Fingertips

Fingertips is giving away three copies of the excellent new Angela Desveaux CD, The Mighty Ship. See the contest page on the main Fingertips site for details.

Born in Quebec and raised on Cape Breton Island (Nova Scotia), the Montreal-based Desveaux is another in a seemingly endless series of talented Canadian musicians that have graced the rock scene over the decades. She has been featured twice so far on Fingertips, most recently for the song “Sure Enough,” which, sure enough, comes from the CD you can now win.

Released this month on Thrill Jockey Records, The Mighty Ship is an assured and well-crafted album; Desveaux sings with a voice at once strong and delicate, and writes with an admirable attention to detail, both melodic and lyrical. For lack of a better label, you might group the CD in the alt-country genre, but only in the same way you might put Lucinda Williams or Kathleen Edwards in that same place. Whatever the tag, this is really good stuff. And remember that giveaways on Fingertips work differently than in other places online. I don’t give away things that I don’t think are worthwhile; I’m not here to be part of a mindless promotional campaign.

Further details here.

There’s a new Q&A available on the main Fingertips site, this time featuring an email conversation with Dirk Darmstaedter.

Darmstaedter is a Hamburg, Germany-based singer/songwriter who spent his formative years in Teaneck, New Jersey. He hit it big in Europe with his band The Jeremy Days in the late ’80s; they remained together through 1995. Since then, Darmstaedter has released a variety of albums as a solo artist. He also co-founded Tapete Records, a record label notable for its good taste, in 2002. “We Are Waves,” a song from Dirk’s Our Favorite City CD, was featured on Fingertips in June 2007.

The Fingertips Q&A is a recurring feature; each month, a real, working, album-making musician will answer a few direct questions about the current state of music in the 21st century, and where things may be going.

The Fingertips Q&A debuted last month with singer/songwriter Jonatha Brooke.

“Morning Tide” – The Little Ones

There’s lightweight-breezy and there’s substantive-breezy, and the Little Ones, a quintet plying power pop from Los Angeles, have nailed the wonderful but difficult job of being substantive-breezy. That’s really what great power pop is about: music that sails and soars but is nevertheless grounded in something deep and true and serious.

So, how to tell the difference between the lightweight and the substantive, when the music is in both cases so breezy and easy and catchy? I look to the craft of it for clues. When there’s more than one hook, that’s a good sign (“Morning Tide” has three, to my ears). When there the song is instrumentally interesting–when, that is, the instrumental parts are themselves worth listening to–that’s another good sign. (The Little Ones, it should be known, like to use a Mellotron, which is potentially a bonus.) Lyrics that aren’t totally vapid: yet another sign (unintelligible lyrics are fine, by the way). Best of all, I discern substance in the unexpected twist or turn–when the song goes somewhere you might not have expected but, once it’s there, it’s perfect. In “Morning Tide,” that moment for me comes halfway through the chorus, when the melody jumps up and shifts rhythms–the “It’s something to think about” part (1:49). Where did that come from? Wonderful stuff.

“Morning Tide” is the title track to the band’s second CD, which was released in the U.K. in July, and is scheduled for an October release in the U.S. on Chop Shop Records.

Lots of you appear to be doing the same. See you next week.

“Days Black Purple Nights” – Peppertree
     If the Montreal-based quartet Peppertree lacks to date the internet buzz of some of their French Canadian peers, it’s not for lack of talent or great songs. “La Cage Appât,” featured on Fingertips in 2006, was a number-one song on the Fingertips Top 10 that year; “Days Black Purple Nights” is another idiosyncratic winner–less overtly dramatic, perhaps, than its predecessor, but with a beautiful sense of development and atmosphere.
     The song starts with some sly misdirection. After a short, dreamy guitar line, we’re introduced to an insistent organ, alternating between one major and one minor chord, which hammers the song’s pulse into our heads. After 15 seconds of that, a lower-register guitar melody, staccato and ascending, glides in and takes over. This will prove to be the musical core of the song. Fifteen seconds later, the organ, without fanfare, disappears, having done its job. When singer Patrick Poirier enters, one minute into the song, the character of the piece has been altered. In an aching tenor that calls Thom Yorke to mind, Poirier sings over a musical clearing of sorts, acoustic guitar and crisp percussion now pushing us along, with the authority lent to it by the non-presence of the pounding organ. And here we feel the full effect of the minor chord the organ had earlier introduced us to: listen at 1:14 or so and experience the sense of loss induced by the march into the minor key. And then: pay attention to how Poirier is joined by singer Marianne Charland, who enters the song subtly–first harmonizing at the end of the un-chorus-like chorus (1:38) and then, more prominently, singing along with the wordless melody that the guitar had played in the intro. After that, she’s fully on board, singing prominent harmony lines and, sometimes, countermelodies. I think the 30 seconds in the middle of the song, from 2:00 to 2:30, with Charland most audible, nails everything together here.
     “Days Black Purple Nights” is one of four songs on Peppertree’s new EP, A Green Flash From the Sun. All four are available on the band’s site as free and legal MP3s.