Free and legal MP3:
Cate Le Bon
(Welsh singer/songwriter w/ Nico-like air)

January 26, 2012

Cate Le Bon

“Puts Me To Work” – Cate Le Bon

Unhurried and untidy, “Puts Me To Work” saunters along in its own universe of sound, with a mid-tempo beat that seems uninterested in quite coalescing. Le Bon admits to playing an out of tune piano here but to me the more salient and interesting feature is the instrument’s idiosyncratic resistance to the imperative of meter. Listen carefully to the introduction and notice how the piano chords lag ever so slightly behind the beat—or, perhaps, the beat itself moves past the piano. In any case, it’s a delightfully anomalous effect.

Everything about this song seems to lag and withhold. We don’t hear the chorus until a minute in, and we don’t hear the pay-off, titular line (“It puts me to work”) until the second and final time the chorus comes around, two-thirds of the way through the song.

And okay, once Le Bon starts singing, it’s all that a rock writer can do, it seems, to keep the name “Nico” from spontaneously emerging from his or her computer keyboard. As much as I tried to resist the urge, there is too much in Le Bon’s disaffected mezzo that recalls the one-time “Warhol Superstar.” And it’s not just the voice, and the dainty accent (Le Bon is from Wales)—it’s the world-weary vibe that combines sing-songy simplicity with some kind of instinctive but unutterable wisdom. What nails both the Nico comparison and the song is the cagey hook, which happens when the melody takes her voice to the beginning of the upper part of her range, on the lyrics “And I know you won’t remember” (first heard at 1:01). Right there it feels like the late ’60s all over again, but with better coffee.

“Puts Me to Work” is from Le Bon’s new album, CYRK, which was released this on The Control Group. This is her second full-length release; she has also released a Welsh-language EP. MP3 via The Control Group, an indie label based in New York City.

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Free and legal MP3:
Team Me
(vibrant, smartly-textured Norwegian pop)

January 26, 2012

Team Me

“Show Me” – Team Me

Resplendent indie pop for people who might think that they’ve gotten a bit tired of resplendent indie pop. So that once and for all we might all realize that it’s not a type of music that gets tiresome, it’s boring or uninspired music that gets tiresome. Not a genre, not a type, not a style.

But I digress. “Show Me,” from the new-ish Norwegian sextet Team Me, has a marvelous momentum to it, rooted in its smooth chord progressions and its unexpected grounding in a 12-measure verse melody. I’m not saying there’s any other connection but I will note that 12-measure melodies are uncommon in pop while of course being the prototypical construction for the blues (thus the phrase “12-bar blues”; a bar is another word for a measure). “Show Me” is not the blues, by any means. But the unfolding of a melody through 12 measures is something we tend to experience, whether we even recognize it or not, in a blues setting. And here instead is this vibrant, smartly-textured, hopeful-sounding (but not necessarily hopeful) song. I’m not sure what this means but felt it worth noting. Oh and of course in a blues setting, the melody is spare, ritualized, all but preordained, and sung by one voice, while Team Me here serves up a swooping, involved melody with harmonies, double-tracking, and the occasional gang shout. And yet, too, there is a seriousness hiding here in the ebullient flow and playful vibe. Could this be what 12 bars does? Nope, probably not. But it’s fun to consider.

“Show Me” is a track from Team Me’s debut full-length album, which came out in Norway in October and is due to arrive in the US in March on the Oslo-based label Propeller Recordings.

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Free and legal MP3:
Theresa Andersson
(splendid, haunting amalgam)

January 26, 2012

Theresa Andersson

“What Comes Next” – Theresa Andersson

With its unconventional use of brass band and snare drum, “What Comes Next” quickly announces its boundary-free musical identity, blending traditional New Orleans sounds with an outlier sensibility that attentive listeners may just be able to link to her home country of Sweden. Not that Sweden–with arguably the richest and most significant rock’n'roll history of any non-English-speaking country—has just one way of doing rock’n'roll. But from the outside looking in, one can hear generalized ideas and sensibilities that feel musically Swedish. What makes Andersson’s music so potent is that she has by now been living in New Orleans longer than she lived in her native country. She has absorbed both environments and is coming out swinging here. It’s a beautiful piece of work.

