Fingertips

“Parallel Lives” – La Scala

We can all use a big heaping dollop of melodrama with our pop every now and then, and La Scala is happy to deliver. (Even the name of this Chicago band implies something larger than life and over the top.) Up above the introduction’s searing, machine-gun guitar line and the ’80s dance beat, listen to that second guitar plucking out a homely, vaguely East European motif. Or maybe it’s not a guitar, as it sounds like a bouzouki or some such old country instrument; in any case, this is the best kind of musical melodrama—the kind that has you smiling for potentially unknown reasons.

Like for instance the verse. Listen, in the second half, to how singer Balthazar de Ley and one of the guitars “harmonize” in a crazy sort of way–the guitar plays a line completely in sync with the melody rhythmically, but squonking all over the place harmonically. It’s kind of wacky but also subtle–you might not notice, but, again, it creates an enjoyable mood. And then there’s that resplendent, two-part chorus, at which point this song truly sounds like some great early ’80s post-new wave hit, an impression furthered by de Ley’s familiar-sounding voice, which has the throaty warmth of one of those dreamy New Romantic-era singers.

De Ley by the way grew up both in Paris and in Champaign, Illinois, which may at least partially account for the intriguing, old-world sensibility laced into the band’s sound. La Scala was just formed last year. “Parallel Lives” is from their first EP, The Harlequin, to be released next week by the Chicago-based Highwheel Records.

<"My Father" – Raise High the Roof Beam

And now we get the antidote to sweeping, driving melodrama: the vulnerable, acoustic-based “My Father,” from singer/songwriter Thomas Fricilone, also Chicago-based, doing Salinger-inspired musical business as Raise High the Roof Beam. I find myself engaged right away by the broken descent of the opening riff—we begin with a standard downward progression but what’s less standard is how it stops and hangs out at the third note, two notes short of the resolution. We suspend there for the same length of time it took to get us there, and then the resolution is turned upside down: after hearing 5-4-3, and hanging out on 3, we then get 1-2 rather than 2-1. It’s all very simple and clear but interesting, and implies overturned expectations or unexpected conclusions, themes that bear out lyrically as the song unfolds.

Fricilone has a quavery voice that does not always stay on pitch, but in the particular musical setting he gives himself here the end result is gracious and affecting. For all that it may sound at first like a simple acoustic-guitar strummer, there’s actually a nimble array of instruments weaving together, including piano, ukelele, eletric guitar, maybe a melodica, and perhaps a synthesizer. Fricilone also double-tracks his vocals here, which I think gives them extra potency, and maybe compensates for the pitch variation, while maintaining the underlying fragility that serve the lyrics especially well: “My father told me I’d be late for life/That’s okay ’cause I think that waiting’s all right/I avoid the news for things that I might fear/My father tells me all the things that I don’t want to hear.”

“My Father” is a song that will appear on Raise High the Roof Beam’s Family EP, a work that is still in progress. MP3 courtesy of Fricilone’s web site.

“Pull Me Out Alive” – Kaki King

Dipping for the first time into the new SXSW MP3s, I’ve pulled out a plum, and an unexpected plum at that. Kaki King is a musician known initially for her ear-opening acoustic guitar virtuosity, which she has had a tendency to put on display in songs that are maybe a little complicated. Even as she has expanded her sonic palette over the past couple of years, and started singing on her songs, she has not previously focused her music quite so pointedly. But for her soon-to-be-released Dreaming of Revenge CD, King had producer Malcolm Burn at the board. Burn has worked with everyone from Bob Dylan and Patti Smith to Emmylou Harris and the Neville Brothers; he apparently told King, “If someone can’t be sawing a log in half and whistling along to the song, I don’t want it on the record.” Thus has King’s music taken a turn towards the accessible, shall we say.

And it doesn’t sound like a bad thing to me. Accessible doesn’t mean uninteresting, or bland. “Pull Me Out Alive” alternates itchy, idiosyncratically propulsive verses–check out the way her vocals are layered (starting around 0:29) to sound like a slightly out-of-sync conversation–with a drony, dreamy chorus that finishes on a wonderfully unresolved chord. I find the instrumental break at 2:10 particularly interesting; employing an intriguing blend of electric and electronic sounds, it nevertheless strikes me at its core as something she might previously have used at the center of one of her acrobatic and percussive guitar displays. While those who latched onto King for her instrumental mastery may be disoriented by a song like this, I kind of like it. And I assume she still does play the guitar now and then. I guess we’ll find out when the CD comes out next month. That’ll be on Velour Recordings. MP3, as noted, via SXSW, and this one may in fact be exclusive.

