Fingertips

Free and legal MP3: The Rosebuds (ominous, bouncy, w/ melodic hook)

“Secret Life of the Rosebuds” – the Rosebuds

Are duos especially well suited to exploring dualities in music? Is there something about having two people creating music together that channels and augments its capacity for exploring yin-yang properties such as darkness vs. light, happiness vs. sadness, triumph vs. loss? That’s a paper for another time here in my virtual degree program in the Serious Pop Music Studies Department. For now I’ll simply note that the Rosebuds, a Raleigh-based duo, have a deft way of conjoining the ominous and the bouncy, which do not typically co-exist. (I noted this in fact a few years ago, complete with grad-school theorizing on a slightly different topic.)

It’s the bass-heavy, minor-chorded intro that manages the trick. This kind of deep, minor-key music is typically slower if not downright thudding and yet here it snaps along at a toe-tapping pace. The beauty of the juxtaposition is that you don’t even notice it (except that I’ve gone and pointed it out) even as it is one of the song’s primary enticements. Another is that poignant leap up in the melody of the chorus, a full five intervals at the end of the line, first heard at 0:44. It’s unexpected enough to stand out and yet natural enough to feel as if you’ve anticipated it half a moment before it arrives—great hook, in other words. A bonus is how the melody reflects the lyrics, which at that moment imply crashing waves. Note how the second half of the chorus features the melody without the end leap, with different lyrics.

An opaque view of 21st century globetrotting, “Secret Life of the Rosebuds” has been around for a few years, previously available on a tour EP long since out of print. The MP3 comes newly via the Hopscotch Music Festival, happening in Raleigh in early September. The band has been together since 2001, initially as a trio, paring down to Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp in 2007. A new album, their fifth, is slated for a 2011 release.

Free and legal MP3: Meridene (brisk, punchy power pop)

“Gone, Baby Gone” – Meridene

The beauties of power pop are many and varied but not the least of its charms is how adaptable it is to the complete range of human emotions. Feeling wonderful? Power pop’s a great medium for expression. Feeling ambivalent? Go with power pop. Feeling low? It’s somehow pretty good for that too. Case in point, “Gone, Baby Gone,” which as far as I can tell is dealing with a bummer of some kind (I’m guessing, mind you, but the entire thing does end with the words “It hurts like hell”). And yet it does so with the same package of spiky-crunchy guitar riffs, rumbly drums, and killer chorus, complete with a sub-chorus, that a more lyrically upbeat effort might put on display. It’s a great thing, that power pop.

The genre seems to go best with higher male voices, so Meridene does well with the vocal services of Trevor Ives, who also plays guitar. It’s Ives’ responsibility here, in fact, to sell us on the mood of the song, since the upbeat music misdirects us. He does this quite well, in part by channeling a bit of early-Police-era Sting, alternating in tone between forceful exhortation and a breathier sort of resignation. The song’s stomping succinctness also suggests something darker than lighter. Notice, after all, that we only hear the terrific chorus two times; happier songs tend to overstay their welcome a bit more readily. And notice too, as long as you’re noticing things, how the chorus is enhanced big-time by three subtle touches: 1) the lead-in from a so-called “sub-chorus”—a separate part of the song that is neither verse nor chorus; 2) some awesome but subtle chord changes underneath the anthemic melody; 3) some awesome but subtle harmonies underneath the same anthemic melody.

Meridene is a quartet from Eau Claire, Wisconsin. “Gone, Baby Gone” is a song—sixth track, actually; impressive—from the band’s second full-length album, Something Like Blood, due out on Eau Claire-based Amble Down Records in September. MP3 via Amble Down; thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: The Drums (’50s + ’80s = ’10s)

“Down By The Water” – the Drums

Setting a ’50s-style melody, complete with a “Heart and Soul” bass line, to a stately, hymn-like march, “Down By The Water” is an instant brain melt. You’ve heard a thousand songs like this and nothing like this. It’s beautiful and odd and tormented and stirring. The bass line is soon being delivered by a tuba-like sound. The song proceeds precisely, as if on tip-toes. Echoey tip-toes. (“If reverb didn’t exist we wouldn’t have bothered trying to start a band,” Jacob Graham, the guitarist, has said.) Vocalist Jonny Pierce, well-named, sings with an earnest ache, audibly catching his breath: Jonathan Richman doing a Johnny Mathis impersonation. What decade are we in? His bandmates join in for the solemn chorus, which accrues both gravity and pathos with each iteration.

