“Beside You” – Magana

MIdtempo rocker w/ distortion & heart

“Beside You” – Magana

A bashy midtempo rocker with instant character, “Beside You” has a circular melody, a distorted wall of background sound, and the compelling voice of Jeni Magaña leading us through a very ’20s narrative of personal and cultural uncertainty. And while these are themes that could strike a listener as over-familiar, there is something about Magaña’s tone and resolve that grabs at the soul here. Give it a few listens and see if you don’t feel it too.

A central, potent feature is the juxtaposition of a double-time verse with a half-time chorus, the latter of which gives the song a recurring place of aural (and lyrical) solace to land. And take a listen to the variegated guitar work. First, there’s the ringing guitar line that provides the instrumental hook in the introduction; next we get some blurry guitar noise in the second half of the verse, contributing to the aforementioned wall of sound; we also get some high squawky notes livening the verses starting around 0:58, sounding nearly (but not nearly) like mistakes, and then, not to be outdone, some low buzzy accents rising up around 1:48.

Another of the song’s primary characteristics is its outpouring of lyrics in the double-time verse, which seems an of-the-moment singer/songwriter technique (an excellent model here is “Kyoto” by Phoebe Bridgers). Magaña puts such tender heart into both the words and the performance that she finds the authentic core in a songwriting mode that can veer towards the stale or robotic in the wrong hands.

Jeni loses her first name, and her tilde, to perform as Magana. Originally from Bakersfield, and now in Los Angeles, via Brooklyn, she has most recently been on stage as the touring bassist with Mitski. She is also part of the intermittent duo pen pin, with Emily Moore. As a solo artist, she was previously featured on Fingertips in October 2016. “Beside You” is the lead track from her new album, Teeth, which comes out in a month on the Audio Antihero label (whose tagline, for the record, is “Specialists in Commercial Suicide”). You can check more of it out, and pre-order it, on Bandcamp.

I’ll try not to think

Eclectic Playlist Series 11.01 – January 2024

The year 2023 didn’t come and go with much that resembled joy but let’s at least recognize that it was a pretty darned good year for music. Then again, independent of the dreadful news that afflicts our global community month after month, one year to the next, music seems always to deliver–which is to say, every year turns out to be a pretty darned good year for music. (We receive at least that consolation, and it’s no small one.) Note that I am speaking from neither the thoroughly mainstream nor the rigorously avant garde; I’m talking about quality music that rises up somewhat but not entirely left of center. Music that’s accessible but thoughtful, engaging but interesting, music that hasn’t given up on the organic involvement of human bodies and human consciousness. That kind of music. You may not see in the “What’s Hot” playlists but it’s out there, thriving artistically (if not financially).

All of which is a roundabout way of acknowledging the presence of four 2023 songs in this first playlist of 2024. Typically, in seeking balanced chronological distribution among the 20 songs, I aim not to have more than three songs from any given decade in each playlist. So much, this month, for that rule. In and around the new-ish music you’ll encounter the usual admixture of decades and styles, a 20-song journey that hangs together, however elusively, from start to finish.

As discussed last month, the artist roster resets in January–any artist featured in 2023 (or before) is free again to populate a playlist in 2024. Even so, for what it’s worth, this month’s mix hosts 12 artists who never previously had a song featured in an EPS playlist dating all the way back to 2014. Here is what’s in store to start the new year; extra notes as usual below the widget:

1. “She Moves On” – Paul Simon (The Rhythm of the Saints, 1990)
2. “All Night Long” – Peter Murphy (Love Hysteria, 1988)
3. “Cars and Parties” – Edith Frost (Wonder Wonder, 2001)
4. “Monticello” – The Monty Alexander Trio (We’ve Only Just Begun, 1972)
5. “XO Skeleton” – La Force (XO Skeleton, 2023)
6. “Talking Backwards” – Real Estate (Atlas, 2014)
7. “You’re Gonna Make Me Love You” – Sandi Sheldon (single, 1967)
8. “I Love You Honey, Give Me a Beer” – Blondie (demo, 1980)
9. “Hudson” – Allison Miller (Rivers in our Veins, 2023)
10. “Make You Better” – The Decemberists (What a Terrible World, What a Beautiful World, 2015)
11. “Nearer Than Heaven” – Delays (Faded Seaside Glamour, 2004)
12. “To Cry You a Song” – Jethro Tull (Benefit, 1970)
13. “Sasha, Sissi y el Círculo de Baba ” – Fito Páez feat. Mon Laferte (EADDA9223, 2023)
14. “6 Underground” – Sneaker Pimps (Becoming X, 1996)
15. “My World is Empty Without You” – The Supremes (single, 1965)
16. “Hard to Explain” – The Strokes (Is This It?, 2001)
17. “Someone to Talk To” – The Police (B-side, 1983)
18. “Our Town” – Iris DeMent (Infamous Angel, 1992)
19. “Spanish Dancers” – Bob Welch (Rebel Rouser, 1979)
20. “Requiem” – Allison Russell (The Returner, 2023)

