Free and legal MP3: Blessed Feathers (beautifully sung, w/ banjo)

Jacquelyn Beaupre’ sings as if placing each note in a favored location—a bright windowsill full of keepsakes, perhaps, or a tree-trunk altar along a wooded, late-summer path—and then letting them go, no big deal.

Blessed Feathers

“Stinging Nettle, Honeysuckle” – Blessed Feathers

I’ve got another banjo song for you, somehow. Another wonderful one. Go figure.

“Stinging Nettle, Honeysuckle” is sold to me via singer Jacquelyn Beaupre’ (apostrophe included), whose sweet, determined voice blends breathy innocence with grounded certainty. She sings as if placing each note in a favored location—a bright windowsill full of keepsakes, perhaps, or a tree-trunk altar along a wooded, late-summer path—and then letting them go, no big deal. There are always more notes to sing. And don’t get too attached to her anyway because she’s likely to wander away sooner than later.

The banjo this time is plucky and thoughtful. The ambiance is ancient-folky, as the title too suggests, even as there’s likewise something snappy and contemporary in the melody and presentation. I especially like the way a certain kind of lo-fi reverb is used to scuff the background without taking over the sound. The backing vocals receive this treatment, and it turns out there’s also some persistent underlying white noise in the mix which becomes audible only when the song comes to a full stop around 2:21. Pay attention to Beaupre’ right after that as she gives us a dainty cough before continuing. I really like that cough.

Blessed Feathers is a trio that was founded as a duo. The band bio begins: “Jacquelyn Beaupre’ plays everything. Donivan Berube plays everything else.” Beaupre’ and Berube are also girlfriend-boyfriend. The recently-arrived third player is Jordan Knowles, who handles percussion. “Stinging Nettle, Honeysuckle” is from the album From the Mouths of the Middle Class, the band’s second, released this week on Listening Party Records. You can buy the digital album for whatever price you’d like or you can buy a limited-edition vinyl album for $15, both via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: Hospitality (quirky, minimalist NYC pop)

Spunky and ineffably nostalgic, “Friends of Friends” is a New York song with a New York sound, firmly in the later ’70s.

Hospitality

“Friends of Friends” – Hospitality

Spunky and ineffably nostalgic, “Friends of Friends” is a New York song with a New York sound, and one that to my ears is rooted firmly in the later ’70s—music that blends an edgy Television/Talking Heads 77-ish bounce with a more playful David Johansen/Syl Sylvain-y groove and throws in a saxophone that surely has arrived through a time machine.

And yet “Friends of Friends” struts with its own, minimalist center of gravity and personality-driven sensibility. Check out the bass playing at the beginning for a conspicuous example of the band’s unembellished aesthetic, as well as the spaces, generally, that are left around the beat. As for personality, Hospitality has Amber Papini, a Kansas City-born kindergarten teacher who apparently learned to sing by copying Richard Butler on the Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk album. (Well and who didn’t?) Here, she takes a herky-jerky melody and really works it. Neither the blurty verse nor the clipped, seemingly under-developed chorus is easy to make sense of as a singer; she pulls them off through sheer force of tone and presence.

Hospitality formed as a trio in 2007. They are now a quartet, and they have recently been signed to the consistently wonderful indie label Merge. The full-length Hospitality debut album is due in March 2012.

Free and legal MP3: Lindsey Buckingham (gentle melody, fierce fingerpicking)

A beauty and a grower, “Seeds We Sow” is all bittersweet wisdom and musical depth. Put it on repeat and soak it in.

Lindsey Buckingham

“Seeds We Sow” – Lindsey Buckingham

“Seeds We Sow” couples lullaby calm with instrumental ferocity as bona fide rock legend/guitar hero Buckingham supports his gentle, whispered melody with some vigorous fingerpicking. The guitar work is so fluid that you might miss how likewise maniacal it is, working alternately with and against the complex time signature (12/8, maybe?) to soothe and unsettle in equal parts. The lyrics appear to serve a similar purpose.