And then—another brain melt—the synthesizer floats in. 2:12. My goodness. New Order joins the Salvation Army band. The synthesizer sounds almost mixed up, and unerringly beautiful. What decade did we decide we were in? Oh yeah. The 2010s. Of course.

The Drums are a foursome from Brooklyn, and you may be hearing a lot more about them moving forward. “Down By The Water” was originally found on the band’s debut EP, Summertime, which came out last year. It will re-emerge on the full-length self-titled debut, which is arriving in the U.S. in September on Downtown Records. (The album was released in Europe and Australia in June.)

Free and legal MP3: Lost in the Trees

Poignant indie melodrama

“Walk Around the Lake” – Lost in the Trees

Melodramatic noises and rhythms greet us, without hesitation: an ominous chorus of wordless singing over bass-drum-heavy three-beated measures, the minor, steadily descending melody like some mini-opera exorcising specters and despair. A fourth beat sneaks in on the fourth and eighth measures and then we’re at a clearing, and front man Ari Picker (great name for a guitarist) starts singing. He’s got a pressing, Thom Yorke-ish tenor, the voice of a man who thinks too much, and then thinks he can think his way out of thinking that way.

Makes for a messy life but potentially powerful songs. “Walk Around the Lake” tricks out its epic ambiance with a poignant hesitancy, never staying too long in one time signature, and never giving us those operatic bashings for too long before retreating to the sound of one acoustic guitar. This is after all an introspective song—“Some times all it takes/Is a walk around the lake/To ease your mind”—and so the back and forth between the hubbub and the repose during the first two-thirds of the song seems to evoke the way a tender psyche can feel battered by the world, along with its efforts to find solace. The last third might be seen as an effort to more fully integrate the inner and outer worlds, which makes the short section near the middle (1:15) the linchpin upon which the song turns. This is when the ensemble swings into 2/4 for a focused, Pink Floydian seven seconds or so, staving off the foreboding 3/4 soundscape for the first time. We will hear that just once more, after which we finish out in balanced 4/4 time, Picker singing now about how his heart has grown and he’s moving on. And this a song not quite three minutes long.

Lost in the Trees, from Chapel Hill, began life as a solo project for the Berklee-educated Picker; now a seven-piece ensemble, the band lists some 20 extra people as part of its “extended family.” “Walk Around the Lake” is from the album All Alone in an Empty House, which was initially released on Trekky Records in 2008, but has been reworked and enhanced by producer Scott Solter for a new version, which is due out next month on Anti- Records.

Free and legal MP3: Tim Chad & Sherry (’70s funk homage, w/ spirit)

“The Love I Make” – Tim Chad & Sherry

A thick slice of faux-’70s white-boy funk, paying homage to a generous variety of that decade’s full- and part-time practitioners, from Atomic Rooster to the Average White Band to Hall and Oates to Talking Heads. Not to mention David Bowie and maybe even the Grateful Dead. And somehow it comes together, and somehow—an important point, to me—it sounds fresh without sounding ironic.

Part of it, I think, has to do with what I was talking about last week, about music that makes you smile. If a band is being ironic, they might make you smirk, or prompt a slow knowing smile; if a band is being genuine, any smile provoked is pure—it comes to the face without the brain getting in the way. I think the intro groove is just plain happy—funky, yes, but also spiffy and elaborate in the interplay between what sounds like a synthesizer (or two) and a bass, each playing a skittery, dance floor line. The next thing to listen to is the keyboard, which has a throwback organ sound, and is used once the singing starts with the lightest possible touch, deftly echoing the end of lyrical line. Just when the musical language has seemingly been established, two loud additions crash the party—the guitar, low-register and clangy, beginning at 0:49, and then the snare drum (1:02), which had been missing in the percussion until then. With the drummer now fully engaged (I like his sense of rumble and spirit) the song breathes with added fire. In the end, maybe, authenticity emerges through simple presence: through a sense that the musicians are engaged moment to moment, both individually and collectively. The trippy guitar solo (2:14 etc.) is an obvious highlight; less obvious, maybe, is the allure of the song’s sneaky lack of structure—it’s built on a series of clipped lyrical lines that use the underlying funk to rise and fall as if we are hearing verses and choruses but we probably aren’t, and give the song its ongoing feeling of play and inspiration.

