Tag: UK

Free and legal MP3: Tribes (big brash well-produced guitar rock)

A smartly-crafted song with lots of melody and guitars may sound like a relic or—maybe?—it could be a clarion call for a change of musical/cultural course.

Tribes

“We Were Children” – Tribes

As DIY- and/or electronics-focused as rock’n’roll has become in the 21st century, sometimes it does an ear good (my ear, anyway) to hear a band that aims for a big, brash, well-produced sound. Yes, “We Were Children” brings to mind music from a bygone era—either the ’70s or the ’90s, depending on your frame of reference—but this is only because of how thin and/or muddy and/or manipulated is the characteristic sound of the here and now. A smartly-crafted song with lots of melody and guitars may sound like a relic or—maybe?—it could be a clarion call for a change of musical/cultural course. This is a young band; as the lyrics clearly state, “We were children in the mid-’90s.” If it also brings to mind Mott the Hoople covering early Radiohead, well, let’s see, we can either take it as a sign that pop culture has run out of steam or is yet again reinventing itself via the past.

The title phrase by the way is nearly all that’s clear about the lyrics, which employ ordinary nouns like magazine and suitcase and clothes in the opening verse to spin a quickly mysterious story in bashy, quasi-glam-rock-y style. The chorus withdraws into an introspective, semi-whispered refrain full of simple, one-syllable words. We are both attracted and bewildered. Who is the “stranger”? “These things happen”—what things? The words acquire an anthemic cadence, even as the music holds back. Meanwhile, guitars are everywhere, lead and rhythm and solo, with effective bits of squonk and drone. Front man Johnny Lloyd emotes with a natural swagger, his voice operating at both high and low volume without losing character or presence. By the time (2:27) we hear the chorus sung in all-out mode, with elusive sing-along backing vocals, it’s as if that’s what we’d been hearing all along. Nicely done.

Founded in Camden in 2009, Tribes released its debut full-length album, Baby, in the UK in January, after releasing two EPs in 2011. The album is getting a US release on Universal Republic next week.

photo credit: Martin Zähringer

Free and legal MP3: The Big Pink (fat glitchy groove, w/ a heart of pop)

Answering the question no one was probably otherwise asking: “What would Tears for Fears sound like had hip hop existed in the early ’80s?”

The Big Pink

“Give It Up” – The Big Pink

With a groove slow and fat enough to lose yourself in and glitchy enough to sound of the moment, “Give It Up” manages to answer the question no one was probably otherwise asking, which is, “What would Tears for Fears sound like had hip hop existed in the early ’80s?”

And if that sounds facetious I don’t mean it to be. First of all, I kind of like Tears for Fears. Second of all, while I like authentic artistic expression as much as the next guy, I also like a good pop song (in the traditional sense of the word, not necessarily meaning that I like what is currently played on Top 40 stations). And at the risk of pointing out the obvious, there is almost nothing about a good pop song that can be rightly called “authentic.” Good pop songs have always been shrewd constructions, built from any given era’s available materials. (This is no excuse for Auto-Tune, by the way, but that’s a separate post.) So, here we have a British duo that blends sampled and/or synthesized strings and horns and all sorts of elusive electronic effects into something that sounds both super constructed and super attractive. And also—I like this part a lot—connected to its own history. When Robbie Furze sings, “It doesn’t have to be/So hard,” switching from falsetto to normal register for that last phrase, I feel myself in the presence of a huge interconnected wave of pop that arrows back not only through the early ’80s but straight into the birth of pop music with a groove, which happened on soul records some time in the late ’60s to early ’70s. The sample here—apparently taken from Memphis soul singer Ann Peebles—is telling. I’m not sure precisely what’s been sampled—horns? strings? vocals?—but that never seems to be the point here in century 21. It’s all about the final collage, and if the collage pulls me in this smartly, I’ll happily go along. Just steer clear of that Auto-Tune.

“Give It Up” is from Future This, the band’s second album, which was released in January on 4AD Records. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Liz Green

Windswept, blues-ish & precise, w/ tuba

Liz Green

“Hey Joe” – Liz Green

An interesting and/or amusing playlist might be made of songs with the same title as a much more famous song, but which are new songs, not covers of the famous ones. “Hey Joe” goes right on that playlist, as this is assuredly not the Jimi Hendrix song of the same name.