“Power Lines” – the Interiors

I can’t make out what they’re singing about, and the title doesn’t necessarily imply a fun time, but the music is extremely good-natured, in an early Talking Heads-ish sort of way–the stuttering drumbeat, creative bass playing, swooping melody lines, and singer/guitarist Chase Duncan’s amiable, wide-mouthed vocal style (sounding quite a bit like Dave Matthews doing a David Byrne imitation) all contributing to that sensation. One of the things that I think makes the rhythm here so ear-catching is the dynamic interplay in the rhythm section: listen in the introduction and the verse to the stark difference between the steady, clockwork bass and the changeable drum pattern. Interestingly, the bass breaking free of its strict pulse is more or less what creates the chorus, as the melody itself does not alter that much.

On guitar, Duncan adds a handsome depth to the chuggy ambiance, with rounded, semi-drone-like tones and ringing arpeggios. No doubt he’s very happy to be doing all this, after a freak accident last year required the amputation of a fingertip. (Of all things.) This happened the day after the Chicago-based trio had signed with the record label 54°40′ or Fight. The band had to take most of last year off while Duncan, thankfully, recuperated. Their self-titled label debut is slated for an April release. MP3 courtesy of the band’s site.

“Bodyguard” – Dawn Landes

“Sultry” and “banjo” are two words not normally encountered within the same sentence. But Dawn Landes, the Louisville-born, Brooklyn-based singer/songwriter, is one those 21st-century musicians who appears comfortable juxtaposing sounds, vibes, and emotions–while happily emerging with a firm voice of her own, rather than a pointless mashup. (Not all 21st-century musicians are as fortunate. Just saying.) So here, then, we get a minimalist groove, some almost trip-hoppy but organic aural space, Landes’ pretty yet matter-of-fact voice (a disarming blend of deadpan and sultry), and yes, somehow, too, a banjo.

Anchored by its deep, unhurried bass line, “Bodyguard” unfolds in its own world, both musically–beyond the banjo, don’t miss the sleighbells in the distance–and lyrically: “I had a dream that we were robbed/They took the moldings off the walls/Erased our signatures from things.” Those are remarkable opening lines, I think, for their concrete, casual leap into the surreal, beautifully served by a melody spanning a full octave. Landes here is mining an actual, terrible real-life incident (not an intentional theme, this week, honest!): her apartment was in fact broken into, and they took her stuff (though not, I imagine, the moldings), including her laptop and hard drive, which at the time contained the only copy she had of her entire new album, then ready for production. Gone and not coming back. She didn’t try to re-create it; “I just started over from scratch,” she has said. “I wrote ‘Bodyguard’ in the kitchen while waiting for the police to show up.” I hear something of the incomparable Jane Siberry both in Landes’ vocal presentation (Sib fans note her abrupt “Where’ve you been?” at 3:22) and in something inscrutable residing deep down in this strange but hypnotic song.

“Bodyguard” is from the CD Fireproof, which was recorded live in a single day in an old fire station in Brooklyn. The album will be released next month on Cooking Vinyl; MP3 via Cooking Vinyl USA.

“Sarah’s Game” – the Loved Ones

Musical genres are a funny thing. As labels, some are very broad and more or less indispensible–say, blues or jazz or reggae–in that they clearly describe a distinct universe of music, while leaving lots of room for variation. Many others make an effort to slice and dice music into narrower and narrower sub-universes (jangle pop, anyone? folktronica?), with the unfortunate end result of implying many more boundaries than there need be, especially within the broad, theoretically embracing kingdom of rock’n’roll. (To me, the only sensible boundary to make is between good music and bad music, but we’ll leave that for another time.)

I bring this up because the Loved Ones, a quartet from Philadelphia, are supposedly a punk rock band on a punk rock record label. The band’s previous releases, a 2004 EP and a 2006 full-length, were hailed as fine punk rock by people to whom such things matter. Punk rock, it turns out, is a genre particularly resistant to boundary crossing. Punk rock fans often start to get suspicious if the music gets too “catchy” or “melodic” (which is exactly, by the way, when it starts becoming actual music rather than unprocessed noise, but we’ll leave that for another time also). So I don’t know what the punk rock purists will make of “Sarah’s Game,” but to me, this is a great listen: simultaneously harsh and focused, passionate and engaging, with a powerful melody, nicely crafted lyrics (note the internal rhymes), careful musicianship (the two guitars work impressively together), and even a harmony or two. God forbid!

