Category: MP3s

Free and legal MP3: Faunts (sweet, glum, soaring neo-shoegaze from Edmonton)

“It Hurts Me All the Time” – Faunts

Breezy and melancholy is a seductive musical combination, trickier to master than it may at first seem. The big problem when aiming for both pretty and glum at the same time is avoiding glib pastiche; in this day and age when knob-twiddlers rule the world, it’s easy enough to combine disparate moods and sounds and harder than ever to make it sound a convincing whole.

“It Hurts Me All the Time” blows right past any difficulties from the get-go: first comes that extended intro mixing sprightly synths and low-level dissonance, and then (eventually) the decisive opening lines: “You could never love me/The sky is black above me,” sung with pitch-perfect doleful-sweetness by Tim Batke (one of three Batke brothers in this five-man band). Scored or sung the wrong way, lyrics like that might set off the twee alarm, but not only is Batke’s voice burnished with a subtle throatiness one might not expect from a soaring pop tenor, get a load too of that clanging guitar noise going on as a backdrop to the bubbling synthesizers accompanying him–a visceral signal of the song’s mixed message. And then there’s also the smooth, repeated synthesizer theme that’s more or less an instrumental hook for the song–a pretty line aired with an eerie, organic fragility; a line which, as well, carries with it a distinct echo of Joy Division’s famously melancholy “Love Will Tear Us Apart,” which further undermines the sweetness.

“It Hurts Me All the Time” is a song from the CD Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., the Edmonton band’s second album (not counting last year’s remix album), to be released next week on Friendly Fire Recordings. MP3 via Friendly Fire.

Free and legal MP3 from Stina Stjern (wonderful, scuffed-up Scandinavian rock’n’roll)

Straightforward rock’n’roll with a scuffed-up edge, assured vocals, and a subtly powerful melody.

“The Horizon” – Stina Stjern

Straightforward rock’n’roll with a scuffed-up edge, assured vocals, and a subtly powerful melody. The guitar work here is especially wonderful, all rough and crunchy and bendy, with a dissonant flair and offhanded discipline. There’s a rumbly guitar at the bottom of the mix that gives the song a beat-up gravitas, and there’s a rhythm guitar pretty much playing lead (I tend to like that, now that I think about it), and there’s probably a regular rhythm guitar in there too but by and large everything coheres so agreeably that my mind resists further efforts to pick it apart. I’m just enjoying the vibe, a lot. Stjern herself says she’s “a sucker for good melodies and edgy white trash rock music (whatever that is),” so there’s as good a description as any. And be sure to pay attention to that great coda (3:06): a full minute of churning, squeaking guitars, held together briefly by a circular lead guitar line before disintegrating into a squonky puddle.

Born in Norway and now based in Copenhagen, Stina Stjern has one of those natural voices that gives the illusion that she’s speaking more than singing; there’s something in her full-bodied tone that brings to mind another wonderful Scandinavian singer/songwriter, Ebba Forsberg, but yikes that’s an analogy that’s going to mean nothing to almost everyone. Well, look her up someday. And then here’s something that reminds me of nobody at all: Stjern has hand-knit (as in yarn and needles) covers for the 7-inch vinyl version of the single; she’s made a video of many of the covers, accompanied by the song. MP3 via Stjern’s web site.

Free and legal MP3: The Antlers

Twinkly and hypnotic, with gathering force

“Two” – the Antlers

For a tune that pretty much loops over and over, “Two” has an uncanny–and almost unbearable–amount of grit, substance, and heartache. The song is part of a tightly-themed album called Hospice, which is clearly based on a tragedy in front man Peter Silberman’s life, a tragedy which is only amplified by his free-flowing but unpitying lyrics, his dry, falsetto-like tenor, and the music’s tinkly, buzzing, hypnotic momentum. For all its gathering, contraption-like force, “Two” retains a hand-hewn quality that adds to the pathos; and just listen to those pensive piano chords that appear intermittently (first at 1:53), commanding attention despite–or maybe because of–their quiet matter-of-factness. They’re kind of heartbreaking in their own way.

