The allure of electronic pop is also its abiding challenge: the transformation of an alienating aural landscape of beeps and tones and tinkles and ripples into music with some emotional impact. There’s a thin line between elegant and icy, and the best electronic pop music glides along that line without breaking a sweat.
The allure of electronic pop is also its abiding challenge: the transformation of an alienating aural landscape of beeps and tones and tinkles and ripples into music with some emotional impact. There’s a thin line between elegant and icy, and the best electronic pop music glides along that line without breaking a sweat.
“Star Receiver” glows with not only elegance but genuine warmth. Listen to how it builds itself up from a few meandering synth lines, grounding the song from the start in something not simply mechanical sounding. Even after the beat kicks in (0:16), the listener’s ear is drawn to the sounds that either float above or weave themselves gently around the basic rhythm. The effect is unhurried and idiosyncratic rather than robotic or clock-like. When the groove is completed by the deft integration of an acoustic guitar (0:48), the rhythm gets a discernible riff and, ultimately, after an entirely unhurried series of graceful repetitions, a genuine, resolving melody (1:32). And then, at long last, Sebastian Arnström begins singing. This is its own kind of treat–his lovely tenor is at once firm and delicate, the trace of an unplaceable accent adding to its subtle tremor. He backs himself up, elusively, with vocals that echo in a lower pitch, adding spaciousness and intrigue. Soon we get a sound nearly like a violin, or maybe a harmonica. The whole thing glistens and bubbles and moves.
Arnström is in the Swedish band Aerial; Simian Ghost is a side project. “Star Receiver” is from the debut Simian Ghost album, Infinite Traffic Everywhere, set for release in the fall on Nomethod Records, a Swedish label. MP3 via Nomethod.
Beginning as a pensive bit of Jane Siberry-like abstractness, fueled by little more than an egg shaker and a spare piano line, “Slip Away” unfolds deliberately, but never loses my attention. Despite the minimal instrumentation, the song opens with a strong melody and a prolonged sense of anticipation. It’s two full minutes before the music stretches out a bit and yet I’m with it all the way.
Beginning as a pensive bit of Jane Siberry-like abstractness, fueled by little more than an egg shaker and a spare piano line, “Slip Away” unfolds deliberately, but never loses my attention. Despite the minimal instrumentation, the song opens with a strong melody and a prolonged sense of anticipation. It’s two full minutes before the music stretches out a bit and yet I’m with it all the way. I’ve heard plenty of 20-second introductions that lose my interest way more easily.
And then at 2:15, the song really kicks in, and the kicking-in part is at once lyrically incidental–there are no lyrics in it at all, in fact–and musically central, radiating out both forward and backward in time, illuminating both what we’ve already heard and what we are about to hear. What I think we have here is a lyric-free chorus, sung without words, which I’m not sure I’ve heard too often. But what a wonderful, dynamic thing it is, with a melody taking almost yodelly leaps that would surely have defeated any effort to be burdened with language.
Calder is a singer and keyboard player from Vancouver who is best known at this point for being the least known person in the New Pornographers. She also co-fronts the band Immaculate Machine, which has been featured here in April ’09 and May ’07. “Slip Away” is the lead track from her first solo release, Are You My Mother?, coming in August via File Under: Music. MP3 via Spinner.com.
The June Q&A features Craig Barnes of the NYC-based quintet MiniBoone. MiniBoone’s song “The Devil In Your Eyes” was featured on Fingertips in February. The friendly and articulate Barnes had so much to say that he voluntarily divided the first question into two, so this month, the Q&A has six questions instead of the usual five. If you want to know why the wild people may not be making the music any more, keep reading….
The June Q&A features Craig Barnes of the NYC-based quintet MiniBoone. MiniBoone’s song “The Devil In Your Eyes” was featured on Fingertips in February. The friendly and articulate Barnes had so much to say that he voluntarily divided the first question into two, so this month, the Q&A has six questions instead of the usual five. If you want to know why the wild people may not be making the music any more, keep reading….
L to R: James Keary, guitar/keyboard/vox; Taylor Gabriels, drums; Sam Rich, bass; Doug Schrashun, guitar/keyboard/vox; Craig Barnes, guitar/keyboard/vox
Q:Should MP3s be free across the board? Why or why not? And if musicians can no longer make money off their recordings, as some presume, where does that leave you? What are your other options?
