Fingertips

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.

Free and legal MP3: Erik Friedlander (movie-ish jazz instrumental from NYC cellist)

“Aching Sarah”

Apparently it’s cello week here. Or experimental music week. Not that this is experimental sounding per se—it’s quite a lovely, graspable instrumental with a jazz-like construction but with enough melody and offbeat aural flourishes (check out the percussion) to engage the ear of the non-jazz-aficionado (i.e. me). While cellist/composer Friedlander has made a name for himself in New York City’s downtown music scene (oh; it’s NYC week too), this doesn’t sound like you think that would sound like.

To begin, we get a trumpet and piano trading off on a gentle but insistent motif that is played enough to stick in your head but then gets unraveled in atmospheric development. With the cello content to play quiet descending lines in the background, we seem at first to be heading into jazz combo territory, the trumpet and piano and bass and percussion noodling around the now-unstated theme. But even here I’m appreciating the melodic focus that remains, not to mention the almost literally cinematic vibe, as the particular combination of Friedlander’s long bowing and trumpeter Michael Leonhart’s ’60s-cinema flair washes this with the wistful ambiance of a bittersweet European romantic comedy. Until, that is, Friedlander emerges from the background, at 2:47, for a droning minor-key improvisation/solo that is half spiritual plea, half cubist deconstruction of the original motif. It’s an interruption that feels both unexpected and welcome, an aural change of scene that renders the motif’s straightforward restatement as the solo gives way all the more affecting.

The movie-like feeling is apparently no accident. Released as a digital single earlier this month, “Aching Sarah” is supposed to be part of what Friedlander calls his “Cutting-Room Floor Series,” in which, he writes, “movie characters are cut from a film, and with their lives only half-realized, walk in a kind of limbo, aimless and confused, with no way to live out the arc of their scripted lives.” That not only informs the distinctive but unresolved central motif but also the concluding section, when the music seems almost literally to smash against its own limits, only to fade out. The MP3 available for free from his web site, but also for purchase via Amazon, eMusic, and iTunes.

Free and legal MP3: Two Hours Traffic (crackling power pop from Canada)

“Noisemaker” – Two Hours Traffic

And now back to our regularly scheduled programming: sharp, catchy, summertime pop from our impressively talented musical neighbors to the north. That’s more like it, eh?

This song has many things to love, and right away. First, the brisk, ringing guitar intro, which is not merely a persuasive opening salvo, but sounds brilliant following just about any other song on a playlist. Try it at home, you’ll see. Second, the way the voices join in, singing wordlessly, with the brisk, ringing guitars. Subtle and wonderful. Third, the fleet, wonderful sidestep taken from that guitar riff into the “oooooh” that opens the verse. Nifty, effortless little chord progression there. And then, oh boy, what about that “oooooh” itself? Straight out of the power pop handbook (Shoes, anyone?) and yet also a surprise coming right at the beginning like that. If they didn’t have me at hello, they surely had me at “oooooh.” The song is now about 23 seconds old. (And lasts 3:41–also as per the power pop handbook.)

Singer Liam Corcoran has just the right kind of spirited tenor required to make this crackle and resonate. It’s about energy, not content, as the thing about great power pop is that no one has to be singing about anything that is in itself all that powerful or intriguing; rather, there’s something in the music and presentation that makes whatever is being sung pretty much besides the point. It’s all deep and mysterious when the melody’s there, and the chords, and the unflagging energy of a band that knows it’s onto something. Songs like this often push that extra bit harder to knock your socks off, and I hear that here in the second half of the chorus, which uses a bit of unanticipated repetition to add an almost giddily satisfying resolution beyond the basic hook.

Two Hours Traffic is a foursome from Prince Edward Island. “Noisemaker” is the lead track (of course) from the band’s third album, Territory, which was released last year in Canada, and is due out in the U.S. in September via Bumstead Productions.

Free and legal MP3: Postdata (hushed, echoey, portentous ballad)

“Tobias Grey” – Postdata

I missed this one when it came out back at the beginning of the year, but it was probably one of those on-purpose accidents, as there is something in this hushed, portentous, echoey acoustic ballad that resonates with me in the middle of this seriously wacked-out weather. There’s a stifling stillness in the air during a heat wave, you don’t even have to go outside to feel it, it seeps through the building’s walls, suffuses the remedial air conditioning, makes effort—any effort—sad and impossible. This song is kind of like that, only pretty, also. Bonus for particularly relevant lyrics
(“Sometimes the weather don’t change/It just stays in the very same place”).

And it’s all so very quiet, with whispery vocals, tightly recorded acoustic guitar (you can hear fingers squeaking on the strings), and a really effective keyboard drone in the background, grounding the piece in something electric and threatening.

Postdata is a Canadian duo featuring Paul Murphy of the band Wintersleep and his brother Michael. The self-titled, self-released album has been out since January. The songs were born during a visit to their parents’ home in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia. They were recorded on a laptop originally, then reworked a bit some months later in Halifax—mics, at least, were added, but they still used the laptop. So if you hear some lo-fi distortion here, that’s why. And for once I don’t really mind the roughness of the recording because the intimacy isn’t compromised—it might even be augmented.

Free and legal MP3: Saadi (hazy electro-pop w/ piano)

“Pollen Seeking Bees” – Saadi

Sweet yet surprisingly sturdy bit of piano-driven electronic pop. The piano line is a two-finger special—I mean quite literally it sounds like two index fingers going at it—that is instantly likable because its seeming simplicity still generates a complex rhythmic bed. Or, alternatively, because it’s the same two notes that open “Friday On My Mind“—you decide.

Born in Syria, raised in Pittsburgh and Manhattan, Boshra AlSaadi got her rock’n’roll start in the band Looker, which was featured in January 2007 (strangely enough, the same week, again, as Arcade Fire). In that incarnation she was cooking in a punk-pop mode; here, on her own, with her name abridged, she simmers in a hazier, electro-ish setting, but her potent soprano keeps this from getting too noodly. She sings in the midst of a smeary, reverberant bath that kind of spreads her voice out but does not touch the rest of the aural space, which is kind of an interesting effect. Note how she keeps the lyrics close to the edge of comprehensibility except for the third verse (1:08), beginning (hmm) with “Images in pixels” and ending (hmm again) with “the fog is knee deep.” Mixing lyrics down is a common trick but I don’t know that I’ve often heard them come and go within one song. It surely pulls the ear in, like getting a suddenly clear clue on an obscure puzzle.

“Pollen Seeking Bees” is from a 12-inch vinyl EP entitled Bad Days that came out in March on Serious Business Records. The link to the free and legal MP3 only recently emerged on Largehearted Boy, which is where I first heard it. MP3 via Serious Business.