And for whatever reason, the thing that nails this down for me is the wordless addendum to the chorus that he employs (first at 0:58)—the “ahhhh, ta ta ta,” part, which seems at once curious and perfect. Why “ta” versus the standard “la”? How would that even occur to someone? This is also the moment at which Buckingham unleashes his most characteristic vocal sound; it’s like an old friend abruptly appearing at a party you hadn’t known he was invited to. In any case, the song is a beauty and a grower, all bittersweet wisdom and musical depth. Put it on repeat and soak it in.

“Seeds We Sow” is the title track to Buckingham’s new album, his sixth as a solo artist, which he self-released (using the imprint Mind Kit Records) earlier this month. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. Note that Amazon is selling the MP3 album for $4.99 right now if you’re interested.

Forecast: Cloudy

This week, the results of a survey commissioned by the subscription online music store eMusic were released, and they were notable. The survey targeted people who buy music online. Among the findings:

● 89 percent of respondents said they would rather own the music they like than stream it
● 86 percent said that owning the music gives them security that their files will not disappear
● 79 percent said that they don’t think they will ever abandon ownership for streaming
● 76 percent said they use streaming to discover music and to decide whether they will buy it

These aren’t just iffy numbers, these are landslide numbers.

And yes, this survey was sponsored by eMusic, a company with a business model based on paid downloads. Yes, it was a survey of online music buyers. As a result, on web sites that reported on the survey, commenters insisting the survey is bullshit were not hard to find.

The music industry site Music Ally itself put it this way: “Company whose business model is built around downloads rather than streaming releases research claiming music fans prefer downloads to streaming— shock!”

Okay, then, where’s the shock when a man whose business is built around streaming claims that the future of music is access not ownership? I saw no such blowback when Daniel Ek went on his media blitz in July as Spotify arrived in the U.S.

The respondents in the survey were online music buyers, sure, but don’t the opinions of online music buyers matter? Rather than scoff at them, I should think that musicians and music-industry pundits alike should be very interested in them.

The mere fact that online music buyers exist, and actually in very large numbers, means that the opinions of this group should be noted and reckoned with, not brushed aside simply because they don’t align with the grand vision of Music in the Cloud.

And speaking of absent skepticism, where is the skepticism that greets the opinions of those whose livelihood depends upon promoting the cloud as the future of music? There are any number of pundits and consultants who go around talking about this and making a pretty penny in the process. (They make more money than the vast majority of the musicians providing the cloud with the music, but that’s another story.) Why do we accept the pronouncements of these folks with any less skepticism than the eMusic survey was greeted?

Why are we trained not to listen to the people who are actually out there buying music? Why do we seem readier to listen to the people who have a strong vested interest in telling us what they think we are going to want?

Look, Music in the Cloud makes a nice fairy story, but the reality is going to be much more complicated than that. The main point that the eMusic survey makes is that access does not replace ownership for a sizable and, dare I say, important audience. Access is a great new development—don’t get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoy Spotify—but does not foretell the categorical disappearance of ownership.

This should not even be news. But so hypnotized have we been in the 21st century by digital ideologues that when we receive a rare dispatch from the reality-based world, well, it does seem like news. And rather welcome news at that.

Free and legal MP3: Fanfarlo (tense, unusual chamber pop)

Unusual song lacking any rock-band instruments, but which keeps me coming back for more.

Fanfarlo

“Replicate” – Fanfarlo

Keep your ears on the synthesizer here. It has a wonderfully goofy-fiendish sound to it, half haunted house, half vintage sci-fi. It is also the only instrument on display in this song that you might otherwise normally find in a rock band. Everything else here is a string, a woodwind, or a piece of percussion of the sort on display on the percussionist’s table in the back of the orchestra.

I’m not sure what prompted the unusual instrument choice here. But the strangest thing is how you almost don’t register it. You notice the song’s odd sense of tension, and sparseness, and slow unfolding-ness, but not its wholesale acoustic/orchestral foundation. But check it out: no guitars, no bass, no drums. The focus is on Simon Balthazar, a Swede fronting a British band, whose Bryan Ferry-ish warble has a sneaky depth even as he spends half the song singing in stuttery slivers. His band mates meanwhile get to sing primarily in howling, wordless bursts. Okay so “Replicate” is pretty much weird beyond all explanation. And yet there is alluring muscle here, particular in the chorus, with its striking, string-voiced counter-melody and those aforementioned vocal bursts. This is the kind of song that is hard to know what to make of after only a listen or two, but that seems to prompt repeated listenings.

