Category: Uncategorized

A quick note to let you know that there’s a new contest posted on the main Fingertips site: you can enter to win the new 3CD Bob Dylan compilation, which they’re simply calling Dylan (probably because they’ve already used up “Greatest Hits” and “Best Of”). What’s notable about this one is that it spans his entire career, from his first CD in 1962 through to last year’s Modern Times.

Dylan fans are already complaining–not without some merit–that the collection is pretty much of a retread; given the depth and breadth of Dylan’s catalog, even a three-disc collection can end up, as this one has, pretty much just rounding up the usual suspects. One track that qualifies as an obscure gem, not previously collected on any of the other packages of Dylan’s best stuff, is the song “Dark Eyes,” from his nicely titled but otherwise forgettable 1985 album, Empire Burlesque. There are also a trio of songs from three of Dylan’s lesser-heard ’90s albums, Under the Red Sky, Good As I Been to You, and the truly great World Gone Wrong. Other than that, lots and lots of pretty high-profile tunes.

While I understand the fans’ disgruntlement, the thing is, die-hard Dylan fans already have everything, so simply putting more obscure songs on the collection doesn’t give aficionados any more need to own it than a package full of the big, safe hits. And if it’s rarities the zealots are looking for, the record company has been reasonably good about offering those over the years through the so-called “Bootleg Series.” A package such as Dylan is clearly being aimed at people who maybe don’t otherwise have any Dylan CDs. As predictable as it seems to long-time fans, this new triple-CD set is now the best thing a new fan can buy to get lots of the major works in one place.

(Of course, if you enter the contest and win, you won’t even have to buy it.)

I think maybe what the Dylan fans are really complaining about is how these packages serve to keep newbie fans continually in the dark about lots of other really good songs. And I completely agree. In fact, I’ve personally decided to do something about that: I’ve assembled an iMix playlist featuring 15 really great Dylan songs that have never, any one of them, been collected on any of the greatest hits and best of CDs that have been done to date. You can check it out on iTunes here. They may not be familiar to anyone who’s not already a big fan, but these, too, are some wonderful songs. Check it out and see what you think.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
Sept. 2-8

There’s still a wee bit of time to enter the latest Fingertips Contest; the deadline for entry is midnight EDT but truth be told if you get your email in by tomorrow morning that’ll be fine also. Three winners will each receive a copy of a new compilation CD entitled This Is Next, featuring 15 songs from a variety of well-regarded non-major-label artists, including Neko Case, the Shins, and Spoon.

“To the Dogs or Whoever” – Josh Ritter
A ramshackle folk rock tall tale overrun by breakneck lyrics and underscored by colorful keyboards. The literate Ritter–who designed his own major in American History through Narrative Folk Music, at Oberlin–cuts loose a bit here, singing with an off-the-cuff charm that unites generations of gonzo lyricists, from Greenwich Village beatniks to punk-rock snarlers clear through to late 20th-century hip hop rhyme masters. (And okay, also that guy from Minnesota, but I was trying to give Ritter a break and write about him without mentioning that particular influence.) I like the way he appends a vaguely boozy, sing-along style chorus to the rapid-fire verses, which adds to the good-natured vibe. I get the idea that Ritter wants us right away to remember (this song opens his new CD) that he’s not the overly earnest singer/songwriter he’s often portrayed as in the glowing reviews he’s been receiving since the beginning of this decade. The album title is another hint: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, and if the words don’t reveal a tongue planted firmly in cheek, the cover, featuring one red-crested Roman soldier’s helmet and an early-’60s album cover font, should do the trick. The CD was released a couple of weeks ago on Sony/BMG. The MP3 is via Ritter’s site, where you can also by the way stream the whole album.

“Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” – Siberian
With its ringing wall of guitars and croony lead vocalist, the Seattle quartet Siberian reminds me how much a good chunk of the music identified online as shoegaze owes to early U2; but U2 of course isn’t cool anymore so they are rarely mentioned except in a disparaging way by the shoegaze-friendly but snark-infested blogosphere. Meanwhile, Finn Parnell, Siberian’s aforementioned crooner, reminds me how much Thom Yorke sounded like Bono sometimes on The Bends, for what it’s worth. In any case, what we have here is a song with a chiming, bittersweet power to it, due primarily, I think, to its unusual, three-sectioned structure. In place of the standard verse-chorus framework (one or two verses followed by a chorus, followed by another verse or two and another chorus, etc.), “Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” is divided into three distinct and relatively equal sections, each a melody that’s repeated. At the heart of this structure is the arresting second section (beginning at 1:01 the first time), featuring a mournful melody that is simply a sixth interval going back and forth, back and forth, over chords that alternate between minor and major. This then yields to a third section that aims at a heart-rending sort of resolution before pulling up short in the song’s center (1:48) and starting over. When the promised resolution at last arrives, after the song cycles back through its three sections, the song literally stops right on that long-awaited note. Nicely done. “Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” will be found on Siberian’s debut full-length CD, With Me, scheduled for release next month on Sonic Boom Recordings.

