Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: Alex Winston (bashy & engaging)

Winston is 21, and was born and raised in the Detroit area. She’s now in New York City and watch out. I suspect we’ll be hearing from her.

“Sister Wife” – Alex Winston

How and why do some songs grab you right away? It’s a mystery. This one has a bashy, kitchen-sink-y feeling to its wordless vocal intro that makes me quickly happy. And then there may be something in the octave span that deepens the introduction’s allure. That is, Winston’s “oo-oos” descend an entire scale in that opening section; and I think the ear is engaged when a melody encompasses the whole scale, just like our eye is engaged by a black-and-white photo that utilizes the entire range of gray.

And when she starts singing the actual lyrics, watch out. I am now hooked by new mysteries: her rich yet slightly baby-ish voice, calling up echoes of early Kate Bush recordings; a lyrical audacity that launches us into the middle of a song that seems to be about polygamy; the xylophone that augments the “oo-oo” section the second time we hear it. There’s something big and brash on display here, but it’s a sweet sort of brashness, the kind borne of young talent, talent that just does things because they seem right. I could pontificate about the slidey sort of verse that we hear and how it’s sung largely off the beat and out of the center of the measure, and then how it pairs so effectively with a front and center chorus, nearly anthemic in its melodic inevitability; and it may have nothing to do with how she just wrote the damn thing.

Winston is 21, and was born and raised in the Detroit area. She’s now in New York City and watch out. I suspect we’ll be hearing from her. “Sister Wife” is the title track to her debut “mini-LP,” coming in March on Heavy Roc. MP3 via NME.

Free and legal MP3: Matt Longo

Sweet, melancholy, concise

“The Night” – Matt Longo

Sweet, melancholy, and concise, “The Night” is half ballad, half lullaby, with a lovely, organic melody that links the verse and chorus so seamlessly that it sounds like one long outpouring of thought, breath, desire, regret. Longo’s light, expressive tenor works equally well with the simple guitar accompaniment that begins the piece and the string- and drum-enhanced arrangement in the middle.

The song sounds like something you might stumble upon at a late-night party, where a guy with a guitar breaks into an easy, heartfelt tune, is joined by a couple of other friends with instruments, while a quiet roomful of people nod their heads in musical sympathy. There’s nothing complicated about it except its power to move you without being complicated. To kind of go meta on you for a moment.

“The Night” is one of seven songs on Longo’s debut album, Alexandria, which was released in November and available for free via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: The District Attorneys (rag-tag barroom stomper)

You can just about hear the pints being raised during this rag-tag, barroom stomper.

The District Attorneys

“Splitsville” – the District Attorneys

You can just about hear the pints being raised during this rag-tag, barroom stomper. And yet it’s an easy-going barroom stomper, if there can be such a thing—no full-out, Replacements-style aggressive sloppiness for this relatively new Atlanta quintet. You can tell right away from the banjo and harmonica which make their presence known early on. These are not kick-ass instruments; they’re serious ones. So, yeah, there are gang-style sing-alongs and shout-alongs, a chugging, Stones-like rhythm guitar line, and a general feeling of lazy looseness, but something tells me these guys don’t just stumble into their songs. They work for them, and polish them, and in this case what they want to polish was something rough-hewn and loose-limbed. This is not as easy as it sounds.

Take the rousing chorus, for example, which, starting the second time we hear it, offers up not one but two separate sing-along sections—two hooks for the price of one, basically. And yet singer/songwriter Drew Beskin was crafty enough to make us wait for it, to give us one run-through without the second part. There’s a related moment at 2:12, when the end of the first verse is repeated but this time with a couple of extra lyrical lines. It’s a small thing, doesn’t necessarily register to most listeners consciously, but it speaks to the care with which the song was created, even as it flaunts its ramshackle vibe.

“Splitsville” is from the band’s debut seven-song album, Orders From…, which was self-released digitally in June 2010 but is being given a full-fledged national release next month. The whole thing remains free at the band’s Bandcamp page.

