Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Wildlife Control

Think the Records crossed with Phoenix

“Analog or Digital” – Wildlife Control

The pumpkin ale may be arriving on the beer shelves, but I hope it’s not too late to slip a great summer song into your music library. In “Analog or Digital,” pure power-pop adrenaline meets a nimble 21st-century sound palette—think the Records crossed with Phoenix—and all that’s missing are people still listening to their car radios with the windows open. Not to mention radio stations that would play this. But you get the idea.

This one hardly needs any annotation—it’s got a head-bopping one-note bass line, an infectious melody, is three minutes long, and is about listening to records (a subject that forms its own important splinter group in the kingdom of power pop). Bonus points for the chorus’s recurring lyric “It doesn’t matter if she’s analog or digital,” which seems instantly zeitgeist-y—a brilliant blend of the concrete and vague, simple to sing along with, while inviting more meaning than it actually offers.

Wildlife Control is a duo comprised of brothers Neil and Sumul Shah. They grew up in rural northeastern Pennsylvania and are now bicoastal, with Neil in Brooklyn, Sumul in San Francisco. Their web site bio, which seems purposefully nebulous, notes that the brothers “collaborate on everything,” while offering no specifics on, say, who does the lead vocals, or who else helped them out in recording their album (“an ensemble of close friends” is the best we get). “Analog or Digital” has been running around the internet since December, in advance of the band’s first album, which was just self-released at the end of July. No worries about the anonymous-looking file name here, this one checks out as free and legal. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the original link.

Free and legal MP3: Wild Moccasins

Glistening, purposeful neo-’90s guitar rock

“Gag Reflections” – Wild Moccasins

With its glistening union of purposeful guitar rock and a mellifluous soprano, “Gag Reflections” gives off a welcome aroma of ’90s alternative rock (Belly, anybody? Tanya Donelly?), and okay, here’s something that the Retromania crowd refuses to understand: how brilliant it is that today’s bands have such wide-ranging, decades-spanning musical language by which to be inspired. Sure, it was cool when rock’n’roll was younger and new forms were emerging, but it is also cool now with nearly 60 years of rock’n’roll behind us for bands to comb through it all and decide what works as a platform for their own musical expression. For laughs, browse the blogosphere and note how often writers disparage a band for “not breaking any ground.” By which they mean that a given piece of music doesn’t seem to sound “new.” And yet to judge “newness” based entirely on whether it’s a new form is not only short-sighted (there’s way more to music than form, and always has been) but entirely misses the point of rock’n’roll in 2012. End of rant.

Both solidly built and subtly quirky, “Gag Reflections” begins with an odd but incisive prelude—first we hear a double-time riff, with an air of Morse-code urgency about it, then Zahira Gutierrez enters singing only the song’s title, the riff continuing, building tension, and releasing, now, into a proper intro. And quite an intro it is, with a satisfying, all but anthemic guitar line (0:22), the kind of guitar line, indeed, that rock’n’roll songs were made to be built around. And yet here, this superb guitar line feels a bit hidden—less central than slightly left-of-central, and soon overshadowed by Gutierrez’s fetching, elastic voice, which is simultaneously inviting and mysterious. She is one of those singers who can appear to sing clearly while still concealing most of the words she’s saying. And so you lean closer in. The payoff arrives at the end of the chorus, when she abandons words entirely for that angelic “oo-oo-oo” we first hear at 1:12. I love that the song’s most powerful hook is a fleeting moment, almost an afterthought, after the lyrics have ended. I also love the even higher “oo-oo-oo” Gutierrez unleashes later on (2:44), and, then, the brief but compelling guitar noise the band puts out shortly thereafter.

Wild Moccasins are a Houston-based quintet founded in 2007. Their debut album, Skin Collision Past, was self-released in 2010, and then re-released nationally in 2011 on New West Records. “Gag Reflections” is a single released in mid-July on New West.

Free and legal MP3: King of Spain (one-note melody, w/ power & style)

I don’t know if I’m a sucker for one-note melodies but I sure am fascinated by them.