“Nothing Burns Like Bridges” – Penny Century
Penny Century vocalist Julia Hanberg sings with a breathless vigor that helps transform this attractive bit of fleet, late-summery pop into something that strikes me as substantive and lasting. There’s an air of some earlier era floating around in the cheery mix of keyboards and what sounds like a trumpet; the chorus’s infectious, speeded-up echoing of the old Linda Ronstadt nugget “Different Drum” adds to the ineffable nostalgia, as does the brief bit of boy-girl dueting halfway through. That said there’s something entirely of the here and now in the band’s sound–in particular its gleeful blend of the homespun and the precise; I keep thinking that a lot of this sounds sort of sloppy except that it actually isn’t at all. The song flies across one’s field of awareness in a zippy 2:07 and the first thing I’m tempted to do when it’s over is hit the play button again. Penny Century is a sextet from the village of Östersund, in northern Sweden. “Nothing Burns Like Bridges” is a song from the band’s debut CD, Between a Hundred Lies, which was released two weeks ago on Letterbox Records. The MP3 is via the Letterbox site.

Reaction to “The future (or not) of the album”

A discerning few of you may have noticed over time that Fingertips does not offer “comments” sections in any way, shape, or form. To explain that particular quirk would probably take its own “Commentary” essay (and watch out, I’m thinking of writing it); suffice it to say that I am very interested in what people have to say, but I’m not interested in publishing quickie reactions from random visitors–which often turn into their own conversations–on an equal footing with carefully thought-out essays. Just because 99% of all web sites do this doesn’t mean it makes sense.

That said, as this essay (posted here originally on Aug. 2 and Aug. 3) has indeed prompted a number of thoughtful responses, I was moved to give some space to some of them, here–both on the web page with the original essay and here on the blog.

Mary Ann Farley, a talented singer/songwriter (and painter) in her own right, writes to mention an excellent point I completely overlooked:

One thing I loved about the vinyl disc was that it had two sides. When I made both of my CDs, neithier one cracking 40 minutes (My Life of Crime came in at 37), I felt like even that amount of time was too long a stretch for someone to sit and listen to. I worried that the songs further down the list wouldn’t get listened to as much, even though they were just as good and placed there for a reason. And it seems I was right.

Just from anecdotal conversations, people tend to talk about the earlier songs on my discs. One friend said he found the music so dense (in a good way) both lyrically and musically, that he could only listen to a few songs at a time in order to digest it.

When I used to listen to vinyl records, I felt like there were two tiny worlds, one on each side, and the splitting in half of the entire work helped me get to know an album intimately. That experience, as you say, is just gone now, never to return, and I miss it.

Visitor Courtney brings up another excellent point that I missed:

Speaking for myself only, I can tell you why the CD changed albums forever for me: Because they make it so easy to skip a song. Records and tapes made it (comparatively) labor intensive to change to the next track. So I sat in my car or my room and learned to appreciate a song that I might initially have disliked, because I was too lazy to skip past it. I was forced to listen to the album in its entirety and to give in to the flow the artist intended (so that even years later, I would always expect track 4 to follow track 3 even when hearing that song on the radio).

I can name only a handful of albums that I have listened to that way since the introduction of CDs. The siren call of that forward button makes it SO easy to disregard a song that doesn’t grab you immediately. A song you might learn to love if you gave it a chance.

Yes, absolutely, a crucial point. I didn’t think of it in part because I never developed the habit, somehow. To this day I rarely if ever use the “next track” button; I forget it’s even there, I feel rather sheepish in admitting.

Courtney notes that the iPod has aggravated the problem:

Now I don’t even pretend to listen to an album as a whole. It gets dumped into my library and I listen to it when it finally pops up in shuffle mode.

Talk about breaking the spell of the album! This reality didn’t occur to me either, so thanks to Courtney for bringing that up. I didn’t think of it because of another idiosyncrasy of mine–namely, I do not by default upload CDs automatically into iTunes; I pick and choose and only put songs in my library that I like. This does require a bit of familiarity with the album on the one hand, but on the other hand it obviously results in me dismantling the album and never really hearing it again either. So, different approach, same results.

Visitor Chris writes in to point out that my quick summary of the album’s rise in the mid-’60s overlooked the fact that jazz artists were most definitely recording albums as “cohesive musical statements” back in the ’50s. Absolutely true, and I might have made it clearer that I was grounding the entire argument in the pop world. Still, this makes me wonder why the likes of Brian Wilson or the Beatles or any other thoughtful pop musicians of the day hadn’t already looked to the jazz world for inspiration on the matter.

Chris also notes, rightly, that even as the album focus grew through the ’60s and into the ’70s and ’80s, there always remained a reasonably strong concurrent focus on songs and singles on the pop side of things. Finally, he observes that while things have changed over the last generation, he does not see the album dying out any time soon:

I think maybe the cd was an agent in the trend away from the great rock albums of the 70s, but a focus on albums is still quite common in many realms of music. I keep encountering great new albums in metal, jazz, country, and rock music. I’m actually surprised that the album form is still doing so well despite all the pressures against it. I think there is hope that artists will continue to want to put the effort into creating albums and that dedicated listeners will still want to hear them.

Lucas Jensen, on the other hand, notes that there are genres of music that might do better to abandon the album format entirely:

Wouldn’t a lot of R&B/rap artists be better if they didn’t have to make or be judged by albums? I love Beyonce for a song or two but not a record because I think her singles are tops.

Lucas, who promotes indie artists for the Athens, Ga.-based Team Clermont, then wonders if the shift to digital distribution isn’t damaging music in a way that goes deeper and further than merely killing off the idea of the record album:

Moving music away from the physical realm hasn’t been properly addressed philosophically yet in my eye, but I think something is being lost in terms of permanence–when music is easily tradeable and deleteable it will become disposable. Someone’s year of hard work goes down the drain because you didn’t like the way it sounded at the beginning and deleted it.

