Brooklyn – Page 7 – Fingertips

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: Shiv Hurrah

Wilco-ish and melodic

“Oh Oh Oh” – Shiv Hurrah

This is a brand new band but they don’t sound like it. Because in a way they’re not—four of the five guys in Shiv Hurrah grew up together in Rochester, New York, and played in a band there in the early ’00s. Ten years, two cities, and one additional band member later, they regrouped in Brooklyn early this year, and early this month released the first results of their renewed labors—a five-song self-titled digital album, available for free, that includes this unknown beauty of a song.

Or call it, more accurately, a diamond in the rough. The production is a problem, and I don’t just mean the mixed-down vocals (which some of course do on purpose). I don’t mind a bit of DIY but the oddly recorded drums are surely more accident than strategy; I suggest not turning the volume too high so that tom that reverberates weirdly every now and then is less distracting. And yet I keep coming back to it, charmed by the relaxed ease of the Wilco-ish groove and, truly, slayed by the strength of the songwriting. What a great great melody, and how quickly it arrives! Most songs need a lot more set-up time, but this one gives us a brilliant, back-door resolution right at the end of the first line of the verse (first heard from 0:44 to 0:46). It’s the kind of resistance-melting melody that enhances the lyrics so that they zing and pierce—get a hold of how it supports the line (1:04) “But I’m the one who taught you how to tie that knot.” Brilliant. Another strong sign is the fact that this homely song from an unknown band offers a great new rock’n’roll lyric, near the end, too: “I never get homesick/I just get sick of my home.” Production challenges and all, front man David Bechle sometimes sounds like a million bucks, and shows me that his new (old) band is well worth keeping an eye on.

“Oh Oh Oh” is the fifth and final song from the band’s debut EP, a digital-only release that is available for free via Bandcamp.

Free and legal MP3: Phosphorescent (slow burner w/ great guitar)

“The Mermaid Parade” – Phosphorescent

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.

Free and legal MP3: Color of Clouds (lovely blend of acoustic and electronic)

With a hint of glitch seasoning its spry intimacy, “Brother” is the work of a band with a gift for uncomplicated complexity, if that phrase makes any sense. Great pleasures await here in straightforward juxtapositions. For one immediate example, listen to how the beat glides seamlessly from a chime-like electronic stutter into a cozy 4/4 with a wistful bounce, driven by the gentlest of drumbeats. And then, without fuss, enters singer Kelli Scarr, arriving as if she’d been here all along, starting the story just about in mid-sentence, in tones of bittersweet honey. She has us at hello.

“Brother” – Color of Clouds

And things only get better from here in a song blending the acoustic and electronic in a most gracious manner–the instrumental palette here is nothing short of delightful–and building towards a brilliant, light-footed chorus. I still can’t tell if that’s some sort of steel guitar in there or a nuanced synthesizer, but those are definitely stringed instruments that arrive for a first visit at 0:57, returning with the chorus to mesh almost heart-breakingly with that steel-guitar-ish sound and, most nimbly, that subtle persistent electronic glitch in the beat. And yes I’m afraid this is one of those songs that’s far more trouble to describe than to listen to. Rest your eyes and reward your ears with repeated listens.

All three band members were previously in the electronic band Moonraker, and Scarr has also been a frequent collaborator with Moby. “Brother” is a song from the debut Color of Clouds album, Satellite of Love, released digitally this week via Stuhr Records. MP3 via One Track Mind.

Free and legal MP3: Air Waves (snappy, lo-fi chugger w/ happy energy)

“Sweetness” – Air Waves

Lord knows I don’t think of Fingertips as me sharing playlists with the world (um, see essay), but I have to say I entirely love how the three songs this week interlock musically. In particular, check out the strummy warmth of the intro here and how welcome it feels after the swaying sadness of Thorn’s tune. (And how perfect, somehow, that we first get that solitary drum beat, which functions as an instant head-clearer.)

Front woman Nicole Schneit is another alto, but hers is a different instrument than Thorn’s–a fuzzy, plainspoken, lo-fi voice, happy to get almost but not quite lost in the mix, happy to deliver a sing-song melody over a rumbling, chugging, two-chord accompaniment. I keep listening for a third chord but I don’t think they get there, and it goes to show you how far a snappy melody and some good innocent instrumental energy will take you in a pop song…along with, okay, some “oo-oos” and other oddities in the background, including maybe bird noises. At least I think those are bird noises.

Air Waves is a Brooklyn-based trio founded by Schneit; the name comes from a Robert Pollard song and is definitively two words, not one. To date the band has released one EP–in 2008, on Catbird Records; “Sweetness” is a new song, released on a compilation Winter Review 2010 disc put out in December by the label Underwater Peoples. The band has recently added a fourth member; a full-length album is expected later this year.

Free and legal MP3: The High Places (beat-driven, but short and engaging)

“On Giving Up” – High Places

While beat-oriented songs usually puzzle me (okay: bore me) more than engage me, “On Giving Up” offers some extra hand-holds of interest and allure that make it more, to my ears, than just another manipulated groove of a song.

Let’s start with the beat itself, in which a blend of distinct sounds become difficult to pry apart aurally, and create, together, something larger than themselves. You can hear it at the very beginning: there’s the deeper, thumpier part; there’s something of an electronic tom-tom sound closely aligned with the thumpier sound (but note how the tom misses the third beat, playing only 1-2-x-4, which helps give the song its late-night swing); and then there’s this distinct, higher-pitched sound, almost like an electronic wooden drum, delivering, off the beat, what feels like the song’s central rhythm. And, phew, look: all these words to describe something happening nearly below conscious awareness and before the song even really starts. Maybe that’s why I usually steer clear of this stuff.