Random notes:

* The above-mentioned artist reset gave me the opportunity to find a slot for a great, lesser-known Blondie song just a couple of months after the band’s last appearance here. I have a giant soft spot for Blondie, a band that seems to me underrated despite the mass popularity of a few of their biggest hits. The song here is a demo version of something that was re-envisioned and re-titled before making it to an album–as “Go Through It,” it landed on 1980’s Autoamerican. The lyrics were fiddled with and a semi-gratuitous, Mexican-style horn section was added on the LP version; the demo version is punchier, looser, and happily reminiscent of some of the band’s earlier recordings. I have nothing against trying new styles and directions, but was happy to discover how Blondie could sound like a classic version of themselves even in a time frame in which they were beginning to re-imagine themselves into nonexistence.

* While the unusually literate music blog Said the Gramophone has gone dormant as a regular source of posts for a number of years now, the site’s founder, novelist Sean Michaels, still assembles at year-end his annual list of favorite songs. Each year there are 100 of them, and they veer towards the 21st-century hipster’s characteristic mix of the blatantly popular and the inscrutably offbeat. The descriptions are singular, worth the trip alone, and even as most of the songs listed edge beyond the range of my own peculiar musical taste, I always locate 10 or 15 among them that transform into favorites of mine as well. One of which, now, is “XO Skeleton,” from the Canadian singer/songwriter Ariel Engle, who does musical business as La Force. Michaels calls it “a tune about mortality and care that flexes, shimmers, iridescent as a beetle.” Engle is also a current member of the Canadian collective Broken Social Scene. Note that only one song featured on Fingertips in 2023 made the STG list, but it was up there at number seven: Debby Friday’s “So Hard to Tell.”

* Fito Páez is an acclaimed and popular Argentinian musician; his profile here in the U.S. is decidedly lower. He peaked commercially with his 1992 album El Amor Después del Amor (“Love After Love”), which sold some 750,000 albums in Argentina, but he has nevertheless had a long and busy career since then, with more than two dozen studio albums to his name to date. He’s won a number of Latin Grammy Awards over the course of his career, and in 2021 was given a Latin Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award. In 2023, he released the album EADDA9223, which is a song by song re-recording and re-vamping of his previously mentioned hit 1992 LP. Paéz has been quoted as saying that this project aimed to prove “that there are no sacred, untouchable albums.” The new version of the album–I’ve yet to discover where the album’s title comes from–features a variety of Spanish-speaking guest musicians, among them Ángela Aguilar and Andrés Calamaro, and also Elvis Costello. (Costello had previously worked with Paéz on Spanish Model, Costello’s 2021 Spanish-language version of This Year’s Model. That album features all the original Attractions backing tracks, topped by new vocals sung in Spanish by Spanish-speaking artists. Paéz sings “Radio, Radio.”) The vocalist sharing the spotlight with Paéz on the single “Sasha, Sissí y el Círculo de Baba” is the Chilean-born, Mexico-based singer/songwriter Mon Laferte, a musical star in her own right.

* Andy Summers sang only four or five lead vocals while with the Police; “Someone To Talk To” was one of them, and it was only a B-side to the 1983 single “Wrapped Around Your Finger.” (The piquant and more outre “Mother,” another Summers composition and lead vocal, did make it onto the Synchronicity album that year.) A skilled and inventive guitarist, he had had a busy career, largely as a session player, before joining the Police in 1977, replacing the band’s original guitarist, Henry Padovani. Since the Police’s hiatus in 1984 and effective dissolution by 1986, Summers has released 13 solo albums (all instrumental except for the first), along with eight albums in collaboration with other musicians. His most recent is 2021’s Harmonics of the Night.

* There is a music industry cliché about the so-called sophomore slump; the often expressed idea is that a musician has 20-odd years to make their first album, and six months or so to make their second. Thus, in theory, the lesser quality. Whether generally true or not, Allison Russell has easily escaped the trap, following her sparkling 2021 debut, Outside Child, with an equally impressive second album in 2023, The Returner. Spanning the emotions from the mournful to the jubilant, the album features a good number of songs that sound like instant classics, so sturdy are the melodies and arrangements. The timeless and uplifting title track is a particular triumph, but I’m also partial to the closing track, “Requiem,” which I’ve likewise employed as a closer this month. And by the way if you happened to miss Outside Child, you might want to correct that oversight.

