A fuzzed-out, mid-tempo jam, Keebo 's most recent offering "Follow" sounds exactly like what you might think. The chorus, relying heavily on the title lyric, chases itself between lead and backing vocals. Glittering lead guitar is offset by a feedback heavy low-end, a sum-total that sounds like Beth Cosentino trying to cover "Cut Your Hair"; and this is more of a compliment than it might sound.
With a brashness usually reserved for rap music and the wide-screen bombast of the title sequence of a Bond flick, Brooklyn's Lolo rips the doors off the industry with debut single, "Weapon For Saturday". Channeling dense visual metaphor - other than the title lyric she suggests she is, " the baddest car in parking lot", "the house that fell on the bitter witch", "the corporate guy with the biggest tip", "the fastest horse in the Derby race", and this doesn't even address Lolo's most reaching comparative lyric, "I'm only the face of every woman" [...]
Chris Laufman, the keyboard mastermind behind the bedroom jams of Wise Blood , settles the listener into an imediate claustrophobia on "Alarm". The first lyrics, "I can't think/Someone's sitting right in front of me/I need some personal space," become the hook, a modern dystopia full of crossed fingers, local news reports about arson, tense and dissonant woodwinds in the bridge. For an artist that digs obfuscation (see every promotional photo ever) as much as illumination, it makes sense that a song that sounds this breezy would cover such terribly anxious ground. "Alarm" has the potential [...]
All unfiltered bombast on "Dream Machines", Big Deal drape themselves in a blighted, shouting fatalism. "Dream Machines", slamming with double-tap drums and a boy-girl duet sounds like Joy Formidable (and it's worth noting that Big Deal are the heirs to this throne) covering a Stars joint, dream-pop holding a long kiss goodnight with shoegaze. One of the biggest songs of the year, it's a world of moral victories and letdowns, as singer Alice Costelloe leads from above with lines like, "Nothing here is built to last / what you wanted and what you chose [...]
Built on a simple guitar progression and a reliable snare drum, Island Boy launches "Heart Attack" into an echoing stratosphere of pop. It adds complexity, a chorus that explodes out of the speakers like the best parts of the Small Black catalog, all whipping synthesizer drums and vocals drowning in layer upon layer of reverb. The final movement grows no bigger than the original conceit, it merely reaffirms the idea: a long slow jam for someone with far too much to think about. Like the cover art, it is a flight over water, pensive [...]
With an ode to the synth and bass pick-ups of the Killers' "Human", Waylayers produce a similar progression with remarkably more muted results. "The Hook" is all pent up aggression, lyrics about resignation, not transmutation, a shrugging and pretty, "give into the fault lines", as good a visual metaphor about geology as you'll get in 2013. While the arrangement, soaked in ethereal synthesizer and guitar, never fully takes off, never delivers the moment of explosion that the listener might suitably be expecting from all this build up, "The Hook" proves interested in something a [...]
![Amity Beach :: "Sunday Nights to Infinity" and "Avalanches" [Premiere]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/4996465_lg.jpg)
We are proud to hold the world premiere of the latest double-sided single from Amity Beach , a band with a name that evokes one of the most famous tropes of summer - a marauding, homicidal shark set against the pragmatic and alarmist town sheriff. These are, after all, the two narrative thrusts of the season: societal moralisms in direct conflict with unrestrained id , anarchy at war with the social contract, a shark come to terrorize your town. Amity Beach manages to find a sweet medium here, structured pop constructions with nothing but [...]
This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents' House List blog with great photos from Brian Reilly . Last fall, New York magazine wondered if Brooklyn was finished . The cover story featured Barclays Center, a veritable spaceship of urban development that landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues . But the arena as a new Brooklyn icon wasn’t truly finished until the National , a band whose Midwestern-displacement story mirrors many of the borough’s residents, took to its stage [...]
In their most ambitious and expansive single to date, First Rate People layer the synth-stabs in equal measure to elegy on "Dark Age". Full of killer lyrics about a receding youth like, "We were moody and hopeful and green" and "I'm digging the claws in the feeling", the band describes a sort of dissatisfied hyper-modernity, the song's title, this "Dark Age" described as a note on a phone, rhymed with "new keys for a new cage". It's a generational polemic in form and function, lines about the "folly of youth" backed by a relentless [...]
Long Walks On The Beach have been churning out bucolic, Polaroid pop for a few years now. A mixture of leading guitars and fish hook refrains, the band channels a sort of nostalgia that feels just washed out at the edges, a certain prettiness that can only exist in the past after memory performs its grand editorial magic. "1st Times (You and I)" builds this type of artifice, lines like "All I needed was you", interpolated between an urgent drum loop and a leading guitar line that owes more to twee than anything else. A beautiful and [...]
