Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Grounders Fuzzy noisy chorus-free pop

Via unexplained mechanisms, the Toronto-based quartet Grounders employ a familiar-sounding synth pop vocabulary to create something that strikes my ear as anomalous, and very satisfying.

“Bloor Street and Pressure” – Grounders

Via unexplained mechanisms, the Toronto-based band Grounders employ a familiar-sounding synth pop vocabulary to create something that strikes my ear as anomalous, and a lot of fun. As the perky intro, propelled by a series of six-note descents, takes some time to establish itself, you’ll notice, if you listen, the ongoing encroachment of fuzzy noise (or, perhaps, noisy fuzz) underneath the main melody; almost as if a series of retro-futuristic machines are being variously turned on, the noise is all but constructed before our eyes (ears). Once the vocals finally start (0:52), it then provides a constant, multifaceted background throughout the song’s sung portions.

But it’s elusive, this fuzz/noise. Is it simply an extension of the bass line? Something extra going on in the synthesizer department? Something to do with that unaccountable “wa-wa” sound that cycles through the musical undergrowth? Whatever it is, it’s both always there and sometimes not quite there, and may be what gives “Bloor Street and Pressure” its intangible charm. That and the fact that for all its propulsive energy and ear-worm-ish bias, the song does not possess either a chorus or anything much to sing along with. Which is great if you can get away with it.

Grounders is a five-piece band that was previously a four-piece band and might in fact still be a four-piece band, but their current photo has five guys in it. These things can be hard to untangle. They are in any case from Toronto (where, in fact, you will find Bloor Street). Their debut self-titled album was released on Nevado Records in May. You can listen to the whole thing and buy it via Bandcamp.

MP3 courtesy of Insomnia Radio.

A list of things I didn’t do

Eclectic Playlist Series 2.06 – July/August 2015

If there is a distinct thread of nostalgia running through this month’s playlist (and trust me, there is), I did not consciously plan it; the music just came out that way. But perhaps it’s not surprising as I constructed this list while in the middle of moving out of a house my wife and I have lived in for 17 years. Nostalgia is in the air. So, here on 2.06 it turns out there are the obvious throwbacks such as Jesse Winchester’s unspeakably gorgeous “Sham-a-Ling-Dong-Ding” (and if you’ve never seen the late singer/songwriter do a live version of this on Elvis Costello’s old “Spectacle” series, drop everything and watch it now) and Patti Scialfa’s girl-group-ish “As Long As I (Can Be With You)”; there are also songs by Amy Rigby and Waxahatchee that offer contemporary spins on early-rock’n’roll-ish melody lines. But the nostalgia here, I see after the fact, runs subtler and deeper than that, via both the older songs that show up and the lyrical recollections featured in a few of the more contemporary tracks. And then you have the Pat Benatar track (Pat Benatar?), which manages to be doubly nostalgic, burying its Phil Spector-ish beat beneath an ’80s patina that was of course very contemporary at the time. Musicians today please take note.

Speaking of Amy Rigby, is “All I Want” one of the most adult love songs ever written, ever? “I just want a little pat on the back from you/Not another little subtle attack from you”—now that is a grown-up lyric (and a brilliant one to boot). Or: “I feel kind of furious/And you’re not even curious.” Note I called it a love song even though it sounds more like a break-up song. But it’s an adult love song because rather than veering towards an adolescent “You suck, I’m leaving,” it’s an effort at mature communication, of the “What you do X, I feel Y” variety. It’s just the kind of thing that couples who want to figure out how they can stay together even if they are driving each other crazy are instructed to do. This entire Amy Rigby album, Middlescence, is something of a lost classic, as clever lyrically as it is skillful musically. As a bonus, Rigby remains one of the rare musicians who blogs interestingly; check out what she’s up to here: https://diaryofamyrigby.wordpress.com/.

And speaking of grown-ups, and best things ever, is Cassandra Wilson’s cover of the Monkees’ “Last Train To Clarksville” one of the best cover versions ever done of anything? I’d suggest so. She managed to turn a very pleasant but rather fluffy song into something deep and memorable. And it’s not just because she inserts that wordless vocal refrain in 9/8 time, but honestly that doesn’t hurt.

