Free and legal MP3: Bad Veins (nuanced indie rock w/ huge chorus)

“Gold and Warm” – Bad Veins

Propulsive and canny, “Gold and Warm” sneaks a huge, sing-along chorus into a multifaceted piece that sounds very little like standard-issue indie-rock-duo music in an age in which the duo has become oddly commonplace.

The dreamy, retro-y orchestral intro is an immediate clue that the song may not unfold as expected. While “Gold and Warm” drives with a determined beat, it also opens itself at various points to more delicate touches, and although singer-songwriter-guitarist-keyboardist Benjamin Davis pushes his voice through something of a Strokes-like filter, he doesn’t use that as an excuse to sing monotonously, which is something this particular effect typically encourages. The rich-toned Davis shows me a thing or two about the emotional range that’s still possible for a filtered voice, while partner Sebastien Schultz gives the duo the gift of a human drummer, grounding the band’s sound in something nuanced and organic, often putting his cymbal work more forward than the drumming in the mix. And then listen to him work the drum kit in the instrumental break that accompanies the instrumental interlude three-quarters of the way into the song (2:46)–that’s just some good, old-fashioned drumming the likes of which you might have heard from Ringo way back when: patient, spacious, self-effacing, and effective precisely because it doesn’t try to be intricate or show-off-y.

“Gold and Warm” is the second track on the Cincinnati-based band’s self-titled debut, released last month on Dangerbird Records. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3: The Blueflowers (reverb-laced and twangy, w/ dreamy melody)

“I Wasn’t Her” – the Blueflowers

Relaxed, reverb-laced tale of woe from a Detroit-based quintet that’s new on the scene but features musicians with a lot of experience, including two–guitarist Tony Hamera and vocalist Kate Hinote (can that be her real name? “High note”?)–who had previously fronted Ether Aura, a dream pop band with a bit of a following in the ’90s. Not to sound like a broken record on the matter, but I continue not to understand music culture’s relentless focus on newcomers when music itself is so enriched by the background and experience of the players. I don’t think musicians can sound simultaneously so laid-back and so compelling without years of playing under their belts.

In any case, dream pop is ostensibly out the door this time in favor of an old-fashioned sort of Americana that offers echoes of hard-core country and western in its slo-mo twang and steel-pedal sorrow. And yet I’m hearing in the song’s central hook—when Hinote, silkily, sings “You weren’t everything that I wanted” in the chorus—something that comes from outside the genre in which the band appears to be operating. That is not by any means a country and western melody, and hearing it here makes me realize rather abruptly that there is in fact a musical place in which C&W and dream pop are not at all far apart, given both genres’ love of reverb and dolor. Being so personally against the over-genre-ization of music, I love when the borders grow foggy, and find myself drawn again and again to songs that can’t be given a simple genre tag.

“I Wasn’t Her” can be found on the band’s self-released debut album, Watercolor Ghost Town, released in June. MP3 via Last.fm; thanks to the blog Hits in the Car for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Slaraffenland (inventive Danish art-pop, w/ horns)

“Meet and Greet” – Slaraffenland

The enigmatic Danish art-popsters Slaraffenland return to Fingertips with a brisk, deceptively restless composition that incorporates some of the most delightful and inventive horn charts I’ve heard in a pop setting, not to mention some gratifyingly precise and rumbly percussion. This is the kind of song that, if you sink into it on its own terms, has you rethinking what a three- or four-minute rock song might be able to do. I don’t hear any standard hooks here and yet not for a moment does my attention or spirit sag.

And do check out those horns. There’s the splendid bit of syncopated layering we hear from them in their first concentrated appearance, from 1:14 to 1:36, but then listen to how they come back in the same extended instrumental section (now 1:48), this time playing in a blurry, sliding/pulsing sort of chorus, and yet still with their own rhythmic integrity. This is extremely wonderful, to my ears. Eccentric, but extremely wonderful.

For some interesting notes on the band’s name, read the review from the last time they were here. “Meet and Greet” is the lead single from the forthcoming album, We’re On Your Side, slated for a September release on the Portland, Ore.-based Hometapes label.

[The link is no longer direct, but the song is still available as a free and legal download, via Stereogum.)