“Replicate” is the first song made available from Fanfarlo’s forthcoming, as-yet-untitled second album. The band’s debut, Reservoir, was released to much acclaim in 2009, when Balthazar was still going by his birth name of Aurell and the London-based five-piece was a sextet. The wonderful song “Harold T. Wilkins,” from that album, was featured here in March of that year. The MP3 comes via Pretty Much Amazing. Perhaps the video will help illuminate the song? You be the judge:

Free and legal MP3: Gross Relations (muddy & melodic, w/ a strong riff)

The opening riff, featuring that dirty/fuzzy/distorted guitar, with the organ noodling behind it, is so strong, to my ears, that I almost don’t need anything else.

Gross Relations

“When You Go Down” – Gross Relations

Okay, you want rock band instruments? You’ve got ’em here, without hesitation: guitar, bass, drum, and an old-time classic-rock organ. The opening riff, featuring that dirty/fuzzy/distorted guitar, with the organ noodling behind it, is so strong, to my ears, that I almost don’t need anything else. And then—bonus!—the first riff transitions into a secondary riff (0:22), on a janglier guitar, and now I really don’t need anything else.

But as luck would have it, there is yet more. I like how the song manages to be simultaneously bludgeony and melodic—not an easy accomplishment, but Gross Relations’ singer Joey Weber is a big Ramones fan so I guess he knows how to do it. And the cool thing is he may dig the Ramones but aside from the loud, thick sound and the strong melody this doesn’t really sound anything like the Ramones. Big Star via Guided By Voices, maybe. And, no, you can’t hear Weber distinctly, but this is one of those lucky instances in which the singer’s overall incomprehensibility adds to the charm of the piece. I’d say the muddiness is less a production technique than a distinct strategy, embodied not just in the singing and the instrumental sounds (there are distortion pedals at work here, even on the organ) but in the song’s very structure, which disguises what is a normally constructed song (verse/chorus/verse/chorus/instrumental/bridge/chorus) by blurring the verse and chorus and building the bridge as a kind of chorus extension. Cool stuff, and wrapped up in 2:39.

Gross Relations is a relatively new Brooklyn-based foursome. “When You Go Down” is from their six-song Come Clean EP, the band’s first non-single release, and, as it happens, the first release for Raven Sings the Blues Records, an offshoot of the blog of the same name. MP3 via the label.

Free and legal MP3: The Middle East

Odd tale w/ inscrutable appeal

The Middle East

“Jesus Came to My Birthday Party” – The Middle East

After a tuning-up kind of introduction, “Jesus Came to My Birthday Party” launches with an extended melody line sung in tandem by male and female vocalists. And we have to stop here now and think about this. A 16-measure melody is hard enough to come by; to hear one delivered via male/female octave harmony is highly unusual if not unique. And yet it doesn’t draw any attention to itself, as neither of those two characteristics—the extended melody, the male/female joint lead—in and of itself sounds strange or unusual.

Couple the music now with the lyrics—themselves, too, at once strange and straightforward—and the appeal deepens. Mostly what we get is a repeated insistence by the narrator that “Jesus came to my birthday party/When I was seventeen.” The circumstances are otherwise sketchy in the extreme; we are only told that the narrator thought it was a dream, but knows he/she saw him “standing there,” and that Jesus had long hair. The song pivots on the second verse, the second and last time we hear the full 16-measure melody, when the narrator, recalling this “long ago” time when Jesus was at the birthday party, suddenly thinks he/she has seen Jesus again, but this time not actually in the flesh but “in the eyes of the strangers that pass,” and “in the eyes of the poor.”

As a plain narrative this song leaves so much unsaid as to be inscrutable. But there’s something in the repetition, the vibe, the rugged persistence of the male-female lead vocal line, and the eventual blending of acoustic rhythm guitar with a stirring electric lead guitar that prompts reflection, and opens the song up to its fuller meaning—which by the way, to me, has nothing whatever to do with anybody’s one religion, in case you’re worried.