“Boy With a Coin” – Iron & Wine (The Shepherd’s Dog, 2007)
“Last Train to Clarksville” – Cassandra Wilson (New Moon Daughter, 1995)
“More…” – Wilco (Star Wars, 2015)
“This Town” – The Go-Go’s (Beauty and the Beat, 1981)
‘I Don’t Want to Take a Chance” – Mary Wells (single, 1961)
“All I Want” – Amy Rigby (Middlescence, 1998)
“Sham-a-Ling-Ding-Dong” – Jesse Winchester (Love Filling Station, 2009)
“Thick as Thieves” – The Jam (Setting Sons, 1979)
“She Came” – Fé (single, 2013)
“Perfidia” – Janet Dillon (single, 1967)
“Neighborhood Girls” – Suzanne Vega (Suzanne Vega, 1985)
“Bodhisattva” – Steely Dan (Countdown to Ecstasy, 1973)
“Betray My Heart” – D’Angelo and The Vanguard (Black Messiah, 2014)
“We Belong” – Pat Benatar (Tropico , 1984)
“No Excuses” – Alice in Chains (Jar of Flies, 1994)
“Goodbye” – The Argument (Everything Depends, 2009)
“All the Diamonds in the World” – Bruce Cockburn (Salt, Sun and Time, 1974)
“As Long As I (Can Be With You)” – Patti Scialfa (Rumble Doll, 1993)
“Calling For Your Love” – The Enticers (single, 1971)
“Swan Dive” – Waxahatchee (Cerulean Salt, 2014)

Free and legal MP3: The Cairo Gang (catchy/complex brilliance)

“Ice Fishing” is a semi-garage-y, amorphously psychedelic bit of guitar-driven power-pop brilliance that keeps getting better and better with repeated listens.

“Ice Fishing” – The Cairo Gang

“Ice Fishing” is a semi-garage-y, amorphously psychedelic bit of guitar-driven power-pop brilliance that keeps getting better and better with repeated listens, being that rare combination of catchy and complex. Plus, it’s a song about ice fishing, which is about as refreshing a topic for a pop song in 2015 as can possibly be imagined (after of course dancing and fucking).

Just how many satisfying chord progressions ferry this song forward is difficult to quantify. And just how comforting front man Emmett Kelly’s voice is is equally hard to measure with objectivity, but his warm blend of Robert Pollard, Elvis Costello, and Jonathan Richman is a beautiful thing to behold. But most beautiful is the song itself, a wondrously assured construction of heart-melting chords and generous melodies. “Ice Fishing” is in fact so melodically generous that one of the song’s best bits is all but a throwaway: the wordless melody that functions as a kind of unresolved bridge between 2:29 and 2:40. How much self-possessed momentum does a song have to have to effect something like that? And okay the best bit of all is the most gloriously obvious: the nonchalant two-line chorus (first heard beginning at 1:00), each line with its own distinct, bittersweet/wonderful hook.

The Cairo Gang is a five-piece band based in Chicago. “Ice Fishing” is from their new album, Goes Missing, released last week [6/23] on God? Records, a side imprint of Drag City Records. The album is the band’s fourth. MP3 via the record label. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Blind Lake (comfy, unhurried)

Comfy like a roomy old leather reading chair, “Lately” glides with offhanded purpose and resonant charm.

“Lately” – Blind Lake

Comfy like a roomy old leather reading chair, “Lately” glides with offhanded purpose and resonant charm. Fueled by crisp acoustic strumming, the song’s instrumental palette is craftily expanded by a melodic bass line, tasteful electric guitar accents, and some good old “oo-oos” in the background. No one is in a hurry here, but the song still feels sharp and essential.

At the center of it all is the underutilized trick of synchronized lead vocals, as the duo of
Lotta Wenglén and Måns Wieslander both sing the entire song, often without harmonizing. And there is something about their cumulative effort, leading to the climactic lyric “I’ve got myself a pair of slippery hands/And nothing to hold onto” that turns “Lately” from merely comfy to downright moving without my quite knowing how it happened.

Blind Lake is based in Böste, Sweden; they take their name from a 2003 sci-fi novel by American-Canadian author Robert Charles Wilson. In their press material, the band claims that “Lately” is “best played while driving on a slightly wet road on a late summer’s night while deep thinking.” Have yet to try it but I won’t argue.

You’ll find the song on the album On Earth, released earlier this month. Thanks again to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Thanks (minor-key rocker w/ appealing swagger)

While rock’n’roll may be past the point of reinventability, there is the occasional band that comes along and gives it a good ride.

“Bad Tattoos” – Thanks

There’s something intriguingly old-school about “Bad Tattoos”—the hand-constructed beat, with its slightly fuzzy and very insistent bass line; those penny-whistle synth bursts; and a female lead singer full of soul and swagger, who happens to perform with the name Jimi Hendrix. At the same time, the song’s sonic landscape and general drive feels entirely of our 21st-century moment. While rock’n’roll may be past the point of reinventability, there is the occasional band that comes along and gives it a good ride. The Portland sextet Thanks appears to be one of these bands. If nothing else, how often, I am realizing as I listen to this, do you hear a stompy, minor-key rocker these days? Not very often, I assure you.