Portishead, Twitter, and Resisting Digital Ideology

Portishead’s Geoff Barrow can hardly be considered a technophobe. As producer and multi-instrumentalist for the trio Portishead, Barrow has proven himself to be one of the foremost manipulators of digital sound of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Last week, however, Barrow crossed up the digerati by tweeting a series of statements about what people should and (mostly) should not expect from the band’s next album. With tongue almost but not quite planted in cheek, he wrote things such as:

There will be NO free downloads. There will be NO bonus tracks. There will be NO remixes. There will be NO hidden footage. There will be NO additional content. There will be NO corporate partners.

He did not, anywhere, say the band would not publicize the album. (Nor did he remotely specify when the album would be coming out.) He just seemed to be happily rejecting any number of PR tools and fan engagement techniques considered de rigueur by many online pundits and amateur commentators alike.

Some of these folks answered unkindly; a recurring mocking response, seen not only on Twitter but in comment sections on sites such as NME and Hypebot, was something to the effect of “There will be NO sales”—if nothing else an inaccurate retort, as Portishead has a devoted following and will have no trouble selling an album that follows a release as good as Third, their last one. Some immediately jumped to disparaging conclusions about Barrow’s age, such as the Hypebot visitor who said, “He’s lazy and old. Who cares,” or the Twitterer who said that he sounds like “a cranky old man.” Barrow is 39.

And, because “There will be NO Twitter” was also amongst his tweeted sentiments, there were those who couldn’t get past the idea that he was hypocritical by tweeting these comments. “He wrote to Twitter to say there will be no Twitter?” wrote a commenter on the Daily Swarm. “OH how contrarian. Gimme a break.”

A mere moment of reflection, however, will reveal that Twitter is of course the best place to go to tell people about your plans not to use Twitter for one reason or another. That’s not hypocrisy, it’s efficiency. Besides, he did not otherwise swear off Twitter. (In fact, just a few days later he tweeted to assure the world that his outburst never once noted that the next Portishead album is coming out any time soon, which many seemed to infer.)

If you take a second to read the whole thing (go here and scroll down to January 5) now that the heat of the moment has cooled, it’s pretty clear Barrow was having fun (“There will be NO fashion lines,” he wrote; “There will be NO tabloid pictures”). Some were clearly not amused, however—such as the Hypebot visitor who wrote, minus a certain amount of punctuation: “What a complete idiot. Portishead are an established band with a fanbase so it’s easy for them to do this He can go do one – i for one am deleting Portishead from my brain. What an arrogant tool”

While on the one hand I hesitate to legitimize spiteful and/or uninformed comments, on the other hand, until a sea change occurs in how most sites operate, such comments take an unfortunate center stage in online discussions all too often. And in this case, I think they are particularly instructive. They stand in for a general sort of combative, unreasoned attitude that has flourished not only online but in our overall culture for the better part of the last 10 years or so.

And it’s gotten kind of foolish by now, and exquisitely counterproductive.

I mean, look: the fact that a technician/musician as skilled and experienced as Geoff Barrow has found good reason to put the brakes on the Music 2.0 love—whether he even completely means it or not—should give all thoughtful people at least a little pause. “Pause” as in easing up on reactive mode.

And we might, while pausing, want to contemplate a number of pretty important questions that arise in the wake of this pretty unimportant kerfuffle. Such as:

* Since when did fan engagement efforts become an ideology, full of what must be done and what must not be done?

* What will happen if it turns out that social media is not the be-all and end-all of a musician’s existence?

* What are the chances that all the tweeting and “liking” and YouTubing and SoundClouding everyone’s been doing for the last couple of years is amounting by now to a lot of sound and fury which may, already, be signifying nothing?

* Why do fans feel so entitled to all sorts of extra goods and services from musicians when, apparently, so many of them don’t even want to pay for the music itself?

* Why do discussions of these issues so often turn vitriolic and childish?

* What if anything can we do to prevent us all from becoming ideologues rather than reasoned thinkers and commenters?

That last question is maybe the key to all of them. And who knows, maybe it’s too late—maybe we’re all ideologues by now: people bound in lockstep to ideologies rather than open to the clear-headed pursuit of reality.

Lord knows, maybe I’m one too. It’s like pod people, or the new Facebook profile: it just happens to you, you can’t stop it.