I agree with this idea that lacking a physical form renders music more disposable, to the harm of artist and listener alike, and definitely to the detriment of the pop music album such as it used to exist much more commonly. It’s worth noting that in our digital age you don’t even have to delete a song literally to delete it effectively–bringing us back to Courtney’s observations about how the “next track” button often leads her to ignore a track for good simply because it didn’t grab her quickly enough.

More responses that add to the conversation will be included here as they come in.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
Aug. 5-11

“Crown Victoria” – Robbers on High Street
An unmistakeable Kinks-iness animates this boppy little nugget–the opening clearly echoes “A Well Respected Man”–but that’s just the beginning of “Crown Victoria”‘s charms. Working with noted Italian film composer Daniele Luppi, who had previously never worked as a producer on a rock album, the NYC-based trio Robbers on High Street have found their British Invasion-y ’60s sound enhanced with a Spaghetti Western-y ’60s sound, and damn if it doesn’t work rather well, if only because in retrospect all those sounds kind of blend together historically anyway. So, the slowly-strummed chord that starts the song happens not on an acoustic guitar (as per the Kinks) but on a twangy, throbbing guitar straight out of Ennio Morricone. (An acoustic guitar soon joins in, however.) The piercing organ that chimes in around 0:38? Spaghetti time again. All this insider homage-ing will get us only so far, however. To me, the song takes off when we get to the chorus, which has a swingy, winning melody, deftly enhanced when the organ begins to add some swoopy, ascending lines below. Keep an ear open for the bass next, which plays some acrobatic lines itself when the second verse comes along. And stay tuned for the wacky (but still somehow retro-y) duck-like sounds (maybe they’re just vocals? hard to say) in the instrumental coda. “Crown Victoria” is from the CD Grand Animals, released in July on New Line Records. The MP3 is courtesy of New Line.

“Throwin’ Shapes” – Minus the Bear
Bright, brisk, and determined, this song is in the mix this week not just because I like it but because it sounds exactly right between its two TWF-mates. And I can’t say why that is, at all. I do know that I particularly enjoy the interplay between Jake Snider’s yearning vocal style and the painterly guitar licks brushed around him by the gifted David Knudson. I am also captivated by the comfortable but unplaceable soundscape here–although the opening recalls Haircut One Hundred (I kid you not), there’s something in the blend of beat and arrangement that sounds neither like typical ’00s indie rock nor like the music of any particular past era. It’s easy enough to do that if you’re just trying to be weird, but this Seattle quintet manages to sound at once fresh and familiar. “Throwin’ Shapes” is a song off the band’s Planet of Ice CD, scheduled for release later this month on Suicide Squeeze Records. The MP3 is via Suicide Squeeze.

“Escape City Scrapers” – Mono in VCF
Another quintet from Washington State; very different music. The sublime mystery of this song is how something that threatens at first to be syrupy and too retro for its own good ends up, rather quickly, sounding so pure and vibrant. Clearly a lot of credit here belongs to singer Kim Miller (such a substantive and alluring voice!), but let’s pay attention as well to the grand aural structure that supports her reverb-laced vocals, which is nothing less than a creamy orchestral souffle that knowingly marries Phil Spector-ish majesty with darker James Bond-ian swank. Either way, yes, we’re back in the ’60s, inspiration-wise. At the same time, this is no slavish tribute. Mono in VCF understands its influences (the band’s name is a nod towards Spector, who recorded in mono; VCF stands for voltage-controlled filter, which is a Moog synthesizer gizmo) but transcends them through a willingness to be creative on its own terms as well. Although the echoey strings and occasional drum bashes help build a sort of “wall of sound” (Spector’s famous production effect), the band here steers clear of both the “Phil Spector beat” (think “Be My Baby”) and any girl-group-style pop tune; what we get instead is a snakey, spy-movie melody, some wonderful piano interjections, and grand washes of synthesizers that sound maybe like something Portishead might have done if someone took their sampler away. All in all, a sweeping and memorable bit of work from this unsigned (but probably not for long) Tacoma band with but one four-song EP to its name so far. (The debut album is expected either late this year or early next.) The MP3 is via the band’s site; thanks again to the 3hive gang for the head’s up.

The future (or not) of the album
a Fingertips commentary
part 2 (see 8/2 for part 1)

The CD broke the spell of the record album.

Interestingly how we all kind of intuited this before long, even if it was nothing we thought to articulate. The use of the word “album” diminished as the CD era progressed. Instead of saying, “Did you get the new Radiohead album?” you maybe, more often, said, “Did you get the new Radiohead CD?”

Bonus tracks were but the first step. Once music fans had pretty much abandoned the vinyl LP, by the early ’90s, the industry found itself released once and for all from the time restriction of the vinyl LP. After which point albums, sure enough, became longer. Quite a bit longer.

While there are certainly individual exceptions to the rule, as a whole, the music industry never makes decisions based on quality, and I never expect it to. To wonder whether longer albums were better albums, qualitatively, was besides the point: longer albums were better quantitatively so longer albums by and large became the rule of thumb. I mean, aren’t 16 songs better than 10? Eighteen better than 16? Etcetera.

Price was part of it. I do not doubt for a minute that industry honchos figured they could push $17, $18, and $19 CDs onto the music-buying public more easily if the CDs came with 16 or 18 or 20 songs and lasted more than an hour than they could if artists had only 10 or 12 songs and only 40 minutes of music.