“Motions” – King of Spain

I don’t know if I’m a sucker for one-note melodies but I sure am fascinated by them. Rock’n’roll has had a smattering of famous songs with extended one-note melodies (“Subterranean Homesick Blues,” “Pump It Up,” and “It’s the End of the World As We Know It” are the three that always come to mind) and yet consider the difference in feel between that trio of harangue-like tunes and this one-note wonder, which is smooth and cat-like in its unfolding. The arrangement, drony and hypnotic, pulls us with style and determination through such a silvery series of chords that the ear almost doesn’t hear how dogged a one-note melody this is—unlike its one-note companions from rock history, which veer now and then from the primary note, the melody in “Motions” is literally just one note for the entire length of the verse section, beginning at 0:39, until the very last note, which falls off on the last word of the phrase “This is the way that we fall.”

One-note melodies inescapably draw our attention to the lyrics, since our ears seek the source of complication in what they are listening to, in an effort to understand, and if the melody is all one note, the complication pretty much all comes from the words. The lyrics in a one-note melody carry an inescapable feeling of stream of consciousness; the lyrics of “Motions” take this one step further—they seem less a spontaneous litany of cool-sounding words than themselves a meaningful exploration of the inner workings of the mind. They pour out, demand contemplation, yet leave no time in which to contemplate. Focus if you can on the words and you’ll find the power of the song multiplies.

When the debut King of Spain album, Entropy, was released in 2007, the band was a solo project for Tampa singer/multi-instrumentalist Matt Slate. In 2009, King of Spain became a duo when bassist Daniel Wainright joined as a full-fledged member. “Motions” is from the forthcoming album All I Did Was Tell Them the Truth and They Thought It Was Hell, to be released at the end of August on New Grenada Records.

photo credit: Lucy Pearl Photography (http://www.lucy-pearl.com)

Free and legal MP3: The Nervous Wreckords (snarly, snotty, & good-natured)

On the one hand a poison pen letter to music critics, “Let Them All Talk” is at the same time a kind of self send-up, which makes the whole thing function in a much more delightful way than it otherwise might.

“Let Them All Talk” – The Nervous Wreckords

Snarly and snotty and yet still good-natured, “Let Them All Talk” is a speak-singing throwback to some earlier, more primal kind of rock’n’roll. I’m not sure I normally like this kind of thing—whatever “kind of thing” this in fact is—but I am won over by front man Brian Karscig’s unerring musical instincts. Even while sort-of-talking it’s clear that he has a fine singing voice, and even as the song sounds simple, the arrangement is inventive and the band ever so tight. I love in particular the peculiar, background guitar solos (0:57 and 2:12) and the perfect finishing touch of the female background singers who begin chiming in with fills of “Oooo! Jealous!” at 3:01.

On the one hand a poison pen letter to music critics, “Let Them All Talk” is at the same time a kind of self send-up, which makes the whole thing more delightful than it otherwise might be. I don’t know if there’s any effective way for a rock singer to take a straight potshot at critics without sounding like a whiner; Karscig avoids that with his goofy bravado, which winks while it chastises, and includes some actual flak he himself has received (e.g. “sounds like a girl when he sings,” a charge sometimes leveled at him while in the band Louis XIV). In the process he comes across as both serious and jokey, which, in a meta kind of way, allows him all the better to get some good digs in (e.g., “You act like a rock star/But all you play is your pen, and your mouth”). The best way to act like a tough guy in our post-ironic age is to make fun of acting like a tough guy.

Karscig played with the relatively successful Louis XIV (2003-2009), which released two of its three albums on Atlantic Records, and made appearances on late-night TV in the U.S. The Nervous Wreckords were started in the wake of Louis XIV’s dissolution in 2009. In addition to playing guitar and singing, Karscig has worked increasingly often as a producer. “Let Them All Talk” is the title track to the second Nervous Wreckords album, which was recorded in Karscig’s home studio on a vintage Neve board with ’60s and ’70s gear. This will be the band’s first national release, slated to arrive in September via Knitting Factory Management. MP3 courtesy of the fine folks at Magnet Magazine.

Fingertips Q&A: The Royalty’s Nicole Bourdeau

The Royalty’s front woman Nicole Bourdeau answers five questions about the state of music in the digital age.

The El Paso quintet The Royalty have a marvelous throwback feeling to them without, somehow, sounding overly nostalgic or out of step. They have the assured vibe of musicians just doing what they do, waiting patiently for the world to come back around to wanting this kind of thing. The band’s buoyant appeal has much to do with big-voiced Nicole Bourdeau, who sings with a verve that channels many decades’ worth of charismatic vocalists, from pre-rock’n’roll belters to girl group powerhouses to new wave chanteuses.