But I don’t want to be. And that’s the first step out of it, I should think. It’s okay to have ideas, it’s okay to have opinions. But check your facts. Curb your (aggressive) enthusiasm. Be open-minded. Give the other guy the benefit of the doubt. Be willing to admit you don’t know where the future is leading.

To be sure, Twitter is not a great platform for nuance or subtlety. It’s all about quips, basically. And daggers make the best points. Maybe this is why Barrow—for all his Twitterizing jollity day to day—didn’t see the platform as a meaningful part of his art. Maybe this is part of why he launched his salvo across the good ship internet. And he was no doubt unsurprised to find a few feathers ruffled in the process.

But those who felt ruffled seem by and large to have been reacting ideologically, overlooking that there might be actual reality to take into account. A perfect example is the Hypebot commenter who, in response to Barrow’s statements, wrote: “Portishead fans must be feeling really special right about now.” She was being ironic, of course; her point was that given everything Barrow said the band would not do, fans must be feeling ignored and unvalued.

It was a slick and sardonic tweet. But it was also sheer invention, disguised as knowing aside. A quick perusal of Twitter reveals that, on the contrary, Portishead fans were overwhelmingly happy with Barrow’s little outburst. Reactions included:

“Loving Geoff Barrow’s rant about the new Portishead Album.”

“Right there is why I love this band”

“Geoff Barrow is effing brilliant.”

“Geoff Barrow of Portishead is a fucking genius!!! Just US and the Music!!!”

Despite the commenter’s assertion, Portishead fans fully appreciated what he was trying to communicate with his cheeky tweets: let’s remember it’s about the music. Let’s remember that true artists are following their muses, not the whims of their “followers,” and certainly not the whims of followers who seem too often to believe they deserve everything they want right now while not seeming all that interested in actually paying anything for the privilege.

Maybe all Barrow was really doing was resisting digital ideology. Maybe that’s all any of us should be doing.

We are in the middle of a wildly interesting time in the history of music. To claim that anyone who wants to assess and discriminate when it comes to new technology is merely old and backward is to be an ideologue. To be more interested in Tweeting ridicule than examining reality is to be an ideologue.

The world has enough ideologues. What we need are more folks who remain quirky and individualistic, who seem to be using both their heads and their hearts, who resist both the pull of the mob and the illusory “logic” of the marketplace. We are dealing with music and human emotion, not coffee beans and pork bellies. More importantly, at the top of the game here, we are dealing with genuine artists, whom their fans—if real fans—have zero business directing or controlling.

Free and legal MP3: Wye Oak (alterna-folky noise pop, kind of)

Sneaky great single from this increasingly impressive Baltimore duo—an elusive mix of alterna-folk and noise pop, using timelessness to unleash volume on a fulcrum of suspense. Or something like that.

“Civilian” – Wye Oak

“Civilian” has a simple structure: there are four two-line verses, with a repeating instrumental break between them. There is no chorus, even as the song directly implies one. Within this simplicity, however, admirable musical drama unfolds. From the outset, we get the foot-tapping rhythm and guitar-picking backbone of an old folk song, juxtaposed with smoky-voiced Jenn Wasner’s teasingly blurred phrasing; she has mastered the Stipean trick of allowing us to discern intermittent words but few extended thoughts. The impression of ancient folkiness is deepened by the steady recurrence of one particular three-note descending guitar line that we first hear at 0:10. There is something timeless and troubadoury in this motif, which repeats every 10 seconds or so for the better part of the song. When it comes missing at around 1:02 is in fact when we know that something is up, the moment pretty much coinciding with the recognition that the open-ended verses may not be leading us to a chorus after all. The three-note motif is here replaced with a more suspenseful, more electric guitar riff that doesn’t end up transforming anything but the volume, which cranks up a few notches at 1:19, thanks to the influx of fuzzy guitars and Andy Stack’s abruptly fuller-bodied drumbeat. Any chance we had previously to decipher Wasner is gone; Stack clearly doesn’t want us to hear her now.

