well-crafted – Page 3

Free and legal MP3 Joywave (well-crafted, retro-y synth pop)

“True Grit” is slick and stylized even as it likewise feels heartfelt and handmade.

“True Grit” – Joywave

A delightful splash of retro-y synth pop, “True Grit” is slick and stylized even as it likewise feels heartfelt and handmade. With its well-crafted blend of electronic sounds—pulse-like, percolating, plucky; wooshy and shimmering—the song floats in the airiest of spaces yet remains grounded and determined. First we get a fully-developed, Eurythmics-like instrumental melody; then comes Dan Armbruster, singing with New Romantic aplomb, cool and hot at the same time, telling us far less with his words than with his tone. The song appears to pivot on the melodramatic, non-sequitur-ish “Sometimes the English countryside remembers war”; yeah, I’m not sure what that’s about either but it glides by with marvelous ease.

The song hinges on that lyric largely because it’s one of the few lines that emerges from Armbruster’s mouth with purposeful clarity. For most of the song, he obfuscates with elegant panache, singing words that you can only almost understand. It’s an underrated pop song trick, not unlike pairing sad words with happy music: pairing a smooth-as-silk sound with not-quite-intelligible lyrics. The ear is captivated and, perhaps, happier this way than if it also has to process a storyline. Works for me, anyway.

Joywave is a quintet from Rochester that formed in 2010. “True Grit” is one of seven songs on the band’s debut EP, Koda Vista, a work indirectly inspired by the rise and fall of hometown behemoth Eastman Kodak. You an stream the album on Joywave’s Bandcamp page, which also offers a variety of corporate-themed purchase options, one of which includes credit towards the purchase of Eastman Kodak Company stock.

Free and legal MP3: Coast Jumper (engaging, unhurried drama)

An engaging, unhurried adventure in two minutes and forty seconds.

“Lawless” – Coast Jumper

Let us stop right away and appreciate the introduction to “Lawless,” which fades in on the distinctive but difficult to identify sound of water being churned or pumped, on top of which soon arrives an unhurried, elastic electric guitar. It’s 20 seconds of sound that is both intriguing and engaging. (A lot of music made in the 21st century, across all genres, from pop to classical, nails the “intriguing” side without bothering with the “engaging” part.) The guitar offers up an actual melody, and the lazy ambiance carries with it a clear sense of impending change and movement. Lots of introductions traffic in pretty much the same tempo and dynamic range of the song to come; something like this merely lets us know we are heading into an adventure.

So the singing starts and we’re still in the same instrumental place, but notice now how the verse melody proceeds in double time, and ends with that quirky repetition that kind of comes out of nowhere but sticks in your head (“time for bed, time for bed, time for bed”). The lyrics, meanwhile, have just alluded to the baby game of “This little piggy,” and are heading who knows where. Drum kicks in. The song both develops and yet seems to stay in a state of unresolved ambiguity. No chorus emerges, just the verse three times over. And by the third time things have somehow gotten pretty intense, thanks in part to the re-emergence of the introduction’s guitar line, soon sounding less dreamy and more vehement; a really effective use of backing vocals also adds to the potency. More than halfway into it, we are still not sure where it’s heading: one moment we are led into an a capella oasis (1:29), the next into an extended guitar frenzy (1:42). The song has a minute to go but we’ll hear no more words, as it eventually finishes off with an instrumental recapitulation of the primary theme. Somehow this multi-faceted, unrushed drama has come and gone in two minutes and forty seconds.

Coast Jumper is four high-school friends from New York, now living in San Francisco (coast jumper, see?), with a fifth guy now in the band. “Lawless” is from Grand Opening, the band’s aptly-titled debut. The 10-song self-released album is available in “name your price” mode at Bandcamp, and will be physically released in May.

Free and legal MP3: Shearwater (exquisitely crafted drama)

Another dramatic, exquisitely crafted song from the Austin-based Shearwater, whose latest album will be released on Sub Pop next week.

“You As You Were” – Shearwater

When you have a voice like Jonathan Meiburg’s—a sad, echoed-out tenor that registers high but resonates deep—there is no sense avoiding drama. The voice announces it, needs it, revels in it. And his songs do tend effortlessly to convey drama, via a combination of careful unfolding, subtle evocation, and urgent unleashing.

