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Free and legal MP3: Zeus (awesome retro rock, ’70s edition)

“Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” was made to be blaring out of your car radio, especially if you happen to be driving maybe a Buick Skylark.

“Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” – Zeus

Can a piece of music sound thoroughly retro and entirely of the moment at the same time? Not if you believe the premise of that Retromania book from last year, with all of its pop-culture-is-over hand-wringing. Let’s call out that foolish book once and for all, shall we? I mean, good lord: no one knows what the future will bring based on present circumstances. And there’s always a lot of less-than-terrific stuff floating around in pop-culture-land. To assume everything has now ground to a halt is the height of baby boomer narcissism.

In any case, no one could possibly convince me that a song as sharp and well-presented as “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” represents anything but pop culture at its finest. If the musical setting is all 1970s, if the lead singer even sounds oddly like the guy in Blues Image (“Ride Captain Ride,” anyone?), what of it? This is one groovy tune, from the fuzzy/flangey guitar to the stop-start melodic momentum to the (yes) cowbell to, what the heck, all the other guitar sounds as well. Special props go out to that connective, lower-register riff we hear in the chorus, first at 0:59; retro my ass, that thing is just timeless rock’n’roll, sports fans. This song was made to be blaring out of your car radio, especially if you happen to be driving maybe a Buick Skylark.

Zeus is a four-man band from Toronto that has otherwise in recent years been doing business as Jason Collett’s backing band. “Are You Gonna Waste My Time?” is a track from their second full-length album, Busting Visions, which arrives next month on the Arts & Crafts label. MP3 via Magnet Magazine. For those interested—and who shouldn’t be?—Rolling Stone has a free & legal MP3 of another new Zeus song, here.

Free and legal MP3: Mike O’Neill (easy-going shuffle w/ deeper complexity)

Spiffy little shuffle with more going on than might initially meet the ear.

“Henry” – Mike O’Neill

Spiffy little shuffle with more going on than might initially meet the ear. The musical feel is old-fashioned in a Beatle-y kind of way (think “Martha My Dear”), a sensation accentuated by the vintage-sounding “doo-doo-doo” backing vocals; everything seems so immediately comfy and solid. But go ahead and try to sing along with this one. I’ll wait.

Yeah, it’s oddly difficult to follow even as it’s oh so easy to listen to. That’s because as amiable as “Henry” sounds, the music is decidedly off-kilter. If you go ahead and tap out the four-beated measures as they roll by you’ll see that hardly any of the music lines up with the song’s structural rhythm. It’s an intriguing effect. The drummer first plays forcefully between the beats in the introduction (which sounds purposeful and flippant), and then merely implies the 1-2-3-4 without at all playing on the beat. The melody hurries and hesitates in idiosyncratic ways that relate more to how words are spoken than how they are usually sung. This is not as easy to do as it sounds. The beat partially reasserts itself in the chorus, at which point the off-kilter part is that the chorus doesn’t have any words—O’Neill makes do, somehow, with those scratchy wordless “doo-doo-doo” vocals, which themselves are still not sketching out a particularly straightforward path. Note that the second time we hear the chorus, the background vocals are supplemented by a second wordless melody (more “da-da-da” this time) that intertwines with the first in a way that sounds almost like a complete mish-mash and yet isn’t at all. And everything wraps up in 2:25. What’s not to like?

Mike O’Neill was one-half of the Canadian bass-and-drums duo The Inbreds (he was the bass), which had a run of college-radio-oriented success in the ’90s. After switching to guitar and releasing solo albums in 2000 and 2004, O’Neill landed a job composing music for the popular Canadian cooking show, French Food at Home, which ran from 2007 to 2010 and no doubt provided a much-appreciated steady paycheck. He even won a Gemini (a Canadian TV award) for his work. Now the Halifax resident is back at the singer/songwriter life, and at last about to release an album he begun working on back in 2007. It’s coming out later this month, it’s called Wild Lines, and that’s where you’ll find “Henry,” and 11 other songs.

