Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Tribes (big brash well-produced guitar rock)

A smartly-crafted song with lots of melody and guitars may sound like a relic or—maybe?—it could be a clarion call for a change of musical/cultural course.

“We Were Children” – Tribes

As DIY- and/or electronics-focused as rock’n’roll has become in the 21st century, sometimes it does an ear good (my ear, anyway) to hear a band that aims for a big, brash, well-produced sound. Yes, “We Were Children” brings to mind music from a bygone era—either the ’70s or the ’90s, depending on your frame of reference—but this is only because of how thin and/or muddy and/or manipulated is the characteristic sound of the here and now. A smartly-crafted song with lots of melody and guitars may sound like a relic or—maybe?—it could be a clarion call for a change of musical/cultural course. This is a young band; as the lyrics clearly state, “We were children in the mid-’90s.” If it also brings to mind Mott the Hoople covering early Radiohead, well, let’s see, we can either take it as a sign that pop culture has run out of steam or is yet again reinventing itself via the past.

The title phrase by the way is nearly all that’s clear about the lyrics, which employ ordinary nouns like magazine and suitcase and clothes in the opening verse to spin a quickly mysterious story in bashy, quasi-glam-rock-y style. The chorus withdraws into an introspective, semi-whispered refrain full of simple, one-syllable words. We are both attracted and bewildered. Who is the “stranger”? “These things happen”—what things? The words acquire an anthemic cadence, even as the music holds back. Meanwhile, guitars are everywhere, lead and rhythm and solo, with effective bits of squonk and drone. Front man Johnny Lloyd emotes with a natural swagger, his voice operating at both high and low volume without losing character or presence. By the time (2:27) we hear the chorus sung in all-out mode, with elusive sing-along backing vocals, it’s as if that’s what we’d been hearing all along. Nicely done.

Founded in Camden in 2009, Tribes released its debut full-length album, Baby, in the UK in January, after releasing two EPs in 2011. The album is getting a US release on Universal Republic next week.

photo credit: Martin Zähringer

Free and legal MP3: Eux Autres (sneakily well-crafted garage pop)

Sneaky-accomplished garage pop from the endearing Bay Area trio Eux Autres.

“Home Tonight” – Eux Autres

Well they tell me there’s a hundred ways to fight
But I’ll only need a few of them tonight

Every now and then an unassuming band delivers up a classic rock song opening line. The Bay Area trio Eux Autres does that here, and then ups the ante by altering the first line when the verse is repeated later in the song so that we now get this:

Well they tell me there’s a hundred ways to fight
And I’m hoping not to use them all tonight

Such attention to detail, and humor, is just one sign that this lo-fi-ish song is sneaky-accomplished. It’s a simple song, with two verses and a chorus and a bridge, but the way things interlock creates a subtle sense of satisfaction in the unsuspecting ear. First, there’s the repeating verse with the altered line; next, we get an augmented chorus the second time through (1:37), with new words delivered to the original melody before the existing chorus is then, also, heard; lastly, the bridge (2:05) arrives using the phrase “‘Cause there’s no way to prove,” which was first heard in the first verse.

None of this would matter that much if the thing weren’t so relentlessly melodic. Note, first, the lack of introduction. Let’s just get right to business. Note, second, the 16-measure melody in the verse. Not a common thing in general, and especially not in this kind of garage pop. Note, third, how both the verse and the chorus have instant appeal, which is another unusual thing—often this kind of quick, catchy pop tune skimps on the verse to offer up the killer chorus. No skimping here.

“Home Tonight” is from the new Eux Autres EP, Sun Is Sunk, which was released last week on the band’s own imprint, Bon Mots Records. (Pronounce the name “ooz oh-tra,” with the “oo” as in “good.) While founded as the brother/sister duo of Heather and Nicholas Larimer, the group added drummer Yoshi Nakamoto in 2008. They have been previously featured here both in September 2010 and way back in May 2005. Ridiculously faithful Fingertips followers may remember, too, that the band was part of the Fingertips: Unwebbed CD compilation, released in 2005.

Free and legal MP3: Brendan Benson (multi-faceted ’70s-inflected ballad)

Recorded in an all-analog studio, “Bad For Me” oozes heart, craft, and ’70s goodness.

“Bad For Me” – Brendan Benson

And speaking of the 1970s, and Mott the Hoople, check this one out. Not really Mott this time, but Bowie-esque, certainly (he wrote “All The Young Dudes,” as some but not all may know). And that’s just the tip of the ’70s iceberg here, as attentive ears are likely to hear a splash of Rundgren, a sprinkle of ELO, and maybe even a touch of Nilsson or Eric Carmen in this one.