* A reminder that you can have this delivered to your inbox every month if you sign up for the newsletter–details to the right in the sidebar. The email version features a couple of bonus notes each month, for the information hungry.

“Bone Dry” – Blood

Short and craggy

“Bone Dry” – Blood

Chunky. guitar-driven, and intriguing, “Bone Dry”–song length, 1:44–ends before you can get your arms around its off-center rhythms and elusive declarations. Despite–or perhaps because of–the song’s evanescent idiosyncrasies, the thing is thoroughly appealing, to my ears.

As a composition at once short and knotty, “Bone Dry” may be similar in length to a certain amount of current pop, but is dissimilar in vibe and resolve. Short songs have become more common in the TikTok era, in which exposure to music often comes in sub-1:00 fragments; many pop hits of the current day clock in not only under three minutes but under 2:30, and some even under 2:00. The first thing jettisoned in these pithy songs is any sense of a bridge; another short-song strategy is to offer just one verse and then a short, repeated chorus. There’s nothing inherently wrong with this, if artistic considerations drive the decisions. I suspect, however, that the shortening of songs is, mostly, happening via a death-circle feedback loop of streaming stats generated by our collective, information-overload-driven short attention spans.

But I digress. “Bone Dry” is in any case an example of a creatively satisfying short song: rather than present itself as a beat-forward, bridge-less, chorus-heavy earworm-wannabe, here’s a song that revels in its craggy folds and discrepancies. One consistent feature is a relentless avoidance of the first beat of a measure: neither the recurring guitar lick nor any of the lyrical lines start on the downbeat, which is traditionally the strongest beat of the measure and the foundation of a song’s rhythm and melody. That’s out the window here, which is what creates an ongoing sense of things being off-kilter, to the point where the time signature, while (I think) mostly a standard 4/4, feels ambiguous. Another way “Bone Dry” achieves its shortness without oversimplification is its elimination of anything resembling a coda; the ending is sudden, all but in mid-sentence.

Blood is a four-piece band based in Philadelphia that used to be a six-piece band based in Austin. “Bone Dry” is the latest of a handful of singles the group has released since 2019. You can check them all out on Bandcamp.

“When I’m Alone” – Rosa Mack

Appealing, slow-building scorcher

“When I’m Alone” – Rosa Mack

Slow-burning, slowly-swinging “When I’m Alone” is both a paragon of restraint and (if you wait for it) a let-it-all-hang-out scorcher. The song is steady and magnetic out of the gate, with its deliberate guitar lines and Rosa Mack’s beguiling tone and phrasing. Listen to how she sings “Well I can get used to just about anything” (0:29) as an elusive blend of singing and speaking, redolent of the implied physicality of lips and tongue and breath.

The accompanying instrumentation is precise and crafty, especially when it comes to the horns; check out, as an example, the way they start in one place (1:15) and head in unexpected directions (by 1:21). Then there’s the delicious, slowed-down punctuation these same horns provide at 2:04, a characteristic example here of less is more. The first guitar solo (2:13, with an immediate eight-second pause) presents another dose of fiery restraint.

But the star of the show is surely Mack herself, whose mighty presence is intimated in the song’s somewhat whispery beginnings and revealed increasingly as the song unfolds–first via Mack’s ongoingly deft singing and at last by way of unleashing her pent-up vocal power (from about 3:20 on). That upward glide her voice takes from 3:39 to 3:41 introduces a final climactic section of squalling guitars, foundational horn charts, and potent mostly wordless vocalizing.

“When I’m Alone” is the formidable debut single from the Brisbane-based singer/songwriter, released in November. I’ll be eager to hear more from her when she’s ready.

“Drum Machine” – Roman Ruins

Drummer singing about drumming

“Drum Machine” – Roman Ruins

The lifespan of a rock band in the 21st-century has grown stretchy and indistinct, given the long periods of recording inactivity that often characterizes life as an indie rocker. The band Death Cab for Cutie, now in their 28th year, have released but 10 albums; the Decemberists, 25 years in the game, have released just eight albums. The Kinks, by contrast, put out their 10th album in year eight of their existence. The music industry is obviously a very different animal in 2024 than it was in 1964, but the upshot is an ongoing sense of a time warp. For instance, here now is the New Orleans-based musician Graham LeDoux Hill, who does musical business as Roman Ruins, with a new single from a forthcoming album, and you turn around and see that his last album came out in 2014, while his previous visit to Fingertips was back in 2010. I can’t tell if this seems like ancient history or only yesterday. In any case, a simpler observation is that one can never be sure one has heard the last of any given indie enterprise at any given moment in time.