![DJ Natty Heavy :: THE FIRST OF THE MONTH [June 2013]](http://cdn.elbo.ws/posts/4977540_lg.jpg)
DJ Natty Heavy is back with his third monthly compilation mix for your ears, an exclusive to 32ft/sec and we're calling it THE FIRST OF THE MONTH [June 2013] , the time when you get paid, or when someone comes to collect, or in this case, both. Natty Heavy is already one of the best spinners of records in the American South, lighting up the airwaves and clubs of Charleston with impunity, and now he brings his talents to indie rock. It isn't his usual wheelhouse - except that he immediately makes a new [...]
In their most angular and insistent work to date, Letting Up Despite Great Faults builds a wall of fuzzy synthesizers on "Postcard". Buried in miles of reverb and feedback, the vocal acts as lead instrument but nothing else, only hints of consonants and vowels hanging at the edge of hearing, a few lines like, "find you" just clear enough from the maw to discern. The breathy snare is ceaseless, even as the arrangement wanders through a protracted outtro, the final, mildly abrasive tones behaving in eulogy for a lost, sunny and barely understood thing.
A shimmering and delicate slice of the late stages of a summer night, Smith Westerns latest single, "3am Spiritual" possesses only a few moments of bombast. The chiming synth and guitar progression that follow the band's carefree group vocal, "whoa ... yeah", exactly the kind of non-answer that the second-half of a parabolic evening demands. Better yet, the second movement, a keyboard interlude lifted right from Win Butler's "We Used To Wait", seemingly doubles the layers of the refrain, a last languid look down a nostalgic hallway. The band sings, "You don't look like [...]
Self-destruction is as dangerous as it is attractive. It's a trope: the poisonous girl with the laissez-faire attitude, a person unbound by the constraints of risk-adverse modern society. She's uninsurable; she's a walking liability; she's fascinating. Or, rephrased and writ-large as a visual simile, "She smokes in bed", the title lyric of latest TV Girl single. With a bass line that very nearly has a voice booming along at the bottom of the arrangement, TV Girl craft "She Smokes In Bed" as a breezy take on the sample-heavy, industrial-pop of a band [...]
A rapid-fire combination pops from the tams as HAERTS ' singer Nini Fabi scoops her way up - and the height is considerable as the arrangement is in full-bloom - to the top of the refrain on latest single, "All The Days". Possessing the ambient power of all great pop music, it describes a place that is no place, a time that is no time, quite literally "All The Days". Cribbing the charming, now Taco Bell-approved sonics of St. Lucia, the creepy vocal loops of Kate Bush and the synth dessert of Men At Work's [...]
A glittering ode to the sound of the Shout Out Louds, Le Fever , a Stockholm outfit, disburse a meticulous and somber bit of pop on latest single, "White Hearts". Featuring down-tempo lyrics like, "Monday morning, what a joke" and the final, admittedly-adolescent crusher, "that you love him and you never loved me", the band courts the sort of fragile, heartsick Northern European pop that has found such an audience on the other side of the ocean. The melody runs downward, each stanza of the verses beginning at eye-level before heading relentlessly to the floor. [...]
It's a bit of form meeting function, vocals rising and falling in a swaying downbeat, as Pure Bathing Culture arrive at the chorus of lead track, "Pendulum" from forthcoming debut Partisan Records LP, Moon Tides . Like some lost 1980s revivalists who awoke in a universe of swimming pastels and Beach House songs set down 10 BPMs, Pure Bathing Culture prove expert at providing a type of modern moral-victory slow dance. "Pendulum" is a sweeping arrangement, an aperture opened wide, a melody focused on the natural rise and fall, the rhythmic cycles that [...]
Brooklyn's Let's Be Loveless draw portions of their name from the second My Bloody Valentine LP and their sound from across the dream-pop and shoegaze landscape. On debut single, "Video Song", vocalist Abby Camaya channels one the band's stated and most pleasing influences: The Sundays. Though "Video Song" is darker by far, a bass line that rumbles with a vague if unyielding menace, the breezy vocal, even on lines like "Give me some time to work this out" is every bit Harriet Wheeler. With an album release show at Muchmore's on July 10th, it [...]
John Ross of Challenger is a synthesizer genius. Latest single, the first from a coming yet-to-be-titled LP, "Back to Bellevue" shares the stomping and halcyon Reading Rainbow -electrics of his 2012 offering, "I Am Switches". Similarly, "Bellevue" also features a stunning second movement, vocals spun in reverse and a leading keyboard line. It stands that the Challenger LP that comes with "Bellevue" will be an enormous and wantonly nostalgic slice of synth-pop, set wide-screen for impact. For New Yorkers, the band plays Arlene's Grocery [...]
An effervescent slice of electronic pop, Swimming Lessons meanders pleasantly through debut single, "Double". The percussion resonates as carbonated, an ever-rising loop of chiming sounds and loops - a snare sound for organizational purposes only - mixed with Ben Lewis charming, echoing vocal. The Leeds outfit gives hints of the Clock Opera empire that never was, and windows to the better sides of Ernest Greene's work in Washed Out. None of it necessarily aims for the ceiling. "Double" gives little hint of unchecked ambitions, rather a frictionless slow-drive through electro-pop tropes that sound as [...]
32ft/Second
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CHVRCHES - Gun
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When Stars Collide
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