Tim Chad & Sherry is a quartet (go figure) founded by Brian Kotzur, formerly of the Silver Jews. (There is no one named Tim, Chad, or Sherry in the band, by the way.) “The Love I Make” is from the group’s debut album, Baby We Can Work It Out, released this month on Cleft Records. MP3 via Cleft. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

Free and legal MP3: Stornoway (buoyant w/ melody & innocence)

“Zorbing” – Stornoway

As invigorating as a bright blue puffy-clouded day, “Zorbing” bursts with melody and innocence, but gets there on its own terms. For the first 35 seconds, we hear only the light, idiosyncratic voice of Brian Briggs and a one-note bass line. Maybe you’ll notice it’s a wonderful melody he’s singing, or maybe you’ll be a bit distracted by the minimalist presentation. Just wait.

His band mates join in vocally at 0:36 and wow that can’t be what anyone was expecting—an almost barbershop quartet-like burst of harmony, baritone and bass voices with little precedent in rock’n’roll after the doo-wop era ended. The bass guitar player at the same time frees himself from his one-note prison and I am completely engaged now. A simple drumbeat and a faintly-played acoustic guitar come on board at 0:54, but with the emancipation of the bass the song now feels both fleshed out and buoyant; when the vocal harmonies return in this setting (1:19), they sound even more striking. Later on we get trumpets and a freewheeling keyboard—so freewheeling, in fact, it not only shifts the feel of the song’s chords but sometimes sounds like it’s floated in from a different song. This is perhaps an unintended consequence of the recording, which was done by the band in non-studio locations like dorm rooms and garages. But it furthers the song’s fancy-free vibe, as does the knowledge of what “zorbing” actually is: “the recreation of rolling downhill in an orb, generally made of transparent plastic” (thanks, Wikipedia!).

Stornoway is a quartet from Oxford, named after a small island town in Scotland’s Outer Hebrides. “Zorbing” was originally self-released as a single last summer. The band was signed to 4AD this spring, and the label released Beachcomber’s Windowsill in May in the UK. The band had planned to release their debut themselves, and the label liked it enough to put it out pretty much in its original, demo-like form. A US release is set for August. MP3 via ~~4AD~~ One Track Mind, with a thank you to Frank at Chromewaves for the tip.

Free and legal MP3: Tallest Trees (gleeful, skewed, clattery pop)

“Alouette!” – Tallest Trees

With a skewed pop sensibility, pastichey zing, and a toy piano, “Alouette!” wrings more good humor out of its electronics-oriented language than one might have thought possible, given the general humorlessness of most electronics-based music. Glad that Thomas Samuel and Dabney Morris ignored the memo on that one. “Alouette!” skips with glitch and glee.

Good humor is an underrated quality in music. And I don’t mean songs that are funny per se; I mean songs in which the music itself makes you smile. “Alouette!” does this repeatedly, in an ongoing variety of ways. There’s the toy piano, sure, but there are also the sounds coaxed from synthesizers—rubbery, reverberant, yippy, squeaky—that make me wonder, as I have in the past, why electronic music isn’t in fact more smile-inducing more often. Beyond that, the arrangement itself is great fun, adhering sounds in a clattery, rhythmic gallop from start to finish. Even the vocals are part of the merry-making, from the twinkly spirit of Morris’s high-pitched tenor to the purposeful use of offbeat harmonies— check out the way the phrase “I am no hero” is sung, at: 1:18, or how the harmony vocal lags behind the melody, starting at the beginning of the second verse (0:58).

“Alouette!” was first heard late last year one the Nashville duo’s self-released EP , Hey There Little Nebula. It will get a wider release next month when the Portland, Ore.-based label Other Electricities presents the band’s full-length debut, The Ostrich or the Lark (title phrase found within this song; and “alouette,” so you know, means lark in French). MP3 via the band’s site.