As for the latest from Roman Ruins, “Drum Machine” may seem a comfortable fit here in the 2020s, with its tight beat, carefully processed effects, and constrained but effective melody, but it also arrives as an homage of sorts to bygone music (and instrumentalists). There’s something warm and familiar about “Drum Machine”‘s laconic melodicism, and a ’70s-art-rock tinge to Hill’s blurry vocals (Eno in particular comes to mind). Meanwhile, you might catch the immediate lyrical reference to Mitch Mitchell, Charlie Watts, and Levon Helm, three classic rock drummers of high standing. And yet right away the contradiction: the song, after all, is called “Drum Machine” and the beat underlying the proceedings does initially sound automated. I am no percussion expert but my guess is that the drumming is actually unautomated, that Hill was initially imitating a drum machine; if I’m not imagining it there’s a subtle shift around 0:30 that suggests this.

The song, it turns out, reads in part as autobiographical; Hill is in fact a drummer, and has notably performed as the touring drummer for the bands Beach House and Papercuts–he even references the Papercuts song “Future Primitive” in the lyrics, which seem replete with elusive references and inside jokes. Hill sings with a lax authority, often behind the beat, which becomes its own sort of inside joke based on the song’s recurring refrain that “timing is everything.” The point he is making by the repeated phrase “I’ll be the drum machine”? Not sure. Perhaps it has to do with his experience drumming on tour for bands that are normally not full bands (Beach House: a duo; Papercuts: a solo project); on their records they likely use drum machines, but on stage they present a human drummer. “I’ll be the drum machine” may be Hill’s ongoing quip. And whether this is the story behind the song or not, there may well also be some metaphorical resonance to the concept. The all-too-human desire to achieve impossible perfection? Our impending status as second-class citizens to the robots? There’s probably also a story behind the song’s prominent, human-generated bass line, the playing of which is credited to Paul Provosty. But, like much about this agreeable song, this remains unrevealed.

“Drum Machine” is an initial release from the Roman Ruins album Isotropes, coming out next month. You can read more about it, and listen to one other song, over on Bandcamp.

The soft spot in my heart

Eclectic Playlist Series 10.11 – December 2023

I’ve curated one holiday-related song into my December playlist, and it’s right there at the top. On the one hand, there are plenty of other places to go for a more generous helping of holiday tunes, if that’s what you’re craving. But I also wanted attention paid to this most humane of seasonal compositions, that it shouldn’t get lost in a candy-coated flow of generic Christmas-ing. “The Christians and the Pagans” by Dar Williams comes to us in 2023 like a long-lost if slightly time-addled friend, a song about personal connection and tolerance, told with open-hearted humor, that reminds us how much these qualities have been shoved aside by the social-media-fueled, extremist-friendly madness that has ruled our collective lives for the past decade. On the one hand, this a straightforward story song with a subtle emotional wallop. (For whatever reason, when Dar sings the line “It’s Christmas and your daughter’s here” I get a lump in my throat, every time. And I’m Jewish.) On the other hand, I read the scene with my 2020s perspective and get a bigger, more intrusive lump in my throat, feeling into the song’s implicit innocence and hopeful fellowship. No one at the dinner table was irrationally angry, no one unwilling to consider another point of view; not unrelatedly, no one at the table was looking at their iPhone, if only because they didn’t exist. Meaning, no one in that world was busy taking pictures of themselves, or insulting strangers from a distance, or blatantly ignoring the people they were sharing space with. I grieve the loss of that world when I hear this song. Whatever improvements we have made together since the 1990s seem not necessarily worth the tradeoff.

Beyond the first track, and perhaps the second, there isn’t any holiday material here, although one can always read between the lines. These mixes, as you know, never arrive to present an overarching theme or particular destination; the ongoing intent is, rather, the (ideally) nimble amalgamation of songs from different eras, a willful stream of divergent sounds towards the goal of one inclusive listening experience. This is the year’s last mix, which means that my self-imposed restriction–no artist featured more than once in a calendar year–will reset the next time we meet. At the same time, I’m always seeking to bring in artists each month that haven’t previously been heard here. This month you’ll encounter nine artists who are entirely new to the Eclectic Playlist Series, not featured at all in any mix dating back to 2014.

