Tag: long

Free and legal MP3: The Concretes (atmospheric indie pop, w/ a dance beat)

“Good Evening” is six and a half minutes. It takes its time. There is a groove involved. There are interesting sounds (try 0:34 on for size, or 1:22, or those background springy percussion noises at 1:28). A sense of tension is established—a combination of the beat, the restrained instrumentation, and a determination to stay focused on two chords—and extends well past the two-minute mark.

The Concretes

“Good Evening” – the Concretes

I am a long song skeptic; I don’t think there is often a very good reason for a pop song to be much longer than four minutes, in fact. Usually things are just repeating themselves at that point, or stretching on without apparent purpose. And yet I’ll admit I’m also a fan of music that might be considered atmospheric, and now that I think about it, atmospheric music almost by definition requires a certain amount of time and space to develop. Do I contradict myself? (My iTunes library is large, it contains multitudes.)

“Good Evening” is six and a half minutes. It takes its time. There is a groove involved. There are interesting sounds (try 0:34 on for size, or 1:22, or those background springy percussion noises at 1:28). A sense of tension is established—a combination of the beat, the restrained instrumentation, and a determination to stay focused on two chords—and extends well past the two-minute mark. This is not something that you can do in a three-minute song. Another thing you can’t do in a three-minute song is take a one-minute recess during which the rhythm and beat stop, most of the instruments leave, and the percussion reduces to something that sounds like swinging, amplified footsteps. Check that out starting at 4:00. Now, admittedly, longer songs are common when there’s a dance beat involved—the club ambiance requiring a totally different musical animal than, say, a radio, or even an iPod. That “Good Evening” manages to bridge that gap, bringing a bit of club-floor panache to something that works as an actual song, is a good part of its well-built allure.

An eight-piece band from Stockholm, the Concretes have been around in one incarnation or another since 1995, although didn’t start recording albums until 2003. “Good Evening” has been making the online rounds for a few months, but is actually from the brand new album WYWH, which was released just this week on Friendly Fire Recordings. It is the band’s fourth full-length. MP3 via Friendly Fire.

Free and legal MP3: Broken Social Scene (involving single from veteran Canadian collective)

Harboring as many as 19 people in its fold, the veteran Canadian ensemble Broken Social Scene is one of those loosely organized “collectives” that the indie rock scene has often favored. But on its first album in five years, Forgiveness Rock Record, set for release next month, the group was prepared to act more like a stripped-down (for them) six-man band, largely because of difficulties getting everyone together to record.

“World Sick” – Broken Social Scene

Harboring as many as 19 people in its fold, the veteran Canadian ensemble Broken Social Scene is one of those loosely organized “collectives” that the indie rock scene has often favored. But on its first album in five years, Forgiveness Rock Record, set for release next month, the group was prepared to act more like a stripped-down (for them) six-man band, largely because of difficulties getting everyone together to record. And so the six prime movers–led by co-founders Kevin Drew and Brendan Canning–did the writing and arranging; but in the end, go figure, pretty much everyone showed up after all, including Amy Millan and Evan Cranley from Stars, Emily Haines and Jimmy Shaw from Metric, Leslie Feist, and some 15 others. It just can’t be a BSS record without a crowd.

“World Sick” is the album’s lengthy opening track, an almost seven-minute composition with the big bashy sound of an anthem, the unhurried development of a prog-rock opus, and an itchy-echoey ambiance that stitches its ambitions together. The band is guitar-heavy (four of the core six are guitarists) but uses its instrument of choice judiciously. What we get is nothing like the muddy, canceling-out effect of those silly rock-celebrity gatherings when they bring nine guitarists on stage to celebrate someone’s birthday and you can’t hear any of them. Here, it’s all about dynamics, about presenting an effective spectrum of sounds from soft to loud, from individual notes to chords, from melodic lines to crashing walls of noise. And while I’m normally not too keen on long instrumental outros, I don’t mind this one, both for its subtle interplay of guitar and rhythm and nature sounds and for the thematic statement it makes in the context of its somewhat inscrutable but obviously world-weary lyrics.

Forgiveness Rock Record is due out next month on the Toronto-based Arts & Crafts label. MP3 via Magnet Magazine