I like too how embedded and cloaked the guitar work is here; more than a minute passes before you hear the guitar, and it arrives with such muted self-assurance (1:04) that it immediately seems as if it had already been here and you just weren’t paying attention. Through most of the rest of the song, the metallic, low-register splendor of Andrew Hanna’s guitar provides both motion and density to a song with a gratifying number of moving parts. By the time the recurring guitar line coalesces into a bit of a solo (2:50), you will have thoroughly forgotten that this song was ever anything but a guitar rave-up. But go back and listen to the beginning; surprise!

“Bad Tattoos” is a track from the annual and always engaging PDX Pop Now! Compilation, the 2015 version of which was released in early June, in advance of the PDX Pop Now! music festival, scheduled for later this month in Portland. More information about the 42-track album is available here. “Bad Tattoos” is also slated to appear on Thanks’ next release, No Mercy in the Mountain, their second full-length, and an album they are at this moment raising money for on Kickstarter.

New Fingertips contest!

Things have been slow around here because I am in the process of moving. Fun!

In clearing out and packing up, I realized that I might have a few too many CDs lying around. Especially if the stated goal of the move is “downsizing.”

But my loss is your gain, potentially. I have packaged up a box of 30 (count ’em, 30) CDs that I have received promotionally over the last 12 years. Every CD in the box is from an artist featured at least one time on Fingertips. So while I can’t vouch for the consistent quality of every track on every disc in the grab bag, I do know that each album contains at the very least one very good song. Which is something!

For more information, visit the Contest page: https://fingertipsmusic.com/?page_id=15489

How did this come to be?

Eclectic Playlist Series 2.05 – June 2015

So here’s one great song you may not have heard before: “If Silence Means That Much to You,” by the Scottish singer/songwriter Emma Pollock, who has never gotten her due. Its sudden beginning made for a difficult segue but I didn’t let that stop me. It’s a good song and no one knows it and that always seems a shame to me. Another good song that you probably sort of know and sort of don’t: “Am I the Same Girl,” by Barbara Acklin. The instrumental track might sound very familiar, as it was taken out from under her and marketed as a single called “Soulful Strut,” without her vocals, before her (original) version was released. Acklin also never got her due. The music industry is like that.

Hat tips this month go first to the great and under-recognized Radio Paradise, the internet’s truest and most steadfast multi-genre, multi-decade radio station, run (somehow; unaccountably) by two people in California. When I’m not specifically checking out new releases, I find myself spending quite a lot of time listening to Radio Paradise, and I rarely hear the same song twice, even after hours of listening at a time. I “stole” two songs from them this time around: “Rain,” by the Icelandic singer/songwriter Elvör, and “Among the Bells,” from Jane Tyrrell, an artist and musician based in Calgary. And I must also salute the always endearing retro blog dustystevens, responsible for alerting me to the Duke Pearson track. I’m not much of a jazz guy but sometimes the right tune smacks me on the head at the right time and I surrender.

“Maybe Tomorrow” – The Chords (So Far Away, 1980)
“Trouble Every Day” – The Mothers of Invention (Freak Out, 1966)
“Rain” – Elvør (Room, 2012)
“Faster Than Light” – Neil Finn (Try Whistling This, 1998)
“Day OK” – Spiral Beach (Spiral Beach, 2005)
“Pointy Shoes” – Cowboys International (The Original Sin, 1979)
“Hey Now” – London Grammar (If You Wait, 2013)
“I’ve Got Something On My Mind” – The Left Banke (Walk Away Renée/Pretty Ballerina, 1967)
“Stepping Razor” – Peter Tosh (Equal Rights, 1977)
“As Cool As I Am” – Dar Williams (Mortal City, 1996)
“Minimal Affection” – The Vaccines (English Graffiti, 2015)
“Love Comes Quickly” – Pet Shop Boys (Please, 1986)
“If Silence Means That Much To You” – Emma Pollock (Watch the Fireworks, 2007)
“Say You’re Mine” – Duke Pearson (The Phantom, 1968)
“The Gospel According to Darkness” – Jane Siberry (When I Was a Boy, 1993)
“Adventurers” – Interview (Snakes and Lovers, 1980)
“Wild Country” – Thunderclap Newman (Hollywood Dream, 1970)
“Misery is a Butterfly” – Blonde Redhead (Misery is a Butterfly, 2005)
“Am I the Same Girl” – Barbara Acklin (Seven Days of Night, 1969)
“Among the Bells” – Jane Tyrrell (Echoes in the Aviary, 2014)

Free and legal MP3: Heidi Gluck (rapid-pulsed acoustic confessional)

“One of Us Should Go” – Heidi Gluck

A breath of frictionless fresh air, “One of Us Should Go” is a rapid-pulsed acoustic confessional, and if it initially sounds like just another “girl with a guitar” song I invite you to listen more carefully. The instrumentation is simple but rich: in fact, there’s not a moment in this three-minute heart-breaker that doesn’t reveal itself to be exquisitely conceived and executed, from thoughtful electric guitar contributions to well-timed piano accents and creative electronics. Gluck’s plain-spoken vocals, which achieve the difficult trick of sounding like talking even while singing, add to the subtle interpersonal drama on display.