“You As You Were” beings with one note—a D# on the keyboard, repeated rapidly by the right hand for 5 seconds before stepping down to a C# as the left hand begins to sketch out a thoughtful melody under the ongoing hammering of the dominant hand’s single note. A quiet bass drum has added a pulse but maybe you don’t even notice. The rest of the band lays back until past the 40-second point. Somewhere in here the singing has started. And yet the song doesn’t feel as if it has truly kicked in until 1:24, when the drums finally give us a backbeat. And even so there’s a sense of restraint, something being held back, and finally we see what it was when one of the earlier melodies returns with a variation that leads us to a previously unheard three-note descent starting at 2:28 that features the song’s highest notes and its clearest (if still vague) sense of climax. Note that the song seems all verse, with a couple of related melodies, each of which go through some variations; there is no obvious lyrical repetition even as some key words and images recur—river, blood, mountains, weather. The song seems to be about both the damage and the promise of a personal epiphany. The combination of music and poetry here is exquisite, and well worth close, repeated listens to get to the bottom of the drama.

“You As You Were” is a song from the album Animal Joy, coming out next week on Sub Pop Records. This is Shearwater’s seventh full-length (not counting the experimental, instrumental, self-released Shearwater Is Enron album from 2010). It is the band’s first album for Sub Pop; they have recorded previously for both Matador Records and Misra Records. The MP3 is available via Sub Pop, and note that if you click on the first Sub Pop mention in this paragraph, you’ll find another free and legal MP3 from the album that is also available, and also worth hearing.

Shearwater has been previously featured on Fingertips in May 2005, March 2008, and December 2009

Free and legal MP3: Uncle Roman’s Jetboat (well-built, from good parts)

“Fearless Like Yourself” – Uncle Roman’s Jetboat

Look at how many distinct moving parts “Fearless Like Yourself” puts immediately into motion: the whistle, the snaky bass line, the itchy guitar, the brisk stuttering drumbeat, the haunted-house organ, all before the singing starts. A lot of rock bands allow their collective sound to pretty much mush together, which can be its own kind of fun. But I always like it when the ear can distinguish the individual parts even as they coalesce into one compelling musical narrative, which is what is going on here quite marvelously.

Then Thomas Beecham starts singing and in this case, too, the ear is immediately hooked; he begins: “While you were out/I was going through your shit/to find something to stick on you.” A first line that surely keeps you listening. Beecham has something of Thom Yorke’s nasally twitchiness, but channels it here through a less arcane song structure than the mighty Radiohead tends these days to favor. The song moves, has hooks, and interesting sounds, and nicely connected segments. We are also treated—don’t miss it—to an honest-to-goodness guitar solo, beginning at 2:39, which is squonky and delicious.

Uncle Roman’s Jetboat is a new project that combines four-fifths of the defunct Seattle band The Kindness Kind with Beecham, who is British, and was formerly in the band The Raggedy Anns. “Fearless Like Yourself” is from the debut Uncle Roman’s Jetboat release, a six-song album entitled Floodlights in the Sunlight, which is arriving in March on Don’t Be A Lout Music. MP3 via Don’t Be A Lout. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Caged Animals (bass-driven blend of old & new)

Front man Vincent Cacchione manages to blend a knowing, 21st-century approach to beats and lyrics with a grander vision of popular music, evoking ’50s doo-wop groups as surely as he does anything current.

Caged Animals

“Teflon Heart” – Caged Animals

Okay, so after that, perhaps you’d like to balance things out with a superbly constructed song and a highly disciplined production? No problem. “Teflon Heart” is slinky and deliberate, written with care and performed with controlled New York City cool. I love the way front man Vincent Cacchione manages to blend a knowing, 21st-century approach to beats and lyrics with a grander vision of popular music, evoking ’50s doo-wop groups as surely as he does anything current. His words have hip-hop flair, but the mood is more reflective, the rhythm leisurely, the beat dominated by actual bass playing, the singing hinting at inner ache more than outer bravado:

I know you know I’m not bourgeois
You act like I’m a replica
A ghost inside your retina
That only you can see

Another highlight is Cacchione’s prickly guitar work, offering up almost-but-not-quite dissonant solos in between verses, deconstructing both melody and rhythm as the beat, literally, goes on. And do not overlook the effectiveness of the central metaphor, which might seem too slick for its own good but for the subtext conveyed by the singer’s plaintive conclusion “I want one too,” regarding the teflon heart in question.

Caged Animals began as a solo project for the Brooklyn-based Cacchione but has blossomed into a foursome. “Teflon Heart” is from the album Eat Their Own, released in late September on Lucky Number Music. ~~MP3 via Lucky Number.~~ Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the head’s up.

NOTE: Far sooner than usual, this MP3 has been taken down by the record company, and is no longer available.

Free and legal MP3: Bon Iver (indie icon returns, powerfully)

“Calgary” opens as a benediction, Vernon blessing us with that aching falsetto, layered on top of itself, in a cathedral-like setting, with only an organ-like synthesizer as accompaniment.

