Fingertips

Playlist: Power Pop, Vol. 1

A Spotify playlist featuring power pop gems from the last 40 years or so.

So here I am presenting a nice little power pop playlist, even as I am finishing as we speak a post for the Linn Products blog about how tiresome genre-related playlists are, and how playlists online should really be much more eclectic. Potentially a contradiction, but what can I say? I contain multitudes.

Besides which, as I was attempting to articulate last week, when reviewing the fine new Blurry Lines song “The Hunted,” power pop is an elusive genre at best. Which got me thinking what’s up with power pop anyway, which quickly became an excuse for me to attempt to tell by showing. Here is what power pop sounds like to me. I don’t think I have too many genre-based playlists in me, but this one is a necessity.

In the interest, always, of relative conciseness, I make no effort here to be exhaustive. I include enough of the all-time, critic-approved power pop and proto-power pop must-haves (“Go All The Way,” “September Gurls,” “Starry Eyes,” et al.) to ground it in consensus, while skipping over a number of others (“Girl of My Dreams,” “Surrender” “Cruel To Be Kind,” et al.), just because that’s how this list played out for me. We start effortlessly, with the impeccable Shoes classic “Too Late,” veer unexpectedly into late-era Matthew Sweet, and move on idiosyncratically from there, ranging in time frame from the proto-power-pop years of the early-ish ’70s all the way through to 2012, but in no order except that dictated to me by the sound and flow of the music. Two Fingertips selections are mixed in (“Anime Eyes,” “Wildlife Control”), and some other left-field choices spice things up (the Ass Ponys song is a particular oddball gem, says me). My only regret is that there are not nearly enough women in here, but power pop has historically been a male pastime—although I obviously could have included another Blondie song or two had I chosen. And no doubt I left out some obvious others I have either forgotten or have yet to discover. I am delighted in any case to present the late great Kirsty MacColl, who can never be praised enough, and whose untimely demise 13 years ago (!) still brings tears to my eyes. That the only version Spotify has of “He’s on the Beach” is the long version is a bit of a shame; power pop doesn’t need to go much longer than four minutes and is ideal between 3:20 and 3:40, but there are plenty of exceptions. Hell, “Starry Eyes” is four and a half minutes, and it has long been considered by many the greatest power pop song of them all (and I would not disagree—notwithstanding production that sounds a little dead to my 2013 ears).

While each and every entry here strikes me as a power pop gem, note that I don’t believe so much in “power pop artists” as “power pop songs”; a wide variety of bands are here shown achieving some semblance of power pop bliss, even if few of them line up regularly in lists of notable purveyors of power pop. In my mind, few worthy artists hew that tightly to this idiosyncratic musical style to be filed entirely under power pop, and that’s all for the best. It’s a crazy-brilliant-slippery genre for intermittent songs, but to aim for this sound as a career move might simply be crazy-making.

That said, there are enough great songs past and present omitted or otherwise overlooked on this playlist that I leave at least the possibility for sequels. Thus, here is Power Pop, Vol. 1…..

Free and legal MP3: Kim Taylor (crisp, heartfelt acoustic stomp)

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence.

“Like a Woman Can” – Kim Taylor

Equal parts stomp and grace, “Like a Woman Can” spiders its way into your body with its minimal urgings and dusky vibe. I think it’s that hollowed-out stamping sound, kicking in around 0:32, that really hooks me and makes me engage in a bit of office dancing. To show you how centrally the song is organized around that elusive effect, which sounds kind of like clapping hands crossed with marching feet, see how the sound moves from background to foreground at 1:36, and how this is when everything begins to make perfect sense.

Kim Taylor has a convincing timelessness about her; she seems the kind of singer/songwriter who can disappear for years and later return as if in mid-sentence. In “Like a Woman Can,” she has come back to us with something of particular importance to say; in interviews, she has called it nothing less than a “protest song,” penned by someone not merely tired of the persistence of garden-variety misogyny but aware of how much we have to gain by getting past it already. It’s 2013, people.

Taylor was first featured here back in December 2005 and then again in August 2010. “Like a Woman Can” is a song from her fourth studio album, Love’s a Dog, which she recorded with drummer Devon Ashley and producer/multi-instrumentalist, and long-time musical associate, Jimi Zhivago. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. The album, funded via Kickstarter, was self-released earlier this month. You can listen to it, and buy it if you’d like, from Kim’s web site.