And I’m not normally a lyrics-focused kind of guy but this song demands a reading, so check it out when you have a chance. “Two,” by the way, is subtitled “Or, I Would Have Saved Her If I Could.”

The Antlers’ first release, in 2007, was a solo project for the Brooklyn-based Silberman; the band has since evolved into a trio, with more players joining in for the album. “Two” has been circulating around the blogosphere since last fall; Hospice is set for self-release next month. MP3 via the band’s site.

Free and legal MP3: Marissa Nadler (beautiful, mysterious, atmospheric toe-tapper)

“River of Dirt” – Marissa Nadler

A master of atmosphere, Marissa Nadler can maintain her delicate, otherworldly vibe even when she adds percussion and electric guitar to her spidery sound, and even when the music chugs along at a toe-tapping pace. A lot of the aura has to do with that spooky voice of hers, encased in reverb, and the words that voice is singing–weird words, full of romance, escape, and sorrow (the titular metaphor appears to be referring to death itself). The echoey, keening lap steel that hovers in the background heightens the familiar strangeness of it all.

Nadler may be adding band-like instrumentation to her sound, but it’s hardly a standard sort of rock band she’s got going here. Listen, first, to the drumming, which moves forward with an idiosyncratic blending of rims and toms, and a most judicious use of cymbals–what you hear in the intro from about :06 onward is what propels the entire song; it’s a subtly peculiar sound, seeming at once mechanical and homespun. Then check out the aforementioned lap steel guitar, which howls and sings with uncanny luminosity, mixing in and around an electric guitar and also Nadler’s own backing vocal tracks, often stressing notes that set it apart from the melody and harmony and yet join everything mysteriously together. Beautiful, compelling music we have here.

Fingertips regulars may recall Nadler from the oddly gorgeous 2007 song “Diamond Heart,” which ended that year among the top 10 favorite free and legal MP3s here that year. “River of Dirt” is from her forthcoming (and fourth) CD, Little Hells, which is slated for release next month on Kemado Records. MP3 originally via Kemado, but no longer available there. You can still grab a free and legal download of it via Stereogum, but it’s no longer a direct link, so you can’t sample it in the player here.

Free and legal MP3: Blue Horns (thorny guitars, yelpy vocals)

“Shotgun Wedding” – Blue Horns

With its thorny guitars and yelpy vocals, “Shotgun Wedding” brings the early work of the late great New Zealand band Split Enz rather immediately to mind, but that’s only because I’m old and remember them. It’s probably an accident. (They didn’t really do the thorny guitar thing, anyway. Thorny keyboards, thorny strings, maybe. Yelpy vocals, definitely.) Perhaps less of an accident is the way the band’s clearly voiced dual guitar sound recalls another ’70s band, Television, although this is jumpier and poppier than what Tom Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were doing. These guys are like Television’s kid brother, just wanting to have a bit of actual fun. (Television was cool and great but not much fun.)

“Shotgun Wedding”‘s charm, to me, has to do with its commanding spirit of loose tightness (or is it tight looseness?)–an aural sense and sensibility that characterizes a lot of great rock’n’roll through the years. You want it to sound spontaneous and alive, but you also want everything just so. There’s nothing muddy or muddled here; the two guitars play cleverly together, and you can always hear what each one is doing if you stop to listen. The song rollicks to a spiky, shuffly beat, singer Brian Park (he also plays one of the guitars) unleashes his warbly falsetto with exquisite precision (check out the note he hits at 0:52, which pretty much sold me on the song), the guitars take a break from their prickly, tick-tock dueting to give us a little “Heat Wave”-y swing (1:19), and the whole thing wraps in 2:40.

Blue Horns is a quartet from Portland, Oregon. “Shotgun Wedding” is the lead track on the band’s self-titled debut album, which was self-released at the end of last year.

Free and legal MP3: Neko Case (spellbinding voice, upbeat but subtle song)

“People Got a Lotta Nerve” – Neko Case

The mighty Neko Case is back with a soon-to-be-released album and an initial song that took a while to sneak up on me, as it were. To be sure, her voice is as spellbinding as ever, with that rich lower register, that clarion upper register. And this one does have an immediate, breezy-jangly appeal. I just wasn’t sure about the song itself. I kept hearing the chorus, with its simple-sounding, repetitive core, and was too distracted to listen to what was actually going on.

