This Week’s Finds: Sept. 23-29 (Cass McCombs, Rats With Wings, Steve Goldberg)

“That’s That” – Cass McCombs

With its rolling, ringing, nostalgic sheen, “That’s That” glows with an almost breathtaking sort of pure pop grace. This is one beautiful piece of work, rendered palpably touching by the self-control that characterizes the song from start to finish. For even with its crisp, head-bobbing rhythm, “That’s That” offers us a lesson in sonic restraint: guitars that withhold as much as they play, silvery melodies that ache off the swing of the beat, and subtlest but maybe best of all, that warm, rounded, tom-tom sound that keeps a hurried pulse in the background, forever implying a crashing release that never arrives. McCombs, furthermore, has a voice that sounds on the surface sweeter than it actually is–listen carefully and you’ll hear a homely, vaguely adenoidal tinge to his tone that sounds oddly enough like a benefit, offering a bit of an edge to the silky melody line, and underscoring the awkwardness of the young man/older woman affair recounted here. “That’s That” is from McCombs’ forthcoming CD, Dropping the Writ, due out next month on Domino Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.


“Everwise Muskellunge” – Rats With Wings

The Brooklyn-based band Rats With Wings has a predilection for synthesizer sounds most bands prefer to avoid: rubbery flugelhorny ones, chimey squeaky ones, cheesy tromboney ones. Let me quickly say that I might normally prefer to avoid such sounds also. And yet let me quickly also say that through some combination of vibrancy and laptop-infused invention, the whole here becomes far more than the sum of its strange, synthesized parts. With its solidly constructed melody, spacious sense of structure (note how many different chords the tune seems to feel comfortable resting on), and inscrutable lyrics, “Everwise Muskellunge” grows increasingly comfortable and engaging–but no less odd–with each listen. (A muskellunge by the way is a large fish, in the pike family; here it is apparently stuffed and mounted on the wall, from which vantage point it stares at the narrator, who both talks to it and imbues it with an unearthly sort of perspicacity.) At the heart of the band is the duo Brendan Fitzpatrick and David Hurtgen, who have played together in various guises for 15 years; they got the name for this latest incarnation from Woody Allen’s memorable description of pigeons in the movie Stardust Memories. “Everwise Muskellunge” is a song from the band’s self-released Tiny Guns EP, which came out last month, and includes a seriously striking version of Duran Duran’s “Hungry Like the Wolf.” MP3 courtesy of the band.


“Summer’s Ending” – Steve Goldberg and the Arch Enemies

Well okay summer has actually already ended, but just barely, and in any case the indelible complexion of late summer/early fall is delightfully embodied in the words, the music, and the spirit of this charming song. The bittersweet cello that leads into the first verse–with its singular way of sounding upbeat and sad at the same time–is just a hint of the tuneful orchestral treat the Pittsburgh-based Goldberg has in store for us, with its nicely incorporated string, woodwind, and brass parts. I like how, even so, the guitar and drums–the only “normal” rock instruments on display–are still given their due; the guitar plays an important textural role, and the drums are woven into a larger percussive sound with a nifty sort of homespun finesse. And boy was this homespun: the self-titled album from which this comes was recorded over eight months as Goldberg’s senior project as a music student at Carnegie Mellon University; all the musicians on the album (a total of 22 instruments employed) were CMU students as well. Goldberg even sang into a microphone that was custom-built by an electrical engineering student. And perhaps it took an actual college student to so evocatively capture summer’s end, with its looming, double-edged departure scenes (“I couldn’t wait to leave/But now I want to stay”). Kind of gets you right in the stomach. The CD is available via Goldberg’s web site; the MP3 is no longer available as a direct download, but you can still download it via Bandcamp for any amount of money, including none at all.

This Week’s Finds: Sept. 16-22 (Men Among Animals, Peter Case, Jamie T)

“Slow Years” – Men Among Animals

An irrepressible air of the madcap permeates this sly and slightly manic piece of pure pop from the Danish quartet Men Among Animals. One of the many fun things about “Slow Years” is how misleadingly it begins: I’m not sure what sort of song is being signalled by the throbbing bass line and portentous guitar noodles of the intro, but I don’t think it’s the gleeful hookfest that follows when Lasse Nielsen opens his mouth at 0:12. Nielsen sings with a yelpy but agreeable doubletracked tenor (a voice that makes “most bluebirds quiver and almost all librarians faint,” according to the band’s MySpace page); check out the likable way he takes those upward sidesteps in the verse, away from the notes you think he’s going to hit. This is fun in its own way but all the more so for how it sets up the chorus, which has the simple, unstraying melody of a lost classic. I like too how the band augments the proceedings with some flavorful work of their own, including an extended instrumental break that begins at 1:16 with a previously heard guitar riff and stretches way out from there, first with a glissando-crazy haunted-house organ, then (my favorite part) a guitar solo that consists pretty much of one note, bent and strained for 15 seconds or so. Don’t miss it. “Slow Years” comes from the CD Bad Times, All Gone, which was released last week in Europe by the small but tasteful German label Tapete Records, which is run by Dirk Darmstaedter. The MP3 is via the Tapete site.