What we have instead is a windswept, precisely orchestrated bit of minimalist pseudo-blues. Featuring lonesome percussion, a cleanly picked acoustic guitar, and an offbeat, handpicked blend of brass and woodwind, “Hey Joe” swivels on the lyrical structure of traditional blues, with its repeating lines, but veers into idiosyncratic territory when it comes to chord progressions and instrumentation. The more I listen, the more taken I am by the accompanying quartet of tuba, trumpet, trombone, and tenor sax that enters around 1:26 and oom-pahs and croons its way across this “simple bitter tale of love,” as Green herself has described the song. I can almost believe that the musical accompaniment somehow preceded the song itself, that Green concocted her words and melodies specifically to hang on the weighty, unorthodox foursome who give testimony from a deeper place. Cool song.

A self-proclaimed “tragi-comic pop clown” (so she says on her Twitter page), Liz Green is a singer/songwriter from Manchester, England who came into the public eye in the UK when she won the Glastonbury Festival’s Emerging Talent Competition in 2007, which is apparently a pretty big deal. She released a 7-inch single in 2008 and then just kind of disappeared. Until now. Her debut full-length album, O, Devotion!, came out in the UK late in 2011 and sees its American release next week, on the PIAS label.

Free and legal MP3: Artery

Churning, post-punk alienation, authentically

Artery

“Standing Still” – Artery

If this one has the ring of a bygone era about it, there’s good reason for that: the band here, Artery, is a Sheffield-based unit that released three albums in the post-punk glory days of the early ’80s, then called it quits. Once upon a time championed by John Peel, they were unexpectedly nudged back into being by Jarvis Cocker, who wanted them for a festival he was curating in 2007. In 2009, the reanimated band put out an EP, their first recording since 1984.

Although they broke up (again) in 2010 when one member decided to leave (again), the band soon found a replacement and have soldiered on. And while there were too many lineup changes even in Artery’s original run to call any given configuration the definitive version of the band, this reunited ensemble is pretty authentic, featuring front man Mark Gouldthorpe and two other gents who had been in the band at one time or another back in the day.

To my ears, what they deliver is both captivating and fascinating. With its churning, old-school blend of guitars, synths, bombast, and alienation, “Standing Still” does not sound of this year, or century, even. But neither, somehow, does the song sound merely “old-fashioned” in the way a truly defunct style like, say, doo-wop does. This may relate to how much of the musical language of the new wave and post-punk eras are still spoken by rock bands in the year 2011. But I also believe Artery’s discontinued-but-vibrant sound has also to do with the fact that whoever these guys are and whatever they’ve been through, they are legitimately carrying on here in the here and now. Even as they know best the musical landscapes of early ’80s Northern Britain, they are aiming to make new music that says new things. Gouldthorpe scolds and warbles in full John Lydon mode as his mates play discernible instruments and chords—no loops or strange sampling for this crew, to be sure. It’s all rather bracing, with everything ultimately anchored by the chorus’s roiling, melodramatic chord progression, which provides the song with its unlikely instrumental hook.

“Standing Still” first surfaced on the “comeback” EP in 2009. This month, a full-fledged album arrived—Civilisation, on Twin Speed/Cherry Red Records. “Standing Still” can be found here too. MP3 originally via Artrocker Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: Vadoinmessico

Easy-going assurance

Vadoinmessico

“Teeo” – Vadoinmessico

An Italian, a Mexican, and an Austrian walk into a bar…well, okay, not a bar, but a music school, in London. And so this is not the beginning of a joke but the beginning of the band Vadoinmessico, a multi-national quintet that remains based in the UK. And you can really hear the non-English-speaking sensibility here, even as front man Giorgio Poti (the aforementioned Italian) sings in English. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something in either the vibe, at once relaxed and kinetic, or the instrumental mix (note the lack of a rock-style drum kit), or both, that feels like nothing a purely American or British band would create or deliver.

And wow I’ve been bumping into these songs with banjos and/or pedal steel guitars in them lately and here’s another one, this time with both, and if some blogger somewhere calls this a country song I shall emit an electronic scream. Vadoinmessico offers up the self-description of “mediterranean alternative folk,” and sure, why not? I love the easy-going assurance of the melody, which is at once amorphous and ear-grabbing. There’s not a clear hook, there’s no immediately obvious verse/chorus division, and what does in the end amount to the chorus (heard just twice, the first time from 1:00 to 1:15) slips by without fuss and without resolution. What’s more, the verses themselves are hard to differentiate, and seem to center upon a repeated melody that is launched off the second beat of the measure with a string of repeated notes. The wonderful allure of the piece has first of all to do with the slight variations this melody undergoes after the consistency of the opening two measures, and then to do with the cumulative, almost hypnotic effect of this not-quite-repetition.

Note in particular the new melodic upturn we hear first at around 1:17, with a match at 1:25. We take it in as pleasant enough at that point, but when this particular variation returns as Poti sings (2:38) “Everybody please wait for me here by the river,” with the half-step ascent on the words “here by the,” we seem somehow to have arrived at the muted epicenter of the song. It feels like a payoff as long as you don’t concentrate too much, like something you can see only with peripheral vision.

