Fingertips

So everything’s kinda sorta interrelated this week. The piano connects “Starlight Town” to “And So On” (upbeat now rather than downcast) and Goldenboy front man Shon Sullivan used to play with Elliott Smith, bringing us back to Harper Simon. As for the unexpectedly potent Billy Joel melody echo at 0:48, while that doesn’t directly couple with the week’s other songs, it does relate to an overarching theme on Fingertips, as true this week as most: that music doesn’t have to “break new ground” to be both good and, still, in its own way, new. Sullivan himself is big into this idea; indeed, he has coined a term for it: “The New Familiar,” which, according to the band’s Facebook page, is “a genre of music of which the melodies, rhythms, & arrangements of pop rock songs are reminiscent to those of the past but blended in such a way & paired with a brand new sound & attitude.”

While his coinage may not catch on, and the syntax can use some work, the underlying credo is a sturdy one. Cultural critics can wring their hands about music somehow not being “new” enough anymore, but in the end such an attitude is closet nihilism, and nihilism is a dead end. We’re alive now and there is absolutely no reason to assume that we have collectively lost the ability to create worthwhile music, and no reason to assume that to be worthwhile, music can’t sound, well, familiar. “Starlight Town” is a smart, crisply-crafted tune, with a central piano lick, some hard-working violins, and an elusive air of the late ’60s or early ’70s about it. I’m finding something about the mix to be delightful, maybe in the way it manages to seem at once blurry and sharp, and how that circular piano line functions somehow as both the song’s teaser and its cornerstone.

Goldenboy is based in Diamond Bar, California, an enclave in the greater Los Angeles area. You’ll find “Starlight Town” on an album called (you got it) The New Familiar, which came out in November on Los Angeles-based Eenie Meenie Records. And, as the last knot in tying the week’s selections together, this one too is available via the good folks at Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Katie Von Schleicher

Mid-tempo rocker, recorded analog & live

“When The Rain Comes” – Katie Von Schleicher

There is something deep and mysterious at work here in this simple-sounding mid-tempo rocker, and the depth and mystery is rooted in the by now strange and wonderful fact that “When the Rain Comes” was recorded live, on analog equipment, in one take. There is nothing whatever wrong with all the technology being employed in the 21st century to make music but someone has to make it clear that what can be done with our digital tools are many different and potentially enjoyable things but one thing they cannot do, can never do, is what Katie Von Schleicher and friends do here. She and her band of living, breathing, flesh and blood human beings are singing and playing in a room together. Nothing replaces the fire of that. Even when a song unfolds in a kind of a lazy way, even when a song’s coolest hook are a bunch of “la-la-la”s, there is fire here, a fire lit by the inexplicable things that happen when human bodies and souls and voices share time and space together, and when the tools are in the service of capturing the shared effort, not manipulating it.

“When the Rain Comes” is the lead track from Silent Days, a seven-song mini-album recorded at the Soul Shop, an all-analog studio in Medford, Mass. built in 2007 into a 160-year-old barn that had previously housed a piano restoration shop. According to the studio’s web site, “We strive for a clean, open, live sound that truly captures the experience of musicians moving air within a room.” Exactly so. Listen to the vocals—both Von Schleicher’s offhanded lead and the unexpected grandeur of the harmonies in the long-delayed chorus (3:12)—and feel the concrete sense of depth and breadth (and breath) that saturates the recording. And then, best of all, the guitars: both Will Graefe and Gabriel Birnbaum, members of the band Wilder Maker along with Von Schleicher herself, are listed as guitarists here so I don’t know who’s who but I love the kind of guitar sound you hear squirting briefly to the forefront at, say, 0:49 or 0:58—a sound both muted and ringing, a melodious sound that carries within it the flavor of dissonance. A deft, off-kilter solo emerges at 1:50 (Graefe in this case), with the air of notes being decided upon moment to moment, which may almost be true—in addition to the songs being recorded live and in one take, the entire album was recorded in just a few days, without any demos, any pre-written arrangements, any rehearsals. This is hardly a formula that guarantees success but in this case, the gods were smiling. Fine stuff.