“Million Dollars Bail” – Peter Case

Before he was frontman for the little-known (but influential) power pop band the Nerves and the better-known Plimsouls, Peter Case eked out a living playing guitar in coffeehouses and busking on the San Francisco streets. After the Plimsouls had their 15 minutes of new wave fame in the early ’80s, Case revisited his roots, re-emerging as a road-toughened troubadour in the later part of the decade, and recording a couple of fine albums in the process. In the years since, Case has all the more convincingly grown into the role; nowadays he sings his finger-picked songs about hard-luck characters with the deep, rough-hewn authenticity of the folk and blues balladeers he admired as a teenager. “Million Dollars Bail” is an old-fashioned protest song—guitar, voice, and indignant lyrics. And yet notice the lack of vitriol, the palpable dignity of the stark yet nuanced performance—he sounds too centered to have to convince us he’s right, and too right to have to point fingers and yell. He’s singing about our two-tiered justice system, but he’s not ranting and demanding changes—he lets the story tell itself, and lets us know, in the end, what’s really at stake: “But there’s a sentence passed on every soul, someday we all must die/When the question’s not who pulled the switch, it’s how you lived and why.” You’ll find “Million Dollars Bail” on the CD Let Us Now Praise Sleepy John, which was released last month on Yep Roc Records. The MP3 is courtesy of Spin.com.

“Salvador” – Jamie T

“Salvador” takes full advantage of its three and a half minutes, filling both the time and space it has with an enticing, cross-genre stew of sounds and rhythms. After a slow intro featuring oddly ancient-sounding electric guitars, the song takes off with a ska-infused beat, at once propulsive and snaky, and atmospheric, often sinister guitar accents. Just as we adjust to this unexpectedly captivating soundscape, the young Briton introduces an unhurried rap verse, which slides into the churning musical terrain quite nicely. As do the threatening “hoo! hah!” background vocals a bit later, somehow. His working-class singing accent has caused a bit of a row in England, as it turns out 21-year-old Jamie T (née Treays) is from well-to-do Wimbledon, and attended a posh school, but all I’m thinking we should care about is does the song work? I say it does. (And would point out that Joe Strummer, the son of a diplomat, was hardly a hooligan either.) “Salvador” is from Jamie T’s debut CD Panic Prevention, which was released in the U.S. at the end of August on Caroline Records. (The record came out in the U.K. back in January and is one of the 12 nominees for this year’s Mercury Prize.) The MP3 is via Better Propaganda.

This Week’s Finds: Sept. 9-15 (Marissa Nadler, Bruce Springsteen, The 1900s)

“Diamond Heart” – Marissa Nadler

Hang with this one for just a little while. Nadler sings with a distinctive sort of warble, and the song starts with her in full warble. (Nadler is often grouped with the so-called “New Weird America” and/or psych-folk movements, with the likes of Devendra Banhart and Johanna Newsom, in which unusual vocal stylings are de rigueur.) She also seems to be singing from the end of an echoey hallway; her guitar, meanwhile, vibrates with an unearthly, harp-like throb. Lyrical substance is difficult to decipher but odd prominent phrases emerge at the outset—“jezebel crown,” “reliquary eyes.” And yet somehow, quickly, the song gathers a deep, resonant beauty, like something unearthed from an ancient time with only a few scratches; even the echoey hallway ultimately adds a mysterious aural texture to what is a heart-breakingly gorgeous song. And this is folk-song gorgeous not pop ballad gorgeous (not that there’s anything wrong with that), meaning we get the unfolding gravity of timeless melody rather than a burst of hooks. By the time she reaches for the climactic words of the chorus—“Oh my lonely diamond heart”—with a sigh at-once world-weary and angelic, all thoughts of weird warbling have vanished in the presence of sheer musical wonder. “Diamond Heart” is the opening track on Nadler’s CD Songs III: Bird on the Water, which was released in the U.S. last month on Kemado Records(it had been released in the U.K. earlier in the year, on Peacefrog Records). The MP3 is courtesy of Insound.

“Radio Nowhere” – Bruce Springsteen

Hang with this one a bit also. It’s not complicated, it’s got a grinding, muddy sort of sonic sensibility, and yeah okay he’s done any number of better songs (he’s Bruce Springsteen, for crying out loud). But this song is a creeper, sticking in the head and heart after a few listens. What I like right away is that, independent of the thick rocking ambiance, this doesn’t really sound much like a Bruce Springsteen song—the melody and chord progression may be plain but they do not specifically call to mind any of the Boss’s big anthemic blasters of the past; this one even has a touch of power pop about it that strikes my ears as unexpected. I like too that it’s just three minutes seventeen seconds, as Bruce has not been known for economy of statement in recent years (or maybe ever). I love the subject matter, as the song laments the abject soullessness of satellite radio: “I was trying to find my way home/But all I heard was a drone/Bouncing off a satellite/Crushing the last lone American night.” And yes I like the music too—simple and direct it may be, but vivid and driven as well, thanks in part to his estimable compadres in the E Street Band. All in all “Radio Nowhere” feels like a reassuring rallying cry from one of our mightiest living rock legends, a guy who I might add has attempted to be a decent human being (no mean feat!) despite nearly being crushed by the “star-maker machinery” back in the ’70s and ’80s. The song comes from Springsteen’s forthcoming CD, Magic, slated for release on Columbia Records in early October (although the vinyl is coming out, actually, at the end of this month). MP3 via Spinner.

