Dropping into an unsettling dystopia, Lonesome Leash 's debut single, "Ghosts" is an ambitious minor key offering that checks in somewhere between the French Quarter and the apocalypse. Sharing methodologies with the drone-pop of Casiotone For The Painfully Alone , Lonesome Leash, however, is no bedroom project, rather the outcome of a one-man-band or, as sole-member Walt McClements says, "hands feet and lungs." "Ghosts" breaks into haunted house progressions, moaning through a sort of neo-baroque disaster, the final, insistent lyric, "There are ghosts between us, as we lay." It's the soundtrack to the final [...]
One of the most promising acts coming out of Britain today, Eliza and the Bear have released their triumphant new single, "Upon The North." It is in the school of their post- Edward Sharpe pop: big, expansive and Western-inspired Americana mixing with a deep British reverence and elegy. The bridge, a shouting and repeated lyric, "I spent summers away," is filled by organ chords, splashy cymbals and backing vocals, the same formula that makes their debut single, "Brother's Boat" so relentlessly charming. "Upon The North" charges ahead with the same type [...]
Sounding like Beach House 's Victoria Legrand playing songs from the Sundays' back catalog, DC's Gems launch a beautiful and troubling single, "All I Ever Wanted." Far from triumphant, the cut features male and female vocals in the verses, building toward breezy and brutal chorus. Guitars wash against the shores of a playful bass line in the distance, all a set up for the final movement. "Too much to bear," sings Lindsay Pitts, making clear the implied counterfactuals of the refrain. This is no happy ending, nor is it about getting [...]
Randolph's Leap are a Glasgow band overflowing with pop hooks and the kind of blighted brilliance on which Scotland has an effective monopoly. On "Hermit", lead track from their EP of the same name, the band sounds intensely like British stab at the horn-soaked pop that Beulah made deservedly famous in the previous decade. Think Stornoway with a bit more punch and a relentless pursuit of a chorus that twirls under its own melodrama. It is, like so much of this type of pop, about being lost and alone. Belle and Sebastian [...]
To grasp the demos from Velveteens , you need eyes to see demo"Do You Remember?" not as it is now, but what it could be in a real studio, served with an extra portion of bombast. This is bedroom pop: Casio-looped drums, bits of ambient noise, conversations at both the beginning and end of the recording. The hooks are buried, red-lining the recording, clipping the top of the mix and breaking into fuzz, but the string arrangement and melody are undeniable. The early Mountain Goats recordings were made on a Fisher-Price tape recorder; roughness can [...]
Challenger , a band who released an incredible debut single, "I Am Switches" over the summer, returned with the release of their full length, self-titled debut this past Tuesday. Second track, "I Am Switches" is movie music with three distinct movements: an opening description of the problem, a down-tempo middle section where things look bleakest, and a rousing and ebullient conclusion. The middle third is dark, unfettered elegy, a vocalist left alone with one long, held chord, before the arrangement takes on a bit of Paul Simon- Graceland bass, and a soaring final [...]
The Shout Out Louds return nearly three years after the somewhat underwhelming LP, Work with "Blue Ice," a sweeping bit of widescreen pop. If Work was world-weary and a bit too intentional, the band here sounds committed to something more earnestly down-tempo. Adam Olenius, the mumbling soul of the band's truly excellent Our Ill Wills and Howl Howl Gaff Gaff , the voice who launched a thousand Morrissey and Cure comparisons, is his usual distant and morose self (see "Parents Livingroom") on "Blue Ice" . He braces [...]
London three-piece Teleman 's debut single, "Cristina" opens with the intimate, "I'm coming back to where I started," an odd aside for a band at its very beginnings. Its a reversed remembering, the past pitched as cloistered and bizarre on lyrics like "I never meant to be the bad kid" or the intensely adolescent, "turn the lights on, throw everything around your bedroom." Of course, the glossy arrangement, a sort of cold medicine, plaintive Phoenix , eventually centers on the song's most important line, "some thing's just take you right back, you forget you've [...]
Veronica Falls ' "Teenage", a jangly little single, inspires nostalgia in more than just its name. For the teenagers of the 1990s, this all feels like a lost submission to the Reality Bites soundtrack, Winona Rider issuing winsome and distant stares from a softly lit and unintentionally ironic Volvo passenger seat. Narrowing even further, Veronica Falls sets the scene as "driving late at night", all dashboard glow and passing headlights, where you can "listen to the music you like," which the listener almost certainly has to presume is "Teenage."
One of 2012's most self-assured and brash singles, Stepdad unleashes the organized cacophony of peeling synths and buzzing keys on "Must Land Running." It is widescreen pop that boils over on the self-actualizing lyrics of the chorus, "Feel it all / feel it all around you / take it back / take it back with you." The keyboards, and it feels like there are fifty of them, climb to the top of the room, flickering against the top of the arrangement like a million summer moths around a bare porch light bulb. "Must Land [...]