Bon Iver

“Calgary” – Bon Iver

When last seen around here, in October 2007, Bon Iver was the obscure, self-released solo project for a guy best known as a member of a band called DeYarmond Edison. Yeah, not many people had heard of them, either. The album was released by Jagjaguwar Records in February ’08 and then in Europe by 4AD in May. Let’s say it strikes a chord with a lot of people. Within a couple of years, the guy is in the studio with Kanye West. I can’t claim to have seen that coming.

“Calgary” opens as a benediction, Vernon blessing us with that aching falsetto, layered on top of itself, in a cathedral-like setting, with only an organ-like synthesizer as accompaniment. Percussion joins in around 1:14, centered on some rumbly tom-toms, along with an extra, twangy keyboard and some hints of a fuller band. The main melody, which repeats throughout the song, acquires a beat and a momentum that it did not hint at in the church-ish opening section. This to me is the power and delight of the song—that seamless, “how’d-he-do-that?” transition from prayer to proclamation, achieved by the very careful, if casual-seeming, entering and exiting of instruments and sounds. By the time the full band arrives in earnest around 1:53, the repeating melody has acquired a whole new kind of solemnity, a solemnity based on movement and rhythm rather than incantation. The electric guitar comes out of its shell for an itchy sort of solo at 2:23, leading into a bridge during which—don’t miss it—Vernon drops the falsetto. The song ends over an acoustic guitar that was previously hidden in the mix, giving both Vernon’s voice and the song’s melody one last iteration.

“Calgary” is the first single from the long-awaited second Bon Iver album, which is self-titled, and slated for release next week on Jagjaguwar. MP3 via the record company.

Free and legal MP3: The Heavenly States (smartly crafted, smile-inducing)

Even though thumpy and clappy and light-hearted, “Model Son” also unfolds deliberately, with an exquisite sense of sound and accompaniment.

The Heavenly States

“Model Son” – The Heavenly States

Even though thumpy and clappy and light-hearted, “Model Son” also unfolds deliberately, with an exquisite sense of sound and accompaniment. The precisely-picked acoustic guitar line that we hear in the introduction lays the slightly-skewed groundwork for this smartly-made song. Without ever quite knowing what’s going on lyrically, you are likely to find a smile on your face through the cumulative force of happy music. This sounds like XTC and CCR joining forces to enter a Modest Mouse songwriting competition.

The level of detail at nearly any moment is splendid and endearing (example? that penny-whistle sound that wiggles oh-so-briefly to the forefront at 0:58). In the hands of the Heavenly States, a section of the song that might otherwise be like treading water—some wordless backing vocals over a steady beat, tying the end of the chorus to the beginning of the next verse (beginning around 1:00)—becomes its own charming adventure. Violinist Genevieve Gagon is another matter entirely, shredding everything in her path when her solo arrives (2:19).

Currently a trio (although the picture on the Oakland-based band’s home page still shows four; see above), the Heavenly States have been recently in the news because they are, somehow, and bizarrely, the only American band ever to have played in Libya, which they did in 2005; Gagon and front man Ted Nesseth were interviewed on CNN about the experience earlier this month. She and Nesseth, by the way, are married; her brother Jeremy is the band’s drummer.

“Model Son” is from the EP Oui Camera Oui, due out next month on Hippies Are Dead Records, a label founded last year as an offshoot of the blog of the same name. MP3 via HAD.

Free and legal MP3: Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion (old-fashioned feel, rock-solid songwriting)

A rollicking, low-key stomper with an old-fashioned feel and rock-solid songwriting chops.

“Speed of Light” – Sarah Lee Guthrie & Johnny Irion

A rollicking, low-key stomper with an old-fashioned feel, a gut-kicking beat, and rock-solid songwriting chops. The husband-wife duo of Guthrie and Irion don’t sound like they’re breaking a sweat here as they let the song do the work for them, with its three strong sections (verse, pre-chorus, chorus), its echoes of some vague lost soul classic, and an incisive lyrical payoff—almost a punchline, except it’s insightful rather than funny—at the end of the chorus that pivots the whole song into place. And I won’t give it away because you should hear it in context. And don’t miss the lyric’s musical punctuation, that vintage instrumental accent first heard at 0:54. An essential and exquisite touch.

“Speed of Light” is a song from the pair’s second full-length Bright Examples, due out in February on Ninth Street Opus. And yes, Sarah Lee is a genuine Guthrie: daughter of Arlo, granddaughter of Woody. Although she sang at age 12 on one of her father’s albums, she hadn’t necessarily planned on a musical career but eventually found collaboration with her husband too fruitful to resist.