Meanwhile the unresolved verses keep the ear waiting, vaguely, expectantly. And who knew? What we were waiting for, arriving at 2:36, is a squealing squalling outbreak of Wasner’s guitar, which obliterates the three-note motif and pretty much everything else in its path. She returns the favor to her partner, as guitar now pretty much manhandles the rhythm section in what surely will remain one of 2011’s best solos.

“Civilian” is the title track to Wye Oak’s forthcoming album, slated for a March release on Merge Records. MP3 via Merge. Wye Oak has previously appeared on Fingertips in both 2008 and 2009.

Free and legal MP3: The Ericksons

Singing sisters, w/ guitars, & unaffected vibe

“Box of Letters” – the Ericksons

There’s something ever, ever so slightly unhinged about the Erickson sisters’ basic Indigo Girls-ishness that I find immediately fetching. First, the obligatory acoustic-guitar-strumming intro itself is a bit off-kilter, aligning insistently with the in-between beat (i.e. the “and” in the “one-and-two-and-three…”). When the singing starts, it’s not yet the sweet, harmony-laced offering one might expect from singing sisters with guitars but rather a blurted, conversational, idiosyncratically-phrased vocal from Bethany. And when she’s finally joined by her sister Jennifer, the first harmony we get is actually dissonant (check out the “oo”-ing at about 0:27). Even the chorus, with its delightful, light-stepping, drum-brushed momentum, has a vaguely off-center feel, thanks to how the melody lags friskily behind the song’s driving beat.

And yet the Ericksons are not actively quirky in the manner of, say, Ani DiFranco, or, for that matter, any of the so-called “freak folk” crowd. If anything, the cumulative effect of the peppy “Box of Letters” is of two performers who are, simply, loose and unaffected. The song’s quiet eccentricities–many of which have to do with vocal phrasing–seem organic rather than mannered, and each delivers a pleasant little surprise when encountered. I particularly like the crazy little flourish the women give to their “oo-oos” around 1:54, and the way the song ends with the instruments fading away while the sung note is held maybe a tad longer than expected.

“Box of Letters” is from the album Don’t Be Scared, Don’t Be Alarmed, the duo’s second, released this past fall. Thanks to Robbie at Girlysounds for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Arches (spacious music, w/ swing & hesitation)

“This Isn’t a Good Night For Walking” – Arches

One more twosome in what has inadvertently turned out to be “duo week” here. Of the three, Philadelphia’s Arches may be the least-likely-sounding band-that’s-only-two-people of all, because of how spacious this music is. The song is long by Fingertips’ standards—six and a half minutes—but hang with it. The length is part of the space. So of course is the reverb. But there’s more to it than that; the time the song takes to unfold and the echoey ambiance don’t create the space as much as model it. There’s something large and unhurried in the air here, a sense that the music needs the time it’s taking, if that makes any sense.

A concrete symbol of this need for space is the band’s use of hesitation throughout the song, both figuratively and literally. What I mean by “figurative” hesitation you can hear right away in the back-and-forth guitar chords employed in the introduction (and throughout), which pivot on one whole-step interval. On a piano this would be played by your index and middle finger, alternating in an even rhythm—which, if you think about what that looks like, is a gesture of waiting (the idle, or sometimes impatient, tapping of those two fingers). The sound sounds like it. Literal hesitation otherwise suffuses “This Isn’t A Good Night For Walking,” in everything from how the keyboards swing slightly behind the beat to the subtle way the back-and-forth chords get microscopically delayed as the song develops (say, at around 1:38), to how the five-note keyboard motif we hear in the foreground at 4:07 gets held up maybe a split second with each recurring statement. And then there’s the grandest hesitation of all: the way the lyrics disappear just past the halfway point, only after which the song takes us to its musical climax: a dramatic, strangely satisfying guitar-led iteration of the song’s verse.

“This Isn’t A Good Night For Walking” is the first available song from a forthcoming, yet-untitled album that Arches hopes to release before year’s end. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3: N’T (concise & chuggy electro-glam[?])

“Good Karma” – N’T

A concise, chuggy piece of electro-glam (or some such thing), “Good Karma” is one of those songs with a moment—a precise juncture at which the ear surrenders to the music, and everything is okay with the world. An effective moment, repeated each time it comes up (typically in a chorus but not always), extends its blessing both forward and backward, granting a kind of giddy grace to an entire song.