So anyway then comes that reverberant synth melody (0:09) and slinky bass line (0:17) and, lastly, Mary Pearson’s floaty, echoey, Beth Gibbons-y voice, equal parts burn and withdrawal. Partly I suspect this needs to be heard at ear-vibrating volume on a foggy and mysteriously lit dance floor while surrounded by blissed-out, slightly sweaty strangers. If you get there let me know how it is. “On Giving Up” is from this Brooklyn-based duo’s second album, High Places vs. Mankind, set for release in early April on Thrill Jockey Records. MP3 via Pitchfork.

Free and legal MP3: Dinosaur Feathers

Ramshackle, pseudo-Latin indie pop

“Vendela Vida” – Dinosaur Feathers

Ramshackle, pseudo-Latin indie pop that may engage your ear and spirit in a way that Vampire Weekend didn’t manage to (if, that is, you happen to be among those whose ears and/or spirits were not, in fact, engaged thereby; I know some of you are out there). The music by this Brooklyn-based trio has an amiable, second-nature feel to it, while singer/guitarist Greg Sullo possesses a marvelous rock’n’roll tenor, at once lazy and insistent. He sounds like a guy who doesn’t sweat the details and yet for whom the details seem to work out pretty well most of the time.

Vendela Vida–and isn’t her name fabulously easy to say?–is a writer, and wife of the perhaps more well-known writer Dave Eggers. Not sure how the song relates–Sullo does manage to rhyme “Vida” and “read her”–but she was born to be a lyric, among her other accomplishments. You’ll find the song on the band’s debut album, Fantasy Memorial, which is scheduled for self-release in March. MP3 via Magnet. Oh and as another sign of these guys’ musical aptitude, check out the cool mixtape they made in conjunction with an interview on the Music is Art blog last summer, which connects the Kinks to Harry Belafonte to NWA to Genesis and more.

Free and legal MP3: Bear in Heaven (driven yet spacey indie rock)

“Lovesick Teenagers” – Bear in Heaven

Can a song be spacey and determined at the same time? “Lovesick Teenagers” seems to manage this unusual effect. Determination is heard through the relentless pulse of the snare-free beat along with front man Jon Philpot’s purposeful tenor, which sounds like someone with a wavery voice trying not to waver. And the melody itself seems also to possess an endearing sort of tenaciousness in the way it keeps leaping up a fourth on every syllable it seeks to emphasize.

But the spaciness too comes in various guises. Echoey, rocket-like synthesizers, sure. You’ll hear those right away. But it’s also there in the synth’s ongoing throb, which moves at twice the pace of the drumbeat, and lends a sci-fi-cartoon-iness to the proceedings. The chorus, when it arrives, arrives in a wash of psychedelic effects–soaring synths, fuzzed-up vocals, glitchy accents–even though, if you listen, you’ll see that the driving drumbeat persists underneath it all. And look how the song’s final moment pretty much encapsulates the underlying aural paradox, being at once the epitome of driving determination–a “sting,” as we used to call it in radio (meaning a sharp, abrupt ending)–and moony vagueness, since the sting echoes afterwards with the faintest of synthetic wind sounds.

Bear in Heaven is a quartet of Southerners who landed in Brooklyn and have been recording since 2003. “Lovesick Teenagers” is a song from Beast Rest Forth Mouth, the band’s third album, released this month on Hometapes Records.

Free and legal MP3: Secondstar (meditative, wistful, harmony-laced)

“Tied to the Mast” – Secondstar

Meditative, wistful, harmony-laced, and lacking any introduction whatsoever, “Tied to the Mast” (sea theme continues, inadvertently) envelops us instantly in its welcoming vocal layers. While reminiscent, clearly, of the sorts of harmonizing that Fleet Foxes abruptly brought back to rock’n’roll last year, what you’ll hear here has a smaller-scale and less architected feeling. Liam Carey, the Brooklyn-based driving force behind Secondstar, uses an accumulation of fragile vocal tracks to create something decidedly unfragile, anchoring it all on a simple acoustic rhythm guitar and some oceanic percussion, nicely evocative of the “ever-hooded, tragic-gestured sea,” to quote a landmark poem that comes to mind as I’m listening to this. The guitar, by the way, may be uncomplicated but the chords are so hospitable, the sound so warm and plush that I am newly reminded that complication isn’t everything.

“Tied to the Mast” is one of five songs on Secondstar’s Teeth EP, self-released this summer. A follow-up EP is due some time this fall, says Carey. Note that the link is via Bandcamp, and is not direct. Follow instructions from the link above and you’ll have the MP3 in no time.

Free and legal MP3: Hopewell (throbbing, neo-psychedelic lullaby)

“Stranger” – Hopewell

A noisy, disciplined exercise in 21st-century genre-bending, this throbbing, neo-psychedelic lullaby probably kills in concert. Even on a recording, concisely churned and pummeled into three and a half minutes, even with Jason Russo’s restrained, whispery tenor, “Stranger” is a bracing, vehement number. The instrumental parts have an almost feral quality, even as the overall vibe is tight as a drum; when the five guys in this Brooklyn-based band crank up the volume, one gets the feeling that while any one of them may not know exactly what he’s going to play next, the other four always do. That’s what you get when you’ve been together for more than a decade. (Okay, there’s me again, singing the praises of experience over “hot-new-thing-iness.” It’s a tough job but somebody’s got to do it.)

Oh and then, after all that unfettered intensity, check out how the song ends, with that one homely, lonely gong-like cymbal. Unexpectedly smile-inducing.

Hopewell was featured on Fingertips in 2007 for the song “Tree.” “Stranger” is the latest MP3 available from the band’s Good Good Desperation CD, their sixth, released in May on Tee Pee Records. MP3 via Tee Pee.