The Virginian-Pilot
Welcome to the premiere of Hit Refresh. The concept for this column is simple: Every week, three free, absolutely legal MP3s will be posted here along with a review of each song.
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Though the reviews may sometimes discuss the artist's body of work or the album from which the song is taken, the emphasis will always be on the individual track. Albums that are brilliant from start to finish may be relatively uncommon, but the world is overflowing with artists with amazing songs. This column aims to present a cross-section of them for you every week.
We hope you'll find some new favorite songs and artists in the coming weeks, from a wide variety of genres and styles.
Keep ONE things in mind: The songs will be available as free downloads for only six days.
"Eva Braun"
A Frames (Sub Pop)
With its uneasy but strangely satisfying mixture of unrelenting bleakness, gallows humor and cacophonous punk rock, the A Frames' Black Forest is one of last year's underrated, largely unheard gems.
"Eva Braun" is the album's centerpiece, a eulogy for Adolf Hitler's doomed bride that expresses genuine sympathy for a woman whose love for one of history's great villains damned her to years of loneliness and secrecy before 1945, when they committed suicide a day after their wedding.
Erin Sullivan's cold, nearly expressionless voice avoids sentimentality even when he's singing about wishing he could go back in time and show Braun a better life. But his guitar more than compensates with an emotive solo that sounds like a pane of glass shattering and falling to the ground in slow motion. Click for downloads
"Take Me Home"
Nouveau Riche (self-issued)
Sounding like nothing so much as an eclectic, well-stocked iPod set to puree, Philadelphia's Nouveau Riche display an uncommon confidence and effortless experimentalism for a new, unsigned act.
Don't let the "E" word scare you away, though. As much as songs like "Take Me Home" play out without regard for the rules of established genres, the music is unabashedly accessible pop with ingratiating melodies and hip-swiveling beats. The band seems to have found hidden passageways between arty indie rock, bohemian hip-hop, modern R&B,and modern classical music, making the song feel like a seamless and thoroughly uncontrived melange.
Aside from the stylistic ambiguity, frontwoman Nikki Jean's vocals possess an unforced charisma and a gift for phrasing that brings out the simple joy in this romantic, decidedly undramatic set of lyrics.
When Jean sings "all your scars and beauty marks make me love you more" and offers to make a "patchwork quilt of every day we've spent together," it's the quiet sentimentality of unassuming love -- more like what we stumble into if we're lucky rather than fodder for a soap opera. Click for downloads
"Benton Harbor Blues"
The Fiery Furnaces (Fat Possum)
For the past three years, the sibling duo known as The Fiery Furnaces have been alternately thrilling and confounding audiences. They've offered a rapid succession of albums containing tuneful pop songs rich with unlikely lyrical details and peculiar, occasionally self-sabotaging musical tangents seemingly designed to scare off casual listeners.
The Furnaces' primary songwriter, Matthew Friedberger, insists his penchant for overstuffing his compositions is the result of his desire to keep the tracks interesting. But his greatest achievements come when he stifles his urge to tinker and allows for moments of beautiful simplicity.
"Benton Harbor Blues" appears twice on the Furnaces' latest album, Bitter Tea. The first take is bloated to over seven minutes, loaded with arbitrary detours and momentum-killing effects. But the version posted here is the core of the song, stripped down to just over three minutes.
It is set to the gentle shuffle of a primitive drum machine and a sweet keyboard riff that vaguely recalls Vince Guaraldi's classic "Peanuts" theme. Eleanor Friedberger sings heartbreaking lyrics about a repentant criminal filling up empty days with nostalgia, self-pity, and bike rides through the snow en route to a mini-mart.
Without the clutter of the extended mix, the song reveals itself to be one of the Friedberger's finest efforts yet, a miniature melancholy masterpiece that showcases Matthew's gift for affecting melodies and Eleanor's crisp, understated voice. Matthew Perpetua is the creator of fluxblog , one of the first and foremost MP3 blogs. Want to comment? Sound off at soundoffasap@ap.org . As for local downloads, make sure to check out Hear & Now in Hampton Roads
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