Only a noticeable minority, at least outside the old Confederacy, refuses to embrace the triumph of science and reason. This is progress, even in the anti-intellectual bastion of the United States. Still, this inexorable march toward truth is kills a bit of the mystery. It kind of sucks to know how the transfiguration works; the inexplicable ends up becoming the banal. Bedroom jammer Mystery Pills , the work of Raj Dawson, embraces a bit of this duality, a plea for strange, that which isn't beholden to an algorithm or a matrix of outcomes. In some [...]
Ra Ra Riot jag in a new direction on latest single "Beta Love", afraid and ebullient for the future of their band and their sound. Put another way, it's a long way from the strings-first rock songs they arranged at Syracuse. They played in basements before storming the New York rock scene in late 2006 with a set at Canal Room that offered a take on orchestral rock that put even Arcade Fire on notice. And then the band struggled to bring their intensity to the studio, to record accurately the ruckus from the stage. It [...]
"Breathe on me my buffalo," coos Alt-J lead-singer Joe Newman as sort of invocation before latest cut, "Buffalo" suffers a minor explosion into its second movement. Representative of the band's methodology, they are here backed by a choir, shifting easily from sparse elegy to an arrangement in full throat. The final twist sees the band recalling their second-movement hook from single, "Breezeblocks," the lyric "please don't go," replaced with a tweaking, "The buffalo from Buffalo." It is delicate and edgy, soft and dark, silly and serious. The final descending progression purporting to do all [...]
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Ritzy Bryan is absolutely possessed. It is a mixture of sex and violence, rock and roll tied up in this white Victorian dress. Her signature stare, a blend of surprise and being overcome, scanned the corners of the room at Littlefield, a challenge and a dare from the lead singer of the Joy Formidable , one of the best rock bands you can currently see live. But this possession, the seeming loss of control in the hands of the moment has a secondary quality. As Bryan collapsed, heaved and writhed in the hands of her [...]
Harriet , an LA band with former ties to PAPA and Dawes , already have one of the best songs of the year, the seminal and eruptive, "I Slept With All Your Mothers." While this debut single was covered in a fun bitterness, on new release, "No Way Out", singer Alex Casnoff describes a moment last April when he ingested far too much weed and his heart stopped . It is considerably more elegiac. He was rushed to the hospital, dosed with Ativan, doctors and nurses saving his life. It's the same piano-base of [...]
Riding down the back of Purity Ring and the intentionally bizarre Grimes , CHVRCHES (a Latinized "Churches") craft one of the best synthesizer singles of 2012. "The Mother We Share" explodes into a glittering chorus of fist-raising Kate Bush -lite vocal loops and buzzing keyboards that recall a far poppier version of the Knife . Vocalist Lauren Mayberry does the vulnerability trick well, howling a barely post-adolescent soprano at the maw of synthesizers and digital flourishes that threaten to drown her, managing to tame them all into time and [...]
All the way back in 2005, The Little Ones stormed into the early music blog scene with "Lovers Who Uncover" , a song that boiled over on falsetto chorus that bemoaned everything with a sighing, "oh no". The bridge invoked a different faded glamor, "way back when we were the latest around," before the lead guitar line and a series of fist-punching "hey's" papered over this richly modern anxiety. Now, seven years later, The Little Ones prepare their second LP, The Dawn Sang Along , a title that invokes at least something [...]
One of the great conditional love songs of 2012, You Won't craft a breezy earworm melody on "Who Knew", all centered on the word "if". Surrounding the great unrequited questions of why things don't work out, the band builds a series of increasingly absurd counterfactual scenarios ("If I was a cute little kid", "If I was a middle aged man", "If I was 103", "If I was Marty McFly") backed by flickering mandolin and a breathing, moaning accordion. The chorus, "All along I did what I could, but you tell me my timing's no [...]
A bit of downtown lounge-act veneer covers the surface of Mesita 's latest single "XYXY". Following early 2012 LP , The Coyote , and its shimmering first song, "Ken Caryl", which recalled the better-than-the-best-of Loney, Dear , "XYXY" taps a different vein, though no less satisfying. The aesthetic here is loaded with splashy drums and little lyrical admonishments like, "you were not the thing I'm dreaming of," as Mesita sends a fuzzy melody against a sparse piano and watches the unfolding drama. Episodic in nature, "XYXY" pulls back into [...]
Teen Mom 's "I Wanna Go Out" drops messily in medias res , like a rehearsal the listener stumbled into, the bass, drums and guitar eventually finding a synchronicity. Of course, this is a useful descriptor for a band who's instrumentation resembles so firmly the Police , and maybe more accurately the arrangement tension in "So Lonely". Teen Mom, a Washington, D.C. act, however, draws much more on an independent, college radio aesthetic than Sting's wanton talent for writing radio singles. The chorus, a shabby and fuzzy winner, is also the title lyric, a falsetto lilt [...]
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