Here’s the lineup for December; extra notes below the widget:

1. “The Christians and the Pagans” – Dar Williams (Mortal City, 1996)
2. “Thank God the Year is Finally Over” – Paper Route (Thank God the Year is Finally Over EP, 2009)
3. “Townie” – Mitski (Bury Me at Makeout Creek, 2014)
4. “Whole Wide World” – The Rolling Stones (Hackney Diamonds, 2023)
5. “You’ve Been in Love Too Long” – Martha Reeves & The Vandellas (single, 1965)
6. “Getting Away With It” – Electronic (single, 1989)
7. “Cybernaut” – Tonto’s Expanding Head Band (Zero Time, 1971)
8. “Limbs” – Emma Pollock (Watch the Fireworks, 2007)
9. “Fotzepolitic” – Cocteau Twins (Heaven or Las Vegas, 1990)
10. “Broken Wing” – Lowpines (In Silver Halides, 2018)
11. “All I Can Do” – Carpenters (Offering, 1969)
12. “The Book I Read” – Talking Heads (Talking Heads 77, 1977)
13. “Everything Reminds Me of My Dog” – Jane Siberry (Bound By the Beauty, 1989)
14. “Video Game” – Sufjan Stevens (The Ascension, 2020)
15. “Empty Chairs” – Don McLean (American Pie, 1971)
16. “I Remember” – The Roots (Undun, 2011)
17. “Retour a Vega” – The Stills (Wicker Park original soundtrack, 2004)
18. “Take Good Care of Me” – Rachel Sweet (Protect the Innocent, 1980)
19. “Jeff Goldblum” – Mattiel (Georgia Gothic, 2022)
20. “Astral Weeks” – Van Morrison (Astral Weeks, 1968)

Random notes:

* Mitski is a compelling singer and songwriter, fully inhabiting a variety of sonic landscapes. Her first two albums, in the early ’10s, were recorded as school projects while at SUNY Purchase, and veered mostly towards quiet, off-kilter compositions, some piano-driven, others more idiosyncratically scored. For her 2014 label debut, Bury Me at Makeout Creek, she picked up a guitar for the first time and the music in some cases went in new directions. “Townie” is crunchy and catchy and may take you aback a bit if you’re more familiar with her more recent, silkier (but still idiosyncratic) output.

* I like how the Rolling Stones sound on this new record–snappy, interested, even vibrant, with Mick in fine voice. I’m less in love with the songs themselves; with a couple of exceptions, the songwriting strikes me as humdrummy as some of the generic-sounding song titles (“Depending On You,” “Mess It Up,” “Tell Me Straight”). “Whole Wide World,” however, has a bit of musical sparkle to it, to my ears. The riff-based groove is at once clean and dirty, as Stonesy as they come; on the heels of that, the unexpectedly melodic chorus is a bit of a delight. I salute these guys for still making it happen.

* When visiting the various decades, I often seek to find songs from different years in each decade, for variety’s sake. But sometimes two songs from the same year can be just as illustrative of a decade’s variety. Case in point: “Cybernaut” and “Empty Chairs,” both released in 1971, but would one ever suspect? They seem to be coming to us from different planets, never mind different years. “Cybernaut” is the lead track on one of rock’n’roll’s earliest synthesizer albums, while “Empty Chairs” is a warm and organic song featuring only acoustic guitar and voice. “Cybernaut” is forward-looking, mesmerizing groove, “Empty Chairs” evocative nostalgia. Merriam-Webster, by the way, claims that the first known use of the word cybernaut came in 1989. They are apparently not fans of pioneering electronic music outfits, never mind devotees of the classic British spy show The Avengers, the third episode of the fourth season of which was called “The Cybernauts,” and aired in 1965.

* Most people are familiar with the Carpenters for their run of soft-rock mega-hits in the early 1970s, and perhaps also for Karen Carpenter’s tragic trajectory. But before they became chart-toppers and household names, they had recorded an album called Offering, and were credited as Carpenters (no “the”). The LP went nowhere commercially, but was re-released the following year as Ticket to Ride, after their single “Close to You” went to #1 in the summer of 1970. Offering/Ticket to Ride is notable for being performed largely by Karen and Richard themselves (she on drums, he on keyboards) and for featuring Richard on lead vocals on half of the tracks. As you can tell from “All I Can Do,” the sound is rather different from the vibe they presented as the hits started rolling in that next year.

* While there is nothing at all wrong with Bonnie Raitt’s well-known cover of “You’ve Been in Love Too Long,” the Martha Reeves & The Vandellas original is unbeatable.

* The Stills’ song “Retour a Vega,” sung in French, was an early Fingertips favorite, featured originally here in 2004. The band, formed in Montreal in 2000, were something of a big indie deal back in the ’00s, but called it quits in 2011. The song appeared on the soundtrack to the movie Wicker Park, which featured a purposeful lineup of happening indie bands of the moment, including Death Cab for Cutie, Broken Social Scene, and Snow Patrol.