“When I Say Go” – the 1900s

Guided by a jaunty piano and sung with a Carole King-like forthrightness by Jeanine O’Toole, “When I Say Go” is a potent piece of midwestern indie pop that rewards careful listening with its inventive sense of arrangement. To begin with, this Chicago septet features three vocalists and here utilizes two of them: O’Toole is the Kingly one, singing the verses, while Caroline Donovan handles the choruses; they sound almost the same but kind of not, also. Listen as well for the careful use of strings, which intermittently lend the song a very parlor-like sensibility, other times adding the air of, almost, a hoedown. Sometimes a small touch means a lot, like the way the piano, after pounding out basic major and minor chords until then, releases, abruptly, into a somewhat thornier arpeggio (at around 1:18; sounds like maybe a major 7 chord). This may not be something you consciously note but it alters the mood on the spot, all the more so because of its subtlety. On the other hand, not subtly at all, the song breaks in the middle (starting at 1:38) for a bracing guitar solo, a scant 10 seconds of expert, squonky deconstruction that is not to be missed. “When I Say Go” is a song from the band’s debut full-length CD, Cold & Kind, slated for release early next month on Parasol Records. The MP3 is courtesy of the band’s site.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
Sept. 2-8

There’s still a wee bit of time to enter the latest Fingertips Contest; the deadline for entry is midnight EDT but truth be told if you get your email in by tomorrow morning that’ll be fine also. Three winners will each receive a copy of a new compilation CD entitled This Is Next, featuring 15 songs from a variety of well-regarded non-major-label artists, including Neko Case, the Shins, and Spoon.


“To the Dogs or Whoever” – Josh Ritter
A ramshackle folk rock tall tale overrun by breakneck lyrics and underscored by colorful keyboards. The literate Ritter–who designed his own major in American History through Narrative Folk Music, at Oberlin–cuts loose a bit here, singing with an off-the-cuff charm that unites generations of gonzo lyricists, from Greenwich Village beatniks to punk-rock snarlers clear through to late 20th-century hip hop rhyme masters. (And okay, also that guy from Minnesota, but I was trying to give Ritter a break and write about him without mentioning that particular influence.) I like the way he appends a vaguely boozy, sing-along style chorus to the rapid-fire verses, which adds to the good-natured vibe. I get the idea that Ritter wants us right away to remember (this song opens his new CD) that he’s not the overly earnest singer/songwriter he’s often portrayed as in the glowing reviews he’s been receiving since the beginning of this decade. The album title is another hint: The Historical Conquests of Josh Ritter, and if the words don’t reveal a tongue planted firmly in cheek, the cover, featuring one red-crested Roman soldier’s helmet and an early-’60s album cover font, should do the trick. The CD was released a couple of weeks ago on Sony/BMG. The MP3 is via Ritter’s site, where you can also by the way stream the whole album.

“Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” – Siberian
With its ringing wall of guitars and croony lead vocalist, the Seattle quartet Siberian reminds me how much a good chunk of the music identified online as shoegaze owes to early U2; but U2 of course isn’t cool anymore so they are rarely mentioned except in a disparaging way by the shoegaze-friendly but snark-infested blogosphere. Meanwhile, Finn Parnell, Siberian’s aforementioned crooner, reminds me how much Thom Yorke sounded like Bono sometimes on The Bends, for what it’s worth. In any case, what we have here is a song with a chiming, bittersweet power to it, due primarily, I think, to its unusual, three-sectioned structure. In place of the standard verse-chorus framework (one or two verses followed by a chorus, followed by another verse or two and another chorus, etc.), “Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” is divided into three distinct and relatively equal sections, each a melody that’s repeated. At the heart of this structure is the arresting second section (beginning at 1:01 the first time), featuring a mournful melody that is simply a sixth interval going back and forth, back and forth, over chords that alternate between minor and major. This then yields to a third section that aims at a heart-rending sort of resolution before pulling up short in the song’s center (1:48) and starting over. When the promised resolution at last arrives, after the song cycles back through its three sections, the song literally stops right on that long-awaited note. Nicely done. “Belgian Beer and Catholic Girls” will be found on Siberian’s debut full-length CD, With Me, scheduled for release next month on Sonic Boom Recordings.

“Nothing Burns Like Bridges” – Penny Century
Penny Century vocalist Julia Hanberg sings with a breathless vigor that helps transform this attractive bit of fleet, late-summery pop into something that strikes me as substantive and lasting. There’s an air of some earlier era floating around in the cheery mix of keyboards and what sounds like a trumpet; the chorus’s infectious, speeded-up echoing of the old Linda Ronstadt nugget “Different Drum” adds to the ineffable nostalgia, as does the brief bit of boy-girl dueting halfway through. That said there’s something entirely of the here and now in the band’s sound–in particular its gleeful blend of the homespun and the precise; I keep thinking that a lot of this sounds sort of sloppy except that it actually isn’t at all. The song flies across one’s field of awareness in a zippy 2:07 and the first thing I’m tempted to do when it’s over is hit the play button again. Penny Century is a sextet from the village of Östersund, in northern Sweden. “Nothing Burns Like Bridges” is a song from the band’s debut CD, Between a Hundred Lies, which was released two weeks ago on Letterbox Records. The MP3 is via the Letterbox site.

This Week’s Finds: Aug. 19-Sept. 1 (Iron & Wine, plus 5 MP3s w/out reviews)

The Fingertips Home Office will be closed between August 19 and Sept. 3. To avoid leaving everyone empty-handed for two weeks, I’m offering you one reviewed MP3, plus a list of five others I’ve been listening to lately. Any one of these—or none of them—may yet end up as a TWF pick; see what you think if you have the time to check them out.