Free and legal MP3: The Innocence Mission (lovely, pure, acoustic toe-tapper)

“God is Love” – The Innocence Mission

Karen Peris, long-time front woman for the Innocence Mission, has an idiosyncratic purr of a voice, part velvet part parchment; it alternately soothes and cracks, sometimes doing both at once. She has an unplaceable accent and likes to sing of simple things out there from her Lancaster County abode, comfy in the 20-plus-years’ presence of her bandmate husband Don and his bandmate childhood friend Mike Bitts. The trio’s new album, My Room in the Trees, their ninth, is full of the outdoors, of weather and leaves and water and quiet neighborhoods. It is lovely, and this is one of the lovely songs on it, but with more of a toe-tapping beat than most of the others, with jazz-flecked acoustic guitar chords, gentle percussion, and what sounds like a hushed horn or woodwind but is actually a combination of pump organ, chromatic harmonica, and melodica, all played by Karen.

And given our fractious age, with tolerance and intolerance locked in misery on the cultural dance floor, I feel a need to comment briefly on the subject matter. Despite the title’s centrality to the lyrics, this is not an overtly religious song; its spiritual message in fact is so deeply ecumenical as to unify all but the most strident fundamentalists fuming away on the two extreme sides of the God-existence argument. I’ve seen one online review take the song to task for its lyrical simplicity, a criticism that never fails to amuse me. Ninety percent of all songs have simple lyrics. That’s why they’re songs. They rise or fall on the depth of the music, which can also appear simple in many cases. This song’s simplicity is part of its allure; purity has a place in our ears and hearts. Not a lot of indie music explores this place; I give these guys a lot of credit for making it look, and sound, as easy and comfortable as a conversation with old friends.

Which these guys, recording together since 1989, surely are. My Room in the Trees was released last week on Badman Recording Co.

Free and legal MP3: Like Bells (musically adept trio from Oberlin)

“Sea Salt” – Like Bells

And this one, not so simple. But still pure, in its own way. “Sea Salt” begins with such an extended introduction that first time through you are excused if you think it’s an instrumental. This long opening section unfolds via a series of eight-measure riffs that, together, slowly develop and shift the feel and texture of the music. We begin with a nimble bass line plucking out a handsome, ambling groove over tapping cymbals. After eight measures of that, a rhythm guitar joins, lightly played, and off the beat. Pay particular attention to the goings-on in the third eight-measure set, beginning at 0:35, featuring the introduction of the violin, as it plays a melody that becomes important much later. Then the lead guitar steps in for an eight-measure answer.

The next two minutes explores the musical ground established by the first minute, with the violin and guitar each having a chance to to lead the way, each in turn moving steadily into louder and more involved playing. This ends up being quite a bit of fun, since the trio (guitar-drums-violin; bass playing is split between the guitarist and the violinist) met while students at the Oberlin Conservatory. Which means they are actual musicians. Which is a nice bonus in the indie rock world. I like that the instrumental section maintains a nice clip—it seems too easy here in 21st-century rock’n’roll-land for instrumentals to bog down in overly dramatic slowness—and I like the relatively unexpected but musically satisfying entrance of actual vocals three and a half minutes into the proceedings. Violinist Garrett Openshaw does the singing, and he hinted as much back at 0:35 when the first thing he played on his instrument was the melody he would eventually sing.

Like Bells’ self-titled 2009 debut was pretty much all instrumental, with just a hint of vocalizing from Openshaw. Palma, their 35-minute, seven-song new album, features more singing, but as you can see from “Sea Salt,” the singing does not necessarily dominate. The album was released digitally in April and is now out on vinyl as well, on Exit Stencil Recordings. ~~MP3 via Exit Stencil.~~

Removing five MP3s; not free and legal

I am sorry to report that MP3s I have featured intermittently over the last couple of months from the music site Direct Current are not, after all, free and legal.

This comes as an unpleasant surprise to me. I had previously contacted that site and was led to believe the MP3s there were sanctioned.

As a result, songs by the Books, Arcade Fire, School of Seven Bells, Sophie Hunger, and Sarah Harmer have now been removed from Fingertips.

Many apologies for the misunderstanding and the illegal postings. If you’d like more information about the situation, check the Fingertips Facebook page, where I posted a more detailed note about what happened.