Fingertips

“Wild One” – Those Darlins
     Take the Appalachian back-porch music of the Carter family and paste a Lily Allen-style 21st-century 20-something’s attitude on top of it and here we are. This is not complicated stuff, but it’s utterly charming, somehow. To begin with, there’s something wonderful in the air when you’re hearing three women, employing a hillbilly melody, accompanied by retro-sounding rhythm and lead guitars (plus, a ukulele in the mix), singing words like this: “If you can’t handle crazy/Go ahead and leave/If you don’t want a wild one/Quit hangin’ round with me.” It’s hard enough to combine the contemporary and the traditional in a way that respects both; it’s particularly hard to do so and come up with something fun. (Usually you end up with “earnest” in such instances.) (Not that there’s anything wrong with earnest, but fun is, well, more fun.)
     Based in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, Those Darlins are three women who go by the names Nikki Darlin, Jessi Darlin, and Kelley Darlin, which also tells me that their historical respect extends likewise, and unexpectedly, onto the streets of downtown Manhattan in the mid-1970s, where a quartet of unrelated, black-leather-clad young men adopted the same last name and went on quite a tear themselves. (And what the heck: CBGB did, after all, stand for Country, Bluegrass, and Blues; I kid you not.) Maybe it’s their sense of history, or maybe it’s their sense of humor, or maybe it’s just their plain old sense, but I’m getting a deeper and stronger vibe out of this trio than I get from most of the other brassy 20-somethings who’ve flung themselves onto the scene over the last year or two. Showing an awareness of a wide world beyond the tips of their own noses (or the touch screens of their iPhones) is way more enticing than being snarky and fashionable. At least it is here.
     “Wild One” is the title track to the group’s first release, a three-song EP, which came out this fall on Oh Wow Dang Records, which I’m pretty sure is the band’s own label (information is scanty), but if not, with a name like that, it should be. Thanks to the mighty Largehearted Boy for the lead.

“In the New Year” – the Walkmen
     So with the musical pickings slimming down with year’s end, I’m starting a new Fingertips tradition: revisiting the “Almost Bin” in December, to see what songs might be wanting and needing another chance. The Almost Bin, you see, is the file into which I deposit all songs I’ve considered seriously for a “This Week’s Finds” slot, but end up not featuring for who knows what reason. These things just sort of are. But this is such a non-science, there could well be a song or two in there that, if reconsidered, might sound, now, like a “This Week’s Finds” entry for sure.
     “In the New Year” was always really really close to getting the nod. Maybe in the back of my head I just figured it would be a better song to hear in December. There’s something idiosyncratic at work here, to be sure–the song lopes along in a sort of undefinable tempo; something seems coiled up, but the intensity leaks out in aspects other than speed. A lot of the vehemence is worked out through singer Hamilton Leithauser’s unrestrained capacity in his upper register–he’s not screaming or shreiking, but he is surely letting loose, expressing his torn-up feelings indirectly, via roiling combination of glad tidings (“It’s going to be a good year”) and troubled hints (“It’s all over anyhow”). Without a fully graspable structure–the song doesn’t seem to have verses or chorus as much as drum-free sections, filled with ringing guitars, and drumming sections, the latter dominated by that chiming organ riff–very new yearsy it is, somehow, yes?–which cycles through again and again, generating a driving surge of appeal as the song unfolds in its potent but unhurried way.
     The Walkmen are a NYC-based quintet that has been together since 2000. “In the New Year” is a song from the group’s You and Me CD, their fifth full-length album, which was released on Gigantic Records in August. They were previously featured on Fingertips in July 2004.

“White Shade” – Lukestar

Be aware, to begin with, that this is a man singing. I will quickly admit that I do not usually warm to a male voice that sounds this much like a female voice, but this has only to do with the fact that in my experience, singers with unusual voices tend to over-rely on the basic aural gimmick and therefore under-deliver on the song. Hell, I could listen to a male voice that sounds like a female hyena if the song is good enough.

In “White Shade,” lead man Truls Heggero, of the Oslo-based quartet Lukestar, has a worthy piece of material to work with, featuring first and foremost that European pop band tendency to sneak up a bit on the hook, and to manage in general to make a three-minute song seem expansive and interesting. The song has three distinctive sections: the upbeat verse, with Heggero’s voice in such a high range that he can make that five-interval downward leap and still sound like a soprano on the lower note; the meandering bridge, which arrives unexpectedly after a forceful instrumental interlude, and has the air of some hidden section of a lost prog-rock classic (but much shorter!), complete with organ flourishes; and then, wow, a swift and appealing chorus, with an assured, wide-ranging melody that brings Heggero so much further down in his range that a-ha, it’s clearly a man singing after all. The song goes through the three sections again but with an alteration at the end of the verse, just to see if you’re paying attention (around 1:42); when the chorus comes back it seems both more appealing and shorter than ever–wait! sing that again! you want to say. Good news–he does, and then, without fuss, the song is over.

“White Shade” is a song from Lake Toba, Lukestar’s second CD, which came out in Norway early this year, and was released in the U.S. last month on Flameshovel Records. Lake Toba, I feel compelled to inform you, is the largest volcanic lake in the world (it’s on the Indonesian island of Sumatra); an enormous eruption there 75,000 years ago changed the Earth’s climate and apparently wiped out a lot of the human population on earth at the time. Just to keep things in perspective.