“Boy With a Coin” – Iron & Wine

As Sam Beam continues to flesh out his homespun sound, he sounds better and better, to me. The strong, sure acoustic-guitar rhythm propels “Boy With a Coin,” but the electric and percussive accents—including hypnotic handclaps—add so much texture and substance that this right away feels like far more than standard singer/songwriter fare. I particularly like the blurty punctuations the electric guitar begins to make at around 1:18, and how they subsequently lead to a marvelous instrumental break beginning around 1:32. The tightly harmonized female backing vocals are another background element that contributes centrally to the alluring vibe. I’m not sure what he’s singing about but the overall effect is mysterious to the point of being outright spiritual, a sense accentuated by the droning electric guitar that haunts the background during the second half of the song. “Boy With a Coin” will be found on The Shepherd’s Dog, Iron and Wine’s third full-length CD, which is due out in September on Sub Pop Records. The MP3 is via Better Propaganda.

Vacation Special: five MP3s, minus reviews:
“Nothing Burns Like Bridges” – Penny Century
“Setting Fire to Sleepy Towns” – the Sleeping Years
“For Science Fiction” – Maritime
“From a Tower” – Love Like Fire
“100 Days, 100 Nights” – Sharon Jones & the Dap Kings

As noted, you may yet read about one or more of these in an upcoming TWF update. In any case, all are worth hearing. “This Week’s Finds” will resume in its regular guise on Tuesday, September 4.


Reaction to “The future (or not) of the album”

A discerning few of you may have noticed over time that Fingertips does not offer “comments” sections in any way, shape, or form. To explain that particular quirk would probably take its own “Commentary” essay (and watch out, I’m thinking of writing it); suffice it to say that I am very interested in what people have to say, but I’m not interested in publishing quickie reactions from random visitors–which often turn into their own conversations–on an equal footing with carefully thought-out essays. Just because 99% of all web sites do this doesn’t mean it makes sense.

That said, as this essay (posted here originally on Aug. 2 and Aug. 3) has indeed prompted a number of thoughtful responses, I was moved to give some space to some of them, here–both on the web page with the original essay and here on the blog.

Mary Ann Farley, a talented singer/songwriter (and painter) in her own right, writes to mention an excellent point I completely overlooked:

One thing I loved about the vinyl disc was that it had two sides. When I made both of my CDs, neithier one cracking 40 minutes (My Life of Crime came in at 37), I felt like even that amount of time was too long a stretch for someone to sit and listen to. I worried that the songs further down the list wouldn’t get listened to as much, even though they were just as good and placed there for a reason. And it seems I was right.

Just from anecdotal conversations, people tend to talk about the earlier songs on my discs. One friend said he found the music so dense (in a good way) both lyrically and musically, that he could only listen to a few songs at a time in order to digest it.

When I used to listen to vinyl records, I felt like there were two tiny worlds, one on each side, and the splitting in half of the entire work helped me get to know an album intimately. That experience, as you say, is just gone now, never to return, and I miss it.

Visitor Courtney brings up another excellent point that I missed:

Speaking for myself only, I can tell you why the CD changed albums forever for me: Because they make it so easy to skip a song. Records and tapes made it (comparatively) labor intensive to change to the next track. So I sat in my car or my room and learned to appreciate a song that I might initially have disliked, because I was too lazy to skip past it. I was forced to listen to the album in its entirety and to give in to the flow the artist intended (so that even years later, I would always expect track 4 to follow track 3 even when hearing that song on the radio).

I can name only a handful of albums that I have listened to that way since the introduction of CDs. The siren call of that forward button makes it SO easy to disregard a song that doesn’t grab you immediately. A song you might learn to love if you gave it a chance.

Yes, absolutely, a crucial point. I didn’t think of it in part because I never developed the habit, somehow. To this day I rarely if ever use the “next track” button; I forget it’s even there, I feel rather sheepish in admitting.

Courtney notes that the iPod has aggravated the problem:

Now I don’t even pretend to listen to an album as a whole. It gets dumped into my library and I listen to it when it finally pops up in shuffle mode.

Talk about breaking the spell of the album! This reality didn’t occur to me either, so thanks to Courtney for bringing that up. I didn’t think of it because of another idiosyncrasy of mine–namely, I do not by default upload CDs automatically into iTunes; I pick and choose and only put songs in my library that I like. This does require a bit of familiarity with the album on the one hand, but on the other hand it obviously results in me dismantling the album and never really hearing it again either. So, different approach, same results.

Visitor Chris writes in to point out that my quick summary of the album’s rise in the mid-’60s overlooked the fact that jazz artists were most definitely recording albums as “cohesive musical statements” back in the ’50s. Absolutely true, and I might have made it clearer that I was grounding the entire argument in the pop world. Still, this makes me wonder why the likes of Brian Wilson or the Beatles or any other thoughtful pop musicians of the day hadn’t already looked to the jazz world for inspiration on the matter.

