MP3: Orenda Fink (evocative and folk-ish)

“High Ground” – Orenda Fink

Orenda Fink returns, not long after her technologically experimental O+S project, with a solo record that grounds her firmly back in a world of acoustic instruments and evocative songwriting. “High Ground,” with its minor key orientation, purposeful picking (both mandolin and banjo, from the sound of it), and group vocals, unfolds with the offhand seriousness of a back-country folk song. The title, and the central metaphor therein, implies both threat and survival; Fink’s lovely, careful singing voice, is, by song’s end, all but swallowed by the vocal wave around her, but she keeps singing, and doesn’t raise her voice. And we still hear her, all the more so because we have to try.

“High Ground” is a track from Fink’s forthcoming album, Ask the Night, to be released next month on Saddle Creek Records. And the ever-active, prolific Fink has also been playing with Maria Taylor as Azure Ray again this summer; the word is that a new Azure Ray album is in the works for next year.

Free and legal MP3: Pugwash (Beatlesque and XTC-like catchiness)

“Apples” – Pugwash

Here on 9/9/09, with big marketing news regarding both the Beatles and Apple Computer in the air, how can I resist a Beatlesque/XTC-like piece of pop entitled “Apples”? Resistance, clearly, is futile. I love in fact how the XTC-isms and Beatle-isms here are so consistently interdependent as to be inextricable. Because let me interrupt here to note that XTC remains, to this day, the great, largely unacknowledged link between the Fab Four and the entire alternative/indie rock explosion of the last two-plus decades; they were the one band that took what the Beatles did and alchemized it into something truly their own. I’ll go as far as to suggest that they gave us a hint of what the Beatles themselves might have come to sound like had they stayed together a bit longer.

And so: that cheery little ascending motif at the end of the first two verse lines (first heard at 0:12)? Nicely, intertwiningly related to both great British bands. Likewise the effortless weaving of guitar effects, string-like effects, and vocal effects in such a sharp and focused pop song. Note too how Irishman Thomas Walsh tends towards a Lennon-ish timbre but phrases his words in quite the Andy Partridge-like manner. (And isn’t Pugwash itself a sort of XTC-ish word?) The coda-like touches near the end–this song has a definite ending, it doesn’t just stop–is further evidence, if required, of both seminal influences.

And now it turns out that Pugwash–which pretty much is Walsh, plus some friends and guests who help him out when he records–has been signed to Partridge’s own Ape Records, which is why we’re hearing “Apples” now, although originally released in 2002. Ape is first releasing a compilation of the best songs from the band’s four existing albums. “Apples” is the lead track on that album, entitled Giddy, which will be out later this month.