Founded in 2005, the band released its self-titled debut album just last year, and was featured here at that point, for the song “Alexander.” A follow-up album, Lovers, was released this May; it has yet to yield a free and legal MP3 but if or when that happens I’m rooting for the song “Bartender,” which you can check out via the band’s video.

In the meantime, front woman Nicole was kind enough to stop by, virtually, to tackle the relentless but well-intentioned Fingertips Q&A questions.

The Fingertips Q&A, for the uninitiated, is a recurring feature. More than 30 artists to date have participated. The Q&A’s sole intent is to allow actual, workaday 21st-century musicians a forum for discussing the state of music in the digital age. So-called experts and futurists have far too loudly dominated this discussion for too long.

Q: Let’s cut to the chase: how do you as a musician cope with the apparent fact that not everybody seems to want to pay for digital music? Do you think recorded music is destined to be free, as some of the pundits insist?

A: Yeah this is a tough issue. It’s definitely hard to deal with the modern boycott of purchased music. I do not think music should be free. It’s just like everything else, there needs to be money to back you up and give sustenance to what you’re doing. We’ve noticed a shift to live music (i.e., all the festivals) and vinyl that is becoming the new income source for musicians. That’s not a bad thing. It’s cool. But as for digital music, it’s a tough battle and no one in the industry has an answer. But hey, at this second, we’re getting to play and we’re happy campers about that.

Q: What do you think of the idea that music is destined for the “cloud”?

A: There are lots of ways to look at the cloud. As a musician, it’s a little daunting because it’s never been this way before, historically. As a listener, I can see pros to it though. Technology has taken away the artifact (tangible recordings) and made them immortal in a way. So ANY musician is on the same playing field. The likelihood of getting shelved and forgotten is now a lot smaller…because there is no shelf! I feel like I could go in circles on the pros and cons but overall I’d say this new age of transparency is a good and challenging chance for musicians to rise to the occasion.

Q: How has your life as a musician been affected—or not—by the existence of music blogs? Do you miss old-style music criticism, or do you welcome the non-professional music fan into the mix?

A: As a band, I think we’ve greatly benefited from the existence of music blogs. Victory [the band’s record label] actually first heard about us through a random blog and it lead to getting signed. We’ve had some really wonderful reviews and it’s always great to get that encouragement. I say let people have the freedom to start blogs and if you are good at giving reviews, your opinion will matter. But there’s a difference between well-thought intelligent opinion and an agro-nerd rant. We keep crossing our fingers because the reviews so far have been pretty friendly…

Q: One obvious thing the digital age has introduced is the ease of two-way communication between artist and fan. Does this feel like a benefit or a distraction, or a little of both?

A: Good question! Well I think the digital age has let the artist/fan relationship reach new heights in the best kind of way. It’s kind of like that transparency I mentioned. The contact level is so solid that you have to be honest about who you are and I say any honesty added to the world is a good thing. It’s a benefit and can be so much fun. Distracting? Yeah maybe, haha. It’s another element added to the job description of musician but it’s an important one.

Q: There is clearly way more music available for people to listen to these days than there ever used to be. How do you as a musician cope with the reality of an over-saturated market, to put it both economically and bluntly?

A: I would say economically speaking, at the moment at least, the over-saturation is hitting us hard. On one side, anyone can record at home (including us) and that’s creatively really great. But it leads people to feel like music is a free resource and that decreases its value on the market. On the other side, I think the music business is still the same ol’ cut throat place. You have to have a stroke of luck plus the talent to back it up. The burst of evolution in the music world is going to proceed in a predictable fashion, musicians need to adapt and become stronger or they won’t make it.

Fingertips Flashback: Ephemera (from November 2004)

Revisiting a previously featured song, this one from 2004.

Fingertips is going into its summer hiatus, which means no new songs will be posted until July 25th (or so). I won’t be entirely absent from the internet, and there may be a certain amount of activity around here, but a lot of it will be maintenance oriented and somewhat invisible.

To ease into the slowdown, I offer you a wistful summery song from the land of ice and snow. And okay it’s actually not a cheerful song—few songs entitled “Saddest Day” would be aiming in that direction—but it’s a lovely musical breeze on a hot July day nonetheless.