And Benson is not just talking the talk here. He went and made his new album, What Kind of World, at Nashville’s all-analog “Welcome to 1979” studio (“Fingers on strings, Hands on faders, Music on tape,” as they like to say). Recording in such an environment will affect not only how the music sounds but also what music one chooses to record in the first place. Sonically, structurally, and attitudinally, “Bad For Me” has little to do with standard ’10s blog-fare; equal parts heart and craft, it takes us on a four-minute adventure that ranges from intimate confessional to operatic melodrama and back again. The song even comes to a complete stop at one point (3:09). I don’t tend to get too caught up in sound-quality considerations but I adore the palpable, spacious warmth here, and how it plays out differently in the quieter versus the more expansive moments. Even something as simple as the bass player entering (0:42) seems to happen with rich, ear-opening lucidity.

Brendan Benson is an American singer/songwriter who at this point is most well-known for his association with Jack White and his membership in The Raconteurs. He does have four previous solo albums to his name. What Kind of World will be released in April on Benson’s new Readymade Records label. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead. MP3 via Better Propaganda.

Free and legal MP3: The Big Pink (fat glitchy groove, w/ a heart of pop)

Answering the question no one was probably otherwise asking: “What would Tears for Fears sound like had hip hop existed in the early ’80s?”

“Give It Up” – The Big Pink

With a groove slow and fat enough to lose yourself in and glitchy enough to sound of the moment, “Give It Up” manages to answer the question no one was probably otherwise asking, which is, “What would Tears for Fears sound like had hip hop existed in the early ’80s?”

And if that sounds facetious I don’t mean it to be. First of all, I kind of like Tears for Fears. Second of all, while I like authentic artistic expression as much as the next guy, I also like a good pop song (in the traditional sense of the word, not necessarily meaning that I like what is currently played on Top 40 stations). And at the risk of pointing out the obvious, there is almost nothing about a good pop song that can be rightly called “authentic.” Good pop songs have always been shrewd constructions, built from any given era’s available materials. (This is no excuse for Auto-Tune, by the way, but that’s a separate post.) So, here we have a British duo that blends sampled and/or synthesized strings and horns and all sorts of elusive electronic effects into something that sounds both super constructed and super attractive. And also—I like this part a lot—connected to its own history. When Robbie Furze sings, “It doesn’t have to be/So hard,” switching from falsetto to normal register for that last phrase, I feel myself in the presence of a huge interconnected wave of pop that arrows back not only through the early ’80s but straight into the birth of pop music with a groove, which happened on soul records some time in the late ’60s to early ’70s. The sample here—apparently taken from Memphis soul singer Ann Peebles—is telling. I’m not sure precisely what’s been sampled—horns? strings? vocals?—but that never seems to be the point here in century 21. It’s all about the final collage, and if the collage pulls me in this smartly, I’ll happily go along. Just steer clear of that Auto-Tune.

“Give It Up” is from Future This, the band’s second album, which was released in January on 4AD Records. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Dirty Three

Chunky, inscrutable instrumental

Rising Below” – Dirty Three

Let’s be honest: no one really knows what to do with rock’n’roll instrumentals. Yes, I realize that in rock’n’roll’s first decade, instrumentals were, well, instrumental in establishing the popularity of the nascent genre. There’s “Sleep Walk,” “Apache,” “Walk Don’t Run,” yada yada yada. But those tended to be short and melodic, typically featuring an atmospheric and memorable lead guitar line. And but for a last gasp by organ-oriented Booker T. and the MGs in the latter half of the ’60s, instrumentals became novelties at best, before, a half decade later, in the hands of the prog-rock colossi, mutating into patience-testing exercises in baroque noodling.

“Rising Below” is neither novelty nor incisive burst of melody nor bombast. It’s a chunky, initially unsteady piece that sneaks in through the side door: guitar and violin motifs enunciate themselves as afterthoughts while drummer Jim White slowly ponders the variations open to him for pounding out the first three beats of each four-beated measure. Listen to what happens after the minute and a half mark—it’s as if he’s now taking the pause in which he leaves out the fourth beat to plan his next rendering; you can almost hear the new idea arrive at the end of each successive measure. And when he gets a really-new versus a subtly-new idea, the instruments follow his lead and change their own courses. The most prominent change happens as the song churns past the three-minute mark. First, White incorporates a couple of snappy rolls into his playing and then, yikes, all hell breaks loose at the drum kit (3:13), prompting the violin and guitar to follow with their own disciplined eruptions of dissonance and noise (especially the violin). Then, around 4:10, the drumming reverts to the simple pounding pattern he had been using at the beginning, the one-two-threefour rhythm that gives us four hits but leaves out the actual fourth beat. It’s like he’s saying, “Okay, calm down now.” And they do. Only it’s a fake-out, since White breaks rank at 4:45 and we get a final 45 seconds of ordered craziness before there is, apparently, nothing left to say. This is not necessarily an easy ride but there’s something endearing about it.