* I am not normally on board with long, repetitive and/or meandering songs, and furthermore have little patience for Van Morrison’s self-important improvisational shtick. And yet, “Astral Weeks”: somehow it all comes together here–the offhand, inscrutable lyrics, the marvelous acoustic groove, the incisive flute accents, the bass line hook, the wild string arrangements, all conspiring to take listeners, nearly against their will, on a seven-minute ride to some other world than our own. It goes on and on and I guess I enter the slipstream, or some such thing, because it feels over in a flash. For those who may be interested in more background about this song than you thought might be possible to report on, check out the most recent episode of Andrew Hickey’s monumental podcast series A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, which is partially what brought the song back to the front burner here (although I’ll note I had nearly included it in EPS 10.10, before the Hickey episode; it’s been in my “to be featured at some point” folder for a long time).

“How High” – The Usual Boys

Distinctive character, with guitars

“How High” – The Usual Boys

“How High” is a nifty, left-of-center rocker, pairing a sophisticated riff motif with a disco-derived bass line and hoping for the best. Which turns out to be pretty darn good. While the song doesn’t sound all that much like the Smiths, I sense a bit of a Smiths-like vibe here in terms of the idiosyncratic structure and distinctive character–and, more concretely, the central, lead-like role of the rhythm guitar. Who does this anymore? Probably a good number of people, you just don’t get a lot of them from the algoritihm.

The song takes its time establishing itself, but rather than this involving some sort of slow and/or repetitive vamping (a pet peeve of mine!), this is an introduction that introduces us, properly, to the variety of rhythm guitar refrains upon which the song is constructed. Front man Aleksi Oksanen enters at around 32 seconds, his resonant, slightly distorted baritone delivering a patter of nearly spoken lyrics with charismatic dexterity. The funked up bass line and itchy percussive touches add unanticipated texture, then step away as the chorus (1:03) reprises two of the riffs we heard at the outset: the first slowing down to half time (the “You say, ‘Jump!'” part), the second reasserting the pace (after the “I say, ‘How high?'” part) with a tumble of unresolved chords.

“How High” is a concise song, wrapping up in under three minutes, but still offers a sense of development, partially due to the unfolding guitar work, and partially due to production details that add appeal along the way, including a siren-like guitar heard first around 1:36, and an extra instrumental sound–a synthesizer, or some sort of processed guitar?–that chimes in at 2:20. These are small flourishes but I always appreciate it when someone is continuing to think about and play with a song’s sound from beginning to end, rather than recycling the early parts as is.

The Usual Boys are an international foursome (Finland, Scotland, England, Sweden) based in Germany and playing together since 2017. Released in October, “How High” is the third single to date released by the band from the as-yet forthcoming debut album. Thanks to the band for the MP3.

“Buddy” – Eileen Allway

Subtle power

“Buddy” – Eileen Allway

Deliberate and engaging, “Buddy” has an air of casual accomplishment about it. Everything seems just so, from the short, no-time-signature introduction to the easy, well-built melody of the verse, and then, best of all, the way the song opens up and out in the subtly brilliant chorus. Note too the different vocal ranges and aspects: in the verse, Allway employs a low tone, her voice nearly speaking as much as singing; while in the chorus her voice soars to a powerful upper range. And even here we get two iterations–the airy voice that takes us through the affecting chord change in the first line (starting at 0:51), and the stronger, yearning tone we get in the second line (starting at 0:57). There’s something almost Kate-Bushian in the air here.

The accompaniment feels at once minimal and well-rounded, a deft mix of acoustic and electric guitars. The slide guitar accents heard throughout communicate knowingly, in particular the upward-reaching note that leads into the chorus (first heard at 0:37): simple, striking, perfect. Meanwhile, also in the chorus, the prickly high notes that offer moody fill between the lines of lyrics deliver entirely different but equally canny enhancement. The second time the chorus comes around, lower-register guitar lines add to the carefully crafted atmosphere. Speaking of which, while the lyrics are somewhat hard to decipher, there’s one clear, telling moment, which is at the end of the chorus, when Allway sings, with a pang, “I want to make you fall in love.” Notice how the words pull up short of music here; how much an added “…with me” is implied but unstated. That’s devious in a good way.

Not outlasting its welcome, the song disintegrates at 2:10 with some initial noise, then fading slowly in a mush of distant, repeating vocals, quivering instrumentation, and, near the end, an ominous line of descending, Beatlesque strings, which happen to echo the opening notes of the introduction–another sign of the attentive craft involved in putting “Buddy” together.

Eileen Allway is a singer/songwriter based in the Los Angeles area. “Buddy” is her latest single, released last month. You can (and should!) check out her music on Bandcamp. Thanks to Eileen for the MP3.