It’s one thing to add songs to make an album last 60 minutes instead of 40 minutes. It’s a whole other thing to make those 20 minutes really good, not to mention fit in with the other 40. I don’t know about you, but my CD collection is chock full of discs that would be truly outstanding if they were 35 or 40 minutes, but seem kind of average at 65 minutes. (Of course, what do we do with these CDs, with our iPods? We upload only the good 35 or 40 minutes, don’t we.)

I’m not here to argue with the industry philosophically. These were business people making business decisions. I am here to point out, however, that a combination of technological capacity and business acumen (or not) fostered an age of 60-plus-minute albums that absolutely and positively led to the demise of the very thing that was being marketed. (Ironic, ain’t it?)

Thing is, albums really do have an appropriate length. With the benefit, again, of historical hindsight, it’s clear that a vinyl LP-length album tends to work as a listening experience in a way that a CD-length album does not.

There is nothing magical about this; it’s kind of just ergonomics, in a way: how long it feels comfortable to sit and focus on one somewhat connected piece of music. And the fact that the vinyl LP works for this and the CD doesn’t is rather accidental, since neither the CD nor the vinyl LP were developed with pop albums particularly in mind.

Originally used for classical recordings, long-playing records, when they finally made their way to the market in a pop music setting, were nothing more than the latest collection of a performer’s songs, with no particular rhyme or reason to look and feel, or even sequencing. It took some 10 to 15 years between the widespread emergence of the 33 1/3 LP in the early to mid-1950s and the arrival of record albums in the artistic sense of the word–that is, the album as some sort of coherent (though not necessarily thematic) work of art

Circumstances by then had arisen that prompted recording artists to look at the LP as a larger-scale canvas on which to paint their musical ideas. It’s well-known that the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was inspired by the Beatles 1965 album Rubber Soul to produce Pet Sounds, released in 1966, which in turn inspired 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, after which the floodgates opened.

For the next couple of decades, cultural and technological circumstances combined to keep the vinyl album at the center of the pop music market, during which a great majority of pop music’s classic albums were produced.

But in the latter half of the album’s heyday, along came the CD, which took its own 10 to 15 years to change how music was being conveyed to music buyers. And here’s me in 2007 finally realizing that however many great songs there are out there these days there are oddly few great albums.

Leading me to realize that it is the CD, and not the internet, that steered the music industry back to its earlier, pre-Pet Sounds position: record albums in themselves have no artistic integrity as a coherent whole, they’re just a collection of songs for people to buy. Record companies, artists, and music buyers alike have been slowly and steadily over the last 10 to 15 years adjusting their sense of what releasing music is about to the reality of the CD rather than the vinyl LP.

And then the internet came in for the kill.

Because if CDs are just collections of songs for people to buy, and it turns out here in the 21st century that people can, online, buy all the songs they want–or steal them–without buying albums at all, then this is a logical outgrowth of how the music industry began to treat albums on CDs versus albums on vinyl records.

Furthermore, with CDs having stretched albums beyond agreeable length and/or having “bonused” them beyond recognition, it only makes sense that people feel no particular affinity for the collections of songs they’re being sold on CDs now that they can make their own collections of songs–playlists, as they are often called in this online setting.

Re-examining my opening circumstance in light of all this, what does it really mean that I’ve been unable by and large to find albums that I really like? Clearly, as noted at the top, there are no shortage of CDs being released. But with everyone fully adjusted to the CD experience, with the vinyl album experience a quaint relic of the past, I say it’s no coincidence that albums with the spark of that experience in their laser-etched grooves are so hard to come by.

And I have to own up to the fact that my feeling that there aren’t many really good albums these days is no doubt due in part to my own diminished interest in this sort of album, as fostered by the environment I’ve been describing. It’s an odd admission for someone who always thought so highly of albums, or always thought I thought highly of them.

But I’ve been pretty happy with my iTunes library, and shuffling through my odd but engaging assortment of songs on my iPod. Lots and lots of great new songs I’m listening to, I have to tell you. And, yes, of course, the occasional great album. I do not mean to imply by all this that no one is releasing good albums at all.

I hope, still, to post reviews to the Album Bin. Occasionally. And I pledge to myself no longer to worry about not posting.

That said, I have a suspicion that we haven’t heard the last of the album. And if this turns out to be the case, the album’s survival and re-emergence will be grounded in a recognition that the “record album” as often, now, romanticized was a phenomenon born of a time and place and technology and culture that just isn’t coming back. If the album is to have a renaissance someday, it will have to be reinvented–and reinvented in a way that is as inconceivable to us in 2007 as Pet Sounds would have been to Pat Boone fans in 1959. The person or people who accomplish this wondrous task will have themselves grown up listening to CDs. Ironic, ain’t it?

In the interest, at long last, of doing a bit more with this blog beyond posting the three weekly song picks, I’m going occasionally to post some other things here that have gone up on the web site. Commentary pieces make a logical–if lengthy–addition to this blog, so given that I’ve just written a new one, that’s what I’m going to post today. Or, actually, I’m going to post the first half of it here today, and then the second half of it in another few days. So it’s not too much to read at once, basically. If you really can’t wait, there will be a link at the bottom to click to join up with the rest of it on the Fingertips (non-blog) web site. Also, so you know, the full version of the essay has a number of footnotes to click on that I am not bothering to code in here. The essay still works without them.