Free and legal MP3: Blurry Lines (power pop from Charleston SC)

Not all power pop songs are good, by any means, but every good power pop song, to my ears, is almost inescapably great.

“The Hunted” – Blurry Lines

The persistence of power pop well into the 21st century is something of a musical mystery. Even in its relative heyday, in the late ’70s and early ’80s, power pop never captured any kind of mainstream attention for itself. Small wonder—the genre is too elusive and difficult to describe for mass acceptance; it seems perversely fitting that some of the genre’s most definitive songs pre-date its actual existence (yeah, it’s complicated), and equally perversely fitting that the biggest hits associated with it are songs that I, at least, don’t consider power pop at all (I’m looking at you, “My Sharona” and “What I Like About You”). And yet, 30-some-odd years later, there are still new bands pointing themselves in this star-crossed direction. I have my own theories about this, but I’ve digressed enough for now. The bottom line is I’m a melody guy and this is a melodic genre. Not all power pop songs are good, by any means, but every good power pop song, to my ears, is almost inescapably great.

“The Hunted” is very good indeed, so you do the math. We get the ringing guitar line and a pounding 4/4 drumbeat; we get the sweet-voiced lead singer; we get a couple of different, indelible melodies; and we get it all in three minutes and twenty-six seconds. What seals something as power pop to me is an abiding tunefulness that feels both majestic and pining; there’s almost always an ache buried in a good power pop song, and the fact that it comes in a candy wrapping is no doubt a big part of the allure. I hear this grand bittersweetness right in the opening salvo (0:17), as Randall Cox sings, “I took a shoebox full of poems written ABAB style” and even as the melody resolves we are denied the underlying resolving chords, which now makes me realize something new about power pop: that a lot of its vitality comes the pre-resolution moment. Here, for instance, the melody that gets us from “full of poems” through “written ABAB” is what pulls me in and has me falling hard for this song. Likewise in the chorus, the “ran through the woods” part (0:55) seems more the heart of the melody than the actual climax. And if you think I am overanalyzing, try this: I believe these guys are paying homage to the greatest proto-power-pop song of all time in the bridge (2:17) when Cox sings, twice, “We’re going all the way.” Coincidence? I think not. Even if they didn’t do it on purpose.

Based in Charleston, South Carolina, Blurry Lines is a duo featuring Cox on lead vocals and keys and Richard Hussey on guitar, bass, and backup vocals. “The Hunted” is from the debut Blurry Lines release, an EP entitled Minor Works in Major Keys, Vol. 1, released in September and produced by Josh Kaler, who plays drums on three of the tracks, including this one. A Volume 2 is due out before year’s end.

Free and legal MP3: Cameron McGill (Newman-esque piano ballad, w/ soulful flair)

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s.

“American Health Insurance” – Cameron McGill

Refreshingly Randy Newman-esque, “American Health Insurance” starts wry, turns earnest, and engages the ear with chord changes last heard in the early ’70s. McGill is exactly the kind of durable, skillful singer/songwriter who might’ve made a solid name for himself back in those halcyon days. Instead, in the 2010s, he joins the legions who release good music to an indifferent world, not actually as propped up by the endless supply of free digital music as proponents keep telling us is going to happen, any day now, just wait and see. And okay, so I’m especially disgruntled because I just today saw someone still passing along Cory Doctorow’s idiotic “My problem isn’t piracy, it’s obscurity” meme with a straight face, as if being merely one of a zillion artists throwing free content onto the web isn’t being dreadfully obscure in a whole new way.

Anyway. McGill does a nice job here, coming across as simultaneously weary and engaged, while the song smartly transforms from an ambling piano ballad into something more soulful, complete with spiffy horn charts. The title alone prompts a bit of a surprised smile, but despite the opening line, McGill himself has noted that the song is not actually about health insurance, but about how it feels to be an American in this insecure moment in history. And while that may not actually feel too good, I can’t help but be buoyed by McGill’s subtly spirited performance. He’s got one of those rounded voices that can get a little blurry if too reverbed, but we get a good balance in the mix, which stays generally crisp (horn charts will do that for you), and gives him a chance to stretch a bit—I like both his falsetto reaches and then, in particular, that stirring tone he achieves on the lyrics “when the house was on fire” at 1:42. I think we sometimes forget that half of a singer/songwriter’s job is singing, and maybe sometimes some of them forget that too. Not Mr. McGill.