Chris also notes, rightly, that even as the album focus grew through the ’60s and into the ’70s and ’80s, there always remained a reasonably strong concurrent focus on songs and singles on the pop side of things. Finally, he observes that while things have changed over the last generation, he does not see the album dying out any time soon:

I think maybe the cd was an agent in the trend away from the great rock albums of the 70s, but a focus on albums is still quite common in many realms of music. I keep encountering great new albums in metal, jazz, country, and rock music. I’m actually surprised that the album form is still doing so well despite all the pressures against it. I think there is hope that artists will continue to want to put the effort into creating albums and that dedicated listeners will still want to hear them.

Lucas Jensen, on the other hand, notes that there are genres of music that might do better to abandon the album format entirely:

Wouldn’t a lot of R&B/rap artists be better if they didn’t have to make or be judged by albums? I love Beyonce for a song or two but not a record because I think her singles are tops.

Lucas, who promotes indie artists for the Athens, Ga.-based Team Clermont, then wonders if the shift to digital distribution isn’t damaging music in a way that goes deeper and further than merely killing off the idea of the record album:

Moving music away from the physical realm hasn’t been properly addressed philosophically yet in my eye, but I think something is being lost in terms of permanence–when music is easily tradeable and deleteable it will become disposable. Someone’s year of hard work goes down the drain because you didn’t like the way it sounded at the beginning and deleted it.

I agree with this idea that lacking a physical form renders music more disposable, to the harm of artist and listener alike, and definitely to the detriment of the pop music album such as it used to exist much more commonly. It’s worth noting that in our digital age you don’t even have to delete a song literally to delete it effectively–bringing us back to Courtney’s observations about how the “next track” button often leads her to ignore a track for good simply because it didn’t grab her quickly enough.

More responses that add to the conversation will be included here as they come in.

This Week’s Finds: August 12-18 (Portugal. The Man, Eulogies, Joe Henry)

“Shade” – Portugal. The Man

While I don’t think much of the band name–inexplicable punctuation is a pet peeve–I’m finding this slinky, vigorous, genre-resistant song has etched itself slowly but steadily into whatever part of my mind that’s responsible for making songs stick in it. There’s something prog-rock-y about it–the fairy-tale-like guitar riff that opens the piece, for instance–as well as something more Led Zeppelin-y in lead singer John Gourley’s Plant-like yowl and Page-like guitar heaviness. Those synthesized strings floating in from above, and the band’s gift for unexpected, rhythmic melody? That’s a bit of Radiohead, perhaps. At the same time, the drum sounds are so up front and organic that it puts me in the mind of some classic rock track or another even as the overall vibe is good old ’00s indie rock. All in all an attractive and successful stew of sounds and vibe from this young trio from the Northwest. Gourley and bassist Zach Carothers grew up together in Alaska, of all places; they are based now in Portland, Oregon, which is drummer Jason Sechrist’s hometown. “Shade” is from the band’s CD Church Mouth, which was released last month on Fearless Records. The MP3 is via Spinner, the AOL indie music blog.


“One Man” – Eulogies

Listen to how “One Man” plays with us pace-wise. The melody proceeds in an unhurried way, very much in the range of what is (too often) called a “midtempo rocker” (Google that phrase and it comes up 10,000 times; two of ’em right here, I must add, in the spirit of full disclosure). But the rhythm section chugs along in double time, creating a briskness and vibrancy the famous midtempo rocker often lacks. Eulogies is a trio featuring the singer/songwriter Peter Walker (previously featured here in April 2006); the band in fact came spontaneously into existence as Walker realized on his last tour how well he and the two musicians playing with him were jelling. I was impressed last year with Walker’s sure touch as both a singer and songwriter, and am again this time around. I like the subtle but evocative hooks he has going in the chorus–first, to me, just the marvelous way his falsetto bends a bit before settling on the word “I” (and what a great, yearning note that is, too); second, how the melody deftly centers itself between the beats, creating this wonderful, bittersweet sense of movement. A bonus: the lyrics display the same subtle power. Walker sings: “I learned something/In the nick of time/I’m only one man”–and while the song doesn’t reveal enough detail to know exactly what he learned and why it was just in time, the wistful atmosphere suggests a complex sort of heartache, and a good news/bad news type of education. “One Man” is from Eulogies’ self-titled debut CD, due out in September on Dangerbird Records. The MP3 is via the Dangerbird site. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.



“Time is a Lion” – Joe Henry

Joe Henry has one of those really familiar-sounding voices for a guy who doesn’t get a whole lot of exposure in the scheme of things. Part of the lack of widespread exposure has to do with the fact that he’s spent a fair amount of time singing songs with that voice that have been purposefully arcane, oddly cluttered, and more than a little, shall we say, difficult. He has been quoted as calling his 2003 release Tiny Voices “intentionally chaotic,” saying that it was “like a Bunuel film shown on the side of a building during a rain storm.” This time around, lo and behold, he has decided to aim for clarity and if this song is any indication, he’s at least part of the way there. “Time is a Lion” has the sort of barroom swing the likes of which labelmate Tom Waits might concoct, but where Waits tends to deconstruct and croak, and Henry previously might have piled on sounds and squeezed away the melody, he this time opts for a surface-level smoothness, even as the percussion beats out a distinctive pulse and the piano alternates between music hall chords and jazzy washes. Lyrically Henry is full of resonant pronouncements and abstract narrative of the sort Bob Dylan has specialized in since the late ’90s. Good stuff. “Time is a Lion” is from Henry’s forthcoming Civilians CD, to be released next month on Anti Records. MP3 via the Anti web site.