* * * * * * *

The future (or not) of the album
a Fingertips Commentary

A year and a half after unleashing Fingertips onto an unsuspecting public (that was way back in May ’03), I got it in my head that I wanted to augment the MP3 reviews I was doing weekly with an album review section. The Album Bin, accordingly, was born, at the end of 2004.

A page of paragraph-long CD reviews, the Album Bin has sputtered along ever since, with me intermittently pledging to post reviews more regularly, and then that never really happening.

I know that I limited myself by deciding that I would only review albums that I really liked. But I didn’t, at the outset, recognize what a mighty limitation this would become. Because what turns out to have kept me from writing a lot of reviews has been, rather simply, my inability to find many albums that I liked enough to want to write about.

So here’s me, week after week finding song after song that I really love, but month after month hearing a negligible number of albums that get me equally excited. For the longest time I didn’t think about this too carefully, and used this information merely to feel badly that I wasn’t updating the Album Bin very often.

But I finally realized there’s something bigger going on here.

Lots of songs I love, few albums that I love: this sounds in a nutshell like the problem the entire music industry is grappling with. People are buying songs, not albums. And of course there are many who are not buying at all but simply downloading without paying–and not all of these people, alas, are visiting Fingertips and downloading legally.

As a music fan, you may have read an article or two (or five) declaring the album to be more or less dead, if not now then very soon. (Never mind, for the moment, the fact that there are still tons of CDs being released every week.) For proof, everyone points to the latest generation of music fans, who have little to no interest in buying albums in the way that anyone older than 25 or 30 remembers doing, and maybe still does.

So, yes, folks, it’s the internet that has killed the album. Might as well blame Al Gore and be done with it.

Or maybe not. First, there’s the simple point that the album may not, after all, die. The main reason I can find in support of the album’s survival is, to be honest, the fact that so many techno-zealots believe it’s a goner. And techno-zealots are perhaps our single most unreliable prognosticators.

But there’s a second and more complicated point to the story because in many ways, despite the ongoing onslaught of weekly releases, the album is already in serious hibernation. I do not, however, see this as the internet’s fault. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the record album was gravely injured by something we all thought at the time was giving it new life–the CD itself.

Maybe we should define our terms here. When people speak of the death of the album, they may be talking about one of two distinct things: the disappearance of physical CDs entirely, replaced by downloadable songs only; or, somewhat more subtly, the end of an era in which pop musicians release songs that are grouped together in some sort of cohesive way, in which the entire work is thought out as a whole and feels, as a listening experience, to be a unit of some sort.

I am not, here, concerned that much with the fate of the physical CD, and I don’t think that’s what most true music fans fret about when talking about the death of the album. They worry, instead, about a musical world in which we are denied the pleasures of pop music presented in a larger format than a single song–a musical world without good albums, basically. Many seem to believe that a lack of a physical product would hasten this day, which is why the two distinct ideas–no CDs on the one hand, no albums on the other–are so intertwined.

To me, however, the ongoing existence, or not, of the physical CD is actually besides the point, because its indisputable existence for the last 25 years has slowly but steadily eroded the idea of the record album as anything that many people care about.

Go back to the basic problem: lots of good songs out there, not a lot of good albums. How did this come about? Not because of iTunes. Because of the CD. Because the CD was actually unsuited to the task of being a record album. To be more precise, the CD as developed and promoted by the music industry became unsuited to the task of being a record album.

Where this story really begins, then, is with the number 74. As developed by Sony, the compact disc had the (weirdly random) capacity of 74 minutes. Vinyl LPs, by contrast, seemed to max out at around 52 minutes.

The CD’s extra-large capacity is something we heard about but might not have noticed much at first. Because when the CD was introduced in 1982, CDs and vinyl LPs had to coexist. Obviously not everyone purchased a CD player right away, meaning that albums had to be produced that fit onto vinyl LPs, despite the CD’s 40 percent greater capacity. The decade would end before the CD established itself as the preemiment medium for recorded music.

In the meantime, however, one of the principal ways the music industry sought to convince music fans to start buying CDs instead of LPs was by re-releasing popular albums with extra songs of one sort of another. These would typically be songs that were recorded at the same time but not ultimately included on the album, or alternate takes and/or live versions of album tracks.

This seemed like a win-win: the record company sells the same album, essentially, twice, while filling up some of the “empty space” on the CD (which by the way maybe helped justify the higher price), and the consumer gets a new version without vinyl pops and scratches and hey with a few extra songs. These so-called “bonus tracks” were many music buyers’ first encounter with the CD’s larger capacity.

Bonus tracks were also the first stake in the heart of the record album as we know it.

A seemingly small issue, adding bonus tracks to an existing album that had been thought through and laid out without them? Definitely, to music buyers newly enamored of the silvery, futuristic CD in those sleek, hard-shell cases. To talk about spoiling artistic integrity seemed, maybe, quaint.

But this became a slippery slope. Bonus tracks were first a kind of clever add-on (sort of). But eventually they led to an important shift. The album was no longer the same as the thing you had in your hand, it was something contained on the thing you had in your hand. The vinyl LP was the album; the CD was just a storage medium containing the album, and maybe other stuff as well.

Packaging furthered the disconnect. A stack of vinyl LPs looks like an array of different items; a stack of CDs looks like a pile of more or less identical things. Storage media. Those of you old enough to remember pre-CD vinyl record albums will remember that some music fans sorely complained about how the digital format, so much smaller than a vinyl LP, took away the sensory and sensual experience of the album as something to hold and read and study. By and large this was seen as an aesthetic issue. But it was more than that, ultimately.