A: If music recordings are going to be free across the board, then people will need to accept the consequences. First off, free music requires the musician to find a source of income to replace what was lost. That could mean a number of things, for instance:
* Bands who in another era would have been opposed to licensing their songs or lending out their image will now accept it
* More bands will need to be funded by private donations
* The music industry will simply shrink (fewer record labels, fewer music magazines, fewer bands that can actually make music without working 9 to 5)
If music listeners are comfortable with the implications of those things, then I suppose it’s okay to for MP3s to be free.
I feel that another consequence of musicians’ shrinking incomes is that they will have less money to spend on hiring someone to handle the business side of things, and will have to take on more of this role themselves. It’s been interesting releasing and promoting our record, Big Changes, because while we’ve gotten a lot of invaluable support from our buds at Drug Front Records, we’ve also done a lot of work ourselves that in another era a band might have paid somebody to do. It’s not financially feasible for us to hire a PR company, so Sam and I have been reading and emailing hundreds of blogs to cover the record; we can’t afford a booking agent, so Doug and Taylor have been busy booking a tour for us this summer; and James has done a lot of research into buying a van and forming an LLC under the band’s name. It’s hard for me to imagine Joey and Dee Dee Ramone doing this sort of work.
I don’t know if there’s a way to actually prove or disprove this statement, but I think you could argue that the modern (independent) music industry isn’t going to attract the wild people anymore. The musicians themselves have to be super organized and disciplined in an administrative sort of way. And those kinds of organized people probably make different music than the wild people do, so it’s also going to direct the overall sound of the scene.
Q:If musicians can no longer make money off their recordings, as some presume, where does that leave you? What are your other options?
A: I was shocked to read on Wikipedia a while back that Peaches’ newest record sold 3,000 copies in its first week, and then promptly fell off the sales charts. I don’t think Peaches is very well known outside the underground, but nonetheless, I was surprised that an act that has been around for more than a decade and has a pretty popular live show sold so few records. So, rather than asking “IF musicians can no longer make money off their recordings, where does that leave you?” I would ask, “NOW THAT musicians can no longer make money off their recordings, where does that leave you?” And the answer is, touring and licensing.
For the most part, music fans seem to be accepting the licensing and increasing commercialization of their favorite bands. I think that’s actually a good thing, because if you download a record illegally–or, for that matter, legally and for free–then you’ve lost the right to protest when a band tries to make money in a more “commercial” way. Since you’ve already guaranteed that a band will not make a living off of you, that band has to figure out how to do it another way. Actually, on the Peaches topic, I just did a little search on Google and found out that one of her songs was used in a Gap commercial a few years back. So that’s where Peaches finds the money.
I think the question should no longer be “Should a band be active in the commercial realm?” but rather, “How can a band be commercial artfully, and with minimal intrusion in their art?” I do think this is possible. Bushmills has an awesome campaign going on right now with hand-painted ads of Chromeo, the heads of DFA Records, DJ A-Trak, etc. all over Brooklyn. Something about “Friends Since Way Back.” And although I’m not really a Neon Indian fan, I think his thing with Mountain Dew was a really cool idea. Normally I might look at beverage advertising and think that it’s cheesy and fake, but these campaigns are done with such class and with bands that actually make sense that the ads themselves become fascinating pieces of art.
Q:There’s a lot of talk these days that says that music in the near future will exist in the so-called “cloud” and that music fans will not need to own the music they like any longer. As a working musician who writes songs and puts out albums, at least in theory so people will own them, look at the packages, put them on a shelf, etc., how do you feel about this?
A: As a listener, I’m super excited to think that in a few years we might be able to listen to any song at anytime on our iPods simply by paying a monthly fee. I don’t feel I know enough about the record industry to predict if and how quickly this will happen, but it’s a cool idea.
Music sales are already such a small part of MiniBoone’s income that I’m not sure if it will make a big difference to us when people are no longer buying our record at all and are just listening to us on the “cloud” instead. I’m ready to accept it. As for the death of the physical product, I think that’s okay, because I do think people still care about the art, even if they’re viewing it on a computer instead of on a CD insert. I see people proudly displaying the covers of their most recent favorite records like badges on the walls of their music blogs. The record cover, even when represented in a 90 x 90 JPEG, is a symbol of pride.