And now comes the odd news that The Middle East, an Australian collective with an expanding and contracting roster, has unfortunately called it quits. Based in Townsville, Queensland, the band released its last album, I Want That You Are Always Happy, back in April in Australia, and played its last show at the end of July. The album was released in the U.S. in July, on Missing Piece Records. The band was previously featured on Fingertips in April 2010.

Free and legal MP3: Louise Burns (Boss-inspired girl-group rock)

Former teen-pop star Louise Burns reorients her career by channeling early ’60s girl groups via Bruce Springsteen’s further explorations of that same sound. Convincing and just plain cool.

Louise Burns

“Drop Names Not Bombs” – Louise Burns

You never know which way a 25-year-old former teen-pop star is going to go. So many potential avenues are open to her. The one labeled “Springsteen-inspired homages to late ’50s and early ’60s pop” is not the expected one, however. Give Louise Burns props for creatively re-imagining her career trajectory. Better yet, give her props for a fine song, and consider it a great instance of making lemonade from lemons, as “Drop Names Not Bombs” draws upon past bad experience from her days as bass player in the teenybopper Canadian band Lillix.

Now as much as people are impelled to talk “girl group” when they hear Burns’ solo debut, Mellow Drama, there’s more to it than strict revivalism. Springsteen himself is grounded in that late ’50s/early-’60s sound, and Burns here is clearly channeling the girl-group thing via the Boss—I hear it in the chimey, piano-driven backbeat, in the organ flourishes, and most of all in the melodic resolution (check out 0:55, around the lyric “I’ll be buying them drinks all night”). As Bruce drew (and continues to draw) so much from the girl-group sound, it’s a lovely counterpoint to hear a female musician double back and tap into that same spring via his subsequent language. That the mezzo-ranged Burns sings with a hint of Ronnie Spector angst lends an extra charge to the proceedings.

And okay, while I don’t want to bog down in the Lillix story, it’s too central to ignore. Formed in Cranbrook, B.C. as a four-girl band when Burns all of 11, Lillix (originally named Tigerlily) was four years later signed by Madonna’s Time Warner-funded Maverick Records imprint. This was 2001. Fed to the star-maker machinery, they got a name change (there was a preexisting Tigerlily), were handed over to mercenary producers and songwriters (the girls had previously written their own music), and forced into pandering marketing efforts (two were sent to weight-loss camp). An early breakthrough: a cover of the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” was used by the 2002 WB sitcom of the same name. After two years of major-label fussing, the first Lillix album emerged in 2003, to mixed reviews at best; it cracked the Billboard 200, barely. In 2004, Madonna, an early booster, was driven from the label in a flurry of lawsuits. A 2006 follow-up album did well in Japan, and nowhere else, and Maverick, itself foundering, dropped the foursome while they were touring. Burns left the band and started over, diving into the Vancouver music scene and embracing noisy, experimental material as an effort to overcome both her teen-pop history and her music-industry bruises. Landing for a while in a goth-y trio called the Blue Violets, she has seemingly come to accept that she is a popster at heart. But sensitivity about her past remains. In a June interview, a couple of months after her solo debut was released in Canada, Burns said, poignantly, “It’s nice that people are giving it a chance despite my background.”

I’m giving her a good good chance. Mellow Drama was long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize in June; her label, Vancouver-based Light Organ Records, released the album in the U.S. this week. MP3 via Rolling Stone.

Free and legal MP3: The Weather Station

Banjo-driven, but w/ nuance and grace

Tamara Lindeman

“Everything I Saw” – The Weather Station

Truth be told, I don’t tend to be too happy with the banjo. Oh, I don’t mind it as a one-off, informal means of entertainment; in someone’s living room, a banjo can be likable enough, if the banjo player doesn’t overstay his or her welcome. On a recording, in the context of other instruments—that’s when I get the banjo willies. So right away I’d say Tamara Lindeman, who does musical business as the Weather Station, has to me accomplished something wonderful indeed simply by recording a banjo song that I really like.