The CD broke the spell of the record album.

* * * * * * *

to be continued……
or, click here to finish reading at the Fingertips web site

“Lost Again!” – Morningbell

Pop songs tend not to be amenable to significant changes happening within them. In the interest of putting one basic idea across in just three or four minutes, they normally stick to one tempo, one key, one time signature, one vocalist, one type of feeling. This is also why melody lines are inclined to be short, often no more than four measures long, sometimes just two–concise melodies that repeat often being easier for the ear to grasp in a relatively brief span of time (not to mention easier for less-than-inspired songwriters to write). Fortunately for pop aficionados everywhere, however, there are always bands that come along and toss concerns like this out the window. And so we have “Lost Again!,” which begins as a crisp acoustic shuffle, acquiring a quick shot or two of Queen or maybe ELO-like harmonies as the verse sneaks a 16-measure melody into an spiffy, upbeat framework–except of course for that time signature change and slowdown at the end. This slowdown leads, after the second verse, into a chorus in which tempo and feel are completely transformed–the pace slows, the harmonies change character, and the chords transmute from being predominantly minor to predominantly major. (Note one common element: an extended melody again, this time just about 12 measures long.) And then maybe best of all, the instrumental break that begins innocuously enough at 1:20 steps out into a thoughtful and full-fledged guitar showcase, the likes of which bring (oh no, them again!) Steely Dan to mind more than standard-issue indie rock. “Lost Again!” is from Morningbell’s third CD, Through the Belly of the Sea, which is slated for a June release on Orange Records. And as yet another sign of the band’s freewheeling ethos, the CD is billed as rock’s first “Choose Your Own Adventure” album–a different story unfolds depending upon which order you choose to listen to the tracks.



“Brotherhood of Man” – the Innocence Mission

The combination of Karen Peris’s voice and the melodies she writes for her voice to sing kindles unspeakable poignancy with its stark beauty. This is music that might pass you by if it’s playing in the background as you’re fumbling to pay for your takeout coffee but it is music that rewards keen attention with its rich, ageless sense and sensibility. Peris’s distinctive, breathy-yearny voice renders profound the melodic simplicity, aided by husband Don’s ringingly well-chosen guitar lines and subtle organ flourishes. This is also, I would argue, the sound of a small group of experienced musicians (Mike Bitts is in there on bass as well, but you have to listen closely) who are in it for the love of the music–and, in the case of Karen and Don, love of each other. Which sounds corny but the rarity of two people getting along so beautifully in both song and deed for this long–the band has been recording since 1986–transcends corny to all-out awe-inspiring. “Brotherhood of Man” is the opening track from the CD We Walked in Song, released in March on Badman Recording Company. The MP3 is via Insound.



“Dear Confessor” – Immaculate Machine

Friendly and welcoming, “Dear Confessor” launches off a vintage Elvis Costello beat and doesn’t look back. It’s that note that singer/guitarist Brooke Gallupe hits on the second syllable of the word “relax” that does it for me–that’s where I sink in and let them take me where they’re going to take me. There’s an inexplicably comfy vibe permeating the music this Vancouver trio generates that I couldn’t put my finger on until, reading about the band on their web site, I discover that Gallupe and singer/keyboardist Kathryn Calder “have lived down the street from each other since elementary school.” It all begins to make sense. Another victory for a long-term relationship (and another example of how abnormal they actually are, and impossible to manufacture simply because we’re told we’re supposed to want one; and okay end of soapbox!). “Dear Confessor” will be found on the CD Immaculate Machine’s Fables, scheduled for release next month on Mint Records. This will be their third full-length release. (Bonus fact: Kathryn Calder is also a member, since 2005, of the expansive, beloved Canadian ensemble the New Pornographers.) MP3 via Better Propaganda.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
week of May 13-19

** Two quick things:
1) Monday May 14 is the deadline for the Mason Proper contest, so if you’re reading this while it’s still Monday, there’s still time to enter if you email before the end of the day; details here. Don’t be shy!
2) Fingertips was one of the sites involved in selecting nominees for what have been dubbed the Music Blog Awards. They’re seeking votes in a variety of categories, so if you like doing that sort of thing go here and place your votes. Be aware that this is all related to the year 2006. Well, you know what they say: better late than really really really late.

“Kid On My Shoulders” – White Rabbits
With its familiar but not quite placeable vibe–a slithery sort of explosiveness is in the air–“Kid On My Shoulders” jumps along to a nervous piano line and scratchy guitar riffs, its half-stepping melody adding to the jittery ambiance. Apparently a love of ’70s ska was among the things that drew the band mates together, and you can certainly detect a bit of that genre’s twitchiness here, but only to the extent that White Rabbits are using a knowledge of ska to forge their own sound–much the way, it occurs to me, that, back in the day, Steely Dan used reggae to inform a song like “Haitian Divorce.” And I’m going to take the Dan reference and run with it, since the more I listen, the more I hear a Steely-ishness around the edges here–not the sedate, groove-oriented Dan of the ’00s but the musically distinctive and subversive SD of the ’70s; even the vocalist here (and I’m not sure who it is as the band has two lead singers) delivers with a slightly high-pitched Fagen-esque snap (listen from 1:46 to 1:51 for a strong example). White Rabbits is a six-man band from Missouri currently doing business in Brooklyn. “Kid On My Shoulders” is a song from the band’s debut CD, Fort Nightly, scheduled for release next week on Say Hey Records; the MP3 is via the Say Hey site.