Personally, I haven’t bought a physical CD for years, and I don’t feel that I have less of a connection with bands because of it. If you like a band’s music, you will want to know more about them, what they look like, how they act, what kind of scene they fit into, how they choose to visually express their music on a t-shirt, record cover, etc., regardless of how you heard the music.
Q:How has your life as a musician been affected–or not–by the existence of music blogs?
A: MiniBoone became a working band in the age of blogs, so I don’t know what it was like to be a working band before blogs existed. Personally, I find them a lot of fun. It’s fun creating a dialogue with a blog and I like it when writers actually come up to talk to us at shows. I think that musicians should not just create music for themselves, but also actively create a discussion with the listener. And it’s fun to look through blogs and find somebody who we think we will actually like us.
That being said, it’s difficult to say if we’ve actually yet gained anything financially from blog coverage. The amount of information that pours out from just one blog is too great to push favor in the direction of one band over the others. I would say that their value is in their ability to give you an immediate idea of how people are reacting to and processing your music, and they make it easier to open up that line of communication between musician and listener.
Q:What are your thoughts about the album as a musical entity– does it still strike you as a legitimate means of expression?
In your previous columns for the Q&A, you framed this question as something like “What do you feel about the death of the album”? Even though I still listen to full albums most of the time, I am fine with the “death of the album.” First off, the LP didn’t come into vogue until the ’60s, so it hasn’t been around for that long–not nearly as long as the sonata form in classical music, for instance. Exciting pop music was being made before the birth of the LP, but it was instead being presented on singles. The LP was an awesome artistic invention, but it’s kind of strange that it’s become the standard form for pop music. It would be like if modern classical composers were expected to write in sonata form all the time.
If the album does “die,” I think that all that means is that it will cease to become the main form of presenting music, and musicians will only put out a full album if it makes sense as a cohesive work of art: the songs are tied together conceptually, maybe there’s a central sound to it, or maybe they were just all written and recorded in a short period of time. I think it’s perfect for that. Otherwise, if there’s no central concept to a group of songs, the EP is a better and quicker way of presenting music. It captures the sound of a band at a certain point in its life without having the band worry about putting out an “important” record or anything like that. Better to capture that sound before it changes into something else. So far, we’ve only put out one EP as a five-piece and we’re planning for our next record to be an EP as well. Not sure yet what we’ll do after that, but for now I think the EPs make more sense for us.
Besides, I learned in a basic level science class in college that mass extinctions (i.e. The “Big Five” according to Wikipedia) are actually very exciting from a biological perspective, because after an extinction, the ecosystem opens up for the birth of new species. If the dinosaurs hadn’t gone extinct, then there might be no people! It’s very exciting to think of what will arrive to replace the album after its “death.”
Q:What is your personal preferred way of listening to music at this point?
A: When I was still in school, I liked to listen to music with my headphones on in a dark room with my eyes closed. I don’t feel I have the time to do that anymore, so when I listen to music now, it’s mostly while I’m doing something else at the same time: writing email, washing dishes, eating a meal, etc. That being said, I get distracted a lot when a good song comes on. I’ll stop whatever I’m doing, turn it up, and start dancing. Lately I’ve been listening to Peter Gabriel’s So and every time it gets to “Sledgehammer,” the invitation to dance is just too powerful. Actually, rather than dance, I really just freak out and march around my apartment. And sometimes, when I’m in a bar and a really awesome song comes on the speakers, I can’t concentrate on what people are saying to me.
Usually I put full albums on repeat and let them run three or four times through before I switch to another record. When I’m in the moment with one record, it’s hard for me to think of what else I might want to listen to, so I just like to let it keep going. I do not trust shuffle.
While apparently muddier, mix-wise, than the usual Fingertips fare–the very-bashy drums are up front, the vocals buried halfway down–“Oh Ivory!” succeeds through the giddy force of its melodic energy and the quirky chemistry of its not-really-that-muddy-after-all production. There’s something old-school at work here, something that puts me in the mind of the ’60s, though I can’t put my finger on it. And anyway, by the time I think I’m getting it, the song is over. It’s nice and short.
And yet, although just 2:29, check out how the tune meanders for more than 40 seconds in an orchestrally interesting but melodically static interlude–featuring the not often used but always engaging combination of classical stringed instruments and rock percussion. On the one hand it goes on a little too long but on the other hand if it didn’t go on that long the payoff wouldn’t be quite so stirring. And stirring those final 30 seconds are, featuring now a shouted, one-note melody over an engaging parade of chords. In the end, this brief song has an offbeat but resonant structure, giving it the feeling of a much longer journey.