“Teeo” is the third single released by the band, which has yet to put out an official album or EP.

Free and legal MP3: Fanfarlo (tense, unusual chamber pop)

Unusual song lacking any rock-band instruments, but which keeps me coming back for more.

Fanfarlo

“Replicate” – Fanfarlo

Keep your ears on the synthesizer here. It has a wonderfully goofy-fiendish sound to it, half haunted house, half vintage sci-fi. It is also the only instrument on display in this song that you might otherwise normally find in a rock band. Everything else here is a string, a woodwind, or a piece of percussion of the sort on display on the percussionist’s table in the back of the orchestra.

I’m not sure what prompted the unusual instrument choice here. But the strangest thing is how you almost don’t register it. You notice the song’s odd sense of tension, and sparseness, and slow unfolding-ness, but not its wholesale acoustic/orchestral foundation. But check it out: no guitars, no bass, no drums. The focus is on Simon Balthazar, a Swede fronting a British band, whose Bryan Ferry-ish warble has a sneaky depth even as he spends half the song singing in stuttery slivers. His band mates meanwhile get to sing primarily in howling, wordless bursts. Okay so “Replicate” is pretty much weird beyond all explanation. And yet there is alluring muscle here, particular in the chorus, with its striking, string-voiced counter-melody and those aforementioned vocal bursts. This is the kind of song that is hard to know what to make of after only a listen or two, but that seems to prompt repeated listenings.

“Replicate” is the first song made available from Fanfarlo’s forthcoming, as-yet-untitled second album. The band’s debut, Reservoir, was released to much acclaim in 2009, when Balthazar was still going by his birth name of Aurell and the London-based five-piece was a sextet. The wonderful song “Harold T. Wilkins,” from that album, was featured here in March of that year. The MP3 comes via Pretty Much Amazing. Perhaps the video will help illuminate the song? You be the judge:

Free and legal MP3: Art Brut (arch & catchy guitar rock)

Art Brut continues to develop its Cake-meets-Franz-Ferdinand sound in capable and fetching directions.

Art Brut

“Lost Weekend” – Art Brut

Art Brut continues to develop its Cake-meets-Franz-Ferdinand sound in capable and fetching directions. Arch as can be, the British quintet sprang to life in the middle ’00s in the midst of a semi-movement of catchy, post-punk-inspired guitar rock (think Bloc Party, think Franz Ferdinand), but was just somehow weirder than the rest of them. And it was a weird kind of weird, as front man Eddie Argos—not a singer as much as a reciter—proved himself the master of a certain kind of post-postmodern, meta-ironic songwriting, in which his dry, concrete, and often very funny descriptions of things and circumstances themselves become tangled up in the story he tells, somehow. The band’s first single was “Formed A Band,” and the lyrics began: “Formed a band/We formed a band/Look at us/We formed a band.” And didn’t say too much more than that.

This is also an outfit that gained a bit of buzz a few years back for encouraging Art Brut “franchises”—new bands going out and being their own version of Art Brut, whatever that ended up meaning. There really weren’t any rules about the whole thing. But at one point in 2006, some 100 or so different Art Brut franchises were sprinkled around Europe and North America.

Yeah so it might be tempting to write the band off as some kind of balmy gimmick, but on the one hand they’re really too ahead of you for that: if there’s a gimmick, it’s that they flaunt the fact that they have a gimmick, which is then a different kind of gimmick, and so forth. (It’s like mirrors opposite each other, receding into infinity.) But more to the point, the music’s too good, too tightly conceived and performed. Their songs are marvelous little machines of rock’n’roll goodness, all slashing guitar lines, organic drumbeats, and quippy lyrics. “Lost Weekend” is sharp and engaging from beginning to end. And on this new album, Brilliant! Tragic!, Argos says he has actually learned to sing, thanks to producer Frank Black (or Black Francis, if you will), who taught him while they recorded the album. You can hear him test the waters here the second time through the chorus—I assume that’s his singing voice at 2:20, somewhat more tenor-y than this talk-singing voice. Worlds of new arch-opportunities open up for Art Brut moving forward.

Brilliant! Tragic! is the band’s fourth album, due out later this month on Cooking Vinyl. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

Free and legal MP3: The Unthanks (brilliant folk revivalism from the UK)

Pleasantly off-kilter and yet still lovely folk revivalism from a pair of sisters from the English countryside.

