Fingertips

“Cassandra” – Paper Rival
     The mournful fiddle melody and the crisp tom-tom beat, playing through alternating major and minor chords: what we have here is one smart and engaging introduction–and (better luck!), a song that lives up to its intro’s promise.
     A mysterious reimagination of the cursed prophet of doom, “Cassandra” chugs along with a bittersweet, Shins-like sort of vibrancy, its leisurely melody lines unfolding against an unobtrusive but carefully constructed percussive backdrop. The fiddle is central to the vibe, its disconsolate strain standing in for the prophet’s voice, in a tone reminiscent of the gypsy violin Scarlet Rivera brought, memorably, to Bob Dylan’s Desire album back in the day.
     Paper Rival is a quintet from Nashville that did business as Keating until discovering that another band had the rights to the name; they chose their new name as a good-natured nose-thumbing to the gang that got to the Keating name first. “Cassandra” can be found on the band’s debut full-length CD, Dialog, released in early June on Photo Finish Records. MP3 via Insound.

“Hold On” – Windsor For The Derby
     “Hold On” indeed: this song begins with an extended introduction, featuring a rhythm both brisk and soothing. Listen closely and for all the apparent movement you really can’t discern a whole lot of obvious activity: there’s a guitar strumming without quite wanting to call too much attention to itself, there’s a fuzzy organ that seems to dissipate as soon as you hear it, there’s a bass that appears to be playing only one note the whole time, and all one minute and six seconds of the intro features an alternation between just two chords, separated by a simple half-step.
     Then the vocals start, rather wispy and mixed down in that Yo La Tengo, resolutely-indie sort of way. But pay attention at 1:20–we finally hear a third chord. It’s a great moment but it flows quickly by, and is itself easy to miss except that the song shifts and deepens at this point. Though exactly towards what end we still don’t know. (Remember: hold on.) The melody leads us through a few more chords rather quickly (considering the context), the verse repeats, and then, at long last, two full minutes in, the chorus arrives, complete with–of all things–soaring, Brian Wilson-inspired backing harmonies. Nothing about this song signaled that it was going there. It’s a startling juxtaposition, and well worth the long and subtle buildup.
     Led by Dan Matz and Jason McNeeley, Windsor For The Derby has gone through a number of personnel changes since the group’s formation in Austin in the mid-’90s. The band is now a quintet; Matz and McNeeley, recently relocated to Philadelphia, are the only the remaining original members. “Hold On” is a song from the CD How We lost, the band’s eighth, released last month on Secretly Canadian records. MP3 via the Secretly Canadian web site.

“SK Final” – Ndidi Onukwulu
     Happy-sounding blues, with horn charts, “SK Final” hides its musical inventiveness beneath a brassy, old-fashioned vibe. Onukwulu is a British Columbia native born to Nigerian parents, and in her songs seeks to combine blues, jazz, and African music. Check out, for instance, how the song starts: those reverberant drum beats are not directly blues-based, but evoke another continent’s rhythms. When Onukwulu starts singing, she’s accompanied further by an acoustic rhythm guitar, softly marking the beat as she sings off of it, while an electric guitar soon begins to supply gentle flourishes that, again, bring a world-music flair to the musical landscape.
     In the end, however, “SK Final” is dominated by pretty much two things: Onukwulu’s vibrant alto, with its fleeting vibrato, and those snappy horns, which kick in right before the chorus. While providing traditional horn-chart-y punctuation to the lyrics, the horns also offer a mellower sort of instrumental aside (1:07, for example; even better, 1:39) that to my ears gives them a sneaky and enticing spirit, even when finishing the song off in full rave-up mode, as Onukwulu assures us, with frisky defiance, that she’s not going to cry over you again. Like I said, happy blues.
     “SK Final” is the lead track on Onukwulu’s second CD, The Contradictor, released this week on the Vancouver-based label Jericho Beach Music.

There’s a new Fingertips Contest online: the prize this time is a copy of the movie Control on DVD. Control is the acclaimed biopic of Joy Division lead singer Ian Curtis. Deadline for entry is June 18; click here for details.

“Being Here” – the Stills
     There’s a mystery to the majesty of good pop music. Seemingly lacking both surface-level complexity and a weighty philosophical foundation, pop music has always been dismissed by “serious” musicians and critics as insubstantial at best, culturally harmful at worst. What pop’s most supercilious critics don’t understand, however, is that just because pop isn’t “high art” (whatever that really is) doesn’t mean it can’t, in the right hands (underline that part), be an artistically valid mode of creative expression. Pop music cannot be dismissed simply because it does not measure up to the standards of so-called “serious music” (whether classical or avant-garde); that would be like criticizing a cat for not being a dog.
     And so can an apparently simple composition like “Being Here”–even the title communicates the ultimate in unadorned declarations–deliver something ineffably beautiful and moving in a swift three and a half minutes. You’ve heard these chords before, and the plain descending melody, centered around four adjacent notes. You’ve heard the guitars, you’ve heard the large, anthemic vibe. Whatever this song has can’t and won’t be “explained” by its constituent parts. There’s something in the sound, in the presentation, and maybe in singer Tim Fletcher’s big-hearted voice (a voice that brings to mind the late, lamented Stuart Adamson, of the Scottish band Big Country), that rivets the ear, that makes me, in any case, stop, listen, and feel truly–if mysteriously–affected.
     “Being Here” is a song off the Stills’ third album, Oceans Will Rise, which will be released on the Arts & Crafts label in August. This is the Montreal quintet’s third appearance on Fingertips (check the Master Artist List for details). Thanks to Jonk Music for the lead. MP3 courtesy of the Canadian music magazine Exclaim.