Light Pollution is a quartet from Chicago; “Oh, Ivory!” is a track from the band’s debut album, Apparitions, which is set for release next month on Carpark Records. MP3 via Spinner.
“Clementine” creates an appealing sense of urgency without a lot of volume or density or high drama. I’m thinking it’s the cello. The cello has a deep tone, but not as deep as a bass; it registers more as melody than rhythm, but also colludes with an acoustic guitar in an elusive way. It’s there but it’s not there. It adds depth.
Jaffe’s voice doesn’t hurt either. She’s got a slightly roughed-up, Lucinda-like edge to her singer/songwriter delivery, and it’s particularly well-suited to a melody that gains traction from the purposeful repetition both of lyrics and of small musical intervals–few if any of the notes are more than two whole-steps apart. This might be almost claustrophobic if the song weren’t so fleet and insistent. And then, at 1:52, we get that new and different stringed sound–a clipped and itchy motif that sounds maybe like some pizzicato, maybe also on the cello–that helps drive the song even more insistently forward.
Jaffe is based in Denton, Texas, also home to Midlake, with whom she has toured. “Clementine” is a song from her debut album, Suburban Nature, which was released last week on Kirtland Records. The album came out digitally last month. MP3 via Jaffe’s web site. Thanks to Some Velvet Blog for the head’s up.
Okay so noise is one thing. When you come right down to it, it’s easy to make noise. Never understood what the fuss was about from the rock’n’roll primitivists who glorify sheer volume. I mean, okay–turn the bloody amps up and boom. It’s noisy. Like, wow.
“The Way to Canaan” – The King Left
Okay so noise is one thing. When you come right down to it, it’s easy to make noise. Never understood what the fuss was about from the rock’n’roll primitivists who glorify sheer volume. I mean, okay–turn the bloody amps up and boom. It’s noisy. Like, wow.
Start combining noise with discipline and you begin to get my attention. Start understanding music enough to create different kinds of noise, not all of which are simply loud, and now you’ve really got something going. The King Left certainly does, playing continually along the edge of dissonance in this sharp, rumbling rocker. From the outset, we get no settled sense of tonic, a base chord to call home; instead we get slashing, clanging guitars and–key to keeping things unsettled–a dynamic bass line, running up and down and all around. The sound is at once harsh and tight. And listen to where the music goes when the lyrical line ends, at 0:27, and again at 0:40–we’re left not only without resolution but bopping itchily in a clashing key, with that bass guitar refusing to ground us in a stable place. The chorus at long last delivers an anthemic release, but–there’s a catch–buries it under a searing lead guitar, while Corey Oliver, even as he all but shouts, delivers his vocals as if now down in the basement. Nothing is easy but the hand-hold here is that it’s all very precise. Knowing you’re in good hands relaxes the ear, I think.
The band’s MySpace page lists Radiohead, The Beatles, David Bowie, Talking Heads, Nirvana, and R.E.M. as its first five influences and damned if “The Way to Canaan” isn’t some kind of crazy-brilliant amalgam of all five. The song is from the New York City quartet’s first full-length album–which is unfortunately also their last. They played their final show last week and are now no more. MP3 via the band’s site. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.
Nothing says “cinematic” better than a Morricone-inspired whistling introduction, but I like how down-to-earth and personal everything still manages to sound here. Often this kind of spaghetti western-ish styling opens up sweeping vistas with a certain amount of ironic winking, conjuring bleak deserts and dusty trails in an almost cartoonish way. But here Blasko takes the whistly intro, the Spanish-like guitar, and a touch of martial snare and wraps them up in her smoky, heartsore voice, singing a simple, haunting melody.
“All I Want” – Sarah Blasko
Nothing says “cinematic” better than a Morricone-inspired whistling introduction, but I like how down-to-earth and personal everything still manages to sound here. Often this kind of spaghetti western-ish styling opens up sweeping vistas with a certain amount of ironic winking, conjuring bleak deserts and dusty trails in an almost cartoonish way. But here Blasko takes the whistly intro, the Spanish-like guitar, and a touch of martial snare and wraps them up in her smoky, heartsore voice, singing a simple, haunting melody. By the time the strings arrive, we aren’t picturing a lonesome rider in the blistering vastness of the faux Wild West; she is clearly singing about inner landscapes, not outer ones. That producer Björn Yttling (of Peter, Bjorn and John fame) has found a way to personalize a musical setting rooted in outsized gestures is a mighty part of this song’s charm, but it took Blasko’s distinctive husky-breathy voice to pull it off. I’m guessing her voice gave him the idea in the first place. There’s something haunted and unreachable in it.