Free and legal MP3: The Darcys

Iirregular, arresting Steely Dan cover

“Josie” – The Darcys

While the idea of doing a “cover album” versus a “cover song” is not completely new, neither has it ever much caught on. I guess there haven’t been too many artists with the fortitude, or mania, or funding, or whatever it takes, to go off and recreate a previously existing album track by track. Among the few and far between examples are Pussy Galore’s slapsdash, lo-fi 1986 cover of Exile on Main Street and the earnest live cover album released in 2002 by Mary Lee’s Corvette of Bob Dylan’s iconic Blood on the Tracks.

Now arrive a Toronto quartet called the Darcys with perhaps the most serious and most musically worthy cover album yet recorded—a smart, re-interpretive take on Steely Dan’s perfectionist 1977 album, Aja. While all recognizable, the seven songs are also each altered decisively. What was originally a glistening array of artful, jazz-inflected pop has become a brooding, arresting piece of business. Take “Josie,” which transforms a perky-but-complex song into a doleful-and-still-complex song. Note that they manage this without, really, a change in tempo. What the Darcys have done instead is eradicate the percussion, converting the song into a moody, reverbed brew of keyboards, guitars, and chanting-monk-like harmonies. What remains from the original—and what will always make Steely Dan songs Steely Dan songs—are the incomparably intricate chords, and their sometimes dazzling progressions. Hearing those chords and those progressions reanimated in this new setting is an unexpected treat.

The Darcys have one previous album, self-titled, which was released in October 2011. Although Aja was recorded in 2010—the band produced, arranged, and recorded it themselves—the album was just released late in January. ~~The MP3 here comes via Rolling Stone, but be aware that the band is giving away the entire Aja album on its web site, if you are willing to give them an email address.~~ They are also selling a limited-edition, 180-gram colored vinyl version. I recommend at least a listen, and would point you in the direction of “Peg” in particular.

Free and legal MP3: Marvelous Darlings (Buzzcocks style power pop)

It’s loud and muscular but it’s an honest-to-goodness song, with a primitive, ear-catching riff, nostalgic melodies, and any number of musical moments one might almost call graceful except for the general head-bangy ambiance.

Marvelous Darlings

“I Don’t Wanna Go To The Party” – Marvelous Darlings

I’ve never had an ear for the harsher, DIY-fueled end of the punk spectrum. But neither have I found the more blatantly commercial “punk-pop” genre very satisfying. My sweet spot is for the sort of punk or punk-like music made by folks who may be angry, or alienated, or otherwise fed up but still manage to have their musical wits about them. My opinion is that if you’re too angry to be bothered to learn exactly how to write and perform music, maybe you should just leave the music out of it entirely? One man’s perhaps unreasonable idea.

Anyway, with stuff like this, whether in its original, Buzzcocks-y incarnation or when trotted out in the new(ish) century by a crew like Marvelous Darlings, I’m all in. It’s loud and muscular but it’s an honest-to-goodness song, with a primitive, ear-catching riff, nostalgic melodies, and any number of musical moments one might almost call graceful except for the general head-bangy ambiance. There is, for instance, that place in the relentless, mostly two-note melody when singer Ben Cook takes a fifth-interval downward dive (0:36), and it’s just exactly right. And you kind of wait for it to come back and it doesn’t, and it doesn’t, until finally very close to the end, it does (2:08). This more than makes up for Cook’s decision to add an over-the-top British affectation to the word “party,” which is probably in any case a private joke of some kind.

An additional moment of odd grace: how the interwoven repetition of the basic theme (“I don’t want to go”) we hear at 1:04 resolves into a syncopated, falsetto release at 1:11. The song hammers us unflaggingly with a classic rock’n’roll backbeat and yet offers us a few moments like this one that dance away from it. Another is the brief but dandy guitar solo (1:44-1:54).