Free and legal MP3: Yo La Tengo (churning, string-laden craftiness)

“Here to Fall” – Yo La Tengo

Half of the time I love what Yo La Tengo does, half the time I’m not sure I understand it. This falls squarely into the first half. After its odd, electro-echoey intro, “Here to Fall” simmers with that paradoxical low-level intensity that YLT consistently brings to the studio–a product, in part, of the juxtaposition of Ira Kaplan’s plainspoken, softspoken vocals and the churning noise the trio can produce. And yet the noise here isn’t really that noisy, featuring as it does, right in the middle of the mix, the unlikely but thoroughly agreeable addition of a small string section, which somehow brings to mind the sorts of strings we used to hear on old Elton John songs (Paul Buckmaster fans out there, anyone?).

But don’t overlook the guitar work, which is characteristically crazy brilliant without calling any attention to itself. And don’t overlook the additional crazy brilliance of the unadorned melody, barely differentiating verse and chorus, which, cycling inexorably forward, attains a dark grandeur as the guitars burn and the strings melodramatize around it.

“Here to Fall” is a song from the band’s forthcoming album, Popular Songs (their twelfth), which is slated for a September release on Matador Records. MP3 via Matador.

Free and legal MP3: the Dø (percussive, kitchen-sink indie pop)

“Tammie” – the Dø

So go ahead and listen to this song. Shrug and put it aside for two weeks or so. Listen to it again. Go: “Hm. I actually kind of like this! A lot, even.” Well okay, you don’t have to do any of that, but that’s surely what I did. Listening to music can be a flitty and unpredictable affair.

So, “Tammie”: kitchen-sink indie pop, sweetly nutty, with the large-scale energy of the Arcade Fire school of 21st-century rock, but achieved instead via a stripped-down, organic vibe driven by hand-claps and odd vocalizations and peopled by a simple (but multinational) duo—French/Finnish Olivia Merilahti and the Parisian Dan Levy. Where the song takes off, for me, is here: when the insistent, twice-repeated minor-key melodic lines of the verse resolve in the third iteration (first heard around 0:41)—such a smooth and unexpected chord slips in right there in the middle of all the staccato insistence. Check out the next time this comes up, with those invigorating harmonies (1:24, but keep listening). Another wonderful moment is when the repeated chant of the bridge, with all its percussive drive, morphs (1:47) into an orchestral interlude, featuring an enticing influx of woodwind-like sounds.

The Dø is pronounced like the first note of the scale (“‘do’ a deer,” etc.)—even though the “ø” (in languages that use it) is actually pronounced more like the “u” in “hurt.” And while the word “dø” means “die” in Danish and Norwegian, the band says the name comes simply from combining the letters of their first names. (D’oh!) “Tammie” can be found on their debut CD, A Mouthful, which was originally released last year in Europe, and given an American release this month on Get Down Records.

Free and legal MP3: Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions (satisfying, “Fade Into You”-ish ballad)

“Blanchard” – Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions

Fronting the ’90s band Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval–she with the gauzy, achy, reverb-drenched vocals–made a much larger impact on music fans of a certain age (and gender) than the band’s status as a one-hit wonder (“Fade Into You”), not to mention her terminally shy personality, might suggest. The internet is crawling with people who love her, madly.
     “Blanchard” will not disappoint them, but its graceful allure should extend beyond the hopelessly smitten, as it were. To my ears, Mazzy Star’s music blurred into a nebula of echoing, almost debauched gloom too often undisturbed by an actual melody, despite Sandoval’s resonant if downbeat charm as a singer. “Blanchard” echoes much of her previous band’s aura, but eases off on the druggy haze–the reverb is toned down, the pace less dreary. “Blanchard” shares its ghostly 3/4-time rhythm with “Fade Into You” (itself brighter-sounding than most Mazzy Star songs) but gives us what that well-known tune never did: a chorus with a nuanced but noticeable resolution away from the relentless, open-chorded ambivalence in which the band basked. Sandoval doesn’t dwell in the payoff, of course, but the shift at 1:36 is rich and heart-warming. As if, perhaps, to make up for the musical reward, the lyrics at that point become stubbornly unintelligible.
     While Mazzy Star is still officially intact, it has not released an album since 1996’s Among My Swan. Meanwhile, Sandoval began recording with a backing band called the Warm Inventions in 2001; two subsequent EPs were released, rather quietly. “Blanchard” is the lead track from the CD Through the Devil Softly, which is scheduled to be out in September, on Nettwerk Records. MP3 via Stereogum (note: not a direct link).