Von Schleicher is a singer/songwriter based both in Boston and Brooklyn. Before Wilder Maker she was in the band Sleepy Very Sleepy. I thank her directly for the MP3. You can hear the whole album as well as purchase it via Bandcamp.

photo credit: Dianne Lowry de Ortega

Free and legal MP3: San Fermin (intriguing, energetic chamber pop)

A smoother, poppier version of “Stillness is the Move” by the Dirty Projectors, “Sonsick” succeeds both because of and in spite of its debt to the earlier song.

“Sonsick” – San Fermin

A smoother, poppier version of “Stillness is the Move” by the Dirty Projectors, “Sonsick” succeeds both because of and in spite of its debt to the earlier song. The similarities are enough to be disconcerting, and yet San Fermin mastermind Ellis Ludwig-Leone seems less interested than Dave Longstreth in being difficult. I consider this a good thing. I liked “Stillness is the Move” quite a lot, but noted at the time that it was one of the more approachable things Dirty Projectors had recorded, and even so was still pretty thorny. “Sonsick” is the work of someone who doesn’t shy from accessibility.

Maybe it’s because Ludwig-Leone is a full-fledged contemporary classical composer as well that he approaches pop for what it is, or can be: a chance to make music people can listen to without an advanced degree. Not that “Sonsick” isn’t its own kind of interesting. (Take note, hipsters of all persuasions: music can be rich and approachable at the same time!) I’m entirely enjoying the more fluent melodic choices Ludwig-Leone makes in the verse than did Longstreth, and find the appearance of an honest-to-goodness sing-along chorus all but intoxicating. Holly Laessig and Jess Wolfe, who sing together in the duo Lucius, add energy at once lovely and intense to a story that feels elusive but emotional, not purposefully nonsensical (as was “Stillness”). And do yourself a favor and keep your ears on the arrangement. Ludwig-Leone’s use of horns is novel if not unique in a pop setting; they sneak in via sustained background notes, and are used throughout in a flowing, textural way rather than in “horn chart” flares and bursts. Woodwinds glide in too as some point, creating the feel of a pocket orchestra by the end of the piece.

Officially, San Fermin is a “band” of three singers and one composer; the music on the album is all performed by hired guests. The third singer is Allen Tate, Ludwig-Leone’s friend and long-time collaborator; they met at 16 in rock’n’roll camp and were previously performed as a duo called Gets the Girl. Ludwig-Leone, 23, studied composition at Yale and has worked as an assistant to composer Nico Muhly. “Sonsick” is a song from the group’s self-titled debut album, to be self-released next month. Judging from the imposing bull adorning the album cover, I’m guessing that the band took its name from Pamplona’s famous annual festival. MP3 via Spinner.

Free and legal MP3: The Reflections (brisk, well-crafted, minor-key)

Brisk and engaging; keep this on repeat for a while and it just about hypnotizes you.

“Disconnected” – The Reflections

Sometimes the wisdom and splendor of a song can be hidden and/or encapsulated in the smallest gesture. Case in point: the second line in the opening verse of “Disconnected,” which begins at 0:41. And it’s not even the line itself but the rhythm of the delivery that I’m talking about. Front man Darian Zahedi sings, “Lost your grip on what you’ve been holding,” and the words skip out with casual, percussive cogency—“what you’ve been” is colloquialized to “wha’cha been,” and it’s the hurrying of the “what” and the in-between-beat swallowing of the “you” that makes the line inexplicably delightful. We had been delivered, following a ghostly pre-introduction, into a driving, minor-key rock song of uncertain lineage—there’s something early-’80s about it and also something early-’00s—but it’s this skippy little delivery that told me that this band was making its own, smartly-executed contribution to whatever you want to call the genre in which this brisk, engaging song is housed. I vote for “rock’n’roll.”