Marvelous Darlings is a Toronto band featuring Cook and Matt Delong, who were co-founders of the Canadian hardcore band No Warning; Cook, who also performs under the name Young Governor, is best known these days as a member of the Toronto band Fucked Up, which somewhat unexpectedly won Canada’s Polaris Prize in 2009 for best Canadian album. “I Don’t Wanna Go To The Party” is the lead track on Single Life, an album comprised of previously released 7-inch vinyl singles, put out this week by the Canadian label Deranged Records. MP3 via Deranged. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Great Aunt Ida (homespun, escalating chamber pop)

Brilliant evidence that some songs truly need to be listened to for more than 30 seconds.

Ida Nilsen

“Romance” – Great Aunt Ida

Clearly, people, some songs must be listened to for more than 30 seconds. If, for instance, you give “Romance” only a half-minute or so, you might hear it as a sing-songy sort of DIY keyboard pop, veering maybe (maybe) towards the precious. Fortunately for you you have decided to give it more than 30 seconds. Bass and guitar have made minor appearances by 40 seconds; that helps. The drum kicks in around 48 seconds and that both stabilizes and reorients the song. Now we’re kind of bounding in an open space, freed from the potentially claustrophobic feeling of the opening section. Even though melodically the song has merely repeated its verse, everything feels different. What sounded nearly cloying with just the keyboard (check out 0:33 to 0:39, specifically) sounds engaging with the drum and the guitar added (compare now 1:04 to 1:10).

And Ida Nilsen is just yet getting started. We finally arrive at the chorus at 1:20, and its half-time, upward-yearning melody, with the gentle male backing vocal, is just…well, wow. I didn’t see it coming, this is nothing the first 30 seconds telegraphed, and yet it makes perfect sense, and she’s got me now for good. And if that weren’t enough, she throws in a kind of chorus coda there at 1:50, another lovely and unanticipated turn of events. Then: we get horns, and a wonderful array of them. Someone thought this out quite carefully, which horn is doing what where, and after a brief keyboard solo (did the horns already go away?), the horns come back (nope!), in satisfying conversation with both the melody and one another.

Through it all, Nilsen maintains an even-keeled presence. In the muted opening—which in retrospect now sounds rather fetchingly Carole King-ish; not cloying at all, in fact—her voice has a bit of an unaffected wobble, giving her the air of Laura Veirs’ small-town cousin. But as the song escalates into its full power, so does Nilsen’s vocal presence, which without really changing acquires something of the plainspoken, breathy authority of Suzanne Vega. Not sure how she does that either.

“Romance” is from the album Nuclearize Me, the third Great Aunt Ida album, but the first since Nilsen moved from Vancouver to Toronto, and the first in which she is operating without a defined band around her. The album arrives in early December on the Zunior label. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Louise Burns (Boss-inspired girl-group rock)

Former teen-pop star Louise Burns reorients her career by channeling early ’60s girl groups via Bruce Springsteen’s further explorations of that same sound. Convincing and just plain cool.

Louise Burns

“Drop Names Not Bombs” – Louise Burns

You never know which way a 25-year-old former teen-pop star is going to go. So many potential avenues are open to her. The one labeled “Springsteen-inspired homages to late ’50s and early ’60s pop” is not the expected one, however. Give Louise Burns props for creatively re-imagining her career trajectory. Better yet, give her props for a fine song, and consider it a great instance of making lemonade from lemons, as “Drop Names Not Bombs” draws upon past bad experience from her days as bass player in the teenybopper Canadian band Lillix.

Now as much as people are impelled to talk “girl group” when they hear Burns’ solo debut, Mellow Drama, there’s more to it than strict revivalism. Springsteen himself is grounded in that late ’50s/early-’60s sound, and Burns here is clearly channeling the girl-group thing via the Boss—I hear it in the chimey, piano-driven backbeat, in the organ flourishes, and most of all in the melodic resolution (check out 0:55, around the lyric “I’ll be buying them drinks all night”). As Bruce drew (and continues to draw) so much from the girl-group sound, it’s a lovely counterpoint to hear a female musician double back and tap into that same spring via his subsequent language. That the mezzo-ranged Burns sings with a hint of Ronnie Spector angst lends an extra charge to the proceedings.

