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.

Fingertips Q&A: Alina Simone

Alina Simone has one of the more curious backgrounds you are likely to encounter on the 21st-century indie scene. The talented singer/songwriter/author here answers the five Fingertips Q&A questions.

Alina Simone has one of the more curious backgrounds you are likely to encounter on the 21st-century indie scene. Born in the Ukraine, she came to the U.S. as a small child because her scientist parents were fleeing the Soviet Union after her father decided against taking a job with the KGB. She grew up in the suburbs of Boston, ended up at art school, then moved to Austin to become a musician. She began as a street singer, inspired by Boston’s busker goddess Mary Lou Lord. She scraped and struggled and pursued the American music dream like so many other independent musicians in the early ’00s, even as she was slowly but surely realizing there was something slightly insane about the whole thing. In the mid-’00s, deciding she needed to know more about her Russian heritage, she managed to get a job that sent her to Siberia for a while. Her parents were not all that thrilled.

More fun facts: Simone—birth name, Vilenkin—married Josh Knobe, her high school sweetheart, in 1999; he is now a professor of philosophy at Yale, and a pioneer in the so-called “experimental philosophy” movement. (Simone has written and sung a playful “anthem” for the movement, which you can see/hear in YouTube form here.) In 2008, Simone recorded an album in Russian featuring the songs of the Russian underground punk-rock legend Yana Stanislavovna Dyagileva. This year, Simone had a book of essays published by Faber & Faber, entitled You Must Go and Win; the book deal came about because an editor heard a song of hers while listening to Pandora. (And who said technology is killing the printed word?) The book and her latest album, Make Your Own Danger, were officially released the same day, back in June. (Fingertips featured the song “Beautiful Machine,” from that album, last month.)

There’s plenty more to know but I’ve run out of space. Simone and Knobe now live in Brooklyn and have a five-month-old baby. She writes semi-regularly for The New York Times. She is one of those people who seems effortlessly engaging even as she probably doesn’t think she is engaging at all. I would have asked her more than five questions but a format is a format. Assume you have not heard the last of her.

Alina Simone

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: I’d like to declare that the future—where music is “destined to be free”—has already arrived. Basically, anyone buying music today is making a conscious choice to pay for it, whether it’s to support a specific artist or label or record store. How do I cope with this as a musician? It’s largely a psychological issue with me. I was reading a Harvey Pekar comic the other day, and he said something like, “Even though I lose a couple thousand dollars a year putting out my comics, it makes me feel really good when people tell me they appreciate my work.” I thought this was a very blunt and sweet and honest way of spelling out what motivates a lot of us. Supporting oneself entirely as a musician has ALWAYS been exceedingly difficult, even before the internet. And honestly, the indie labels that released my past three albums took one hundred percent of those royalties, aside from what I hand-sold at shows myself. As an independent musician with admittedly weird sensibilities and a penchant for doing uncommercial things like recording Soviet punk cover albums, I really can’t expect to support myself as a singer.

The rub for me is that recording and releasing music still does cost money. Has it gotten cheaper? Undoubtedly. But if you want to make a quality, studio album, and you don’t also happen to be a crack audio engineer, you will still have to spend a whole bunch of money. Also, because so many reviewers still require a physical copy of an album (not to mention the perception that a physical release is taken more seriously), toss in the cost of cover art and manufacturing. Marketing to radio and print media, especially with A-list companies, can easily eclipse all of these expenses put together.

Given the economic realities, a vast majority of musicians, even “critically acclaimed” ones like, occasionally, me, find themselves “paying to play.” They do it because they love it and they want something tangible to show for their efforts, and because, as Pekar put it, it makes them feel good when other people like their work. As someone who’s been doing it for a while, looking realistically at a Kickstarter-based future of miniscule streaming revenues where even breaking on the costs of putting out an album becomes near impossible, I have to ask myself, why do it? Why release an album commercially? Is the excitement of getting accepted to SXSW, or getting played on the radio or reviewed on Pitchfork, worth the mounting costs? After a certain point, no, it’s not. There are other ways of connecting to people with music that are fulfilling and totally free. Sitting in your room, recording a song solo, putting it on YouTube and sending it to your mailing list, for one. You sacrifice production values and orchestration and making a splash in the media, sure. But maybe you make up for some of that with rawness and intensity and a heightened sense of intimacy with your audience. If you don’t care about the public validation, this starts to feel like a more honest exchange.

Q: Related question: we are being inundated with the idea that music is headed quickly to the “cloud” and that music fans, even if paying, will not need to own the music they like any longer, since they will be able to simply listen to everything on demand when they want to. How do you, as both a musician and a listener, feel about this lack of ownership, about handing a personal music collection over to a centralized location?

A: I am a girl who landed a book deal because an editor heard her music on Pandora one day, so I’m hardly one to argue against streaming services like these. On the other hand, do I wish Spotify offered better rates to artists whose music is getting streamed? Sure. Yeah. Definitely.

