Category: MP3s

“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.

“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.

“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.

“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.

“I Have Laid in the Darkness of Doubt” – Mazes
     For better or worse, we live in expansive musical times. Back in the 20th century, which some of you may remember, a band would work hard (or, maybe, not so hard) at being successful, and usually not succeed. That much hasn’t changed. Sometimes, when a band was very successful, one of the members might form an offshoot, a so-called “side project,” for a variety of reasons, but the starting point was that the original band had gained some traction, was relatively well-known. A side project would often arise, in fact, as a way of giving less involved members of an established band a chance to be leader. Today, side projects sprout like dandelions in the indie music meadow. Bands with little or no widespread recognition routinely spawn side projects, sometimes more than one.
     I am not judging this, just pointing out the change. People seem genuinely to have more music coming out of them than hours in the day, and obviously more ways than ever to record and distribute it. And if there had been some small-minded, last-century-oriented part of my brain that did want to judge this phenomenon, it has been silenced once and for all by Mazes, a side project of the worthy but not very well-known Chicago band the 1900s (previously featured on Fingertips in 2007, by the way). Edward Anderson and Caroline Donovan from that band have joined up with Charles D’Autremont to form the trio Mazes, and the result here is a gorgeous bit of sturdy, sort-of-lo-fi Americana tinged unexpectedly with gospelly overtones. “I Have Laid in the Darkness of Doubt” floats along with a backwoods sort of poise, picked and strummed and percussed on top of what surely sounds like a chorus of crickets, in no hurry to go anywhere, without even a chorus to distract us. Every time I listen I’m surprised how quickly it’s over.
     This is one of 11 songs on Mazes’ self-titled debut CD, scheduled for a March release on Parasol Records. MP3 via the Parasol site.

“Blank Test” – Smothered In Hugs
     So listen to that opening melody (beginning at 0:15), remove the primal drumbeat, and think about what this sounds like: it’s not merely based on the standard I-IV-V chord progression, but it’s rooted in an early-rock setting of that progression–three successive ascending notes, each a whole interval apart, each accompanied, in order, by one of those I-IV-V chords. The verse of the hugely popular and evocative song “All I Have To Do Is Dream” uses this exact pattern, in a swaying, Everly Brothers soundscape, but this was hardly the only example. Enough other doo-wop era songs grounded themselves in this simple structure for it to carry forever an ineffable air of bygone times about it.
     Which is what, to me, helps make “Blank Test” so satisfying, somehow: it manages to conjure the past while presenting the melody in not one but two contemporary frames–the opening, percussive section and then the sped-up version (first heard at 1:23), after the song’s prominent tempo change. Interestingly, it was this second, faster version that first sounded most nostalgic, maybe because there was kind of a double-nostalgia at work, this speedier section likewise echoing the late ’70s via the Ramones and Blondie, bands which also mined ’50s and early ’60s melodies and chord progressions for use in their faster and harder-rocking compositions.
     Smothered In Hugs (named after a Guided By Voices song) is a quintet from the picturesque and music-laced island of Prince Edward, way out there in the Atlantic Time Zone. “Blank Test” is the lead track on the album The Healing Power of Injury, set for release next month on Collagen Rock Records, a local collective that Smothered in Hugs has established with three other bands from the Maritimes.