For those keeping score at home, note some changes to the main Fingertips site. In the interest of trimming things down, many features have been eliminated. Moving forward, Fingertips will concentrate exclusively on This Week's Finds , the Top 10 list , the Q&A , and the Commentary essays. Assorted directories oriented towards sourcing free and legal MP3s have been taken out. The Fingertips Twitter feed remains--you can see it to the right here, or go directly to Twitter. This has turned into a valuable, ongoing source [...]
"Turpentine" - Vandaveer An almost hypnotic, quiet-but-intense number that seems perfect for a late afternoon on a late summer day. Featuring pretty much all acoustic instruments and shuffling along on the frame of a gentle, forward-moving keyboard riff, "Turpentine" has an old-timey flair but a sharp present-day vibe. (And it fades in; you don't hear many songs fade in.) The singing performances bring this one to particular life, both the craggy, soulful lead effort by Mark Charles Heidinger and the beautifully attuned, vibrato-laced harmonies offered by Heidinger's sister, [...]
"Hoping and Waiting" - the Hush Now After a church-like organ intro, "Hoping and Waiting" turns upbeat and unexpectedly contagious. I had to live with it a while for the catchiness to sink in, however; it's not a completely obvious hook. But after listening to it on and off for a few weeks, I noticed that it was beginning to pop unbidden into my head. This is almost always a sign of a song that I am liking more than I initially realize I'm liking it. The part [...]
"Hoods Up" - Rollercoaster Project Churning, robotic electro-goth, with a heart of pure pop. I'm oddly entranced by the buried, electronic vocals, which hint only intermittently, only ever so slightly, at their human origin; it's kind of like "Kid A" funneled through a lush carnival of soaring synth pop, on a bed of electronic nails. The wistful, almost heartbreaking melody of the chorus is icing on the electro-cake. Note how the electronic artifice fades into nature noises for the last minute of the track. It's not a half hour of crickets (see Neko [...]
Sorry one and all for the late posts this week. Things went up only slightly late (Wednesday) on the main Fingertips site, but then I got waylaid and didn't have a chance to put these up on the blog till Friday night. Don't forget that the fastest way to stay in touch with the weekly selections is via the email list, if that doesn't seem too terribly quaint of an idea by 2009. You can find out more information about that here .
"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-rea lly-sometimes-kind-of-dreadful "triple A" radio stations, songs are not good or wise or sensitive just because someone's playing an acoustic guitar and has an evocative voice. "She [...]
"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 announces itself discretely: each part--guitar, bass, drum--is unavoidably and distinctly heard, each an important third of the sound. While there is (duh) room in the rock world for larger ensembles, the [...]
"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 vintage" (i.e. '80s) equipment (guitar synths, 20-year-old samplers, and the like), which is no doubt what lends "A Bus Called Further" its chuggy, homemade vibe. Applying [...]
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 the Fingertips Twitter stream, you'll know about these already. (And if you don't follow the Twitter stream, check it out if you're [...]
"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 to be overlooked by most who give this a listen. The band themselves may not even be doing it on purpose, but I'm such a relentless musical integrationist that I love it when [...]
"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 likable and slightly unusual. Or maybe it's not so mysterious, just well-crafted. Even as the lyrics topple out in the mode of a one-note harangue (a la "Subterranean Homesick Blues"), [...]
"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 organic beats. This time around, I'm particularly enjoying Marc Ribot's unmistakable guitar lines, with their dry ghostly twang, which imply a bunch of noise they're not actually making; the subtle interplay of a [...]
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 Decks 2. Trophy Wife" - the Winter Sounds 3. "Die Young" - the Sweet Serenades [...]
The latest musician to sit down and answer a few questions about the state of music in the digital age is Brooklyn's Brian Sendrowitz, front man and songwriter for the informal collective known as Beat Radio. The interview is now online ; and if you go to the bottom you can also catch up on past interviews you might have missed.
"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 determined beat, it also opens itself at various points to more delicate touches, and although singer-songwriter-guitarist-ke yboardist Benjamin Davis pushes his voice through something of [...]
"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 broken record on the matter, but I continue not to understand music culture's relentless focus on newcomers when music itself is so enriched by the background [...]
"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 rethinking what a three- or four-minute rock song might be able to do. I don't hear any standard hooks here and yet not for a moment does my attention or [...]
"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 vocals and the churning noise the trio can produce. And yet the noise here isn't really that noisy, featuring as it does, right in the middle of [...]
"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 of the Arcade Fire school of 21st-century rock, but achieved instead via a [...]
"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, madly. "Blanchard" will not disappoint them, but its graceful allure should extend beyond the hopelessly smitten, as it were. To my ears, Mazzy Star's [...]
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KNIFE PARTY – RAGE VALLEY EP