“American Health Insurance” is from the album Gallows Etiquette, released a couple of weeks ago, its title taken from a Charles Simic poem. This is McGill’s sixth album, and his first after a trio of releases with him fronting a band called What Army. He was featured in that time frame here on Fingertips back in October 2009, for the wonderful song “Madeline, Every Girl.” Note that the Chicago-based McGill is also a member of the band Margot & the Nuclear So-and-So’s. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Playlist: Kinks favorites

A Spotify playlist featuring 25 Kinks favorites.

So the Ray Davies contest is over, but any time I start spending any amount of time thinking about Ray Davies, I always end up falling into a Kinks jag. The material is just too good, too rich, too deep. This time I’ve emerged from the depths with a playlist.

A few notes about the playlist:

– Yes, it’s on Spotify again. For better or worse, that is where I am going to be creating playlists, at least in the near term future. There are all sorts of issues with Spotify, but at least it’s legal.

– While I include a couple of their more widely-known songs, I have more or less steered away from the most obvious choices, aiming this more for discovery than nostalgia. (Besides which, neither “Sunny Afternoon” nor “Waterloo Sunset”—which I would have included; they’re too great—are on Spotify. Neither is the original version “Lola.” See next note.)

– Because we’re dealing with Spotify, and because we’re dealing with what some would call a “heritage” artists like the Kinks, not all the necessary albums are available, for whatever arcane reasons of rights and distribution and such. I used songs from alternative sources when the song itself is still the original version of the song. But I did not include things like a live version of “Victoria” when the original version of “Victoria” is not available. (Sadly, the great Arthur album is not on Spotify, and neither are a number of other essential albums from the back catalog, such as The Kinks Are The Village Green Preservation Society and Lola Versus Powerman and the Moneygoround.

– For the excessively curious, here are the songs I had included on my original playlist that are not available on Spotify:

* “Victoria”
* “Shangri-La”
* “Apeman”
* “God’s Children”
* “Sunny Afternoon”
* “Waterloo Sunset”

They were replaced with:

* “Where Have All the Good Times Gone?”
* “Death of a Clown”
* “This Time Tomorrow”
* “Living on a Thin Line”
* “Tired of Waiting For You”
* “Sitting in the Midday Sun”

All in all, great stuff. If I can entice even one person not otherwise too familiar with the Kinks to give this a listen, my work is done.

Recalibration

Some subtle shifting is in order. You may not notice too much but I feel a lot better already.

When I started Fingertips in 2003, I had no game plan or road map. I had no idea whether I might be writing my idiosyncratic song reviews here for a few weeks, a few months, or a few years.

And here we are 10 years later.

I am surprised that both I and the MP3 have remained viable for quite so long—me with my idiosyncratic song selections and wordy paragraphs, the MP3 with its unideal sound and tendency to be decoupled from proper copyright considerations.

But things do seem to be shifting. I have noticed a decisive reduction in the number of free and legal MP3s that come along with music industry promotional emails over the last year or two; a clear and growing majority of them now traffic in streams and/or videos only. While I do not personally find any solace in the idea of a future in which access trumps ownership for music fans, I also can’t deny that streaming versus downloading looks now to be a major part of music’s future.

Note that this could yet change. No one knows anything, really. The best we can do is keep our eyes open, acknowledge change, and try not to be blinded by greed and ego.

In an effort to keep my eyes appropriately open, it feels to me that a recalibration of Fingertips is in order. This recalibration will be driven by two changes, which are really more like unshacklings, and which are effective immediately.

To begin with, I release myself from the idea that I am updating this site with three new free and legal MP3s every week. Maybe you’ll be relieved as well; maybe it’s become just as hard for you to keep up with the listening as it’s been for me to keep up with the presenting. Or maybe not. In any case, the weekly gig—which has gotten pretty shaky over the last six months or more in any case—is over. My reviews of free and legal downloads will happen when they happen. And if the industry moves entirely away from free and legal downloads at some point, whether sooner or later, that’s okay too. I’m prepared to move forward.

Next, I release myself from the obligation to read all the incoming email. (Gasp, yes, I know: why was I even reading it in the first place? Psychoanalyze away.) I’m not quite sure what took me so long but I realize now in a relative flash that opening and scanning so many emails, day after day, has been the definition of a Sisyphean task. The boulder can now roll down the hill and stay there.