MP3 via Ninth Street Opus. Thanks to Largehearted Boy for the lead.

Free and legal MP3: Orchestraville (very nicely crafted, in 3/4-time)

There’s an appealing, homespun rigor to this song, something in the way it laces its 3/4 time gallop with a rock-band oomph that you don’t typically hear, come to think of it, in 3/4-time songs.

“Half and Half” – Orchestraville

There’s an appealing, homespun rigor to this song, something in the way it laces its 3/4 time gallop with a rock-band oomph that you don’t typically hear, come to think of it, in 3/4-time songs. (For the record, “Manic Depression” is a relative rarity, and in that case Hendrix all but deconstructs the time signature. ) I think it’s the organ that really launches things at the beginning; even though it refuses to move to the center of the mix, it plays its swaying, off-melody lines with haunted-house abandon. The ear is officially engaged.

And the song delivers, especially if you listen carefully. The craft is subtle but exquisite. For instance, listen to the way the melody shifts slightly but unmistakably from the first to the second line of the verse: while the words, nearly repeating (“Why did you smile?/Why did you laugh?”), set us up for a straight repeat of the melodic line, the last note of the line veers up a step. This is ever-so-subtly unsettling, and the exact kind of thing that creates interest, because our ears, bless their hearts (?), like nothing better than to guess where the melody is going and then be proven wrong. It also deftly sets up the resolving turn taken in the third line (from 0:29 to 0:31), which soon, even more deftly, glides us into the sly chorus at 0:40, when Christopher Forbes sings “And the same goes for you” in descending half-steps. It’s sly because this the introverted rather than extroverted part of the song (a chorus by nature is a song’s most extroverted part); we seem to stumble upon the titular phrase as if by accident. And then check back the next time the chorus comes around (1:13) and notice both the lyrical (“And the same goes for me”) and musical changes, as we get a sort of post-chorus—three additional lines that finally deliver the contradictory message to the recurring idea that the you and I in the song are “a perfect match,” an idea never, in fact, borne out by the music.

The Ohio-based Orchestraville seems a poster child for a certain kind of spirited, persevering 21st-century indie band. They have a long and convoluted history (personnel changes, relocations, disbanding, reuniting; sadly, there is also a death involved), they worked hard at what they did, and the fact that they have little in the way of widespread recognition to show for it is obviously no reason to think any less of them. It is indeed what we are all in the process of getting used to in the age of musical over-abundance. “Half and Half” is from the band’s last album, Poison Berries, which was recorded in the first half of the ’00s but never released because the band broke up in ’05. This year, however, they began to make their existing albums available as digital downloads, and in the process put Poison Berries out both as a vinyl album and in MP3 format in September. MP3 for the song via the band’s site.

Free and legal MP3: Elsinore (well-crafted & melodic, w/ strings)

“Lines” offers a sense of the richness about to unfold before, even, the melody begins, in a flowing introduction that features a leisurely but nimble progression of eight chords. This song is clearly going places.

“Lines” – Elsinore

In a photography class I took some years ago, I learned that a satisfying black-and-white photograph is very likely to include the full range of the black-to-white spectrum, from the blackest black to the whitest white but also including many different in-between grays. I suspect, lacking of course any empirical evidence, that something similar is involved with music. For me, anyway, melodies that manage to hit the top and the bottom of the octave, while also employing most of the in-between notes, feel richer and often more meaningful to me than stingy tunes that stay within a more constrained range of notes.

“Lines” offers a sense of the richness about to unfold before, even, its full-spectrum melody begins, in a flowing introduction that features a leisurely but nimble progression of eight chords. This song is clearly going places. Ryan Groff has a crooner’s timbre and engages that ambling, string-festooned melody with a dreamy, charming nonchalance. (For the record, I’m hearing seven of the eight notes in the scale, many used more than once.) There’s that nifty chord shift in the middle of the verse (first heard at 0:15) that each time snaps the ear to attention even as nothing in particular announces it; it is not attached to either melody or lyric; and Groff lets it slide right under him, every time, most casually. The strings grow insistent, the guitars take the song back at 2:28, and the harmonies, suddenly all Brian Wilson-like, sing us up to the pensive coda. This is not some song someone dashed off on the back of a napkin in a bar.

Elsinore is a quartet from Champaign, up and running since 2004. The connection to Denmark and/or Hamlet is unaddressed by any promo material I could find. “Lines” is from Yes Yes Yes, the band’s third full-length album, released last week on Parasol Records.