If you have a voice like Neil Sedaka's but no solo recording contract, what do you do? If you're Timothy Monger, you record an album called Summer Cherry Ghosts and self-release it as a free download on Bandcamp, while also selling the physical CD on the usual websites. (You can also buy it for $4.41 on eMusic, if you still have a subscription.)
Meanwhile, Monger is better known as one of the brothers who front the Great Lakes Myth Society, whose music is a bit more guitar-oriented, and in my opinion, not as good - and not free, either. Still, if you like this, you'll probably like the GLMS album Compass Rose Bouquet.
According to NOT LAME, Summer Cherry Ghosts is "a bewitching, unexpected pleasure a la Elliott Smith with a huge-helping of classic 80's, 90's and present-day XTC and even nod toward ELO." This is not especially accurate. Monger's songs are far sweeter and more pastoral than Elliott Smith's, and the only XTC album that might be brought to mind here is probably Mummer, and even then only the quieter bits. As for ELO, I just don't think so. This record sounds more like the Pernice Brothers or perhaps The Lilac Time (aka Stephen Duffy) than ELO, which is a compliment. But there's precious little of the lyrical irony and sometimes-darkness that those acts have, or that Smith had, and he also seems to lack the ability to occasionally turn it up and rock out that the late Will Owsley had - which is, I fear, not a compliment. He does, however, have a similar sense of tune-and-melody to Owsley, and comes fairly close in the hook-making department.
The most interesting songs here are actually buried in the middle of the track-list: "Metropark," "Crime on a Summer Day," and "The Margaret Letters," the latter especially with its nice touches of melodica and heavily-chorused guitar, are somewhat slower than the others, but nevertheless more memorable.
Monger chose tags like "folk pop," "nostalgia pop," and "summer folk pop" when he uploaded this album to Bandcamp, but "chamber pop" or "orchestral pop" would probably have suited him a lot better. Other than the song "Sunday Night Swing Dancing Lessons," there's very little about this album that's truly folksy - alt-rockers have been misusing that term for years now - but the reason for choosing it is probably valid, since there are no tracks here that will appeal to punks, metal-heads or hard-rockers.
Finally, as you can see by the cover art, Monger doesn't quite have the rock-star looks he might need to make it big nationally, if that's even possible anymore - especially if he continues to release material under his full name. The success of similar-looking guys (like Beck and the members of Death Cab For Cutie) is mostly an aberration. Unfortunately, if he switches to simply "Monger," people will assume he's a metal or hardcore act, and "T-Monger" obviously sound too hip-hoppish. (Still, it doesn't appear that either name has been taken.)
For a free download, this is a no-brainer for pastoral/chamber-pop fans. Hurry up before he decides to start charging money for it.
Points of Reference: Great Lakes Myth Society, Owsley, The Lilac Time, Neil Sedaka
Wednesday, December 1, 2010
Tuesday, November 30, 2010
The Juliets
It would be easy to simply dismiss The Juliets as just another pop band with a
cello and a couple of violins. The cello does give them the right to claim the "chamber pop" tag, but the Juliets aren't some sort of ELO throwback, despite the catchy tunes and the occasionally-syrupy strings. There's an undercurrent of bitter irony, maybe even violence, to this album that isn't easy to discern with just a cursory listen. You'll want to pay some attention to this one.
The first track, "Sweetheart," is basically an image cut, and hard not to like. The same goes for the somewhat twee-sounding "This Just In," a nice love song and one of the album's bouncier numbers.
The highlight of the album, though, is "Sunday Song," an homage to Tin Pan Alley with short, jarring bursts of screamfest punctuating Vienna-boys-choir call-and-response choruses. The effect is ever-so-slightly demented, and the rest of the song sets it up almost perfectly. It's the sort of song you remember easily, even though the rest of the album might not have fully grown on you yet.
"Rimbaud and Verlaine" is a neat capturing of a classic love-hate relationship, complete with a hilarious (and quite vulgar) ending. That track, along with the stomping "Evolved Into" and the waltzy "Like a Parade," keep the quality level up until to the very end - at which point the overly-twee "Drive You Home" is the only letdown, probably the one non-essential track on the whole record. But if you've listened to the whole thing, you'll probably be too impressed to care much about that.
As of Dec. 1st, 2010, all tracks on The Juliets can be downloaded individually for free (or else name your price) if you're willing to give The Juliets a working e-mail address.
Points of reference: The Auteurs, Blur, The Dears, Delgados, The Kinks, Pernice Brothers
cello and a couple of violins. The cello does give them the right to claim the "chamber pop" tag, but the Juliets aren't some sort of ELO throwback, despite the catchy tunes and the occasionally-syrupy strings. There's an undercurrent of bitter irony, maybe even violence, to this album that isn't easy to discern with just a cursory listen. You'll want to pay some attention to this one.
The first track, "Sweetheart," is basically an image cut, and hard not to like. The same goes for the somewhat twee-sounding "This Just In," a nice love song and one of the album's bouncier numbers.
The highlight of the album, though, is "Sunday Song," an homage to Tin Pan Alley with short, jarring bursts of screamfest punctuating Vienna-boys-choir call-and-response choruses. The effect is ever-so-slightly demented, and the rest of the song sets it up almost perfectly. It's the sort of song you remember easily, even though the rest of the album might not have fully grown on you yet.
"Rimbaud and Verlaine" is a neat capturing of a classic love-hate relationship, complete with a hilarious (and quite vulgar) ending. That track, along with the stomping "Evolved Into" and the waltzy "Like a Parade," keep the quality level up until to the very end - at which point the overly-twee "Drive You Home" is the only letdown, probably the one non-essential track on the whole record. But if you've listened to the whole thing, you'll probably be too impressed to care much about that.