I am by the way talking about the impersonal, boiler-plate, send-to-a-zillion-blogs-at-once emails that have always filled up at least 80 percent of my inbox. If it’s personal, if it’s email from a visitor or from a musician specifically addressed to me, I will still read it, and I will still listen to music contained in such submissions. So keep those cards and letters coming in.

Everything else, all the endless streams and videos and album releases and tour dates and “my gimmick is better than that other guy’s gimmick” and “they’re an internet sensation!” and (pet peeve!) “he’s 14 but he’s wise beyond his years”—all of it goes to the trash bin. I’ve been reading it all for 10 years. I’ve paid my dues.

I understand I may miss some good music this way. I know that honest, hard-working publicists and bands alike typically feel they have little choice but to send out impersonal, boiler-plate emails. But: what happens if the sum total of what all those honest, hard-working publicists and bands sends out is quite literally far more than one honest, hard-working blogger can possibly read and deal with? A first-world problem, yes. And: no longer my concern.

Unshackled (I feel lighter already), I can also begin to think about moving Fingertips into a new direction or two, based on the aforementioned recognition of the importance of streaming versus downloading to 21st-century music fans. While I’m still not quite sure what specific changes may be coming to the site, they will likely have something to do with musical integration, something to do with a lifelong interest in mixing a satisfying variety of music together. This interest of mine has never been fully engaged by a format presenting only new songs, and only in three-song packages.

To let go the unflinching need for three weekly MP3s while freeing up my time to explore music in a more natural and easy-going way: this is the recalibration. I am hopeful that it will open up some new vistas, bring me back to my roots as a free-form FM radio DJ, and still allow me to put my own small but particular stamp on the digital music scene.

Stay tuned, and thanks for all the fish.

Free and legal MP3: Fé (graceful, melodic, brilliant)

Now this is the kind of graceful, melodic, idiosyncratic-yet-accessible music that hits me right in my sweet spot—the kind of song Fingertips pretty much exists for.

“She Came – Fé

Now this is the kind of graceful, melodic, idiosyncratic-yet-accessible music that hits me right in my sweet spot—the kind of song Fingertips pretty much exists for. I instantly love the sense of movement and the distant ringing guitars in the introduction. And then the lyrics!; in which we are treated to a new classic opening line:

West London women have no passion
Sadness to them is just another word

Surely there is something Smiths-like in “She Came”‘s fluid, minor-key lamentation, but this is no knock-off; it bursts with a rigorous core of its own device. The melody’s brilliant development, combined with the sly harmonic and rhythmic jiggles that give it continual life, actually bring Steely Dan to mind, and that’s kind of an odd thing because this doesn’t sound at all like Steely Dan. But maybe a few of you will hear what I’m hearing. And if the opening lyrical salvo isn’t enough, there’s the chorus’s closing lines to ponder, which not only nail some kind of beautiful, aphoristic ambiguity, but arrive with an offhanded musical resolution that sneaks in and knocks my socks off:

A weaker man may not have tried
A stronger man may have survived

Fé is the London-based duo of Ben Moorhouse and Leo Duncan, new enough to the scene that they still, apparently, ride the Underground and regale commuters with skiffle-like takes on early rock’n’roll songs. These guys may well be going places that you have to get out of the Tube to arrive at.

Free and legal MP3: Son Lux (dramatic, oddly arranged)

This is a 21st-century tone poem, in a rather literal sense, as the song unfolds as an intersecting of tones: deep tones and high tones, tinkly tones and wobbly tones, soft tones and hard tones, musical tones and mechanical tones, vocal tones and instrumental tones.

“Easy” – Son Lux

Slow and sparse, “Easy” is likewise dramatic and oddly arranged, creating a sense of organic space despite (or, maybe, somehow, because of) the disconcerting, palpable electronic ambiance. This is a 21st-century tone poem, in a rather literal sense, as the song unfolds as an intersecting of tones: deep tones and high tones, tinkly tones and wobbly tones, soft tones and hard tones, musical tones and mechanical tones, vocal tones and instrumental tones. The most apparently natural tones in the song—the voice, the horn sounds, the hand claps—feel processed and edgy, while the most artificial of the tones—some of the machine-like background washes, for instance—come across as intimate and three-dimensional.