A similarly effective small-but-large gesture follows when the song leaves a lyrical blank at 0:53, after “disconnected and mishandled,” and fills it with a brief, plaintive piano chord. All the better that that same phrase emerges one line later to be employed in (and as) the chorus. It all seems so nonchalant and yet fully engineered. Another little detail to notice: in the second verse, the second line is sung minus the “skip” we heard in the first verse, but with the same kind of conversational phrasing (so easy to aim for and difficult to affect), and now (a bonus) with an ear-catching internal rhyme (1:28): “From a voice so near you almost hear it in your mind.” There are of course some larger good things going on too, here—the repeating ghostly “voice” (synthesized?) that propels and unifies the song, the centrality of an unadorned piano, the feeling of discrete aural space in an age in which mixes too often turn to DIY mush. Most of all I love how unfussy everything seems; the song proceeds in a “just so” kind of way; even the guitar solo (2:56) seems to float in with a fetching combination of diffidence and authority. Keep this on repeat for a while and it just about hypnotizes you.

The Reflections are a duo based in Los Angeles. Their debut full-length album is to be called Limerence and is scheduled some time in the first few months of 2013.

photo credit: Adam Goldberg

Favorite free & legal MP3s of 2012, part two

Back quickly with part two, before the year went and ended on me. These are some seriously good songs, these top 10 favorites. To the extent that some of these may or may not be widely recognized on other year-end lists shows you either how many really good songs came out this year or how hard it is for really good songs to attract a lot of attention in an age when people would rather spend time watching vaguely amusing dance steps. Or maybe both.

1. “Leave Your Body Behind You” – Richard Hawley (June 22)
Monumental, moving, inexplicably great piece of neo-psychedelia. Don’t miss it.

2. “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” – Zeus (February 16)
How to be retro and of-the-moment at the same time. Not to mention awesome.

3. “Money” – Slowdim (April 20)
As well-built and uncontrived as a song can be. Not bad for a debut single.

4. “Birds” – Poor Moon (August 22)
Gorgeous Fleet Foxes side project, with lovely melodies and an uncanny arrangement.

5. “Harps” – The Sea and Cake (September 21)
Veteran Chicago band offers up a song as vague and noodly as it is arresting and memorable. Not sure how.

6. “Every Other Day” – Jonka (April 27)
Awesome, layered groove and serious vocal work.

7. “Ruin” – Cat Power (June 22)
Peppy yet fierce, and it grows on you.

8. “Born To” – Jesca Hoop (April 27)
Bewitching brew, full of spirit and artful artifice.

9. “When I’m Dead” – The Dead Heads (November 30)
Sublime combination of the primitive and the sophisticated: garage rock for the 2010s.

10. “The Devil Wears a Suit” – Kate Miller-Heidke (January 6)
Smart, beautifully crafted, and spine-tingling.

And that’s all, folks. Happy new year; we’ll start this up again next week….

Favorite free & legal MP3s of 2012, part one

The annual Fingertips list of favorite free and legal MP3s of the year, part one.

Call me old-fashioned but I like my year-end lists to happen truly at the end of the year. As I think we’re close enough now, I am hereby unveiling the annual Fingertips list of favorite free and legal MP3s of the year. If you’re visiting the site, you can access the entire list through one of the main “tabs.” For those accessing the site via RSS feed or email, I will be spending the last two posts of the year presenting the favorites in two separate lists of 10.

To be considered for the list, songs had first of all to have been featured on Fingertips during the year 2012, and second of all must still be available as free and legal MP3s. You can download any or all of them right here the usual way, or listen via the play button if you happen to be reading this directly on the Fingertips site. If my snappy one-sentence song summaries leave you wanting more, you can read the original reviews by clicking on the date next to each band name, which is the date of the original Fingertips post.

I’ll start, as tradition has it, with the list presenting my numbers 11 through 20 favorites. Next week I’ll be back with the top 10.

11. “Rivers” – Black City Lights (March 29)
This is all about delayed gratification. If you wait for it, the payoff is stirring.

12. “Bang” – Elin Ruth (November 30)
I for one never tire of this kind of retro-pop-soul, if artfully done. This is artfully done.

13. “Lord Knows” – Dum Dum Girls (September 21)
Reverb suffuses this classic-sounding ballad.

14. “Stop This Now” – The Hermit Crabs (September 6)
Lovely, melancholy music as only those bands from Glasgow know how to create.

15. “Observations” – The Raveonettes (June 29)
This now-veteran duo still showing us how it’s done.

16. “A Week of Good Health” – Panoramic & True (September 14)
Inexplicably appealing ensemble pop.