And okay, while I don’t want to bog down in the Lillix story, it’s too central to ignore. Formed in Cranbrook, B.C. as a four-girl band when Burns all of 11, Lillix (originally named Tigerlily) was four years later signed by Madonna’s Time Warner-funded Maverick Records imprint. This was 2001. Fed to the star-maker machinery, they got a name change (there was a preexisting Tigerlily), were handed over to mercenary producers and songwriters (the girls had previously written their own music), and forced into pandering marketing efforts (two were sent to weight-loss camp). An early breakthrough: a cover of the Romantics’ “What I Like About You” was used by the 2002 WB sitcom of the same name. After two years of major-label fussing, the first Lillix album emerged in 2003, to mixed reviews at best; it cracked the Billboard 200, barely. In 2004, Madonna, an early booster, was driven from the label in a flurry of lawsuits. A 2006 follow-up album did well in Japan, and nowhere else, and Maverick, itself foundering, dropped the foursome while they were touring. Burns left the band and started over, diving into the Vancouver music scene and embracing noisy, experimental material as an effort to overcome both her teen-pop history and her music-industry bruises. Landing for a while in a goth-y trio called the Blue Violets, she has seemingly come to accept that she is a popster at heart. But sensitivity about her past remains. In a June interview, a couple of months after her solo debut was released in Canada, Burns said, poignantly, “It’s nice that people are giving it a chance despite my background.”

I’m giving her a good good chance. Mellow Drama was long-listed for Canada’s Polaris Music Prize in June; her label, Vancouver-based Light Organ Records, released the album in the U.S. this week. MP3 via Rolling Stone.

Free and legal MP3: The Weather Station

Banjo-driven, but w/ nuance and grace

Tamara Lindeman

“Everything I Saw” – The Weather Station

Truth be told, I don’t tend to be too happy with the banjo. Oh, I don’t mind it as a one-off, informal means of entertainment; in someone’s living room, a banjo can be likable enough, if the banjo player doesn’t overstay his or her welcome. On a recording, in the context of other instruments—that’s when I get the banjo willies. So right away I’d say Tamara Lindeman, who does musical business as the Weather Station, has to me accomplished something wonderful indeed simply by recording a banjo song that I really like.

Part of this has to do with how she manages to tame the instrument’s tinny-twangier voice (which I realize many people may well enjoy!), playing instead in a tone and bearing that intertwines with rather than muffles the folk-style acoustic guitar that shares the instrumental stage here. I also think that Lindeman’s subtle subversion of banjo music convention further tempers the instrument’s tendency to dominate. (Which isn’t all the banjo’s fault, having little to any capacity for dynamic range.) With Daniel Romano playing guitar and, intermittently, singing alongside Lindeman, the song on the one hand utilizes a familiar sort of duet singing characteristic of bluegrass, yet, as with the banjo-playing, ratchets back the brassiness of tone as well as the formal rhythmic lockstep that seems intrinsic to songs driven by banjos. Here, the melodic structure itself undermines the song’s banjo-iness: listen to how, in the chorus-like section, first heard around 1:00, the duet singing coincides with a thoroughly asymmetrical section of the song: a higher, upward-reaching melody tails off downward, followed by a lower melody that ventures upward but then into an unresolved minor key before properly resolving in the major; note too how we first get two lyrical lines (the aforementioned higher melody) leading into the “All of it is mine” refrain (the lower melody), but three lines leading into it the second time. More complex to describe than to listen to; the end result, almost magically, is a banjo song with nuance and grace.