The words were the first to penetrate. Over what may sound like a throwaway melodic line, she sings “I’m a man-man-man, man-man-maneater/But still you’re suprised-prised-prised when I eat you.” It turns out this is a bouncy, casual, humorous-seeming way of nailing a painful and complicated interpersonal tendency among us humans that would take me a full paragraph to explicate (I don’t have the room; I’ll leave it to you to ponder.) And then, the music: the way the second series of repetitions, on “surprised,” lag at half-rate, and behind the beat, helps deliver the complex, wistful payoff far better than the words alone would. Eventually, too, I noticed she has two different melodies for the two verses, which feels curious and elusive. You keep needing to go back and listen again. Don’t miss, also, that rueful seven-note run on the guitar before the second verse starts (beginning at 0:56), a C-sharp scale that comes up one note short, leaving us on the most unresolved C note possible (in this difficult scale it’s considered a B-sharp, to be precise). She uses this same pattern for the song’s cryptic coda, as she sings: “It will end again in bullets fired,” which strikes me as an allusion to Chekhov’s famous theatrical principle.

So there’s a little more here than meets the eye. And, “People Got a Lotta Nerve” comes with a nifty promotional gimmick to boot. For every blog that posts this song, Case and her record label, Anti, will donate $5 to the Best Friends Animal Society. Today is in fact the last day the promotion is in effect, so I’m in under the wire. Phew. The new CD, Middle Cyclone, is due out in early March. (There’s a nice video on the making of the album, worth watching, here.) MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3: Little Joy (islandy world pop with a wondrous melody)

“No One’s Better Sake” – Little Joy

A delight from beginning to end, “No One’s Better Sake” rolls along with a shuffling, organ-infused island beat and a casual sensibility that belies how beautifully this little song is put together. What we have here is that rare pop composition that is constructed around a full 16-measure melody–listen and you’ll see how the entire verse is an unfolding melody (from 0:18 all the way to 0:54), even as the song’s gentle, world-pop sway implies a simpler melodic framework. The chorus does its magic in eight measures, as the organ comes back to the fore and the song’s lone, exquisitely placed minor chord just melts the heart there at around 1:04. (At least, it feels like the only minor chord; I could be wrong about that.)

Singer/guitarist Rodrigo Amarante has an endearing, laid-back vocal style that gives the lyrics the quality of a developing conversation; he often sings as if he’s just then deciding what to say. At the same time, Amarante’s processed vocals call to mind the Strokes distinctive vocal sound, which may be no accident: the trio Little Joy is a side project for the Strokes’ drummer, Fabrizio Moretti (the third member is singer and multi-instrumentalist Binki Shapiro). Amarante, it should be noted, is far more well-known in his home country, Brazil, than Moretti is in the U.S.; he gained fame as a member and eventual leader of the Brazilian band Los Hermanos, which is currently on hiatus.

“No One’s Better Sake” is a song from Little Joy’s self-titled debut album, which was released in November on Rough Trade Records, to not a whole lot of fanfare. The band took its name from their favorite bar in Echo Park, the section of LA where they lived while recording the album. MP3 once again via the Beggars Group web site, which has had a great run of offerings lately.

Free and legal MP3 from Jessie Kilguss (singer/songwriter combines spacious sound with clarity of expression)

“Americana” – Jessie Kilguss

What I like right away here is the clarity in Kilguss’s voice. The overall mood—upbeat, spacious, minor-key, with a piano pulse–has a familiar, Sarah McLachlan-like sheen to it (and nothing, it should be noted, remotely Americana, the genre, about it). But Kilguss does not milk the drama with any extra vocal ache or wooshiness. This makes an immediate difference, to me. Music of this general sort does not usually come with a restrained singer. (Maybe her previous career as an actress keeps her from having to get all melodramatic vocally.) Kilguss has a pretty tone–prettiness is the first thing to go when histrionics set in—and she doesn’t even lose it in her upper register, which is where many pop sopranos get all airy and blowy. At the same time, she doesn’t have one of those “hey listen to my pretty voice” kind of voices either. Restraint, again, is the key.