Dirty Three have been doing their inscrutable thing since 1992. “Rising Below” is a song from Toward The Low Sun, the Melborne trio’s ninth album, which was released this week on Drag City Records. It’s been seven years since the last Dirty Three album, and sure enough, they were here then too.

photo credit: Annabel Mehran

Free and legal MP3: The Mark Lanegan Band (rumbly rock’n’roll, w/ grumbly baritone)

Listen to how the very rumble and swing of the music here echoes the sound Lanegan himself makes.

“The Gravedigger’s Song” – The Mark Lanegan Band

“I always consider myself to be a pretty good breakfast cook that ended up as a singer,” Mark Lanegan told an interviewer in 2008. That would be a breakfast cook with a distinctively rich and grumbly baritone, in any case. And while the years have taken him on an unexpected musical journey—I mean, no one saw those three albums with Scottish singer/cellist Isobel Campbell coming—everything eventually reduces to that voice. While most facile efforts at pigeonholing Lanegan link him forever with the birth of grunge rock (his band, Screaming Trees, were one of Seattle’s best back in the day), there’s nothing particularly “grunge”-y about Lanegan, who did not fully explore the depth of his vocal tone until the Trees were history. His range and idiosyncrasy align him more with Tom Waits than Kurt Cobain.

Take “Gravedigger’s Song,” and listen to how the very rumble and swing of the music echoes the sound Lanegan makes. However hard-edged the vibe or menacing the lyrics with Lanegan there’s an inescapable caress involved; he sings to embrace you. And he embraces melody, however darkly presented. The music, meanwhile, is more canny than it lets on. As much as the song seems to draw on Delta blues for its spit and spirit, the thing nevertheless spills out with a triple-time feel. That juxtaposition, I think, opens the ear, at least for me, as I tend to like blues that are tweaked more than the standard-issue stuff. And note too that for all the percussive momentum here, the guitar is given the spine-tingling moments. That off chord it hits, first at 0:53, barely audible and yet seething with eloquence, just about nails the whole song—my ear semi-consciously salutes its return each time after that.

“Gravedigger’s Song” is from the album Blues Funeral, released in February on 4AD Records. It’s his seventh solo album, and his first since 2004’s Bubblegum, as well as his first following the Campbell trilogy (note they were featured once on Fingertips, in January 2006.) MP3 via 4AD Records. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

And I may as well point out that Lanegan has also been featured here for his duet with the Swedish singer/songwriter Maggie Björklund, in May of last year.

photo credit: Anna Hrnjak

Free and legal MP3: Your 33 Black Angels (rock’n’roll at once rough-hewn & precise)

At once precise and rough-hewn—like something Ron Sexsmith would write if he were in a band with Neil Young.

“Patient Love” – Your 33 Black Angels

I’ve got a news flash. Rock’n’roll is not dead. Enough with that already. No it’s not what it used to be, no it’s not at the center of the pop cultural universe but can we stop with the witless headlines that arise pretty much every year about rock being dead, or indie rock being dead, or whatever preferred “death of the month” is being declared. I mean sheesh. It is a meaningless and idiotic editorial trope and any editor who runs it is lazy and any writer who writes it is a narcissist. There. I said it.

Rock’n’roll is not dead because there are still rock bands making it, and if you are one of those people who need your rock music to be revolutionary and without precedent well boy have you come to the wrong genre in the first place. Rock bands have been reworking the classics since before Led Zeppelin was ripping off Willie Dixon. So, okay, here’s Brooklyn’s Your 33 Black Angels, and this one just kills it: the vibe is terrific, the guitar riff insistent, the lyrics slippery but compelling, and the organ fills are perfect. (Do not underestimate the organ in the rock’n’roll bag of tricks.) And then there are the little, unutterable things. One example: early in the song (0:26), when the singer sings, “I was just reminded,” and there’s that long and perfect pause between “just” and “reminded,” and it’s exactly the kind of thing you do if you really know how to write songs. In the end there is something so precise and exquisite about this seemingly rough-hewn song. It sounds like something Ron Sexsmith would write if he were in a band with Neil Young.