“The Town Where I’m Livin Now” – Grandaddy

Bittersweet ode

“The Town Where I’m Livin Now” – Grandaddy

Grandaddy is a venerable band with a dedicated following and a knack for creating quirky, spacey, melodic indie rock; at the center of the sound is the sweet, sometimes high-pitched tenor of front man Jason Lytle. They’ve been around, with at least one notable hiatus, since 1992; their catalog is worth exploring, and isn’t as extensive as you might assume, given the on-and-off longevity–there have only been six original studio albums to date. Live albums and compilation albums are another matter. Case in point: Sumday: Excess Baggage, a B-side and rarities collection spun off the 2003 album Sumday and released digitally in August. “The Town Where I’m Livin Now” is a song that’s been around for years, but without an official studio release until it landed on this 2023 album.

The song is a swaying, bittersweet ode to, let’s face it, a surreal hellhole of a town. I assume that’s part of the joke and/or statement: we all of us here on planet Earth live among all sorts of unpleasantness and disaster, and–if we’re lucky–life goes on. Lytle, as he does, can sound a bit like Neil Young’s mischievous younger brother; the voice is high and winsome and seems to come with a baked-in wink or maybe just a shrug. And if this hits the ear at first like a simple, waltz-time acoustic strummer, keep listening. To begin with, there’s a burbling sound living at the bottom of the mix that doesn’t go away, you just kind of get used to it. Cascading piano arpeggios are buttressed by some looney-bin electronics. And the liturgical way Lytle presents these wacko lyrics is a central part of the not-actually-very-funny joke.

You can check out the whole album on Bandcamp. MP3 via KEXP.

At least we get to watch the show

Eclectic Playlist Series 10.10 – November 2023

As the American baseball season has drawn (at last!) to a close, I’m pulling from the immense scrap heap of musical history a semi-obscure piece of jazzy pop named after a baseball player with the unusual name of Van Lingle Mungo. Mungo was a talented pitcher–a five-time All-Star, playing 11 seasons for the Brooklyn Dodgers and three for the New York Giants in the 1930s and 1940s–but we’d have zero reason to recall him at this point were it not for Dave Frishberg’s weirdly compelling song. With lyrics that are nothing more than names of baseball players from the 1940s strung artfully together, the song “Van Lingle Mungo” was a favorite of the legendary NYC radio DJ Vin Scelsa back in the day, which is how I came to know of it as a relative youngster. Something somewhere reminded me of it this fall, leading to its inclusion at the bottom of this month’s mix. Enjoy the autumnal mood and marvel in particular at the way the players’ names scan perfectly as lyrics.

“Van Lingle Mungo” also acts as an idiosyncratic, unintended bookend to the playlist’s opener, which is another song, now that I think about it, that features lyrics that are merely a list of items: King Crimson’s “Elephant Talk,” in which each verse is comprised of words related to talking, the verses going in alphabetical order from A to E. My favorite moment is in the fourth verse, when vocalist Adrian Belew breaks the format to sing “These are words with a D this time.”

In between these two odd but potent songs you’ll find the usual brew of different sounds and decades intermingling as one extended listening experience. Here, specifically, is what you are in for; extra notes below the widget:

1. “Elephant Talk” – King Crimson (Discipline, 1981)
2. “Bootleg Firecracker” – Middle Kids (single, 2023)
3. “Her Eyes are a Blue Million Miles” – Captain Beefheart (Clear Spot, 1972)
4. “Driven Away” – Mary Lou Lord (Speeding Motorcycle EP, 2001)
5. “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” – Tammi Terrell (Irresistible, 1965)
6. “That Tone of Voice” – Amy Rigby (Diary of a Mod Housewife, 1996)
7. “Australia” – The Shins (Wincing the Night Away, 2007)
8. “Dreaming” – Blondie (Eat to the Beat, 1979)
9. “Eucalyptus” – The National (First Two Pages of Frankenstein, 2023)
10. “Haunt Me” – Sade (Stronger Than Pride, 1988)
11. “Ugly Beauty” – Thelonius Monk (Underground, 1968)
12. “The Big Show” – The Extraordinaires (The Postcard EP, 2011)
13. “Inbetweener” – Sleeper (Smart, 1995)
14. “I’ve Got a Need For You” – David Ruffin (David, recorded 1970-71; released 2004)
15. “Down in the Valley” – The Broken West (I Can’t Go On, I’ll Go On, 2006)
16. “The Voice” – The Moody Blues (Long Distance Voyager, 1981)
17. “Red Horse” – Corinne Bailey Rae (Black Rainbows, 2023)
18. “Wanderlust” – Polly Scattergood (Arrows, 2013)
19. “Talisman” – Air (Moon Safari, 1998)
20. “Van Lingle Mungo” – Dave Frishberg (single, 1969)