I love how she works the martial drum work into a song that glides and swings so smoothly. I love the eccentric punctuation provided by the loose/tight horn section (very NOLA). And I love the swaying hook of the romantic chorus, which sounds like nothing the introduction or the verse of this song has prepared us for, musically, and yet once heard, it’s exactly where we should be. Peter Moren, of Peter Bjorn and John, provides some multi-faceted backing vocals here, often of the fetching octave-harmony variety.

Andresson has been in New Orleans since 1991, when, at 18, she moved there to be with guitarist Anders Osborne both musically and personally. To date she is probably best known for the one-woman-band video she made for her song “Na Na Na,” which to me better shows off her appealing personality than her songwriting. You can add to the more than one million views it’s gotten if you haven’t already, below. (Note that she made the video for potential venues, so they would know what to expect from her loop-oriented performances. She was not trying to go viral.) “What Comes Next” is the first available song from Andersson’s forthcoming album, Street Parade, arriving in April on the New Orleans-based Basin Street Records.

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Free and legal MP3:
Ed Vallance
(assured indie pop, w/ edgy grandeur)

January 19, 2012

Ed Vallance

“Crystalline” – Ed Vallance

I love the effortless ones—the songs that just lay themselves out there and do their thing, so securely and easily that there’s almost nothing to talk about. “Crystalline” is one of those.

Okay, but I’ll talk a little.

A lot of the power here comes, I think, from the delayed melody. In both the verse and the chorus, the melodic line begins after two beats go by. In the verse, this allows the scene to be set by a weighty, unhurried guitar chord, even as the rhythmic backbone of the song remains fleet and itchy. So there’s this built-in juxtaposition here between the purposeful rhythm and the thoughtful melody. In the chorus, the melodic delay is augmented by an instrumental countermelody (first heard at 0:54) that gives the song a subtle grandeur. And yet Vallance at the same time seems to be playing with some vocal distortion here, which lends an edge to the sound. In this case the juxtaposition becomes its own potent amalgam: edgy grandeur.

Vallance was born in London and lives and works now in Brooklyn. “Crystalline” is the lead track from his second album, Volcano, which arrives next month on Proof Records.

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Free and legal MP3:
The Zolas
(a melodic adventure of a song)

January 19, 2012

The Zolas

“Cultured Man” – The Zolas

As album releases slow down in late December and early January, I am at the beginning of each year given a bit of an opportunity to go back and make sure I didn’t miss anything worthwhile in the general hubbub of the holiday season.

So here’s one that’s been hanging around a while and finally nudged its way into my heart. More an adventure than a song, “Cultured Man” is melodic and easy to listen to but is at the same time an intriguingly complicated composition. Rather than offering up verses and a chorus, the song presents a complex series of different, seamlessly integrated segments. One section does appear to function, musically, as a chorus (first heard at 0:58, with the lyrics “Just to impress you”), but even that one arrives with different words the next time around. In addition to the melodically distinct segments, the song takes us through changes in tempo and dynamics, as well as three different instrumental breaks. All in just under five minutes.

What holds it all together, for me, is singer/guitarist Zachary Gray’s distinctive baritone. He sounds refreshingly like a grown-up, up front and without pretense, shedding inadvertent light on the muddy or whiny or grandiose voices that slightly overpopulate the 21st-century rock’n'roll scene.

“Cultured Man” first surfaced back in October, as half of a 7-inch split single recorded with the Liptonians. Gray and keyboardist Tom Dobrzanski are the core of the band, although additional players support them on stage. To date the Zolas have released one album—2009′s Tic Toc Tic, on Light Organ Records, which generally employed a more piano-focused sound than you’ll hear here. A new record is being wrapped up this month and could be released by March. MP3 via Magnet Magazine.

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