Your 33 Black Angels is an elusive and idiosyncratic crew, encompassing at least eight musicians, who prefer to go by names like JW, D. Zots, and (my favorite) J. O! (exclamation point included), while apparently utilizing the additional services of “countless others.” “Patient Love” is a song from their fourth album, Moon and Morning Star, which was self-released last week. The band was previously featured here in October 2008. MP3 via the music site Consequence of Sound, and although the link looks generic and sketchy, this was an official premiere so it’s all above board.

Free and legal MP3: Emily Jane White (hypnotic, acoustic, reverbed)

The insistent yet elusive “Black Silk” pulls you into a magical past that somehow blends the Victorian and the medieval.

“Black Silk” – Emily Jane White

At once insistent and elusive, “Black Silk” unfolds in a reverbed acoustic setting that evokes a sense of bygone remoteness; we feel immediately pulled into a magical past that somehow blends the Victorian and the medieval. And yet this sound is likewise very 2010s. Go figure.

At the center of the song is White’s spacious, slightly smoky alto. She sings as if to hypnotize you. The music assists, as she backs her soothing, folk-like melody with a river of double-time finger-picked arpeggios that lull us so with their diligence that we almost don’t notice the rather threatening entrance of the electric guitar about midway through. The song’s very structure, in fact, leads us along as if spellbound, lacking a true chorus while flowing through a mostly unrepeated series of interrelated pieces. The listener can feel both lost and dizzy by the time we get to the climactic clearing. At which point, all White has to say is “oh oh oh,” as you’ll see.

Born in California, White ended up launching her solo music career while living in France in the ’00s, and still has a larger following overseas than in the U.S. “Black Silk” is from Ode To Sentience, her third album, which was released on the Talitres label in France last year. The American release is slated for May on Antenna Farm Records. White was previously featured on Fingertips last March.

Free and legal MP3: The Pharmacy (garage rock, w/ aspirations)

“Dig Your Grave” packs an unusual amount of variety into a two-minute song that might at least partially pass for garage rock.

“Dig Your Grave” – The Pharmacy

This is almost not a song. A scant two minutes to start with, “Dig Your Grave” uses the first 40 seconds on its three-part introduction. Then we hear an engaging, They Might Be Giants-esque verse and a very concise chorus (the words “Dig your grave” repeated three times) before returning to 20 or so more seconds of instrumental; we finish up with the chorus repeated a couple of times. So this thing is two minutes long and fully half of it doesn’t involve singing, and a good part of the singing that exists consists of just three words.

If it all manages to work—and I think it does, particularly in the context of this week’s three songs, as a follow-up to “Black Silk“—it does so on its ability to pack an unusual amount of variety into a narrow time frame. Most short songs, perhaps too aware of their shortness, don’t invest in introductions and instrumental breaks because there seems no time to fiddle with such frivolities. The Pharmacy does the opposite, honing the song down to one verse—although it may be two, sung back to back—so that the rest of the song still has space to breathe and develop. The “frivolities,” it turns out, offer a lot substance. Another way the song seems to expand beyond its clock time is through its rather distinctive mashing together of a very garage-rock-y vibe, complete with lo-fi-seeming vocal distortion, and a more aspirational sort of musicality. The keyboard motif that opens “Dig Your Grave” does not in any way shout “garage rock” at us, and neither does the song’s multifarious construction. And yet the chorus certainly does.

From Seattle, the trio The Pharmacy has been doing its lo-fi, neo-garage-rock thing for 10 years now. They have three albums to show for it and, in keeping with its lo-fi street cred, a bunch of 7-inch singles, a split cassette, and a demo CD-R. “Dig Your Grave” is the lead track from its latest 7-inch, which, at four songs, is more of an EP than a single. It comes to us from Kind Turkey Records, and they’re the ones offering up the MP3 as well.

There’s Always Someone Looking At You:The Two-Way Mirror of Music Industry Email

Most emails that are sent by companies are two-way communication tools disguised as one-way communication tools. And as a result, they are really less like two-way communication tools and more like two-way mirrors, with recipients sitting here on the exposed side, not realizing there are people watching what we’re doing.

I received an email recently from a music promoter that began by thanking me for checking out a song that he had sent as an MP3 link in a previous email.

Maybe I was having a bad day but his email set off little alarms in my brain. He was thanking me for checking it out? Meaning, he knew that I had downloaded the song and listened to it?

He said it so casually. I was not supposed to be perturbed. I was supposed to realize that of course promoters know when you’re downloading their material.

And yet I felt spied on. I emailed him back, not (oops) as politely as I might have, and he answered, a bit irritated, but we kept going and ended up with a friendly and productive dialogue. My eyes were opened to something that they were perhaps rather willfully closed to in the past. Which is this:

Many if not most emails that are sent by companies are not one-way but two-way communication tools. Information is sent to you, and you send information back to the sender. This is standard operating procedure.

