[fingertipsmusic] This Week's Finds: September 6 (Lux Lisbon, The Hermit Crabs, Denver)

From: Jeremy Schlosberg <fingertipsmusic@xxxxxxxxx>
To: fingertipsmusic@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
Date: Thu, 6 Sep 2012 21:09:58 -0400
*THIS WEEK'S FINDS <http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/>*
*September 6*


[image: Lux 
Lisbon]<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/luxlisbon.jpg>
 “GET SOME SCARS” – LUX
LISBON<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/Lux_Lisbon-Get_Some_Scars.mp3>

With its vocal-heavy arrangement and its conspicuous soulfulness, “Get Some
Scars” not only sounds like little you hear in the air in the 21st
century’s second decade, it sounds like a protest against a musical age
known more for its robotic technological frills and hype-oriented gimmickry
than for passionate musical prowess. And let me quickly add that there are
of course many independent musicians today who with equal passion and
prowess stand in opposition to the horror of today’s auto-tuned top 40 and
its pea-brained lyrical concerns. But what stands out here is the unabashed
effort to make inclusive, crowd-friendly music. And what a relief it is to
remember that inclusive, crowd-friendly music can at least sometimes,
still, sound so easy and so affecting. “Get Some Scars” is big without
being loud, simple without being insipid, smooth without being formulaic.

The secret to its success is, I think, its groove. This is a serious
groove, but an elusive one.The bass more often sings and sustains rather
than plucks in the funky style often associated with grooves. Percussion
takes a backseat to vocal harmonies. This is it seems a groove created and
fed by the swinging, swaying momentum of the melody, and driven home by the
vocal layers, as emphatic as they are organic. (The band recruited an extra
singer to help front man Stuart Rook with the four-part harmonies.) My ear
keeps telling me that the melodic interval that repeats, both in the verse
and the chorus, somehow feeds the groove—it’s a major third, four semitones
apart, and heard most clearly at the start of the chorus (1:27), with the
words, “Oh while we’re young,” each syllable bouncing the interval top to
bottom and back again, and with great swing, and all those harmonies. And
right here is where the otherwise slippery lyrics solidify into a true
moment, words and music coalescing into something larger than either:

*Oh while we’re young, yeah, let’s go out and get some scars
‘Cause when we’re older we wear them to tell us apart*

Lux Lisbon is a five-piece band founded in Nottingham and now based in
London. The band’s name is one of the sisters in the Jeffrey Eugenides
novel *The Virgin Suicides*. “Get Some Scars” is their latest single,
released last month. You can listen to their debut album, released in
January, via Bandcamp <http://luxlisbon.com/>. Thanks to the
band<http://www.facebook.com/luxlisbonmusic> for
the MP3. And in case this relates to any of your schedules this weekend,
Lux Lisbon will be playing at the Bestival on the Isle of Wight, on Sunday
night.



[image: The Hermit
Crabs]<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/hermitcrabs.jpg>
 “STOP THIS NOW” – THE HERMIT
CRABS<http://matineerecordings.com/mp3s/Stop_This_Now.mp3>

This is a lovely, crisp bit of strummy, melancholy indie pop, and if it
reminds you of Camera Obscura and/or Belle & Sebastian, well, all hail from
Glasgow, where apparently this type of strummy, melancholy indie pop is a
prevailing musical dialect. But I encourage listening above and beyond the
similarities, and tossing aside genre generalizations because, as I have
said time and again, it’s far less important for a song to sound different
than for it to be good. “Stop This Now” is deliciously good—so good in fact
that it *is* different, if maybe in more subtle ways than can be summarized
via pre-established labels.

Everything happens quickly here. The pace is light-footed, the verse
concise—one melodic line, repeated twice, each time ending on an unresolved
note. We’re at the chorus by 0:25, and yet see how we’re still not at any
resolution. The pace stays fleet but the melody itself slows down, with
front woman Melanie Whittle now singing fewer words per bar. It’s this
opening part of the chorus that just nails the song for me—that lilting,
deceptively simple triplet of lines (“And I know/And you know/We both
know”) displaying both rueful wit and anguished charm, unfolding across
those lovely chords that keep not resolving until we get to the twelfth bar
(0:42). And even then we don’t feel full closure until the guitars strum
their way through to the sixteenth measure, as we tend to need eight eight
or sixteen measures for our ears to feel settled. The second trip through
the verse is fortified by some dandy guitar work, the chorus’s follow-up
enhanced with a winsome countermelody. Pay attention, however, or the thing
will pass you by—it’s all over by 2:18 (the song actually ends before the
MP3 does).

Founded by Whittle, the Hermit Crabs have recorded one full-length album to
date, 2007′s *Saw You Dancing*. “Stop This Now” is from the band’s third
EP, entitled *Time Relentless*, which is out this month on Matinee
Recordings <http://matineerecordings.com/item.php?item_id=223>. MP3 via
Matinee.



[image: Denver]<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/wp-content/uploads/denver.jpg>
 “THE WAY IT IS” – DENVER<http://www.bantermm.com/tracks/Denver-TheWayItIs.mp3>

With its ambling backbeat and lonesome pedal steel guitar,”The Way It Is”
has the spacious, laid-back authority of some ’70s piece of pre-Americana.
Which we might as well just call country. At the same time, it manages an
incisiveness that is almost unsettling; you just don’t expect a song with
this kind of scruffy, dirty-booted ambiance to be focused enough to finish
up under three minutes. Denver pulls off this magic trick by forsaking the
instrumental break, and just sticking to the musical facts: melody,
accompaniment, and weary, achy-hearted singing.

“The Way It Is” launches off an smooth, two-chord vamp, Neil Young-ish in
character. As with theHermit Crabs
<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/?p=12517> song
above, the verse is a succinct two lines; in this case, however, it leads
into a chorus that is fat with resolution, using a descending bass line to
anchor a determined series of classic chords. The melody takes one solid
step up and tumbles incrementally down a satisfying perfect fifth. The
lyrics, meanwhile, blaze with unpretentious majesty, if I haven’t managed
to coin a double or triple oxymoron: “There’s things in the world that I
know nothing about,” laments the song’s narrator, without pity, “And that’s
just the way it is.” You and me both, pal.

Denver is named more for feeling than geography; the six-man band is
actually based in Portland, and features three guys from Alela Diane’s band
Wild Divine, including Diane’s husband Tom Bevitori and two from Blitzen
Trapper. (Diane and band were featured together here in March
2011<http://www.fingertipsmusic.com/?p=6113>.)
Five others are said to “rotate” through the lineup. The band’s debut album
was recorded and engineered at the home of a friend’s mother—“Drums in the
living room, singer in the bedroom, four-track cassette recorder, cases of
beer, whiskey, sandwiches and a sunny porch,” is how band co-founder Birger
Olsen has described it. The self-titled album was released in mid-August on
Portland-based Mama Bird Recording Co <http://mamabirdrecordingco.com/>.






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[fingertipsmusic] This Week's Finds: September 6 (Lux Lisbon, The Hermit Crabs, Denver)

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