17. “Broke” – Sea of Bees (March 16)
As sweet and powerful as a simple-sounding song can be. Another great chorus, too.

18. “Farm Kid” – Elim Bolt (October 12)
Songs with catchy choruses are still being made.

19. “Generals” – The Mynabirds (March 22)
Protest songs are still being made; this one is particularly stompy and wonderful.

20. “Living in a Country” – Brave Baby (December 8)
Earnest, incisive rock’n’roll is still possible, and still being made.

Okay, that’s the second ten. If you like surprises, tune in next week for the top 10; if you need it all right now, you can go here, although be warned: you won’t get the incisive one-sentence summaries over on that page. I have to leave something for next week.

Free and legal MP3: Gross Ghost (reverby/jangly power-poppy garage rock)

“Leslie” stomps along with the complex buoyancy of any dark tale told to a toe-tapping beat and sing-songy melody.

“Leslie” – Gross Ghost

Delightful yet purposeful, “Leslie” is a short shot of reverby/jangly power-poppy garage rock, or maybe garage-rocky power pop. This one stomps along with the complex buoyancy of any somber tale told to a toe-tapping beat and sing-songy melody; the song’s narrator is talking to his father’s wife (~~not, clearly, his own mother~~ and yes it is about his own mother, my mistake; misunderstood the lyrics), formerly and maybe still currently a drug addict. The story’s curious, even random-seeming specificity is an intermittent indie-rock songwriting trait that can either intrigue or irritate, depending entirely on the strength of the music. A lot of times—as here—you can’t really follow the lyrics anyway; when the music is this melodic and insistent, if the lyrics are more sound than story, there’s no loss to the listener, from my point of view. It’s enough for phrases to emerge—in this case, the song coheres nicely around the chorus’s poignant line: “Feels like I’m watching you but no one’s watching me.” Or at least I think it’s the chorus, in that it sounds like a chorus musically, and yet we only hear it once. I’m assuming if the song were any longer than 2:26 we would have heard it again.

Gross Ghost is a band based in Durham, North Carolina. While details are sketchy, they appear to have started life as the duo of guitarist Mike Dillon and bassist William “Tre” Acklen, but at this point their Facebook page lists four members. The debut Gross Ghost album, Brer Rabbit, was released back in March on the Chapel Hill label Grip Tapes; a second vinyl pressing will be shipping next month. In the meantime, the band has since signed with Odessa Records, also based in Chapel Hill, which plans to release the follow-up album this coming spring. Thanks to the MP3 blog Faronheit for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Squalloscope (affecting blend of electronic and organic)

Soft, elusive electronic parts intermingle with organic movement; the song unfolds like a skittish, intimate dream.

“Z-E-P-H-Y-R” – Squalloscope

Unfolding like a skittish, intimate dream, “Z-E-P-H-Y-R” is an affecting blend of the organic and the electronic. The non-organic parts are soft and elusive—a whispery synth here, chimey electronics there, and the gentlest of synthetic beats throughout. The non-electronic stuff, meanwhile, is full of movement and subtle edginess. We get a finger-picked guitar front and center, and it took me many listens to internalize the fact that this is an electric guitar, not an acoustic guitar. It’s being played like an acoustic guitar, which is more unusual than it probably should be.

Meanwhile, Anna Kohlweis performs with a commanding nonchalance, gliding deftly between lyrics that are almost spoken and those that are sung. Her voice has a pleasing richness and an engaging variation between her lower and higher registers, while the words that are half-spoken are often arriving with the velvety urgency of a whispered prayer. Her voice and delivery combine with the uncluttered arrangement to create the illusion that there is maybe not much of a song or a melody here, but that’s exactly what it is—an illusion. Listen carefully and you may see how the song’s melodic strength is hiding in plain sight, at once enhanced and obscured by subtlety and misdirection.

Squalloscope is the current performing name for Vienna, Austria-based singer/songwriter/artist/writer Anna Kohlweis. She previously recorded music under the name Paper Bird. “Z-E-P-H-Y-R” is a song from the debut Squalloscope album, Soft Invasions, which was released on Seayou Records back in March. The song was released this fall as a single and a free and legal MP3. You can download it via the link above or via SoundCloud, where you can also read the lyrics.