“Sarah’s Game” is from the CD Build & Burn, which comes out this week on Fat Wreck Chords. MP3 via Fat Wreck Chords.

“Power” – Nick Jaina

A brisk but elegiac piano sequence, underscored by some spooky strings, leads us directly into the intriguing melody of this new song from the Portland, Ore.-based singer/songwriter Nick Jaina. I’ve been trying to put my finger on just what makes the tune so compelling, and I’m thinking it has something to do with Jaina’s prominent use of semitones, or half steps, which is not something you hear a lot of in indie rock, or classic rock, or any other kind of rock or pop for that matter. The half step is the smallest commonly recognized interval between notes in Western music, and the most dissonant when played in combination. When related within a melody, however, strange and wonderful moods emerge. Listen to how the notes he sings on the words “of the moon” (0:34) and “sacred tune” (0:37) sound so divergent, so firmly separated, and yet lo and behold they are only a half step apart. The illusion is achieved by his returning, in between, to the same notes he was singing leading into the “moon” part. So what we’re hearing is not just the half-step difference in the end notes but the significant difference in sonic relationship between the top and bottom notes in the two segments (i.e. the “moon” segment and the “tune” segment). More semitones are used, in sequence, as the melody line resolves (0:38-0:42).

And I know, this kind of thing sounds neither exciting nor, often, comprehensible in an attempted written explication. And worse, with pop music in particular, I’m always caught in the awkward position of claiming treasure in a seeming musical trifle. What I describe here, after all, is no stunning revelation in music theory land. But the very thing that causes many classical aficionados to stiff at the simplicity of pop music is, I would contend, pop’s very strength–what Proust, of all people, referred to as “the magic appeal to the imagination” found in things that those interested only in “intellectual weightiness” would condemn as “frivolous.”

Then again, maybe I’m all wrong. Maybe the song is compelling because Jaina was playing on Elliott Smith’s old upright piano. Jaina was the last person to play it before it was given to the Experience Music Project in Seattle. Or maybe it’s compelling simply because Jaina–itinerant, whimsical, a former archaeology student–is himself compelling, in a quirky sort of way. “Power” is from the CD Wool, Jaina’s second, and his first for the Hush label. (He recorded the vocals for the album in his kitchen, “refrigerator unplugged so as to be quiet, food slowly spoiling,” according to his web site.) Expect Wool in early March. MP3 courtesy of WFMU.

“Warning” – Wye Oak

This is an unusually breezy-sounding setting in which to encounter such fuzzy/droney guitars. And yet therein lies a good part of the appeal. So here we have vocalist Jenn Wasner, lightly, airily singing the sing-song-y tune to a perky, march-like beat, and listen to what-all is going on around her: extended drones of feedback-laced guitars, rising and falling according to their own logic, existing in their own time and space. Seriously, after the lead guitar offers a fuzzed-up version of the main melody in the introduction, we don’t hear anything straightforward out of the guitars for quite a while. Try listening to this and imagining the song without either the vocals or the drums and you’ll see how driven by entrancing noise the piece actually is. I particularly enjoy the instrumental breaks, which begin with a vague effort to give us the opening riff again, but it never manages to emerge completely amidst the semi-chaos; the second and longer of the two breaks, beginning at 2:04, has the happy Yo La Tengo-ish capacity to sound simultaneously crazed and cozy.

Listen also to the shifty time signatures. The sing-song-y, march-beat-ed verse is given a rhythmic tweak by a dropped beat in the fourth measure. This creates an extra dollop of semi-chaos in the instrumental sections connecting the verses, during which the beat of the entire song seems to have been misplaced. And then the chorus, or what passes for a chorus here, re-establishes some sonic order but all of a sudden, somehow, we’re in 6/4 (or 6/8?) time. For all the noise, this is one smooth song.

You’ll find “Warning” on the CD If Children, slated for release in April on Merge Records. The Baltimore duo Wye Oak, by the way, was until earlier this month a band called Monarch; a self-released version of If Children was put out originally last year under the old name. The change was prompted by the existence of (at least) two other bands named Monarch, and was no doubt connected to their Merge signing. The Wye Oak, you may as well know, was the honorary state tree of Maryland–it was a specific tree, of great renown, that was believed to be more than 450 years old when it was, alas, destroyed in a storm in 2002.