THIS WEEK’S FINDS
Aug. 5-11

“Crown Victoria” – Robbers on High Street
An unmistakeable Kinks-iness animates this boppy little nugget–the opening clearly echoes “A Well Respected Man”–but that’s just the beginning of “Crown Victoria”‘s charms. Working with noted Italian film composer Daniele Luppi, who had previously never worked as a producer on a rock album, the NYC-based trio Robbers on High Street have found their British Invasion-y ’60s sound enhanced with a Spaghetti Western-y ’60s sound, and damn if it doesn’t work rather well, if only because in retrospect all those sounds kind of blend together historically anyway. So, the slowly-strummed chord that starts the song happens not on an acoustic guitar (as per the Kinks) but on a twangy, throbbing guitar straight out of Ennio Morricone. (An acoustic guitar soon joins in, however.) The piercing organ that chimes in around 0:38? Spaghetti time again. All this insider homage-ing will get us only so far, however. To me, the song takes off when we get to the chorus, which has a swingy, winning melody, deftly enhanced when the organ begins to add some swoopy, ascending lines below. Keep an ear open for the bass next, which plays some acrobatic lines itself when the second verse comes along. And stay tuned for the wacky (but still somehow retro-y) duck-like sounds (maybe they’re just vocals? hard to say) in the instrumental coda. “Crown Victoria” is from the CD Grand Animals, released in July on New Line Records. The MP3 is courtesy of New Line.

“Throwin’ Shapes” – Minus the Bear
Bright, brisk, and determined, this song is in the mix this week not just because I like it but because it sounds exactly right between its two TWF-mates. And I can’t say why that is, at all. I do know that I particularly enjoy the interplay between Jake Snider’s yearning vocal style and the painterly guitar licks brushed around him by the gifted David Knudson. I am also captivated by the comfortable but unplaceable soundscape here–although the opening recalls Haircut One Hundred (I kid you not), there’s something in the blend of beat and arrangement that sounds neither like typical ’00s indie rock nor like the music of any particular past era. It’s easy enough to do that if you’re just trying to be weird, but this Seattle quintet manages to sound at once fresh and familiar. “Throwin’ Shapes” is a song off the band’s Planet of Ice CD, scheduled for release later this month on Suicide Squeeze Records. The MP3 is via Suicide Squeeze.

“Escape City Scrapers” – Mono in VCF
Another quintet from Washington State; very different music. The sublime mystery of this song is how something that threatens at first to be syrupy and too retro for its own good ends up, rather quickly, sounding so pure and vibrant. Clearly a lot of credit here belongs to singer Kim Miller (such a substantive and alluring voice!), but let’s pay attention as well to the grand aural structure that supports her reverb-laced vocals, which is nothing less than a creamy orchestral souffle that knowingly marries Phil Spector-ish majesty with darker James Bond-ian swank. Either way, yes, we’re back in the ’60s, inspiration-wise. At the same time, this is no slavish tribute. Mono in VCF understands its influences (the band’s name is a nod towards Spector, who recorded in mono; VCF stands for voltage-controlled filter, which is a Moog synthesizer gizmo) but transcends them through a willingness to be creative on its own terms as well. Although the echoey strings and occasional drum bashes help build a sort of “wall of sound” (Spector’s famous production effect), the band here steers clear of both the “Phil Spector beat” (think “Be My Baby”) and any girl-group-style pop tune; what we get instead is a snakey, spy-movie melody, some wonderful piano interjections, and grand washes of synthesizers that sound maybe like something Portishead might have done if someone took their sampler away. All in all, a sweeping and memorable bit of work from this unsigned (but probably not for long) Tacoma band with but one four-song EP to its name so far. (The debut album is expected either late this year or early next.) The MP3 is via the band’s site; thanks again to the 3hive gang for the head’s up.


The future (or not) of the album
a Fingertips commentary
part 2 (see 8/2 for part 1)

The CD broke the spell of the record album.

Interestingly how we all kind of intuited this before long, even if it was nothing we thought to articulate. The use of the word “album” diminished as the CD era progressed. Instead of saying, “Did you get the new Radiohead album?” you maybe, more often, said, “Did you get the new Radiohead CD?”

Bonus tracks were but the first step. Once music fans had pretty much abandoned the vinyl LP, by the early ’90s, the industry found itself released once and for all from the time restriction of the vinyl LP. After which point albums, sure enough, became longer. Quite a bit longer.

While there are certainly individual exceptions to the rule, as a whole, the music industry never makes decisions based on quality, and I never expect it to. To wonder whether longer albums were better albums, qualitatively, was besides the point: longer albums were better quantitatively so longer albums by and large became the rule of thumb. I mean, aren’t 16 songs better than 10? Eighteen better than 16? Etcetera.

Price was part of it. I do not doubt for a minute that industry honchos figured they could push $17, $18, and $19 CDs onto the music-buying public more easily if the CDs came with 16 or 18 or 20 songs and lasted more than an hour than they could if artists had only 10 or 12 songs and only 40 minutes of music.

It’s one thing to add songs to make an album last 60 minutes instead of 40 minutes. It’s a whole other thing to make those 20 minutes really good, not to mention fit in with the other 40. I don’t know about you, but my CD collection is chock full of discs that would be truly outstanding if they were 35 or 40 minutes, but seem kind of average at 65 minutes. (Of course, what do we do with these CDs, with our iPods? We upload only the good 35 or 40 minutes, don’t we.)