“While You Were Sleeping” – Elvis Perkins
Hypnotic, cryptic, and sweetly melancholy. Also, bracingly produced: what sounds like a simple song for acoustic guitar and voice becomes over a leisurely six minutes an idiosyncratic chamber piece featuring percussion, strings, horns, and some weird, resonant, blowy sort of instrument that I can’t quite place. For everything that is ultimately strummed or beaten or blown or bowed, the arrangement is more subtle than lush, instruments simultaneously playing and calling to mind the silence that exists when they’re not playing. Listen, for instance, to the moment the main drum beat enters–not till 2:06–and see how it enters your gut at the same time and only then do you realize that before that, it wasn’t there. This is a song I’ve been living with a long time, slowly but surely entranced by its meandering lyricism, waiting for the right week, the right combination of sounds to place it between, and I think its time has come. You may have already heard tell of Perkins’ tragic back story, but for the record: father Anthony Perkins died an AIDS-related death in 1992, when Elvis was 17; mother Berry Berenson was on one of the two planes that were flown into the World Trade Center on September 11, just 53 at the time. Maybe we all imagine an extra layer of sorrow braiding through the music as a result but to my ears, yes, there is a sublime sort of sadness infusing both his words and his voice. “While You Were Sleeping” is from Ash Wednesday, released in February on XL Recordings. The MP3 is available via Insound.

“Take Me to the Ballroom” – Moonbabies
The ineffably charming Swedish duo Moonbabies, longtime Fingertips friends, are back with a new CD that charms in the usual Moonbabies way, which is to say elusively. With their adroit blend of crisp acoustic guitars and fuzzy electronics, these guys are hard to pin down sonically–a sense reinforced by both time-signature trickery in the verse and a distinct rhythmic shift between the verse and the chorus. Another thing that keeps the sound pleasantly off-kilter is how multi-instrumentalist/vocalist Ola Frick and keyboardist/vocalist Carina Johansson share the lead vocal duties, and here it’s the male voice (Frick) which gets the dreamier vocal, in the chorus, while Johansson handles the more matter-of-fact poppiness of the verse. I could be wrong but I’m thinking that historically, when male and female voices trade like this within a song, it’s the woman who gets the dreamy chorus. For added perspective, see previous Moonbabies TWF picks here and here. “Take Me to the Ballroom” is the semi-title track of the new ‘Babies CD At the Ballroom, slated for release later this month on Parasol Records. The MP3 is via Parasol.

This is the last week you can put your name in for the Lucinda Williams giveaway in progress right now on the Fingertips Contests page. Once more, with feeling: I’ve got two copies of the newly re-released, two-disc Car Wheels On A Gravel Road to give away for nothing at all but the time it takes to send an email. Two winners will be selected at random; deadline for entry is December 24. Details here.

Note that the Fingertips home office will shut down (mostly) between December 23 and January 1. (The contest winner, however, will be contacted during that week.) The next edition of “This Week’s Finds” will appear on Tuesday January 2. Wishing everyone in the meantime the happiest of holidays (Christmas, Hanukkah, Solstice, New Year’s Day, and then some: all holidays are for celebrating); see you in ’07….

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
week of Dec. 17-23

“Grain of Salt” – the Morning Benders
A completely endearing blend of do-it-yourself-ish indie rock and pure pop know-how. Let me start, for a change, at the end: the fact that this thing closes out with a rave-up guitar solo–and if I better knew my guitar sounds I could tell you what kind of guitar it is; it’s a distinctive and familiar one, to be sure, with a deep feel of rock history about it–says a lot about the Morning Benders’ impressive musical instincts. It’s nothing I’d’ve expected and yet now of course it sounds perfectly inevitable, particularly following the coda-like extension the song takes before the solo kicks in. From beginning to end, in fact, “Grain of Salt” oozes charm and craft in equal measure, from the shuffly bashings of drummer Julian Harmon (I feel as if I just about see his elbows flying as he pounds away on the two and four beats) to the effortlessly merry melody, sung with easygoing grace by Chris Chu, and the happy happy chord progressions that enliven it. With repeated listens, I grow more and more impressed with the ability of this Berkeley, Calif.-based foursome to sound so simultaneously spontaneous and durable–a very friendly combination. “Grain of Salt” comes from the band’s debut EP Loose Change, which was self-released earlier this year, sold out, then re-released in September (with one extra song) on Portia Records. The MP3 is via the band’s site.

“The Vague Angels of Vagary” – Vague Angels
Even though this came out in March and has nothing whatever to do with Christmas or the holiday season of any kind, I like featuring a song by a band named Vague Angels this week. It seems like all we can hope for these days, and maybe all we actually need. And never mind any of that: this free-flowing, structure-free song is itself extraordinarily cool. Rolling firmly to a strong yet elusive train-like rhythm, “The Vague Angels of Vagary” seems, well, vaguely to be about trains, and journeys, and searches. NYC-based singer/songwriter/novelist Chris Leo (brother of Ted) speak-sings the odd but engaging lyrics like Lou Reed with a higher voice and no leather jacket; he seems more bemused by what he sees that pissed off. What hooks me with this one: the energetic, good-natured, descending guitar riff that keeps the song afloat–relentlessly it climbs back to its apex and spills yet again downward while Leo goes on about train track tundras and the WPA and the MTA. “The Vague Angels of Vagary” is from the CD Let’s Duke It Out At Kilkenny Katz’ (yes there’s that weird floating apostrophe in the title), released earlier in the year by Pretty Activity. The MP3 is via the Pretty Activity site; thanks to the Deli for the head’s up.

