The get-to-the-point-or get-out 45 rpm single gave way the 40-minute, two-act structure of the LP, and that gave way to the CD’s 74 minutes of blank canvass, and that dinosaured out to pave the way for the virtually unlimited creative space of the MP3 and the streaming platform, in which time is theoretical “just there” exactly when you need it. Each of these media transitions exaggerated a certain artistic risk: conceptual overreach, your ambition writing checks that your skill can’t cash.
In recent years we have seen a return to the single as maybe the preferred format for new music, a change inspired no doubt by DJ and playlist culture, but also embraced to a certain extent by the album crowd. The expansion of bandwidth is great, but it also devalues individual songs and puts a premium upon quick acting hooks. There’s a feeling of clearing the decks here, making your case without asking anyone to listen to your 27 Cantos.
Hell, I wake up and put on Brahms most days, so this isn’t my world we’re talking about it. Send me your 27 Cantos. But the single is re-establishing dominance at a time where album filler tracks simply will not be tolerated, and everything you put out really has to be your best. If you are an album person, fear not. That will cycle back soon enough.
For part two (Read part 1) of this roundup of proliferative singles by Hudson Valley musicians, we limit the pool to five so that we, meaning me, can say slow the pace of culture by a few miliseconds and say a little more about each.
“Endure,” Mimi Goese and Ben Neill
Mime Goese and Ben Neill wrote the song “Endure” several years ago as part of a larger multimedia piece called Fathom. The shifting contexts of history and culture can change the resonant nodes of any work of art, and in this spring of our discontent Goese and Neil discovered the song had sprouted entirely new dimensions of meaning and relevance. In late March, they released “Endure,” and on June 5 they follow up with a pair of vibrant remixes: The Clap Hands for Essential Workers Trip Hop Remix and the Head in Hands Quarantine Dub.
“Endure” is a languid dance of two voices in a vivid electronic space, Goese’s singing and Neill’s chameleonic mutantrumpet. A stunning legato vocal melody arcs above a bed of morphing ambient counterpoint. Seriously, the sound design on “Endure” puts to the lie to any notion that ambient pads are one-button easy — there is a world going on down there. Like so much of Goese and Neill’s work, the effect is synesthetic, registering visually as much as aurally. Trancey, yes, but It is — in all its mixes — a pure and beautiful art-pop song from two recognized masters of the form. Find it on Spotify.
http://www.mimigoeseandbenneill.com/
“Spun Too Heavy,” Expert and Milk
As the main guy in the super-imaginative and dramatic Orange County band Park Ranger and as a player in Lives of the Obscure and in the genuinely influential if ill-fated indie band Joshua, Sean Hansen has long been at or around the center of some visionary modern rock music. It’s always about extreme dynamics, slanted grooves that make you want to dance to but don’t tell you how, an ambivalence of angularity and sweetness, sonics lush and abrasive, the uncharted wilderness of post-rock wrestled down until it agrees to say pop. Regarding Hansen’s new solo project Expert and Milk, I hate to say “more of the same” but: “Spun Too Heavy” is more of the refreshing, visceral, smart, arty and deliriously musical same.
https://expertandmilk.bandcamp.com/track/spun-too-heavy
“Thin Line,” Aubrey Haddard
When New Paltz native Aubrey Haddard fronted the local band Breakfast for the Boys, she won universal regional acclaim for her ripped-speaker vocal passion and the sophisticated, bluesy grit of her songs, always a winning combo in these parts. The observant, however, could hear something else taking shape in BftB’s recordings, an objet d’art attention to contemporary sonics and arrangements, a taste for clashing stylistic and referential juxtapositions suggesting that Haddard was hearing something else in that noggin and might not be content just being the burnt toast of the old Catskills. Flash forward a few years and the now Brooklyn-based Haddard has released “Thin Line,” a bracing, minimalist groove tune that might suggest, to the unobservant, that Aubrey’s Brooklynation is complete. Not quite though. She’s just reversed the balance, the yin and the yang. “Thin Line” will play fine in the world of Lucius and Solange, but its little secret weapon is a kernel of organic groove rock from some pretty slick players. You won’t even know it’s there until the guitar solo hits. Great stuff from a blazing talent.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N84an-0B_U4
“Wild Honey and Wide Roads,” Connor Kennedy
There was a time when this talented guy was represented locally as a “blues prodigy,” an unfortunate designation and certainly one that was thrust upon him by well-meaning elders and not elected by Kennedy himself. Anyway, Connor sloughed that off long ago and has proved himself a voracious musical traveler who has done a lot of things, including several tours as a guitarist in the post-Becker Steely Dan live lineup. “Wild Honey and Wide Roads” finds Kennedy dropping his first new original in a while, and it is a peach that gets right at the critical balance of timely and timeless in his music. Produced by Woodstock’s Pete Hanlon, the track is a dense and high-impact specimen of bright jangle rock, roots ambience, and a winding, patient, and sophisticated vocal melody that honors the likes of Nilsson and the high seventies. Thematically, it speaks richly and with a stroke of surrealism to the writer’s incessant travel and the subsequent wreckage of relationships. If Kennedy is heir to any of the giants of the Catskills, I’d say it’s The Band, in the way that his music, at his best, makes sense in the barn and in the chamber.
https://connorkennedy.bandcamp.com/releases
“Kindness of Strangers,” Ambrosia Parsley
On her exceptional solo records and with her former band Shivaree, Parsley has proven herself to be a songwriter capable of genuinely sui generis, sophisticated chamber pop, equal parts modernist poetry; cheeky retro arrangement; and warped, contemporary sound design. And always at the center of it is her deceptively agile, pixie-ish voice. “Kindness of Strangers” is a simple and classicist tune by comparison, impeccably crafted and without a single awkward phrase, aiming at a populist target nearly as broad as “I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing.” For a persona, she takes on the big “we,” us all, humanity, needing each other, especially now. Big theme in broad but — as I mentioned before — flawless strokes. In arrangement and production, however, this thing is wicked arty and multi-leveled, a wall-of-sound construct that evinces all 37 sonic forms of “glistening.”
Parsley knew, of course, she was dropping this message into the mess of Covid. With what has happened since to Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd (and, and, and…) this, pajama-footed, light-touch message song about togetherness and inclusion only gains in gravity and urgency. Check out the neato animated video by Nancy Howell and Mark Lerner.
Join the family! 