“Sad Songs” – the Pendletons

I’m never sure quite how or why it happens, but sometimes a song that seems at one level a pretty basic genre exercise at another level rises way above that for me. “Sad Songs” is an excellent example. A stompy, country-tinged garage rocker, there’s something in the basic vibe that sounds like it’s been cycling through rootsy musical ensembles since the dawn of time. Or at least since the 1950s. When the melody is so strongly rooted in a classic rhythm like this (Johnny Cash, anyone?), that’s a sign of a genre exercise. And there’s nothing wrong with that; it just doesn’t tend too often to inspire a melody-oriented listener like me.

But here are four relative youngsters from Athens, Georgia, cranking it up and cranking it out and what do you know?: it’s a blast. Why? No doubt the appeal has something to do with the energy of the playing. Check out, for instance, the speedy, stuttering guitar riff that anchors the end of each verse, at the “no no no” part (for instance, at 0:30)—it’s done with this tight-loose sort of accuracy that conveys an image to me of everyone in the band moving up and down in unison to the stutter of that little lick, in a manner at once comical and serious. And listen by all means to drummer Ben DuPriest, who bashes and bangs and still keeps a train-like pulse; he manages to sound rowdy and polite at the same time. Oh, and don’t miss (e.g. 0:39) the thrilling, brilliant mini-rolls (are these paradiddles? I’m not up on my drumming lingo) that he uses to puncutate each lyrical line in the chorus, except the last. Maybe that’s what’s doing it for me. The (maybe) paradiddles.

“Sad Songs” is from the Pendletons’ debut CD, Oh, Me!, which was released electronically this summer on the digital label Indie Outlaw.

“Boys” – the Autumns

Riveting, dramatic, slightly breathless, and thoroughly satisfying, “Boys” is the perfect soundtrack somehow to a crisp blue January day, even if the band is named the Autumns, not the Winters. The song opens with a distinctive drumbeat that launches us into an edgy, unusually dynamic melody. The edginess comes from two elements: first, the melody appears to start off the tonic–that is, the tune begins within a chord that is somehow not home base, which is an unusual circumstance, especially in a pop song; second, the melody never in fact seems to settle in a place that feels centered. The third and fourth measures are the closest we get to a “home” feeling, harmonically, and even there it’s vague and fleeting; after that, the melody in the verse springs from an almost startling series of chord changes.

And the band is really just getting started at that point. The chorus continues the kinetic vibe: an angular guitar chord–another off-center thing–leads us into a soaring section in which singer Matthew Kelly, leaping up a minor sixth (0:26), shows off a formidable falsetto; here the melodic momentum is such that it seems to be dragging Kelly along with it, the way the tide moves the water but is not the water: up and down he goes, in and out of his upper range, and in and out of singing actual words–the lyrics break for a stretch of wordless syllables right in the heart of the chorus (which themselves mirror the underlying drumbeat), and the effect is of a song overcome by its own fervor.

Perhaps long-time Fingertips visitors remember the L.A.-based Autumns from three years ago, when they were featured here for the song “Slumberdoll.” That was darn good; this is truly great. “Boys” is a song from the CD Fake Noise From a Box of Toys, the band’s fourth, which was released in the U.K. in the fall, and is slated for a U.S. release in April on Bella Union.

“Bag of Hammers” – Thao With the Get Down Stay Down

Thao Nguyen has a woolly-textured, back-of-the-throat sort of voice that brings to mind Erica Wennerstrom of the Heartless Bastards. Thao has an airier air about her, however–a feeling supported by the cheery banjo with which she chooses to accompany herself and the sprightly, slightly cockeyed rhythm that bounces us along. The jaunty guilelessness on display in fact puts me in the mind of the sound pioneered by Talking Heads in their early recordings: this sense of simple yet off-kilter music that surprises even the people playing it, as they play it.

Nguyen, from Virginia, released her first CD in 2005, a solo effort entitled Like the Linen. The disc eventually found its way to Tucker Marine, who plays with Laura Veirs and has produced the Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens. And now, also, he has produced We Brave Bee Stings and All, Thao’s second full-length, recorded with her band, to be released later this month on Kill Rock Stars (that’s a record label). “Bag of Hammers” is the album’s second track.

“Him” – Biirdie

This one features both a classic-sounding melody, almost folk-like in its sturdiness, and an ongoing urge to deconstruct it. Sometimes oddball electronics wander in. Other times, the band grinds itself more or less to a halt, just when you were air drumming to the Phil Spector-ish beat. The bass, meanwhile, seems to come and go, and when present opts often for extended notes rather than a typical, rhythm-oriented pulse. And how often does the worn-out sounding male vocalist get a sweetly harmonizing female vocalist to sing with? Not very often is the answer.