And the extra awesome part is how beautifully the song’s sound and structure intertwines with its content: this is a stunning breakup song, in which the music’s very feel echoes the inertia of a relationship that has outlived its spark, and the words of the chorus betray the difficulty of breaking the passivity with actual action:

I’m sure it’s nice out there
I’m sure there’s beauty everywhere
A wide open road
And one of us should go

Gluck is Canadian by birth, but has been living and working in the US midwest for a length of time that eludes internet research; I do know that she spent some years in Indiana, and has been in Lawrence, Kansas for about the past eight. Careful readers of liner notes (yes, such people still exist!; I have faith) may recognize her name from her session work with Juliana Hatfield and Margot & The Nuclear So and Sos, among others; she was also a member of the well-regarded Indiana band The Pieces in the early ’00s. “One of Us Should Go” is a track from Gluck’s first release as a solo artist, an EP called The Only Girl in the Room, which was released at the end of April on Lotuspool Records. You can stream the whole thing via SoundCloud. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. The EP is the first of a planned series of four; work begins on the next one this summer.

Free and legal MP3: Fabryka (adroit mix of dream and drive, from Italy)

Not often do you hear inventive bass-playing and inventive drumming intertwining so smartly while still allowing a coherent song to be built on top.

“The Unheard”- Fabryka

Check out the rhythm section on this one: not often do you hear inventive bass-playing and inventive drumming intertwining so smartly while still allowing a coherent song to be built on top. And what a coherent and engaging song it turns out to be—astutely arranged and structurally sound, “The Unheard” is a marvelous slice of 21st-century rock’n’roll, coming to us from the seemingly unlikely source of Bari, Italy, down there at the top of the heel of Italy’s “boot.”

I like how busy and determined this is even while cloaking itself in a bit of shoegazey mist. There’s that rhythmic pulse at the bottom driving things, but it’s that ongoing, canny employment of both electric guitars and synthesizers that ultimately gives the ear a lot to chew on—so much, in fact, that what appears to be the song’s chorus (first heard at 1:31) feels like a dreamy breather between purposeful building blocks. Both the guitars and the synths each get a motif-like theme to express—the former a hard-charging, syncopated riff (first heard at 0:55), the latter a chimy noodle (1:21) that shares a similar sense of syncopation. The more I listen, the more I am impressed with the song’s construction, and the more I think I hear something genuinely timeless in its mix of drive and dream. Give good credit to singer Tiziana Felle, whose voice can penetrate or levitate, depending on the need.

“The Unheard” is a song from the band’s new EP, Sparkles, which comes out in Italy next week. This will be the band’s third release, following an EP in 2012 and a full-length album, Echo, in 2013.

Free and legal MP3: Star Tropics

Seasonally evocative power pop

“Summer Rain” – Star Tropics

Urging itself into our lives at the ever-wonderful nexus of dream pop and power pop, “Summer Rain” features a ringing, evocative guitar line, a reverby backwash, a brisk backbeat, and a breath-filled, sweet-voiced lead singer. You don’t need any more description than that, right?

Well, okay, I’ll talk a little. First I am taken with how all but onomatopoetic the song is, with the aforementioned ringing guitar line deftly mimicking rainfall, and with the aforementioned sweet-voiced lead singer (Nikki; no last name provided) creating, for me, somehow, the sound-picture of a warm, grey-green landscape moistened by a gentle but persistent shower (note the summer rain evoked here is of the comforting old-school variety, not the terrifying climate-change-driven monsoons of the 2010s). Next I am oddly intrigued by the brief, willowy instrumental break two-thirds of the way through the song (2:22); when songs are this assured and on-point, I’m always interested in what they are going to do with a bit of leisure time, as it were. Here we get meander-y 25 seconds that begins with the guitar kind of refusing the spotlight that was seemingly aimed at it—rather than the confident chiminess of the intro we get unassertive arpeggios and, most intriguing of all, the distant sound of repeated notes played high up on the neck. The guitar is joined by a particularly low-tech kind of synthesizer, pushing out a wistful, air-toned melody that comes from an entirely different world than Planet Dream Pop but is all but heart-breaking and perfect.

Star Tropics is a Chicago-based four-piece with one previous 7-inch release to their name. “Summer Rain” is part of double-sided single released in March. MP3 via Insomnia Radio.