I’m not here to argue with the industry philosophically. These were business people making business decisions. I am here to point out, however, that a combination of technological capacity and business acumen (or not) fostered an age of 60-plus-minute albums that absolutely and positively led to the demise of the very thing that was being marketed. (Ironic, ain’t it?)

Thing is, albums really do have an appropriate length. With the benefit, again, of historical hindsight, it’s clear that a vinyl LP-length album tends to work as a listening experience in a way that a CD-length album does not.

There is nothing magical about this; it’s kind of just ergonomics, in a way: how long it feels comfortable to sit and focus on one somewhat connected piece of music. And the fact that the vinyl LP works for this and the CD doesn’t is rather accidental, since neither the CD nor the vinyl LP were developed with pop albums particularly in mind.

Originally used for classical recordings, long-playing records, when they finally made their way to the market in a pop music setting, were nothing more than the latest collection of a performer’s songs, with no particular rhyme or reason to look and feel, or even sequencing. It took some 10 to 15 years between the widespread emergence of the 33 1/3 LP in the early to mid-1950s and the arrival of record albums in the artistic sense of the word–that is, the album as some sort of coherent (though not necessarily thematic) work of art

Circumstances by then had arisen that prompted recording artists to look at the LP as a larger-scale canvas on which to paint their musical ideas. It’s well-known that the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson was inspired by the Beatles 1965 album Rubber Soul to produce Pet Sounds, released in 1966, which in turn inspired 1967’s Sgt. Pepper, after which the floodgates opened.

For the next couple of decades, cultural and technological circumstances combined to keep the vinyl album at the center of the pop music market, during which a great majority of pop music’s classic albums were produced.

But in the latter half of the album’s heyday, along came the CD, which took its own 10 to 15 years to change how music was being conveyed to music buyers. And here’s me in 2007 finally realizing that however many great songs there are out there these days there are oddly few great albums.

Leading me to realize that it is the CD, and not the internet, that steered the music industry back to its earlier, pre-Pet Sounds position: record albums in themselves have no artistic integrity as a coherent whole, they’re just a collection of songs for people to buy. Record companies, artists, and music buyers alike have been slowly and steadily over the last 10 to 15 years adjusting their sense of what releasing music is about to the reality of the CD rather than the vinyl LP.

And then the internet came in for the kill.

Because if CDs are just collections of songs for people to buy, and it turns out here in the 21st century that people can, online, buy all the songs they want–or steal them–without buying albums at all, then this is a logical outgrowth of how the music industry began to treat albums on CDs versus albums on vinyl records.

Furthermore, with CDs having stretched albums beyond agreeable length and/or having “bonused” them beyond recognition, it only makes sense that people feel no particular affinity for the collections of songs they’re being sold on CDs now that they can make their own collections of songs–playlists, as they are often called in this online setting.

Re-examining my opening circumstance in light of all this, what does it really mean that I’ve been unable by and large to find albums that I really like? Clearly, as noted at the top, there are no shortage of CDs being released. But with everyone fully adjusted to the CD experience, with the vinyl album experience a quaint relic of the past, I say it’s no coincidence that albums with the spark of that experience in their laser-etched grooves are so hard to come by.

And I have to own up to the fact that my feeling that there aren’t many really good albums these days is no doubt due in part to my own diminished interest in this sort of album, as fostered by the environment I’ve been describing. It’s an odd admission for someone who always thought so highly of albums, or always thought I thought highly of them.

But I’ve been pretty happy with my iTunes library, and shuffling through my odd but engaging assortment of songs on my iPod. Lots and lots of great new songs I’m listening to, I have to tell you. And, yes, of course, the occasional great album. I do not mean to imply by all this that no one is releasing good albums at all.

I hope, still, to post reviews to the Album Bin. Occasionally. And I pledge to myself no longer to worry about not posting.

That said, I have a suspicion that we haven’t heard the last of the album. And if this turns out to be the case, the album’s survival and re-emergence will be grounded in a recognition that the “record album” as often, now, romanticized was a phenomenon born of a time and place and technology and culture that just isn’t coming back. If the album is to have a renaissance someday, it will have to be reinvented–and reinvented in a way that is as inconceivable to us in 2007 as Pet Sounds would have been to Pat Boone fans in 1959. The person or people who accomplish this wondrous task will have themselves grown up listening to CDs. Ironic, ain’t it?

In the interest, at long last, of doing a bit more with this blog beyond posting the three weekly song picks, I’m going occasionally to post some other things here that have gone up on the web site. Commentary pieces make a logical–if lengthy–addition to this blog, so given that I’ve just written a new one, that’s what I’m going to post today. Or, actually, I’m going to post the first half of it here today, and then the second half of it in another few days. So it’s not too much to read at once, basically. If you really can’t wait, there will be a link at the bottom to click to join up with the rest of it on the Fingertips (non-blog) web site. Also, so you know, the full version of the essay has a number of footnotes to click on that I am not bothering to code in here. The essay still works without them.

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The future (or not) of the album
a Fingertips Commentary

A year and a half after unleashing Fingertips onto an unsuspecting public (that was way back in May ’03), I got it in my head that I wanted to augment the MP3 reviews I was doing weekly with an album review section. The Album Bin, accordingly, was born, at the end of 2004.