So this trio calling itself Biirdie—oops, another L.A. outfit this week—kind of makes you listen more than once. Much the way their name kind of makes you look more than once. In the old days, by the way, I’d find the oddly-spelled name somewhat irritating. But here in the Google Age, the name is a boon: search on “Biirdie” and you pretty much get stuff about them and only them. However accidental the origin—they had wanted merely to be Birdie but there was already a Birdie band—the strategy appears sound. I fear a trend coming on.

You’ll find “Him” on the CD Catherine Avenue, coming out this week on Love Minus Zero Records.

“Cherry Tulips” – Headlights

At once delicate and sturdy, quirky and poppy, summery and somehow wintery too, “Cherry Tulips” embraces a seemingly endless series of opposites—in addition to containing the aforementioned dialectics, the song strikes me likewise as both lo-fi and polished, retro-y and current, crisp and echoey. And if that’s not enough, singer/keyboardist Erin Fein manages to be at once airy and substantive, both forthright and mysterious.

Or maybe I just can’t make up my mind today.

I do know that I’m enjoying this one without reservation, from the shadowy opening heart-throb pulse through the sped-up Motown rhythm and maybe most especially the soaring, melodic, call-and-response payoff in the chorus, which enlarges the song in a way I can only describe as florally. Headlights is a trio from the Champaign, Illinois area; “Cherry Tulips” arrives in advance from the band’s second CD, Some Racing, Some Stopping, scheduled for release next month on Polyvinyl Records. MP3 via Polyvinyl.


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“Gila” – Beach House

Sometimes it’ll be one melody that does it, one melody that is robust and agreeable enough to hang a song upon. And “Beach House,” a languorous new song from the Balitmore duo Beach House, gives us that melody as its opening salvo, the first thing we hear from singer Victoria Legrand’s mouth: a dreamy, downward-tending progression that’s actually two lazily swinging four-note descents tucked into one another. Drenched in reverb, steamy organ, and unplaceable atmosphere, the melody hooks me for good the second time, when the upturn at the end disappears; the simple act of staying on the same note one extra time changes the chord, the mood, the trajectory of the song on the spot (compare 0:25-0:26 to 0:32-0:33 and see if you feel it.)

Now normally I’m not sure I enjoy songs with quite this much blurry reverb, but I realize in listening that it’s not the blurry reverb that bothers me per se, it’s the tendency for songs with a lot of blurry reverb to be blurry through and through–indistinct melody, hazy structure, vague instrumentation, vague everything. “Gila” is exactly not that; it’s as precisely crafted as they come, in which case the smeary touch of the reverb offers an enriching counterpoint, in maybe the same sort of way it works when a happy-sounding song has sad lyrics, or a song with fast underlying rhythm has a slow melody. Listen in particular to the guitar, which plays chord-free accompaniment throughout, offering nicely-etched lines that curl in and around the vocal melody.

“Gila” comes from the band’s forthcoming CD, Devotion, which will be released next month on Carpark Records. MP3 courtesy of Pitchfork.

“Henri” – the Heavy Circles

In one of the more unusual multi-generational (but not really) musical couplings in recent memory, Edie Brickell has teamed up with her stepson, Harper Simon, to put out an album as an entity called the Heavy Circles. Simon is Brickell’s husband Paul Simon’s son from his first marriage, and I said multi-generational “but not really” because as it turns out, Brickell is only six and a half years older than stepson Simon, who’s 35.

And here they are, serving up an offbeat, atmospheric homage (it seems) to French painter Henri Matisse, describing Matisse’s imagery via a hypnotic rhyme scheme over a circular, spy-movie motif, fleshed out with some cinematic synthesizers and the barest touch of crunchy guitar. I’m not sure there’s any more point to it than there was when the elder Simon sang rapturously, and surreally, about René Magritte back when Brickell was a teenager. But it draws me in and then—nicely—lets me go, without fuss. Songs under three minutes always score extra points with me.

But: combine the son of a ’60s and ’70s icon with a woman most often considered an ’80s one-hit wonder and the cool factor is way low on this one; I’ll be surprised if the blogosphere pays much positive attention. But I’ve always admired the clear-voiced Brickell as a singer; maybe this collaboration will help her shed her outdated public identity.

The self-titled CD, to be self-released on a label called Dynamite Child, is, yet again, due out next month.