"She Comes to Me" - Adam Arcuragi At once relaxed and intent, "She Comes to Me" is an instantly likable, subtly quirky acoustic strummer. And you should know that I don't have a lot of patience for run-of-the-mill acoustic strummers, which strike me by and large as a little, shall we say, boring. Despite what you might hear being aired on those they-mean-well-but-they're-really-sometimes-kind-
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"Faces" - the Happy Hollows The L.A.-based Happy Hollows return to Fingertips with an itchy-crunchy bit of indie rock enlivened by Sarah Negahdari's pixie-ish (but full-throttled) vocals and slashing guitar work. As intermittently discussed here, the rock trio can be a wondrous beast, especially when veering towards the noisy side of things. Because even at high volume, a trio always announ...
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"A Bus Called Further" - Heroes of Popular Wars Churny, semi-psychedelic, and borderline funky in an undanceable sort of way, "A Bus Called Further" is both groovily electronic and baroquely corporeal at the same time. Now I am the furthest thing imaginable from a gearhead so I only know what the PR material says, but apparently Stephe Sykes, the brains behind HOPW, uses all sorts of "new v...
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Fingertips is heading into vacation mode for one more week, but so as not to leave you empty-handed this time, I'm pointing you in the direction of three notable free and legal MP3s that have come online in the last few days. These songs are well worth hearing, even though I'm not sure I will end up writing detailed reviews of them once I get back in the groove here. If you happen to follow th...
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"Marionettes in Modern Times" - The Color Turning If the music here has the spacious mellowness of a certain sort of ambling old prog-rock composition--mid-career Genesis, perhaps, or later Pink Floyd--singer Steve Scavo's sweet tones add such a decisively contemporary feeling (think Ben Gibbard or Jeremy Enigk rather than Peter Gabriel or David Gilmour) that the older allusions are likely ...
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"Sour Milk/Salt Water" - Port O'Brien Strummy, lyrically insistent verses, with double-tracked vocals, alternate with a plaintive chorus, lyrics now moving at half the pace of the music, vocals still double-tracked but now in an almost Neil Young-like upper register. And while the whole thing is pretty simple sounding at one level it's mysteriously compelling at another--both instantly lika...
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"Death to the Storm" - Joe Henry A dusty, deconstructed, slow-motion gospel-blues stomp. I consistently like Joe Henry's music without really knowing why. His songs succeed through atmosphere, maybe, more than anything else, which with Henry involves a canny intermingling of his fuzzy-buzzy baritone--rich and weary in a fin de siècle sort of way--with an idiosyncratic mix of sounds and orga..
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The Fingertips Top 10, over on the main site, is an easy way to catch up with some of the best songs that have been posted here over the last few months. I haven't blogged about it since April, and it's turned over again since then, so here you have it, as of Friday August 7th. It's something of a Scandinavian takeover, now that I think about it:1. "What You Said" - the Decks2. Trophy Wife" - t...
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"Gold and Warm" - Bad Veins Propulsive and canny, "Gold and Warm" sneaks a huge, sing-along chorus into a multifaceted piece that sounds very little like standard-issue indie-rock-duo music in an age in which the duo has become oddly commonplace. The dreamy, retro-y orchestral intro is an immediate clue that the song may not unfold as expected. While "Gold and Warm" drives with a determ...
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"I Wasn't Her" - the Blueflowers Relaxed, reverb-laced tale of woe from a Detroit-based quintet that's new on the scene but features musicians with a lot of experience, including two--guitarist Tony Hamera and vocalist Kate Hinote (can that be her real name? "High note"?)--who had previously fronted Ether Aura, a dream pop band with a bit of a following in the '90s. Not to sound like a brok...
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"Meet and Greet" - Slaraffenland The enigmatic Danish art-popsters Slaraffenland return to Fingertips with a brisk, deceptively restless composition that incorporates some of the most delightful and inventive horn charts I've heard in a pop setting, not to mention some gratifyingly precise and rumbly percussion. This is the kind of song that, if you sink into it on its own terms, has you re...
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"Here to Fall" - Yo La Tengo Half of the time I love what Yo La Tengo does, half the time I'm not sure I understand it. This falls squarely into the first half. After its odd, electro-echoey intro, "Here to Fall" simmers with that paradoxical low-level intensity that YLT consistently brings to the studio--a product, in part, of the juxtaposition of Ira Kaplan's plainspoken, softspoken vocal...
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"Tammie" - the Dø So go ahead and listen to this song. Shrug and put it aside for two weeks or so. Listen to it again. Go: "Hm. I actually kind of like this! A lot, even." Well okay, you don't have to do any of that, but that's surely what I did. Listening to music can be a flitty and unpredictable affair. So, "Tammie": kitchen-sink indie pop, sweetly nutty, with the large-scale energy..
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"Blanchard" - Hope Sandoval & the Warm Inventions Fronting the '90s band Mazzy Star, Hope Sandoval--she with the gauzy, achy, reverb-drenched vocals--made a much larger impact on music fans of a certain age (and gender) than the band's status as a one-hit wonder ("Fade Into You"), not to mention her terminally shy personality, might suggest. The internet is crawling with people who love her...
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"I'm Turning Into You" - Wheels On Fire There's something about the summertime that makes this sort of driving, garage-y stomper, complete with wheezing keyboards, the perfect soundtrack for warm breezes and open car windows. (And for anyone roughly in the neighborhood, what about a big shout-out for the amazing summer weather we've been having in the mid-Atlantic so far? The nicest I can p...
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"Wonderland" - the Mummers A waltzing, carnivalesque intro segues into some smooth, orchestral retro-pop that owes a bit to Burt Bacharach, a bit to Kurt Weill, and a bit to our century's relentless urge to mix and mash sounds into ear-catching concoctions. To me, "Wonderland" separates itself from a lot of the more disposable contrivances crowding the internet in our music-happy day and ag...
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"I Wonder Who We Are" - the Clientele With an echo of the cheerful old Aztec Camera song, "Oblivious," in the air here, what do you know, we've got yet another summery delight on our hands. At least, seemingly. "I Wonder Who We Are" is an upbeat song with an ostensibly carefree, kicking-around kind of vibe, and yet between the open chords, pensive vocals, and central role of acoustic instr
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The July Q&A is now online and features Ryan Hahn and Taylor Rice of the L.A.-based band Local Natives, who take turns answering questions about the future of music in the digital age.
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"Talking Words" - Darker My Love I have mixed feelings about all the neo-shoegaze one is likely to hear as an active listener of new music here at the end of the century's first decade. While inherently attracted to one characteristic feature of such music--the combination of loud washes of noise with compelling melodies--I am inherently put off by another characteristic feature, which is t...
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