“Saddest Day” – Ephemera

[from November 22, 2004]

A three-woman Norwegian band channeling Astrud Gilberto via Frente—yes, the world can be a wonderful place when we all just mingle together peacefully and see what happens. Bright, silvery, and airy, “Saddest Day” is that sweetest of pop confections: a sad song wrapped in an upbeat package. Stars in their native country (they received the Norwegian equivalent of a Grammy earlier this year), Ephemera have released four CDs to date; this spring, a compilation disc called Score was released for the U.S. market. Not yet out of their 20s, Ephemera has nevertheless been together for 10 years now. “Saddest Day” was originally from the band’s 2000 CD, Sun, which was their second; it is also found on a CD called Score, a compilation released for the U.S. market this past spring. The MP3 is on the band’s web site. Thanks to visitor Jeff for the head’s up.

ADDENDUM: Although the band’s site is still online, and the MP3 is still available there, things have been quiet in Ephemera-land since 2005. Vocalist Christine Sandtorv released a solo album in 2006 (on Ifemmera Records, it should be noted); the internet’s nosy robots pick up no other sign of musical activity from any of the three bandmates since then.

Free and legal MP3: Fast Romantics (no-nonsense rock’n’roll, both epic & wistful)

Not quite a “happy music/sad lyrics” song, “Funeral Song” alerts us to the overlooked and perhaps flummoxing idea that not all uptempo music is in fact happy in the first place.

“Funeral Song” – Fast Romantics

We all know how effective it can be to pair happy-sounding music with unhappy lyrics; it’s a great trick, at which pop music is singularly adept. A subtler variation of this is on display in “Funeral Song,” which alerts us to the overlooked and perhaps flummoxing idea that not all uptempo music is in fact happy in the first place. Brisk, expansive movement to a strong beat can embody defiance or determination or some other complex sense of real life being lived. This is an upbeat song but it’s not “happy music”…which would come to think of it be difficult to pull off with a first line like “I just got back from your funeral” anyway.

Not that it’s clear what’s going on here lyrically, actually. Once the space-travel allusions start (metaphorical? or not?), I will admit to being lost. But this then (how convenient!) is another thing at which pop music is singularly adept: taking odd and/or indecipherable lyrics and making something bigger and grander out of them. And “Funeral Song” sounds big and grand to me, in a no-nonsense-rock’n’roll kind of way. The song’s central melodic descent—the three adjacent notes we hear first on the word “funeral”—is a purposeful, grounding gesture and yet also an off-kilter one: it’s used to open rather than close the verse, and the half-time melody (i.e., each syllable of the word stretches over two beats) plays with the rhythmic momentum just when it might otherwise be kicking in. The choral-like harmonies we first hear on this word/motif are used for emphasis throughout and add to the epic yet wistful feeling. As does the oddly long bridge section (1:57), which is fashioned upon the aforementioned three-note melodic descent, strung together in a condensed way that has the feeling of time-signature trickery but remains (I think) in 4/4 time throughout.

“Funeral Song” is from the band’s forthcoming album, Afterlife Blues, which will be their first full-length. An EP was previously released, in July 2010. Thanks to the band for the MP3, which you can alternatively download via SoundCloud.

Free and legal MP3: Leverage Models (happy beat, buoyant sound)

I’m not sure how much is electronic and how much is organic but the sound is sweet and buoyant, with some great fat bass licks and an early smattering of shiny, retro-future synth squiggles.

“Cooperative Extensions” – Leverage Models

Well, talk about happy music, isn’t this a happy beat? Fifteen seconds in, not a lot has really started, and I’m already smiling. I’m not sure how much is electronic and how much is organic but the sound is sweet and buoyant, with some great fat bass licks and an early smattering of shiny, retro-future synth squiggles. The vocals accumulate over the course of the first minute as little more than a gathering mumble and then, right on cue, comes the first lyric: “We get to this place/After standing in line with everyone in the world.” I’m still smiling.

I can’t really tell you what happens from here on in, but I like it. The beat goes on; the song glides by; stray lyrical bits penetrate; the vocals get a bit frantic in a neo-Talking-Heads kind of way. What I like about Shannon Fields, who does musical business as Leverage Models, is that he creates such a vibrant, chewy sound from his rhythms and keyboards. I mean, that’s so much of what pop music has reduced to in this age of free music: rhythms and keyboards. I am aghast at the number of songs thrown up on SoundCloud that are the most unremarkable constructions that nevertheless attract comments of unadulterated if generic support (“Awesome beat!” “Cool vocal!”). If we keep hearing unremarkable as good we are not going to know anything anymore. But I digress. Fortunately talent still finds a way, some of the time. Fields has a gift, even if I can’t quite describe it or know what it actually is. “Cooperative Extensions” has the feel of a jolly, nebulous, 21st-century adventure (this is the first song I can think of that has a lyrical reference to clicking on a link) and each time it ends I feel inclined to hit the play button again not because the next listen will unlock the mystery (although there’s always hoping) but because it just wants to keep playing and playing.