Nothing moves too fast to avoid scrutiny. Often there is little more than one sound going on at a time. Yet there remains something consistently evasive about the whole endeavor, probably epitomized by the unwieldy yet compelling “horns” (I assume not actual horns) that barge in at 0:57 to oppose the very idea of “easy” even as they offer an ongoing rejoinder to that lyric. Repeat listenings seem more to augment the mystery rather than resolve it, while continuing to yield moments that the ear missed during earlier plays, such as the weird, occult-ish vocal effect at 1:38, or, of all things, the perfectly normal-sounding guitar that glides in at 3:07.

Son Lux is the performing name of Ryan Lott, a composer and producer who has worked across an impressive range of genres, from indie rock to hip hop to contemporary classical. Among his past collaborators are Sufjan Stevens, Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond), Peter Silberman (The Antlers), Nico Muhly, and the quartet ETHEL. “Easy” comes from the third full-length Son Lux album, Lanterns, coming later this month on Joyful Noise Recordings.

Free and legal MP3: Big Deal (simple, compelling rock’n’roll)

There’s something grand and achy in the big sound of the London duo Big Deal—even as it bursts with movement and purpose, I feel an undercurrent of delicious melancholy here.

“Swapping Spit” – Big Deal

There’s something grand and achy in the big sound of the London duo Big Deal—it bursts with movement and purpose on the one hand, serves up an undercurrent of delicious melancholy on the other. This may be rooted in something as simple and structural as the song-length use of octave male-female harmonies/lead vocals. My love for octave harmonies (i.e., the same note sung an octave apart) is long established; when they come in the guise of a lead vocal shared by a man and a woman, it’s a yummy treat times two (or three, or four; not sure math works here, actually). The fact that the harmonies culminate in the repeated line, each time the chorus comes around, “I will, I will” seals the deal: I can’t follow the song lyrically, but that “I will, I will” is an arresting aural paradox—hopeful on the surface, desperate below.

And give me a simple song, tightly conceived, over a sprawling complexity any day of the week. Or, at least, some days. “Swapping Spit” has so much happening within its apparent rock’n’roll simplicity that I listen to it over and over without tiring. The male-female octave harmonies turn out to be a perfect metaphor for the effectiveness of the entire song—it’s the same note being sung (simple) but an octave apart (complication) and by opposing genders (further complication). And so do we also in “Swapping Spit” get: a verse that has two different versions (a lower melody the first time [0:16], a higher melody the second time [1:19], and boy do I love the character of both voices in their combined upper ranges); a chorus that first of all has a pre-chorus and then, the second time around, has expanded versions of both the pre-chorus and the regular chorus; and then, slyly, a song that places its title into the extended part of the chorus. And as for that title, it too offers up compelling equivocation, as Alice Costelloe and Kacey Underwood sing words—“All the lovers swapping spit/I’ll get used to it”—that mess with our heads. Love (good thing? bad thing?) comes up as one more arresting paradox.

“Swapping Spit” is a new single upcoming from Big Deal’s second album, June Gloom, which was in fact released back in June, on Mute Records.

Best of Fingertips 2003-2013: A Playlist

An idiosyncratic look back at 10 years of Fingertips music.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while. If you have Spotify, this should work for you. If not, then probably not, and sorry about that, for now. (Plans are in the works to get around that; see note below.)

Okay, so, a few things to understand about this playlist. First, these songs are not in a definitive order—that was too difficult to do, and rather too pointless. What comes out here as the “number one song” is not necessarily my number-one favorite song. Ever out of step with the times, I don’t tend easily towards ranking and list-making. My concern is more a decent flow of music. The best I can say is that the ones nearer the top tend to among my most favorite favorites, but they are all terrific songs, as are hundreds I could not put on the list.

Second, note that the list originally contained 40 songs, but Spotify didn’t have four of the songs, so they are vanished (for now; again, see note below).

The cool thing about this list is that it allows me to revisit any number of songs I originally featured as free and legal downloads (or else they would not have been here), but have not been available free-and-legally, as MP3s, for quite some time. Going to a legal streaming service allows me to present them to you again with a clear conscience. (Or, at least, semi-clear; I know that Spotify has its own issues, but at least it’s legal.)

But because I ideally want all 40 songs to be part of the list and because my long-ago background as a free-form radio DJ compels me in that direction, I may yet attempt to make more of a podcast-like presentation out of this, including all 40 songs, complete with (one hopes) informative commentary. I will surely let you know if that happens and where to find it, which won’t be on Spotify.