I do love the idea of old, rare, out-of-print music being converted to a digital format so they can reach a wider audience and hopefully exist in perpetuity. Also? Dealing with each new version of iTunes and the fucking scourge of little exclamation marks it inevitable unleashes, makes me want to plunge a pool cue into my eye. If a cloud means I never have to deal with little exclamation marks again, it’s definitely a cloud 9 to me. (Now please insert the obvious Luddite counter-arguments regarding the tactile aspect of music ownership, the death of album art, etc., here.)

Q: Has your life as a musician been affected by the existence of music blogs?

A: Absolutely. I owe my musical career, as well as any tiny crouton of acclaim I’ve managed to scrape together, entirely to music blogs. It’s gotten to the point that—much as I do love the aforementioned tactile experience—I don’t see much use in those “review” bible type print publications that have a million album reviews in small print in the back. I am a teensy bit confused as to who still reads these, and whether they exist outside of some weird music-industry-feedback-loop-vortex. When reading an online music review, you’re just a click away from listening to the music being discussed, and in my opinion this makes writing about music a lot less like dancing about architecture. What blogs bring to the mix is the all-important curatorial function. I’m someone who prefers the restaurant with ten items on the menu, the video camera with only three buttons. There’s a reason Pitchfork only posts five album reviews at a time.

Q: What are your thoughts about the album as a musical entity—does it still strike you as a legitimate means of expression? If listeners are cherry-picking and shuffling rather than listening all the way through, how does that affect you as a musician?

A: If I were to sit down and make a list of stuff to feel crappy about in the digital music era, evil song cherry-pickers and the death of the album wouldn’t make the cut. We all remember the frustration of only liking a song or two off a new album, but being forced to buy the whole thing and then feeling ripped off and cheated and annoyed. I guess I don’t see anything wrong with each song on an album being forced to stand on its own merits.

Q: With the barrier to entry drastically lower than it used to be, there is way way 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: One of the things I love about living in New York City is that feeling of anonymity. There is power in knowing you can reinvent yourself at any point, get lost in the crowd, find your own tribe. The proliferation of music offers a similar opportunity for both artists and listeners. But let me hone in on the economic issue. From the perspective of an indie artist, as opposed to a consumer, this glut makes marketing an ever-more important aspect of releasing an album. Unless you are already famous, competition for press, for those coveted Pitchfork (or NPR, etc.,) reviews, for radio play on the handful of stations that actually impact sales, is fierce. Which brings us full-circle to question number one. What’s it worth? I would go far as to say that with so many artists releasing music independently, good publicists—the kind whose emails actually get read by journalists—are becoming the new gatekeepers of the indie world.

Free and legal MP3: Sunbeam (assured ensemble pop from Portland septet)

Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow.

Sunbeam

“Bulldogs” – Sunbeam

By all appearances breezy and unassuming, “Bulldogs” has a rock-solid core. A new band from Portland, Sunbeam is a six-person ensemble, and you can hear the depth of musical contribution in the song’s assured, layered flow. Six people in a band sounds like a lot on the one hand, but many rock songs do indeed feature at least six distinct instrumental sounds: electric guitar, acoustic guitar, keyboard, bass, drums, and percussion. For practical and logistical reasons, most bands make do with three to five members, doubling up on instruments (typically of course the drummer plays percussion too) and/or bringing in outside players.

So the larger band does not require a larger or more complicated sound, but it does change the vibe in elusive but meaningful ways. A song can, as here, feel at once brisk and relaxed, as it makes room not simply for its sounds but for the people who make the sounds. Separating the drummer from the percussionist has a notable impact. I also like the purposeful way the electric guitar is used—not as a background noise producer but as quiet foreground texture. And then there are horns (oops! a seventh sound, and eighth: two horns), which blend into the fabric of the song without any “now listen to the cool horn part” posturing. (Horns are both played here by an outsider, but the band has since added a trumpet player to the fold.) In the end, for all the extraverted appearance of being played by a larger ensemble, “Bulldogs” has an appealing introversion about it, which is embodied in Brian Hall’s sweetly yearning vocal style but plays out too in the restraint of the arrangement and, even, in the recurring wordless vocal/keyboard hook that in the intro sounded like a throwaway but as it returns acquires a lovely centrality, and will probably be the thing that sticks in your head most of all.

“Bulldogs” is fifth on the band’s 10-track debut album, Sunbeam & the Lovely Ghost, which was self-released earlier this month. You can buy it for a price of your choosing at Sunbeam’s Bandcamp page. MP3 via the band.

Free and legal MP3: Meshell Ndegeocello (genre-crossing minimalism, w/ conviction)

A steely conviction running through the center of this rhythmic, genre-crossing song.