Fields has recorded two EPs as Leverage Models over the last 18 months or so, and seems affixed to what Hometapes, his record label, calls “two-word identifiers” (the previous releases were Interim Deliverable and Forensic Accounting). “Cooperative Extensions” is the title track from the forthcoming debut full-length album, for which I can’t find a release date. Note that Leverage Models was previously featured on Fingertips in January 2011.

Free and legal MP3: The Raveonettes (reverbed and haunting, w/ ’70s touches)

A reverbed composition centered on an elegiac, six-note descending melody, with all sorts of vague ghosts from rock’n’roll past floating through the soundscape.

“Observations” – The Raveonettes

Off a hauntingly familiar piano riff—“Cold as Ice,” maybe, but backwards—“Observations” launches into a reverbed composition centered on an elegiac, six-note descending melody. Minor-key, of course. All sorts of vague ghosts from rock’n’roll past float through the soundscape, as typically happens when the Raveonettes come to town. (I will remind you that the duo’s very name is rooted deep-down in rock’n’roll history: The “Rave On”-ettes.) A good part of the group’s charm is that one is never sure what particular musical obsession will catch their interest at any given time. In addition to bursting on the scene with a major-label debut intent on somehow mashing together My Bloody Valentine and Buddy Holly (My Buddy Valentine?), this is a band that recorded their entire first release in the key of B-flat minor, and then their next album (the aforementioned major-label debut) all in the key of B-flat major.

This time around we appear to be in the ’70s, maybe. Beyond the inverted Foreigner riff, “Rhiannon” is in the air. At first the guitar has an Eric Clapton-ish aspect (e.g., 0:49, 1:09). But then the fuzzy/hazy guitars—nothing ’70s about them—make their entrance, and the cross-pollination begins, full of that special kind of elusive white noise that lets you know this is in any case a Raveonettes record. Male vocalist Sune Rose Wagner takes the lead here, his buzzy tenor dripping with reverb, with partner Sharin Foo floating Christine McVie-ishly in the background.

“Observations” is the semi-lead track from the band’s upcoming album, Observator, which is due out on Vice Records in September. The album is the band’s sixth, or seventh, if you count their eight-song debut as an album rather than an EP. It was recorded with producer Richard Gottehrer at Hollywood’s Sunset Sound recording studio, where any number of ’60s and ’70s classics were born, including Pet Sounds, Exile on Main Street, and albums by the Doors, Led Zeppelin, Fleetwood Mac, James Taylor, and Neil Young. This is the fourth time the band has been featured on Fingertips, with a first appearance dating all the way back to the dark days of 2003.

MP3 via Vice Records. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Cat Power

Peppy, fierce, w/ faux-Latin backbone

“Ruin” – Cat Power

With a measured, faux-Latin piano riff, “Ruin” offers up an expressive mix of the peppy and the fierce. Even in this upbeat, quasi-pop-like setting, Cat Power can’t take the smoke and fire from her voice; as a matter of a fact, one might argue that the voice is all the more effective in this new (for her) environment. The elusive lyrics augment her voice’s capacity to haunt—in particular the chorus’s incantation of far-flung cities and countries.

The music, meanwhile, is frisky but not frivolous. Grounded in that rhythmic riff, Power spends a lot of time in between the beat; even the emphatic choral climax only aligns with the beat for the conclusion, the words “sitting on a ruin”—which is what gives it its intriguing oomph. And for me, at least, that scratchy, slashing guitar sound is a revelation. That may be my own issue, as I have a personal disinclination for the slow, reverby, blues-guitar-y sound to which she previously defaulted. And yeah, I know, everyone was supposed to have loved that. I like this better.

Power—born Charlyn Marshall; known as Chan; pronounced “Shawn”—has not released an album of original material since her indie “mainstream” breakthrough, The Greatest, ten years into her recording career, in 2006. (There was a covers album in 2008 and a covers EP the following year.) Her backstory involves far too much angst and difficulty for me to get into here. You can look it up if interested. “Ruin” is the first song made available from her long-awaited new album, Sun, which is scheduled for a September release on Matador Records. MP3 via Matador. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

photo credit: Nils Bernstein (via http://www.thestoolpigeon.co.uk)