The (now that I think about it) appropriately titled “Good Karma” has its moment beginning at around 1:01, in the second half of the chorus, when Scott French, N’T’s mastermind, sings, “Don’t freak out,” with the “out” stretched to three syllables, describing a descending line equivalent to sol-fa-mi in the familiar do-re-mi scale. This is a basic and eminently satisfying progression, but any effort I attempted (and now edited out) to explain why became quickly labored and complicated. Music is much simpler than words. Listen and smile.

French drums and writes songs for the Philadelphia band the Swimmers; as N’T—apparently we are to say “N apostrophe T”—he has issued an album called The Color Code, which he wrote, recorded, mixed, mastered, etc., by himself. It was self-released last month. You can download the album via his bandcamp page, for whatever price you’d like to pay. Thanks to Scott for letting me host this one.

Free and legal MP3: Braids

Engaging complexity, from Montreal

“Plath Heart” – Braids

Take a listen to the future of a certain kind of pop music. Not pop as in Billboard pop, which seems more than usually mired in robotic, sound-alike simplism here in 2011—I’m talking about pop as in electric-based music with vocals, organized into three- or four-minute songs, aimed at a contemporary audience. As a matter of fact, the more the current age drives robotic, sound-alike simplism through the mainstream, the more today’s rebels may want to study, practice, and begin making songs of engaging complexity and humanity. No point in punks doing the Auto-Tuned, three-chord thing if that’s what’s on the charts.

From the opening violin salvo, you know you’re in for a different ride here. Nothing about this song is straightforward or commonplace, and yet it is consistently engaging. (If the Dirty Projectors were less self-consciously prickly, they might sound something like this.) Electronics are used to create cascading, watery sounds over a jittery rhythm; guitars fill in sometimes like pinpricks, sometimes in a shivery flow of liquid. Singer Raphaelle Standelle-Preston has a theatrical voice that can both soar and particularize—listen for instance to how she ejects this incisive couplet about disconnected lovers, sung seemingly from the male point of view: “I poke and turn/You smoke and yearn.” Meanwhile, you will rarely hear a more precise, restrained drummer in a rock song than Austin Tufts, who plays here like another intertwining instrumentalist rather than a time-keeping basher.

And of course Braids are from Canada. They are in fact four youngsters (all in their early 20s) from Calgary, who met in junior high school, became a band in high school, and were so intent on developing musically that they delayed going to college to practice together for a year. Then, in 2008, they moved to Montreal. And the rest isn’t history yet but it might yet be. Keep an eye on these guys. “Plath Heart” is from the quartet’s debut, Native Speaker, which will be released later this month on Kanine Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3: Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

Humble, compelling, heartfelt

“My Heart Came to Rest” – Brandon Thomas De La Cruz

And yet let’s not write off simplicity entirely (see Braids entry, above). When combined with honest emotion, a sense of history, and that other thing that makes you feel rather than just hear music (not sure what that thing is, however), a simple song can wow you in its own reserved way. SoCal singer/songwriter Brandon Thomas De La Cruz has a comfortable, Bright Eyes-ish thing going here, but maybe with a warmer, less mannered vibe than Mr. Oberst. At once plaintive and gracious, “My Heart Came to Rest” doesn’t innovate or blow the mind; so much of what’s good and true here nestles merely in the unpolished tremor of De La Cruz’s voice, and I mean both his singing and his writing voice. The song’s lyrical lynchpin can be found here, as he sings these unadorned lines:

We’re silent without thought
In the place where we’ve been brought
We both had so much to say
But now we’ve both forgot

Note the march of humble words: 20 of 23 of them are just one syllable, including an astounding (and cumulatively compelling) 19 in a row. Whether done consciously or unconsciously, the craft is impressive. The particular rhythm of how and where the word “both” appears, twice, and the rubber-lipped way the word bubbles from his mouth each time is worth a bit of extra attention.

“My Heart Came to Rest” is from De La Cruz’s seven-song garage-recorded debut Everything Is New, self-released digitally in November. You can buy it via Bandcamp, where one other song is also available for free.