As of Dec. 1st, 2010, all tracks on The Juliets can be downloaded individually for free (or else name your price) if you're willing to give The Juliets a working e-mail address.
Points of reference: The Auteurs, Blur, The Dears, Delgados, The Kinks, Pernice Brothers
It's my first!
This is my first blog entry. Here it is, 2010, and I've never blogged before!
The way I see it, there's no point in blogging unless there's value in it for both yourself and for people who read your blog, because let's face it, in all probability nobody's going to read your blog. Blogs started out, literally speaking, as "web logs" - places for people to comment on pages they'd visited, because if you visit a lot of pages you often forget what you've seen and why you thought it was interesting. (Browser histories and search engines obviously help, but not always.) They weren't necessarily supposed to be exercises in narcissism, though they did get that way for a lot of bloggers.
Bandcamp.com is one of those cases where browser histories and search engines (not to mention narcissism) help very little. There's no internal search engine on Bandcamp - the search box on their home page is just a "search within" link to Google; album/track genre-tagging is determined completely by the artists, making it almost totally useless. Most of the artists are utterly obscure at best, and have little or no outside marketing support. Nothing is "curated," which is to say there's nobody on the site promoting the new releases. Promotion is all in the hands of the artists themselves, who are often not very good at it. If they were, they might be signed to labels already.
But the labels are dinosaurs, and they may eventually become extinct as more artists move to Bandcamp and similar means of online distribution. That's both good and bad. Typically, a label takes 60 percent of an artist's sales, or more in some cases - I've heard of contracts where they actually take 90 percent, and that's not a percentage of retail, it's a percentage of raw licensing, which can be as little as half of the retail price of a download. Since downloads don't actually cost anything to produce once the recording and artwork is completed, this means the signed artist ends up with about 20 cents on the dollar, if they're lucky. What's more, that's only after the artist "recoups" - which is to say, the costs of recording, marketing, and distribution are taken off the top.
Many labels now (especially the majors) also demand a cut of merchandising revenue and ticket sales, which used to be the only way an artist could actually make money. Some labels even charge "digital distribution fees" - in other words, since they're not spending any money on production and shipping of physical product, they simply make up a number and charge it to the artist's account, as if they were. It's little more than stealing, but they do it anyway, apparently without any shame whatsoever. And these are just some of the ways labels exploit recording artists; the rise in online music piracy seems to have only made their behavior that much worse.
On the other hand, without a label, most artists don't have the money, the connections, or the marketing know-how to allow for physical production and distribution at all, much less promote themselves effectively on a national or global scale. Occasionally someone will get lucky and put up a Youtube video that "goes viral" and helps drive sales in substantial numbers. Another way to get lucky is to sign up with Jingle Punks and have a TV or movie producer choose one of your tracks for a major production. It's a one-time payout, but the amount paid for licensing one song is often far more than artists typically make from all the CD's and downloads they sell via labels during their entire careers.
Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to help you find stuff on Bandcamp that's worth actual money, or if it happens to be free, at least the time it takes to download it.
Because someone has to.
The way I see it, there's no point in blogging unless there's value in it for both yourself and for people who read your blog, because let's face it, in all probability nobody's going to read your blog. Blogs started out, literally speaking, as "web logs" - places for people to comment on pages they'd visited, because if you visit a lot of pages you often forget what you've seen and why you thought it was interesting. (Browser histories and search engines obviously help, but not always.) They weren't necessarily supposed to be exercises in narcissism, though they did get that way for a lot of bloggers.
Bandcamp.com is one of those cases where browser histories and search engines (not to mention narcissism) help very little. There's no internal search engine on Bandcamp - the search box on their home page is just a "search within" link to Google; album/track genre-tagging is determined completely by the artists, making it almost totally useless. Most of the artists are utterly obscure at best, and have little or no outside marketing support. Nothing is "curated," which is to say there's nobody on the site promoting the new releases. Promotion is all in the hands of the artists themselves, who are often not very good at it. If they were, they might be signed to labels already.
But the labels are dinosaurs, and they may eventually become extinct as more artists move to Bandcamp and similar means of online distribution. That's both good and bad. Typically, a label takes 60 percent of an artist's sales, or more in some cases - I've heard of contracts where they actually take 90 percent, and that's not a percentage of retail, it's a percentage of raw licensing, which can be as little as half of the retail price of a download. Since downloads don't actually cost anything to produce once the recording and artwork is completed, this means the signed artist ends up with about 20 cents on the dollar, if they're lucky. What's more, that's only after the artist "recoups" - which is to say, the costs of recording, marketing, and distribution are taken off the top.
Many labels now (especially the majors) also demand a cut of merchandising revenue and ticket sales, which used to be the only way an artist could actually make money. Some labels even charge "digital distribution fees" - in other words, since they're not spending any money on production and shipping of physical product, they simply make up a number and charge it to the artist's account, as if they were. It's little more than stealing, but they do it anyway, apparently without any shame whatsoever. And these are just some of the ways labels exploit recording artists; the rise in online music piracy seems to have only made their behavior that much worse.
On the other hand, without a label, most artists don't have the money, the connections, or the marketing know-how to allow for physical production and distribution at all, much less promote themselves effectively on a national or global scale. Occasionally someone will get lucky and put up a Youtube video that "goes viral" and helps drive sales in substantial numbers. Another way to get lucky is to sign up with Jingle Punks and have a TV or movie producer choose one of your tracks for a major production. It's a one-time payout, but the amount paid for licensing one song is often far more than artists typically make from all the CD's and downloads they sell via labels during their entire careers.
Anyway, the purpose of this blog is to help you find stuff on Bandcamp that's worth actual money, or if it happens to be free, at least the time it takes to download it.
Because someone has to.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)