“All I Ever Get For Christmas Is Blue” – Over the Rhine
This year’s directly related holiday tune comes from longtime Fingertips faves Over the Rhine. Karin Bergquist is in fine, bittersweet form while partner Linford Detweiler lays down crystalline piano lines with unearthly deftness. This song comes from Over the Rhine’s new Christmas CD, featuring original Christmas songs, entitled Snow Angels. The instantly intimate and enveloping sound here is no accident; Detweiler himself has written, “We hope that Snow Angels is a record that becomes part of the landscape for small gatherings of people who love each other.” If justice is served, it will be, but then again the world as we are living in it is not is not known, alas, for great justice at a macro level. We are left to do what we can individually, and in small groups. Do yourself, at least, the favor of checking this song out–and the one other MP3 available from this CD, “Darlin’ (Christmas is Comin’)”–and then buying the CD if you like the vibe and think maybe an unabashed album of new Christmas songs is its own sort of wonderful thing (and hey I think so and don’t even celebrate the holiday myself!). These guys have developed a deep, rich, and very personal sound over the years that is a wonder to behold and deserves a wider audience than they have thus far reached. If you’d like to hear more be sure to check out the Over the Rhine entry in the Select Artist Guide for pointers to other free and legal MP3s of theirs.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
week of July 9-15

“Something of an End” – My Brightest Diamond
A quirky, multifaceted pop song with cinematic ups and downs of the Kate Bushian variety, “Something of an End” is a good introduction to the compelling work of Shara Worden, one-time cheerleading captain of the Sufjan Stevens “Illinoisemakers,” now doing business as My Brightest Diamond. I am not one to value all quirkiness as good, just as I don’t criticize everything quirk-free as bad; I like my quirkiness to come with substance–to be fostered, in other words, by genuine expertise, rather than the boring and ultimately empty impulse to “shock” or “rebel” or simply “be different.” I think the fact that Worden’s father was a national accordion champion and her mother was a church organist is important; I like too that she studied classical music in college and, later on, studied composition with Australian composer Padma Newsome. “Something of an End” feels composed, in fact–its demarcated sections sounding at once distinct and tightly bound, its melodies and harmonies rich and unsimplistic. Keep your ears on the instrumentation throughout, as Worden uses strings in particular with marvelous flair. “Something of an End” is the opening track on Bring Me The Workhorse, the debut My Brightest Diamond CD, due out in August on Asthmatic Kitty Records. The MP3 is via Worden’s web site.

“Breakdown” – Stella (U.S.)
Even as the guitars squonk and blaze, and even as singer Curt Perkins emotes with the best of them, and even though the song is called “Breakdown,” there’s something joyous in the air here, so powerful is the energy churning around this one. I’m engaged to begin with by how the song launches with a rhythm that manages to stutter and drive at the same time. When Perkins joins in, he’s singing mostly one note against, mostly, a tom-tom beat, creating a pulsing sort of urgency–you know it’s going somewhere, only it’s hard to figure where. I was not prepared, however, for the glistening chorus, which depends upon the vivid arrangement of a simple three-note descent. I think it’s Perkins’ voice most of all that creates the hook–with the chorus, it becomes more full-bodied, as if there’s a howl now hiding just behind the words he sings; and the transition from the five repeated notes that open the chorus to the next note, one step down: there, that’s it, that’s the moment here, for me, when the song lodges in my gut. Coincidentally enough, Perkins comes from musical parents as well, his father being a classical musician, his mother a Broadway singer. Stella (which adds the U.S. officially to distinguish itself from another, Europe-based Stella) is a quartet based in Nashville; “Breakdown” comes from its “new” CD, American Weekend–the new is in quotes because the album was finished in 1999, but tied up in legal problems for, literally, years. It was legally released, at long last, last week, on Yesman Records.

“Beanbag Chair” – Yo La Tengo
It’s been a while since we’ve heard from this proto-indie, perpetually idiosyncratic Hoboken band. And, actually, when I first listened to this song, it kind of glided past my ears without making much impact. Okay, cute horns, but then what? Ira Kaplan’s trademark whispery-wavery vocals, sure. I still wasn’t convinced. But after living with it a while, I find myself charmed. I think it was (again) the chorus that did it. For here, in the middle of a peppy, horn-flecked tune comes an unexpectedly delicate, delicately harmonized melody–a melody that might fit comfortably in a folk-pop tune from the late ’60s, perhaps, if set in an entirely different musical context. As with “Breakdown,” I think I was hooked by more or less one note–in this case, the third note Kaplan sings in the chorus (as usual with YLT, the words are nearly impossible to discern). He’s just singing the basic chord triad, starting in the middle, going down to the one note, then up to the five, but the quality of his fragile tenor at the top there, combined with the casual, difficult-to-pin-down backing vocals, makes this an exquisite moment, truly. Make sure not to miss, too, the subtly chaotic bridge section, beginning around 1:40; I won’t try to describe it, but for a short while there it sounds like another song is playing at the same time. “Beanbag Chair” will appear on the next Yo La Tengo album, entitled I Am Not Afraid of You and I Will Beat Your Ass, set for release in September on Matador Records. The MP3 is via the Matador site.