The Unthanks

“Queen of Hearts” – The Unthanks

Pleasantly off-kilter and yet still lovely folk revivalism from a pair of sisters from the English countryside. “Queen of Hearts” is a traditional song, first recorded by Cynthia Gooding in 1953 and brought to a wider audience by Joan Baez 10 years later, and the Unthanks honor the song’s heart but expand its soul with their uncanny gift of arrangement.

From the glockenspiel’s carefully tinkled opening notes (and note the odd tension the trumpet quickly introduces) it is clear that we are in exquisite musical hands. Keep your ear on the bottom of the mix, as it’s the drumbeat—resolutely minimal, reinforcing the song’s rapt sway—and its bass partner that lend the song its peculiar sense of magical menace, or maybe menacing magic. The interaction of the players—piano, trumpet, strings, percussion—is all but three-dimensional; they sound like they’re playing with each other both musically and spatially. Notes and chords are both thrillingly precise and yet seemingly just come upon. (A favorite moment: the chord that appears on the word “my” smack in the center of the song, at 2:13, on the line “If my love leaves me what shall I do?”)

And let’s not forget the central lure, which is the two sisters’ voices. Becky takes the lower road, Rachel, eight years senior, the higher, and the intertwining is such that they are hard to separate. Thankfully there is no need to. Unthank is their actual last name, by the way. And also the name of a village near where they grew up, west of Newcastle.

“Queen of Hearts” is from the album Last, the Unthanks’ fourth, which will arrive on the Rough Trade label in the US next month. MP3 via the Beggars Group. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Steve Halliday

Haunted, well-crafted acoustic ballad

Steve Halliday

“Alive Anywhere” – Steve Halliday

The voice is pure, haunted, and dramatic, the guitar playing crisp and stark—a recipe, for me, often, to hit the “next” button. Call me grumpy but I don’t usually like this sort of thing. So what is London’s Steve Halliday doing here that lifts the music out of the realm of overly earnest singer/songwriter fare and into something pretty wonderful?

A few things, I’d suggest. I like, right away, the major-key start to the minor-key song—always a nice and knowing touch. I like, too, the way the opening arpeggios operate at their own pace, slowing down and speeding up based on an expressive rather than a rhythmic imperative. Halliday continues this tempo variation—what in classical music might be called rubato—to great effect throughout the song. Paradoxically, the key to its success is that you don’t even necessarily notice it unless it’s pointed out.

In a subtly related matter of song craft, the lyrics themselves are asymmetrical, using little direct rhyme and in some cases, such as in the opening verse, no rhyme at all:

You were so long ago
You were driving me back
You’re crying, what’s so wrong?
Keep your hand on the wheel

There’s something simultaneously jarring and lovely in this. Whether consciously done or not, the musical and lyrical nonconformity jointly offset the “earnestness” factor rather well. I’m on board.

“Alive Anywhere” is the title track to Halliday’s debut album, which he home-recorded and self-released back in 2009; more recently it made its iTunes debut in January of this year. Thanks to the artist himself for the MP3, which I have permission to share here.

Free and legal MP3: Strawberry Whiplash (reverby, jangly holiday sweetness)

“Santa Needs a Holiday” – Strawberry Whiplash

Candy-coated holiday fare from the Glaswegian (that is to say, from Glasgow; but one must not miss the opportunity to use the word “Glaswegian”) duo Strawberry Lemonade, itself a syrupy-sweet side-project from Bubblegum Lemonade front man Laz McLuskey. (Call it twee if you must, but only if you must.)

Long-time Fingertips followers may remember that I don’t go crazy with the Christmas tunes in December–not because I have anything against Christmas tunes (not at all!; I love them only as much as a Christmas-music-deprived nice Jewish boy can) but because, truthfully, and alas, not much of what the genre offers year to year, new-musically-speaking, is very good. Trust me when I say I’m performing a public service by keeping most of what I hear out of your browser/inbox/hard drive/smart phone/whatever-the-hell-you-listen-to-music-in-or-on.

But this one is lovely in a jangly, lo-fi kind of way, full of melodic nostalgia and 21st-century indie-pop blurriness. Vocalist Sandra sings with a lightness befitting someone who operates resolutely without a last name, but listen closely and you’ll also hear a breathy roundness to her tone that brings (sigh) the late great Kirsty MacColl to mind. Perhaps best of all, the song traffics in its Christmasiness with graceful restraint. The one musical element that flavors the song seasonally is the descending guitar riff we hear at the end of the chorus, which smartly echoes the familiar descending bell motif delivered by any number of holiday standards.

“Santa Needs a Holiday” is found on the latest incarnation of annual holiday goodness put out by Santa Barbara-based Matinée Recordings. This year’s offering is an EP called Matinée Holiday Soiree, which also includes a song from Champagne Riot, a band featured here in 2008. MP3 via Matinée.