Free and legal MP3: Amor de Días (Clientele-like breeziness, w/ some crunch)

Evocative of bygone days and hopeful futures simultaneously.

“Jean’s Waving” – Amor de Días

There’s a gratifying solidity about “Jean’s Waving,” something that evokes bygone days and hopeful futures simultaneously. The feeling is nostalgic, to be sure, but not incurably so. The song is shot through with suspended chords, which tend to have a lovely irresoluteness about them—they haven’t quite committed to a full-fledged chord, but they’re ever charming in their indecision. And did I say solidity? Maybe I meant fluidity, as those uncommitted chords do flow so nicely into other chords, not to mention each other. (The most prominent example in this song is during the bridge, starting at 0:54, which seems to be built pretty much entirely from suspended chords.)

Well, solid or fluid, I like. Amor de Días is the twosome of Alasdair MacLean, best known as front man for the Clientele (currently on hiatus), and Lupe Núñez-Fernández, who is half of the multinational duo Pipas. When last we heard the band here, in March 2011, Lupe Núñez-Fernández was out in front, and the song, while still flowy, had a Continental flair to its brisk chamber poppy vibe. With MacLean on lead this time, the Clientele connection becomes (much) more obvious, for anyone familiar with that evocative band. But even with our friends the suspended chords, the sound here is less gauzy and more, maybe, crunchy than Clientele tunes tend to be. (Listen to “Somebody Changed,” from God Save the Clientele, for a reasonably close comparison.) So maybe we’re back to solidity after all. And I do believe that it’s Núñez-Fernández’s presence in the chorus that keeps the mood from getting too mopey, as it kind of helps the listener, however subtly, see or feel Jean’s departure from both points of view.

“Jean’s Waving” is a song from the second Amor de Días album, The House at Sea, which is coming from the fine folks at Merge Records in January. You can download the MP3 via the song link above or on SoundCloud via Merge.

Free and legal MP3: Joshua James (cryptic folk rocker w/ edgy vibe)

Joshua James is a young man with an old man’s voice. The words he sings are both cryptic and intense, which is a disconcerting combination.

“Queen of the City” – Joshua James

Joshua James is a young man with an old man’s voice. The words he sings are both cryptic and intense, which is a disconcerting combination. Written out they look merely weird; this, for instance—

I heard a lady singing,
“We’re all bound together!”
I joined her side by saying,
“To dance beneath the heavens!”

—is not the only point in the song where you just go what the what? Or, here’s the chorus’s recurring assertion: “But my dog ain’t nothin’, he ain’t nothin’ like my lover/Ain’t nothin’ like my lover at all.” This dude is operating from foreign coordinates, and I don’t mean merely the fact that he splits his time between Nebraska and Utah.

But songs aren’t poetry; lyrics are not intended to stand alone on a page or a screen. Some kind of alchemy is at work in the way these words are sung by this voice to these melodies and this steady, drum-driven arrangement. There are no flamboyant hooks or striking sounds, but there’s an edginess in here somewhere, and a catchiness too, although both are difficult to pinpoint. The key, to me, is the internal rhyme he uses in the second line of the verse. He grabs you with it in the opening moments—“I am a liar, a dirty wire”—but mutes the effect in the second verse with an inexact rhyme (“baby” and “lady”). What he’s done, consciously or not, is set us up for the third verse—the ear was waiting for the return of a true rhyme (“I’ll be she’s pretty, queen of the city”) and even though that’s the only time we hear the title’s phrase, the song now seems effortlessly to have delivered us to this phrase, at just the right moment. Just don’t expect to understand what he’s talking about. One other thing he has mysteriously set up is the twist in the third iteration of the chorus, when the dog is abruptly replaced: “But my lord, you ain’t nothin’, you ain’t nothin’ like my lover/You ain’t nothin’ like my lover at all.” I’m not sure I will ever decipher all this but it feels righteous and deep. Impressive stuff.

“Queen of the City” is a track from James’ third full-length album, From the Top of Willamette Mountain, which was released last month on Intelligent Noise Records. The produced by Richard Swift, who has worked with the Mynabirds and Laetitia Sadier and is also now a member of the Shins.