The other principal thing I like about “Americana” is the left turn the song takes at the chorus. First we get a brief hit of string-like synthesizers, as the piano either disappears or is overwhelmed, and the word “Americana” sung anthemically, but then, hey–check out that unexpected chord shift (1:08) as she sings the word a second time over accompaniment that lags engagingly behind the beat. One more unforeseen chord awaits us at 1:20, and by now it’s apparent that this elusive-sounding chorus is driven by neither melody nor lyrics but by a surging, almost orchestral musical flow. The lyrics alone on paper do not begin to suggest the music, which is not a disconnect but a testament to the songwriter’s musical imagination.

You’ll find “Americana” on Nocturnal Drifter, Kilguss’s second album, which she self-released earlier this month.

Free and legal MP3: Evening Magazine (a big ensemble w/ capacity to stay quiet)

“Apple Eye” – Evening Magazine

Marrying an old-fashioned “sound of Philadelphia” sweep to 21st-century electronics and indie-rock flavorings, Evening Magazine makes music that shouldn’t probably work but in this case does, however idiosyncratically. A nine-piece collective from (yes) Philadelphia, the band is led by guitarist/vocalist David Disbrow (formerly of the band BC Camplight) and engineer Kevin Francis (who plays synths too), and features a trumpeter, trombonist, flutist, and harpist, among others. For all the colorful instrumentation, the band doesn’t feel the need to fill in all the aural blanks. As a singer, Disbrow has a somewhat fragile presence, and the music gives him space to establish this presence; in fact, he usually isn’t singing on top of much more here than an acoustic guitar and a drumbeat. The arrangement is reminiscent of classical music, which is more willing than rock to explore dynamics via having instruments just stop playing for a while. Rock musicians, if they’re holding an instrument, they want to play it pretty much constantly.

What makes it all work for me is nothing more complicated than a pleasing melodic interval. Actually, a relationship of intervals. After the relaxed, horn-driven intro, the melody in the verse, itchier, finds Disbrow singing a rapid-fire series of tones. Staying on the first note for six or seven iterations, he slips down just a half-step for four syllables and then up five steps of the scale for the last three. Disbrow sounds particularly fragile at the top of the leap—so much so that the note, while actually the tonic of the scale, the home base, sounds unresolved, just a bit off, adding to the muted urgency of the ambiance fostered by that half-step-down, big-leap-up combination.
     “Apple Eye” is the lead track off the band’s debut EP, The Ride Across Lake Constance, released this month on Ohso Records, which appears to be the band’s own imprint. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

Free and legal MP3 from Elvis Perkins in Dearland (cryptic, powerful, uniquely instrumented dirge)

“Shampoo” – Elvis Perkins in Dearland
     What may seem like a throwaway, the twiddly gathering of odd-ish creaks and whistles we hear in this song’s opening 25 seconds or so, is in retrospect an intriguing hint of the powerful agglomeration of sound that Perkins and his idiosyncratically-named band pump out as this one ramps up. Among the instruments the group plays are upright bass, saxophone, pump organ, harmonica, harmonium, trombone, banjo, and clarinet. (This is not your father’s rock band.) I advise turning up the volume so as best to hear the deep and mighty sonic breaths that propel this cryptic dirge forward. Perkins sings with an offhanded, cumulatively heart-rending ache; a startling phrase or two comes to the surface (“Black is the color of a strangled rainbow,” for one); but the song’s meaning lies more in the convincing churn of the the musical and lyrical momentum than in precise denotation. (In other words: I don’t know what he’s actually saying.)
     Perkins was featured on Fingertips around the time of his 2007 solo debut CD; check out that review for the executive summary of his sad backstory. He’s been playing, with long-time friends, as Elvis Perkins in Dearland at least since then. The band’s self-titled debut CD is due out on XL Recordings in March. MP3 via the Beggars Group web site.