A page of paragraph-long CD reviews, the Album Bin has sputtered along ever since, with me intermittently pledging to post reviews more regularly, and then that never really happening.

I know that I limited myself by deciding that I would only review albums that I really liked. But I didn’t, at the outset, recognize what a mighty limitation this would become. Because what turns out to have kept me from writing a lot of reviews has been, rather simply, my inability to find many albums that I liked enough to want to write about.

So here’s me, week after week finding song after song that I really love, but month after month hearing a negligible number of albums that get me equally excited. For the longest time I didn’t think about this too carefully, and used this information merely to feel badly that I wasn’t updating the Album Bin very often.

But I finally realized there’s something bigger going on here.

Lots of songs I love, few albums that I love: this sounds in a nutshell like the problem the entire music industry is grappling with. People are buying songs, not albums. And of course there are many who are not buying at all but simply downloading without paying–and not all of these people, alas, are visiting Fingertips and downloading legally.

As a music fan, you may have read an article or two (or five) declaring the album to be more or less dead, if not now then very soon. (Never mind, for the moment, the fact that there are still tons of CDs being released every week.) For proof, everyone points to the latest generation of music fans, who have little to no interest in buying albums in the way that anyone older than 25 or 30 remembers doing, and maybe still does.

So, yes, folks, it’s the internet that has killed the album. Might as well blame Al Gore and be done with it.

Or maybe not. First, there’s the simple point that the album may not, after all, die. The main reason I can find in support of the album’s survival is, to be honest, the fact that so many techno-zealots believe it’s a goner. And techno-zealots are perhaps our single most unreliable prognosticators.

But there’s a second and more complicated point to the story because in many ways, despite the ongoing onslaught of weekly releases, the album is already in serious hibernation. I do not, however, see this as the internet’s fault. With the benefit of hindsight, I can see that the record album was gravely injured by something we all thought at the time was giving it new life–the CD itself.

Maybe we should define our terms here. When people speak of the death of the album, they may be talking about one of two distinct things: the disappearance of physical CDs entirely, replaced by downloadable songs only; or, somewhat more subtly, the end of an era in which pop musicians release songs that are grouped together in some sort of cohesive way, in which the entire work is thought out as a whole and feels, as a listening experience, to be a unit of some sort.

I am not, here, concerned that much with the fate of the physical CD, and I don’t think that’s what most true music fans fret about when talking about the death of the album. They worry, instead, about a musical world in which we are denied the pleasures of pop music presented in a larger format than a single song–a musical world without good albums, basically. Many seem to believe that a lack of a physical product would hasten this day, which is why the two distinct ideas–no CDs on the one hand, no albums on the other–are so intertwined.

To me, however, the ongoing existence, or not, of the physical CD is actually besides the point, because its indisputable existence for the last 25 years has slowly but steadily eroded the idea of the record album as anything that many people care about.

Go back to the basic problem: lots of good songs out there, not a lot of good albums. How did this come about? Not because of iTunes. Because of the CD. Because the CD was actually unsuited to the task of being a record album. To be more precise, the CD as developed and promoted by the music industry became unsuited to the task of being a record album.

Where this story really begins, then, is with the number 74. As developed by Sony, the compact disc had the (weirdly random) capacity of 74 minutes. Vinyl LPs, by contrast, seemed to max out at around 52 minutes.

The CD’s extra-large capacity is something we heard about but might not have noticed much at first. Because when the CD was introduced in 1982, CDs and vinyl LPs had to coexist. Obviously not everyone purchased a CD player right away, meaning that albums had to be produced that fit onto vinyl LPs, despite the CD’s 40 percent greater capacity. The decade would end before the CD established itself as the preemiment medium for recorded music.

In the meantime, however, one of the principal ways the music industry sought to convince music fans to start buying CDs instead of LPs was by re-releasing popular albums with extra songs of one sort of another. These would typically be songs that were recorded at the same time but not ultimately included on the album, or alternate takes and/or live versions of album tracks.

This seemed like a win-win: the record company sells the same album, essentially, twice, while filling up some of the “empty space” on the CD (which by the way maybe helped justify the higher price), and the consumer gets a new version without vinyl pops and scratches and hey with a few extra songs. These so-called “bonus tracks” were many music buyers’ first encounter with the CD’s larger capacity.

Bonus tracks were also the first stake in the heart of the record album as we know it.

A seemingly small issue, adding bonus tracks to an existing album that had been thought through and laid out without them? Definitely, to music buyers newly enamored of the silvery, futuristic CD in those sleek, hard-shell cases. To talk about spoiling artistic integrity seemed, maybe, quaint.

But this became a slippery slope. Bonus tracks were first a kind of clever add-on (sort of). But eventually they led to an important shift. The album was no longer the same as the thing you had in your hand, it was something contained on the thing you had in your hand. The vinyl LP was the album; the CD was just a storage medium containing the album, and maybe other stuff as well.

Packaging furthered the disconnect. A stack of vinyl LPs looks like an array of different items; a stack of CDs looks like a pile of more or less identical things. Storage media. Those of you old enough to remember pre-CD vinyl record albums will remember that some music fans sorely complained about how the digital format, so much smaller than a vinyl LP, took away the sensory and sensual experience of the album as something to hold and read and study. By and large this was seen as an aesthetic issue. But it was more than that, ultimately.

The CD broke the spell of the record album.

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to be continued……
or, click here to finish reading at the Fingertips web site