Part of this has to do with how she manages to tame the instrument’s tinny-twangier voice (which I realize many people may well enjoy!), playing instead in a tone and bearing that intertwines with rather than muffles the folk-style acoustic guitar that shares the instrumental stage here. I also think that Lindeman’s subtle subversion of banjo music convention further tempers the instrument’s tendency to dominate. (Which isn’t all the banjo’s fault, having little to any capacity for dynamic range.) With Daniel Romano playing guitar and, intermittently, singing alongside Lindeman, the song on the one hand utilizes a familiar sort of duet singing characteristic of bluegrass, yet, as with the banjo-playing, ratchets back the brassiness of tone as well as the formal rhythmic lockstep that seems intrinsic to songs driven by banjos. Here, the melodic structure itself undermines the song’s banjo-iness: listen to how, in the chorus-like section, first heard around 1:00, the duet singing coincides with a thoroughly asymmetrical section of the song: a higher, upward-reaching melody tails off downward, followed by a lower melody that ventures upward but then into an unresolved minor key before properly resolving in the major; note too how we first get two lyrical lines (the aforementioned higher melody) leading into the “All of it is mine” refrain (the lower melody), but three lines leading into it the second time. More complex to describe than to listen to; the end result, almost magically, is a banjo song with nuance and grace.

“Everything I Saw” is the quasi-title track to the second Weather Station album, All Of It Was Mine, which was released in mid-August on Ontario’s You’ve Changed Records. You can listen to the whole thing for free, and/or buy it via The Weather Station’s Bandcamp page. Lindeman is also a relatively new part of the eclectic Canadian ensemble Bruce Peninsula, itself due for a new album come October.

Free and legal MP3: Folklore (clattery, melodic lo-fi rocker, w/ a back story)

With its Neutral Milk Hotel echoes, “The Party” is a squeaky bouncy clattery lo-fi rocker, full of momentum and noise, and an appealing melodic through-line.

Folklore

“The Party” – Folklore

There is a hyper-obscure element that has been unleashed upon the musical landscape by the internet. It’s not often commented upon because by nature, the hyper-obscure is either ignored or it’s totally embraced, and the two groups involved—the many who ignore it, the few who embrace it—never much talk to each other. By hyper-obscure I mean music that is so far down its own hole musically or lyrically (or both) that it doesn’t begin to try to explain itself to an outsider. Pre-internet record labels, whether major or independent, were rarely in the business of releasing the hyper-obscure, if only because such projects never look to be brisk sellers. Now that a) traditional gatekeepers are no longer needed to produce and distribute music, and b) musicians aren’t even necessarily trying to sell anything, the ground is fertile for the hyper-obscure. To which I say: yikes.

On the one hand, I admire musicians so committed to their own visions that they just create this stuff, independent of efforts to explain themselves. On the other hand, far too often, either the music or the lyrics (or both) frustrate any outside effort to approach it. Which is a nice way of saying this stuff is typically unlistenable. The payoff can be big—look to the (pre-MP3) brilliance of In the Aeroplane Over the Sea for a powerful example. But, I fear, most musicians drawn down that path are not quite so brilliant.

I don’t equate “The Party” to Aeroplane (although NMH fans will hear some resonance here), but its squeaky bouncy clattery presence, full of lo-fi momentum and noise, combines with a melodic through-line that proves irresistible to me. So irresistible, in fact, that I ignored/didn’t hear lyrics such as “There’s someone at the party getting everyone pregnant/Then mutating his shape and being impregnated.” “The Party,” it turns out, is from a concept album called Home Church Road, which, according to press material, tells “the epic story of a future Earth after human extinction.” We are urged to listen to it in its entirety but here’s an abiding conundrum of hyper-obscure music: it requires a commitment of time and attention prior to the musician having proved him- or herself worthy of said time and attention. Front man and Folklore mastermind Jimmy Hughes—more well-known as a member of the Elephant 6-rooted Athens band Elf Power—has a fertile imagination to be sure, but so do a lot of us. I’m more sold on his musical muscle than his storytelling but I will admit I have yet to listen to the album straight through. That’s another conundrum of the age: all of this music unleashed upon us and still (last I checked) only 24 hours in a day.

This song, however, is definitely worth three minutes or so of your time. Home Church Road was released in June on Single Girl Married Girl Records. Folklore, by the way, while born in Athens, has become a Philadelphia-based “mini-orchestra,” with seven joining Hughes in its northern iteration, and six others still on the roster down in Georgia.