Blasko is from Sydney, where she has a sizable following after three well-regarded albums. “All I Want” is from her third and most recent CD, As Day Follows Night, which was recorded in Stockholm with Yttling and released last year in Australia and this spring in Europe. A U.S. release is scheduled for August.
This graceful electronic dance-ballad unfolds with a New Order-like majesty, but minus the melodrama. Despite the quickly established synth-driven pulse, a gentle dreaminess prevails during the song’s careful build-up. There’s no hurrying this song and in the end, you don’t want to, because the payoff, while subtle, is deeply felt.
So let this one happen on its own terms. The simple pulse–a robotic synthesizer line backed by a conga beat of organic simplicity–fuels an extended intro, while another synthesizer slowly plays with a melodic line that finally takes over the front of the mix nearly 50 seconds in. The singing starts at 1:06, adding a wistful melody to the carefully constructed beat. New synth lines emerge at 1:40. No one is in a hurry, remember. A new layer of percussion and previously unheard synthesizer flourishes add palpable substance around 2:30 but soon the song retreats back to its conga-and-synth origin before blossoming, from 3:00 to 3:15, into almost goose-bumpy wonderfulness the rest of the way, as the melody doubles its pace and we see now that our gentle electronic dream has transformed itself into something brisk, sturdy, and memorable.
The Swedish duo Pallers is Johan Angergård (also a member of Acid House Kings, Club 8 and the Legends) and Henrik Mårtensson. “The Kiss” is a digital single due out next week on Labrador Records (a great Stockholm-based label, itself worth checking out). MP3 via Labrador.
Back when there used to be an “all-time” Fingertips Top 10, “Me and My 424” was on it, near the top. When I came across this song in the summer of 2003 was when I first figured that maybe I was onto something, looking for high-quality free and legal music.
So it begins with this jaunty little piano line, the kind of vampy thing that most guys would work for at least eight measures, maybe even 12. Not Vanderslice; this talented indie rocker doesn’t even fully repeat the line once before he brings in an tweaky sort of electric guitar tone as a one-note counterpoint; and then, on the next repeat, in comes an unexpected, mournful string melody descending on top. Geez, the song grips you before he’s even opened his mouth. And when he does, he hooks you all the more with his reedy, early-’70s-Bowie-but-American voice. And don’t get me started on the queer but compelling way he breaks the title melodically so it sounds more like “And my 424, me/And my 424…” The song comes near the beginning of a concept album Vanderslice released last year called The Life and Death of an American Fourtracker, which is all about a young man rather too fond of home recording. (The 424 in question is a Tascam 424, a multitrack cassette recorder commonly used by musicians with home studios, at least before digital recording began to take over.)
ADDENDUM: Vanderslice has of course been writing and recording regularly since 2003. His most recent album is 2009’s excellent Romanian Names. Visit his web site for lots of information and a goodly number of free and legal MP3s.
At once laid-back and expansive, “The Mermaid Parade” brings a slow-burning quality to its sauntering vibe. Singing this affecting if slightly mystical (or maybe just surreal) tale of love gone wrong, front man Matthew Houck has the knocked-around tone of a man who’s been hurt a little too much; his voice has a built-in crack to it without ever really cracking, and he sings with the relaxed cadence of someone slowly draining the beer from a long-necked bottle.
And the thing, to me, that really gives “The Mermaid Parade” its piercing quality is the electric guitar that plays like a backbone through the skeletally told story. Neither fancy nor newfangled, the guitar brings a classic-rock majesty to the singer/songwritery proceedings. The climactic lyric is plainspoken and startlingly moving: “But yeah I found a new friend too/And yeah she’s pretty and small/But goddamn it Amanda/Oh, goddamn it all.”
“The Mermaid Parade” is four tracks in on Here’s To Taking It Easy, the fifth full-length release from Phosphorescent, a band which is basically the Brooklyn-based Houck and anyone else he can get to play with him at the time. The album is out this week on Dead Oceans, sister label to Secretly Canadian and Jagjaguwar. MP3 via Dead Oceans.
Fingertips 