Random notes:

* “I Can’t Believe You Love Me” was Tammi Terrell’s debut single for Motown, recorded when she was only 20. When her first few records didn’t gain much commercial traction, Berry Gordy partnered her with Marvin Gaye for a series of singles that became major hits, starting with the indelible “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” in 1967. But health problems, which dated back to severe headaches suffered as a child, soon began to interfere with Terrell’s ability to perform. Later that same year she collapsed on stage while singing with Gaye. She was subsequently diagnosed with a brain tumor. After an initial operation she continued to record and perform but her condition would steadily decline. When she died in 1970 she was only 24.

* The National’s cryptically-named album First Two Pages of Frankenstein may be the first release of theirs that captured my ears without hesitation. “Eucalyptus” is one of a number of excellent tracks. That said, I have yet to find time to investigate their surprise follow-up recording, Laugh Track, which shares cover art but offers up 12 new songs just five months after Frankenstein‘s release. It’s almost as if my mind and/or heart can only absorb a certain amount of input from any given artist in the course of a year or so. I’ll get to Laugh Track, which is probably quite good too, but it may yet take a while.

* I missed the memo on this but I am now belatedly glad to know that Mary Lou Lord started singing again in the mid-’10s. I had heard about the serious problem she had with her vocal cords some ten years earlier; it didn’t sound good at the time. And then I lost track of her. (There’s so much to keep track of!) So I’m just now realizing that she returned in 2015 with her first album since 2004, the self-released Backstreet Angels. More recently, the British label Fire Records released a career retrospective double-album last year called She’d Be a Diamond, with all the good stuff–a great introduction to a special artist if you’re not familiar with her. “Driven Away” is a song from the 2001 mini-EP Speeding Motorcycle, and can also be found on the 2022 Fire Records release.

* It’s a bit startling to listen to “The Big Show” and realize that the Extraordinaires, from Philadelphia, released the song in 2011. Were things already that bad back then? They wrote this when Twitter was still on the upswing, and the idea of President Donald Trump would have seemed a bad joke. Here’s how it starts:

We say it like it’s true then watch it put down its roots
And blossom from the gossip into truth
We’re in the weeds up to our knees
It’s hard to tell the poison from the fruit

Little did they know! The Extraordinaires have been a duo, a four-piece, and a five-piece band, while in recent years settling into a trio. Of their dozen or so releases of various lengths, the single “Monika,” from 2020, is their most recent. “The Big Show” appeared on their 2011 EP Postcard. You can explore the whole catalog over on Bandcamp.

* David Ruffin was one of the lead singers for the Temptations during their classic run from 1964 to 1968. “I’ve Got a Need For You” is from a solo album that he recorded in 1970 and 1971 but which, somehow, wasn’t released until 2004. And while I didn’t do this at all on purpose, in doing a bit of research I came upon the slightly uncomfortable fact of Ruffin’s abusive relationship with the aforementioned Tammi Terrell, which included the fact that he proposed marriage to her while (surprise!) it turned out he was already married. Life, in case you aren’t yet aware, is pretty messy.

* The Australian trio Middle Kids remain one of my favorite bands to come on the scene in recent years. Attentive readers here may remember seeing “Bootleg Firecracker” briefly featured here earlier in 2023; I had to take the review down when it came to my attention that the download had been removed from the site that initially hosted it. So here it is more permanently. The other new single the band released this year, “Highlands,” is also excellent. A new album is expected early next year.

* Standard-issue rock music history has it that the mighty prog-rock dinosaurs who ruled the scene beginning in the late ’60s were killed off, asteroid style, by the punk rock assault of the late ’70s. The truth is more nuanced than that, as seen in two divergent entries in this month’s mix. We have the aforementioned “Elephant Talk,” which saw a prog-rock band shift nimbly into new wave territory, managing to create an up-to-date identity while maintaining the King Crimson name. And we also have the Moody Blues, who let the new wave crash all around them, informing some new sounds while they remained true to their musical core; the in-the-moment effort, 1981’s Long Distance Voyager, stands as one of their best, with the lead single “The Voice” sounding at once familiar and fresh. The band’s long and complicated history is too much to get into here; note simply that they persisted, with some commercial success, well past the punk rock interruption, before devolving in the 2000s into a live nostalgia act.

* For those who enjoy these extra notes each month, you should know that visitors who receive the Fingertips newsletter get a few additional blurbs in the email accompanying each playlist. Sign up details are in the sidebar to the right.