Meshell Ndegeocello

“Dirty World” – Meshell Ndegeocello

After 16 seconds of indistinct, ambient background noise, we get a bass line, and a funky snaky ear-grabbing bass line it is. This is Meshell Ndegeocello; she plays bass; and this is how she plays. She had me at hello.

Listen to the mincemeat she makes of the 4/4 time signature, without ever actually leaving it. How could someone conceive of this particular rhythm, never mind add an edgy drumbeat to it, never mind write a song around it? Surely she is not singing while she’s playing here, though I guess you never know. Her smooth round voice floats, unhurried, over the knotty instrumentation of the verse, with a breathy loveliness that belies the venom of the lyrics. With the chorus, everything changes: the beat normalizes, her voice acquires first a plaintive sting and, at the end, as a kicker, plunges into a gruff lower register. As the title suggests, she isn’t singing about rainbows and flowers. There’s a steely conviction running through the center of this song.

Look, too, at how she accomplishes so much with so little. Much of the song is just bass and drums and voice. Guitar and keyboard are not an assumed part of the proceedings but are added only when deemed necessary. The chorus is not much more than the two words, “dirty world,” repeated; the substance comes from the rhythm—specifically, the subtle but definitive shift in emphasis from stressing only the word “world,” the first three times, to additionally stressing the first syllable of “dirty” the fourth time around.

Genre-crossing minimalism has been Ndegeocello’s trademark since Plantation Lullabies, her 1993 debut. “Dirty World” is a track from Weather, her ninth album, due in November on Naïve Records.

Free and legal MP3: Gringo Star (old school, updated, w/ Beatley flair)

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other.

Gringo Star

“Shadow” – Gringo Star

“Shadow” is like a killer find in the vintage clothing shop—comfy and familiar on the one hand, a damned good statement in the here and now on the other. As suggested by the name, this Atlanta quartet traffics in a certain amount of Beatlesque-iness, and the best kind, in my mind: a nod to the Fab Four that brings the sound further along, rather than remaining stuck in rigid homage.

So the nostalgia here suffuses the sound without actually being pinpoint-able. The scratchy guitar that rasps out the introductory line has a vaguely retrospective sound, but the specific riff doesn’t conjure any particular place or time. I like the immediate juxtaposition of the rapidly hammered guitar and the laid-back tempo, which takes the classic rock’n’roll backbeat (emphasis on the second and fourth beats of the measure) and offers it up in half-time. The occasional background nuttiness is partially psychedelic, partially just nutty. And the chorus is plain wonderful—a heart-warming descending melody, covering six full whole steps, that resolves through a chord progression so sturdy and steady that your ear barely registers some of the shifts, although it will thoroughly enjoy the glide through the relative minor around 0:53.

Gringo Star is made up of brothers Peter and Nick Furgiuele, along with Pete DeLorenzo and Chris Kaufmann. All four can play guitar and sing, both Petes can drum, and all but Pete F. will play bass. “With the swapping around of the lineup, we end up being actually 10 different bands,” Nick has been quoted as saying. A pretty cool concept, it seems to me.”Shadow” is the lead track on the band’s second album Count Yer Lucky Stars, which is due out in October on Gigantic Records. The album was produced by Ben Allen, who has worked with Gnarls Barkley and Animal Collective, among others. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Clap Your Hands Say Yeah (succinct & jittery, w/ a power pop heart)

This time around, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah exhibits a Cars-like capacity for wrapping an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

“Maniac” – Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Succinct and jittery, “Maniac” does its best to disguise its power pop roots with multifaceted synthesizers and vocal effects (and affects) but the thing about power pop is in the end there’s no hiding it. The chorus gives it away pretty much by definition. So there it is, at 1:09, the power-pop heart of this otherwise anxious-seeming song.

And yes I realize that it’s anxious-seeming in good part because Alex Ounsworth, with his strangled, nasally tenor, makes David Byrne sound almost relaxed. CYHSY have in fact drawn a lot of Talking Heads comparisons in the past, for clear enough reasons, but this time around I find some unexpected linkage to a different band that arose in late-’70s New England—the Cars. “Maniac” doesn’t sound like the Cars as much as it behaves like them, for its successful wrapping of an edgy, synthesizer-led, contemporary vibe around old-school rock’n’roll melodicism. Though, on second thought, this may likewise sound more like the Cars than it might initially seem. Segue “Maniac” into “Gimme Some Slack” (Spotify users: give it a try) and you will find some wonderful resonance—not an exact fit by any means, but the echoes are there. I direct your ears in particular to the deep guitar line at 2:07, which introduces what works as a kind of an alternate chorus here, and is both very Cars-like and a beautiful power pop device. That’s really where everything comes together in this one.

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah is a five-man band from Brooklyn with a bit of internet history that you either know already or don’t need to know. Seriously. Forget about it. Let’s just listen to the music, sports fans. “Maniac” is a track from their upcoming album, Hysterical, which the band will self-release next month. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.