“Soft Pedals” – Modern Skirts
     Cushy and upbeat with a lounge-like gloss and an incomprehensible flow of lyrics (“Give me a knife and a merry-go-round”?), “Soft Pedals” is all smoothness and unruffled cool, combining crisp acoustic guitar rhythms, bell-like synth lines, chirpy electronics, and occasional bursts of layered harmonies. I’m not going to tell you what it’s all about because I have no idea, although I am picking up a vague scent of soft-core porn that floats around the pretty much impervious storyline. Let me know if that’s my imagination or not.
     And let the record show that Modern Skirts, the Athens, Ga.-based foursome that has sculpted this mysteriously agreeable groove of a song, is not in any way a lounge band; they specialize, rather, in being eclectic, in a Fountains of Wayne kind of way. Had a different song from their album, All Of Us In Our Night, been chosen as the free and legal MP3, you’d be getting a completely different impression of the band right now. Singer Jay Gulley has a languid baritone that works in a variety of settings, although I do in particular like the breathy nonchalance he brings to the job here, along with the backing layers of vocals he provides for himself. I am particularly mystified about how he gets away with that “You got on top/I got on top” part (e.g. 2:05), flagrantly emphasizing the wrong syllable in the background harmonies, and yet making it sound so smooth and unflappable that you don’t even notice (except that I went ahead and pointed it out to you). He manages to make it sounder righter than the right way would’ve sounded. Now that’s smooth.
     All Of Us In Our Night, the band’s second CD, will be self-released next month.

“Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” – Sam Phillips
MP3 REMOVED
     Sorry, gang, but in an unprecedented development here on Fingertips, a song I linked to that was originally identified without question as a free and legal MP3 turns out not to have been a free and legal MP3. The record label (we’re dealing of course with a big record label) was shocked–shocked–to find out that the company they hired to help market the album, a company well known for using free and legal MP3s with every artist they promote, was in fact planning to use an MP3 and not just a stream. So down it goes. And a Keith O.-style “worst person in the world” award goes out this week to Nonesuch Records and their lovely parent, Warner Brothers. Pleasure to do business with you.
     Another rich slice of idiosyncratic marvelousness from Sam Phillips, “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” uses the real-life 20th-century gospel singer Sister Rosetta Tharpe (one of the first to make a career singing secular music) as a jumping-off point for an evocative song about love and loss and the latent power of the self, particularly when challenged. One of Sister Rosetta’s bigger hits was the song “Strange Things Happening Everyday”; Phillips begins her song with the line “Strange things are happening everyday” (and ah! that somewhat odd and bewitching voice of hers!) and takes us from there on a strange journey herself. The jaunty melody sounds like something from the ’30s, a bygone aura enhanced by the use of a Stroh violin (as played by Eric Gorfain), an early 20th-century contraption that has strings and a bow but uses a metal horn rather than a wooden body to amplify its oddly clarinet-ish sound.
     It was on her 2001 album Fan Dance and then, more thoroughly, on 2004’s A Boot and a Shoe that Phillips first explored this old-fashioned musical landscape, although never succumbing to mere nostalgia. That’s really what has made the music so compelling, I think: she takes sounds from the ’20s and ’30s and gives them currency and vigor through the quality of the musicianship, the allure of her smoky-buzzy voice, and the casual brilliance of her songwriting. Listen to the ease with which “Sister Rosetta”‘s melody uses so many different notes in the scale, but listen too to how focused and down-to-earth her language is. “Though the sound of hope has left me again/I hear music up above:” fourteen words for just seventeen syllables, and all three two-syllable words have only five letters; and see how she yet hints at the ineffable core of life itself.
     “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us” was first recorded by Alison Krauss and Robert Plant on their 2007 CD Raising Sand; it’s sort of like Phillips covers her own song, since her version came second, showing up on Don’t Do Anything, which she released earlier this year on Nonesuch Records. A big shout-out goes to the fine folks at Toolshed for getting this one out there as a free and legal MP3.

“Automatic” – Gramercy Arms

Crisp and crunchy speak-singing verses alternate with a short, anthemic chorus with one word–“automatic”–sung in the background, while “It’s automatic” is spoken/sung in the foreground. Very very simple, but oddly compelling. How can some songs be annoyingly simple and other songs be compellingly simple? Let’s try to figure it out.

“Automatic” is short, to begin with (2:21). This is good either way—if a song is simply simple, there’s no reason to belabor the point; if the song is not as simple as it seems, working quickly will increase the complexity (less time spent repeating anything). “Automatic” has no introduction, which is generally good in a simple song, as introductions often tread water anyway. The speak-singing style used here by front man (and ex-Dambuilder) Dave Derby adds subtle complexity, since it registers as talking but he is in fact hitting specific notes. The first verse is eight measures, then we get the partially sung chorus, also eight measures, but it’s interestingly inside out, with the background singers singing first, before the lead singer speak/sings. Plus, the singing section is sing-along wonderful, like a tiny piece of power pop packed into another song altogether (note too that the word “automatic” turns out to be the completion of the last lyrical line in the verse; more hidden complexity). The second verse is six measures, a change that cannily jars the listener ever so slightly. Two more things nail this down for me: the instrumental break (starting at 0:54), which concisely fleshes out the two-chord riff of the verse in a sharp, yet multilayered way; and then, best of all, the bridge (1:19), eight measures of fuzzed-up melodic sweetness, capped by a burst of harmony that sounds like the Move just as they were turning into ELO, for you old-timers out there. Or Cheap Trick, for you not-quite-as-old-timers.

So this one, yeah, it works for me. “Automatic” is a song from the debut Gramercy Arms CD (and they don’t fool around; the whole thing is only 30 minutes long); it’s self-titled and was released on Cheap Lullaby Records in mid-November. Among the indie rock semi-celebrities helping on on the album were Matthew Caws from Nada Surf, Joan Wasser of Joan As Police Woman (who sings back-up on this song), and members of the Pernice Brothers and Guided By Voices, among others. And comedienne Sarah Silverman too, who apparently sings in addition to kvetches.