“Everything I Saw” is the quasi-title track to the second Weather Station album, All Of It Was Mine, which was released in mid-August on Ontario’s You’ve Changed Records. You can listen to the whole thing for free, and/or buy it via The Weather Station’s Bandcamp page. Lindeman is also a relatively new part of the eclectic Canadian ensemble Bruce Peninsula, itself due for a new album come October.

Free and legal MP3: Snailhouse (smooth, swanky, melancholy)

Best of all, I do believe that this song offers up an as good if not better use of the “sentimental”/”gentle” rhyme than the familiar, if rather forced, one we got oh so long ago in the Bob Welch-penned classic that this song is a winning homage to.

Mike Feuerstack

“Sentimental Gentleman” – Snailhouse

Smooth and swanky and melancholy, this wise/weary homage to the old Fleetwood Mac/Bob Welch chestnut “Sentimental Lady” is a sneakily wonderful work in its own right. I love its rubbery, lazy-afternoon vibe, sprinkled with unresolved lead-guitar chords, unhurried horns (or horn-like sounds), and some built-in applause that one can truly call a smattering. Best of all, I do believe that this song offers up an as good if not better use of the “sentimental”/”gentle” rhyme than the familiar, if rather forced, one we got oh so long ago in the Welch-penned classic.

The voice and guitar we are hearing here belongs to Mike Feuerstack, of the veteran Canadian band Wooden Stars; Snailhouse has been his lo-fi-ish side project since pretty much the same time Wooden Stars got off the ground, back in 1994. With both a slight tremble and a pleasing richness, Feuerstack’s voice emerges from his throat so effortlessly he seems merely to be talking, an effect accentuated by his wry, conversational lyrics, which seem at least in part to deal with what it’s like to be an experienced but still pretty much unknown rock’n’roller. “We lied to the promoter/Said we’re packing them in,” he asserts, dryly, along the way.

“Sentimental Gentleman” is the title track to the sixth Snailhouse album, which was released in April in Europe on Mi Amante Records, and then in May in Canada through White Whale Records and Forward Music. MP3 via Mi Amante.

Free and legal MP3: The Warped 45s (old-fashioned backwoods rocker)

An old-fashioned backwoods rocker with an absorbing tale, “Grampa Carl” builds with a well-plotted dramatic arc towards a culminating guitar solo of Youngian ferocity.

The Warped 45s

“Grampa Carl” – The Warped 45s

An old-fashioned backwoods rocker with an absorbing tale, “Grampa Carl” builds with a well-plotted dramatic arc towards a culminating guitar solo of Youngian ferocity. That a song like this can succeed in 2011—and boy does it ever—is both fascinating and inspiring. Moral of the story, yet again, is you just have to be good. Related moral of the story: being good doesn’t necessitate being different, just good. Or, maybe, better: being really good is itself a valid way of being different.

Things start with a drumbeat and a spoken introduction, with co-front man Ryan Wayne McEathron letting us know that the song is about his great-grandfather, who smuggled booze from Canada into the U.S. during Prohibition. Bass and keyboards join in, the lead guitar slightly after, and McEathron shifts from speaking to singing so casually you almost don’t notice. The casual authority of both the song and the band is what carries the day here—that and, specifically, Ryan’s cousin Dave on guitar. Dave’s got it going on, big-time: he can support the vocals with inventive but not intrusive licks on the one hand, while stepping out in between verses with honest-to-goodness lead guitar lines on the other. That indie bands have generally put the lead guitar aside is one of 21st-century rock’n’roll’s lesser accomplishments. But: I fearlessly predict that the ability to show mastery on an actual physical instrument will become more and more highly valued as the new decade wears on, and we grow collectively tired of having reduced most of our exertions to touching fingers to screens. (One can always dream, can’t one?)

“Grampa Carl” is the third track on the band’s second album, Matador Sunset, which is coming out at the end of the month on Pheromone Recordings. Because I’m so impressed with the simple power of this band and this song, I’m posting a video performance of it that does nothing but show the McEathron cousins and company doing their thing. No actors were harmed in the filming of this video.

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.