Free and legal MP3: Wheels On Fire (garage-y stomper w/ vivid riff)

“I’m Turning Into You” – Wheels On Fire

There’s something about the summertime that makes this sort of driving, garage-y stomper, complete with wheezing keyboards, the perfect soundtrack for warm breezes and open car windows. (And for anyone roughly in the neighborhood, what about a big shout-out for the amazing summer weather we’ve been having in the mid-Atlantic so far? The nicest I can possibly imagine for July: warm blue days, cool starry nights, no air conditioning necessary.)

Front and center in the song–the first thing you hear, and what the song is framed on–is an urgent, unadorned guitar riff: five tinny chords, strummed in a relentless rhythm: one; two; three; four-five. The beauty of the great guitar riffs is that they can kind of resemble each other–this one concludes in “Sweet Jane” territory–even while banging out their own piece of the rock’n’roll rock, as it were. A great riff doesn’t have to be surprising, as a great melody must at some level be, and yet it can’t be nondescript either. Rhythm and chord placement is everything; the effect is more primal than intellectual (think “You Really Got Me”; think “Roadrunner”; think “Alex Chilton”). This one rocks, which is all it’s trying to do, and all it needs to do on another ideal July day.

Wheels On Fire is a four-piece from Athens, Ohio. You’ll find “I’m Turning Into You” on the CD Get Famous, which was released back in February on Big Legal Mess Records, a label with a distribution deal with Fat Possum Records. MP3 via Big Legal Mess.

Free and legal MP3: The Mummers (orchestral pop w/ retro touches)

“Wonderland” – the Mummers

A waltzing, carnivalesque intro segues into some smooth, orchestral retro-pop that owes a bit to Burt Bacharach, a bit to Kurt Weill, and a bit to our century’s relentless urge to mix and mash sounds into ear-catching concoctions. To me, “Wonderland” separates itself from a lot of the more disposable contrivances crowding the internet in our music-happy day and age via its rare combination of sweetness and sturdiness. The melodies are expansive and velvety, the arrangements unexpectedly thoughtful, even articulate. The bright-toned singer and multi-cultural multi-instrumentalist Raissa Khan-Panni, who flitted through a semi-successful solo career in the UK at the outset of the millennium, here manages at once to command center stage and to work as merely one of an idiosyncratic ensemble of musicians bowing and pumping out this breezy but slightly mysterious keeper. A whole different kind of summer song, this one is, from the Wheels On Fire track above, but a delightful summer song it nonetheless remains.

The Mummers are an ever-changing array of 20-some-odd musicians, based in Brighton. “Wonderland” is a song from the band’s debut full-length disc, Tale to Tell (Republic of Music/Universal), which was released in either April or June. (The internet is sometimes a contradictory place, information-wise.) MP3 via Fresh Deer Meat.

Free and legal MP3: The Clientele (breezy sound w/ a pensive undercurrent)

“I Wonder Who We Are” – the Clientele

With an echo of the cheerful old Aztec Camera song, “Oblivious,” in the air here, what do you know, we’ve got yet another summery delight on our hands.

At least, seemingly. “I Wonder Who We Are” is an upbeat song with an ostensibly carefree, kicking-around kind of vibe, and yet between the open chords, pensive vocals, and central role of acoustic instruments (guitar, violin, piano), there’s a reserve bordering on melancholy that I’m hearing despite the surface-level peppiness. And sure, lead singer Alasdair MacLean is offering those airy “ba-ba-ba-ba-ba”s but they keep leading to that recurring, rather poignant question: “I wonder who we are?” So I for one am not surprised by the 20-second pause at 3:06 when everything clears away, the chugging rhythm disappears, and we’re left with a bit of forlorn but lovely guitar noodling. Soon enough the “ba-ba”s come back, toes resume tapping, but I’m left with a feeling that we are being invited to ponder something the typical summer song doesn’t usually get tangled up with.

The Clientele are a London-based quartet with a recording history dating back to 2000. “I Wonder Who We Are” will be found on the band’s fifth album, Bonfires on the Heath, slated for a September release on Merge Records. MP3 via Merge.