And there’s only one little thing wrong with it.

With very few exceptions, these two-way communication tools are disguising themselves as one-way tools. And so they are really less like two-way communication tools and more like two-way mirrors, with recipients sitting here on the exposed side, not realizing there are people watching what we’re doing.

Some may shrug and wonder what the big deal is. I’m a music blogger, people are sending me links, of course they are going to want to know what I’m clicking on.

But you see the issue isn’t that they know what I’m clicking on. It’s that they know but aren’t telling me. If these companies were to state in clear terms at the top of their emails that any link you click on in the email is traceable and trackable, then everything’s cool. I may choose not to click links as a result, or I may choose to. This is my fully-informed decision.

But tracking your behavior without telling you is a breach of privacy. You are being watched and you don’t realize it. Wiretaps are illegal for the same reason.

This is why (now I get it) the links in music industry emails often arrive with extra code attached. The intention at the sender’s end is to be able to know whether each individual recipient has clicked on a link, without specifically telling the recipient that this is happening.

Ironically enough, the promoter who sent me the email that initially alerted me to this problem does in fact let recipients know, at the very end of the email, that the downloads are “monitored.” It’s a fine-print statement that is not very informative and yet this is more than almost anyone else bothers to do who is sending behavior-tracking email.

I can see why this has developed but I can’t see why it’s right.

I’m raising a fuss here because the concept of simple human privacy is taking a beating in the Facebook Age. Despite the self-serving pronouncements of Mark Zuckerberg it is not true that we have collectively changed, on a dime, our views of privacy. They are being changed for us by companies that will profit mightily from this change while arrogantly believing that no one will either bother to or be able to do anything about it. It is disingenuous of Zuckerberg to proclaim some vast sociological insight, based on absolutely zero expertise and 100 percent vested interest.

No, make that: it’s positively scummy of him.

His hubris on the matter will bring him down in the end, without question. He thinks human nature has magically changed in just a few years and yet, ha, the ancient Greeks knew things that he has yet to fathom. I’ve seen the plays, and they don’t turn out well for those who send the needles into the red zone on the hubris-o-meter.

But the problem right now is that Facebook and Google—equally guilty of positioning privacy violation as 21st-century “normal”—appear to be controlling the conversation about privacy. We have to start asserting otherwise. And I begin here in this small way to call out the deceptive, privacy-violating practice of emails that track your behavior without informing you.

In some ways, these emails are even more troubling than the privacy violation going on at Facebook, because by now, as the diagram above indicates, most of us should be pretty aware that any interaction you have with a web site or an app is inherently non-private.

But emails look and feel private. Do we have to adjust our perception there now too?

Look, I understand that sending out emails that track recipient behavior makes perfect sense to the promoters sending them. They can use this data to help them better target their campaigns. The data is also, obviously, helpful in terms of reporting back to clients (record companies and/or independent musicians) about how effectively a song or album has been disseminated.

I understand, furthermore, that some of what the promoters gain from the metrics doubles back as a benefit to us recipients. Promoters use their email management software to target us more effectively—so that, for instance, I only receive tour information related to Philadelphia, as one simple example. More complexly, they can also use my clicking behavior to help them understand what kind of music I tend to respond to, and send me more of that kind, and less of other kinds.

So, okay, the data is valuable. But why aren’t they up front about the nature of the data they are collecting? This is an affliction of the 21st-century online business world. They love the data they can access but would prefer not to admit they are accessing it.

And how ironic: it’s the Zuckerbergs and the Eric Schmidts who constantly assure us that everyone now has to be transparent, that we have to get used to sharing everything with everyone. Well, then: why are companies who collect our data so eager to hide what they are actually doing?

Please understand that I am not comparing most music promoters to privacy tramplers such as Zuckerberg and Schmidt. Music promoters tend not to be as Machiavellian about it. Many of these folks are good people who are simply trying to do a good job.

As such, it is my hope that the better souls out there in the industry begin to think twice about collecting this data without openly informing us. You want your data? Fine. Just tell us what you’re doing.

And not in fine print at the bottom, but in a clear and present statement in the email. Give us the option of giving you your data, or not.

I’m not holding my breath about this, however. The free market is notoriously disinclined to police itself.

This also raises the interesting issue of whether the data is itself only valuable, or in any case notably more valuable, when it is collected on the sly. It is likely truer that way, no question. But do we, as end users, somehow “owe” companies who are trying to sell us things all the information they would ideally like to have?

How you answer that question to yourself will determine how concerned you might want to be about the proliferation of email two-way mirrors and what if anything can be done about it.

Image Credit: Dave Makes