"Salvation" - Scanners The London-based foursome Scanners make a kind of music once all too common and now all too rare: smartly-produced, aurally interesting, musically astute rock'n'roll. This is music that isn't trying to be fancy, or arcane, or difficult; and yet neither is it simple-minded in sound or concept. Now, I said that this sort of smartly produced (etc.) rock used to be pretty...
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"Sadie and Andy" - Princeton From its faux classical intro to its jaunty doo-wop melody and deadpan storytelling, "Sadie and Andy" is all craft and artifice. And pretty much irresistible. "I stock the milk and all the eggs there," Andy sings, catching Sadie up on his daily doings in the grocery store, "And all the herbal tea." Sadie is radically uninterested. It's been ten years. "I haven't...
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"Careful What You Say" - Class Actress Given the synthesizer's inherently goofy sound--the rubbery beeps and boops, the cartoonish echoes, and so forth--it's a bit surprising, now that I think about it, that the instrument isn't more jovially presented as a rule. Indeed, the synthesizer is offered up rather humorlessly in rock music by and large, far more often used with austerity or gravit...
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In addition to the comments posted here, I've received a fair number of emails in response to the essay "Farewell to the Casual Fan." As such, I've begun excerpting some of them in a feedback section at the bottom of the essay on the main Fingertips site, for anyone interested.
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So there's a new Fingertips contest online and yet I just found out that my server is down, and there's no quick fix. Bummer. So instead of linking you to the Contest page, as per usual, I'll put the details such as they are up here in the blog. The show must go on and all that. So, okay, pondering the career of Daryl Hall & John Oates made me realize how rather fascinated I am by the hipness c...
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Here's the second part of the long commentary piece posted to the main Fingertips site on Monday. Thanks for the comments so far, and the emails too. Perhaps this second part, for those who haven't read it yet, will clarify some things. Without further ado...* * * * *Consequence No. 2: Cultural disconnectBeyond plummeting album sales, another disorienting hallmark of the digital music age has ...
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"Johanna" - Think About Life So this may be about the best thing I've heard all year. How sharp and sleek and funky; how multileveled and well-crafted and exuberant; what deeply gratifying fun. The basic groove alone is impressive, established at the outset by some brilliant horn charts, with their stuttery swing and that softly dissonant chord they settle on at the end of each phrase. ...
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"Who Will" - Will Stratton Gorgeous and swaying, but with a deep-down sense of gravity. (Anyone remember the old Fleetwood Mac instrumental "Albatross"? This evokes that, pleasantly.) I like the sonic interplay between the crisply strummed acoustic guitar at the front of the mix and that big dark open space underneath--space created seemingly by just a lonesome-prairie guitar and Stratton's...
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"In Perfect Time" - the Sun A fuzzy blast of melodic noise, "In Perfect Time" seems to want to be played really loud. As a matter of fact, it has a kind of sneaky effect going--the louder I turn it, the louder still I feel I need to hear it. This clearly has to do with how singer Chris Burney's voice is mixed down, but it's more than just that. Any number of other bands have done the mixed-...
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There's a new Fingertips Commentary essay on the main site, called "Farewell to the Casual Fan." Subtitle: "Too many 'future of music' schemes overlook the importance of listeners who don't worship you."As always, it's a somewhat lengthy discussion, so I'm breaking it into two parts for the blog. I'll post the second part on Wednesday. The weekly MP3 selections should be up tomorrow. The essay ...
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The latest Fingertips Q&A is now online, featuring Eric Atria of the Gainesville, Fla.-based band Morningbell. Morningbell has been twice featured on Fingertips to date, most recently at the end of September for the song "Marching Off to War."
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Sorry to bug everyone else but this message goes only to the three people who won the Top 10 contest from October 10. Thanks to a bit of prodding by one of the winners, I just realized I gave the wrong email address out, so anyone who's emailed me at that address, well, I never got it. I'm sensitive about putting my email address into a post here on the blog for fear of spamming--this is no dou...
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"Hearts of Palm" - Ravens & Chimes Cheerful songs are usually vigorous things. Songs that seem hesitant, wavery, or otherwise introverted, on the other hand, tend to be at best wistful if not downright mournful. "Hearts of Palm" subverts the formula, and is all the more effective for it--a sprightly, hopeful-sounding song edged by an equivocal, somewhat trembling vibe. Some of this is d...
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"Unpredictable" - Tahiti 80 Carefree English-speaking French pop from a band doing it before it was a genre. There's something not only charming but truly satisfying about a song that works quite so well both for people who are barely paying attention and for people paying close attention. This is no small feat. For the first group, a jaunty, smoothly sung tune is all that's required. Great...
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"Illuminated" - Múm The fact that Múm wrote the music to its most recent album in the middle of Iceland's economic meltdown and political upheaval adds poignancy to the already melancholy beauty of "Illuminated." Against a bed of mystical tinkling and mysterious vocal arpeggios, "Illuminated" doesn't so much start as float into being. The extended chord progression described by the angelic .
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"Floating Vibes" - Surfer Blood "Floating Vibes" has that deep guitar thing going right away, which I always find gratifying. And which always makes me wonder why rock'n'roll has so consistently (and, to my ears, stupidly) glorified the sound of a wailing guitar played so high up on the neck that there's no room left for the guitarist's fingers. I'll take the robust, thoughtful tremor of th...
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"The River" - Audra Mae With clear roots in country and folk, two very structured genres, "The River" hooks the ear with a series of surprising melodic and harmonic shifts. We hear this first at 0:15, when Mae follows the opening two traditional-sounding lines with a third ("The river's gonna wash my sins away") that runs unexpectedly up through a diminished chord. How did we get here? Sudd...
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"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 e...
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"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 e...
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"The Art Teacher and the Little Stallion" - Holopaw Airily idiosyncratic, not to mention lyrically inscrutable, "The Art Teacher and the Little Stallion" required repeated listens for me to really hear it. Songs with vocal (rather than purely instrumental) introductions are a bit hard to get one's pop-oriented mind around, to begin with. And when Holopaw's John Orth is the one doing the voc...
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