the Swimmers :: "Shelter"

Sometimes claustrophobia isn't a bad thing. The feeling of being suffocated at least means something or someone is close to you. Without a fabric of personal relationships, work engagements and responsibilities we might never feel connected to anything. However, when this fabric is pulled over our mouths and every inch of our lives is closing in, it's easy to feel like these connections are a personal prison (body is a cage?). Consider this the beginning of a claustrophobic week.

Out of what I think is Philadelphia, the Swimmers have a light bit of synth-rock with a title about finding a demarcated place inside ourselves to hide out for awhile. So when the world presses in, dig inside yourself, get a little smaller and hole up in your new shelter. If the world won't move, shrink down and create some space inside yourself. The pressing outside just means you're awake and alive but it can absolutely wait.

Listen :: the Swimmers - "Shelter"

Two Door Cinema Club :: "I Can Talk"

Back in January '09 we suggested that Two Door Cinema Club would be a good band to check out. We even suggested that this might be "their year." Of course, we were only dealing with demos and a crafty looking video back then. Now 10-months later, they've stormed the palace, taken the guards hostage and terrified the royal family with lead-single "I Can Talk." If commercial success can be viewed as a violent political coup (and yes, yes it can), this is what it would sound like.

"I Can Talk" is overwhelmingly slick on the first listen. A combination of vocal-loops, Editors-styled high-fret-board guitars and a stomping, Saturday-night chorus, the band discovers something larger than its previous angular, if delicate, songs. This isn't some indie rock song you put on your headphones when your brain is waxing existential and your heart all ripped up about something that almost certainly doesn't matter. This is a dance-song to storm your ears when the sun is down and the wolves are out. It's about the powers of speech. It's a little Bloc Party, a little Postal Service - choppy, dance-rock with a back-beat to kick your doors in. You know, if this was a coup or something.

Listen :: Two Door Cinema Club - "I Can Talk"

[Elevator] Dominant Legs :: "Young at Love and Life"

Out of my top 20 favorite acquaintances, less than ten percent are in committed relationships. You could say this involves a troubling trend where the 90s grunge generation found that mastering disaffectedness came with terrifying consequences. Our ability not to be wowed by anything, to be made angry by little cultural slip-ups, to judge-first-lest-we-be-judged has left us strikingly alone. Our one skill: being unimpressed. Oh Love? Yeah, we saw them live a couple years back. They weren't even that good.

And yet, something else is at work. It is not simply a lost generation of youth reacting to over-stimulation, an intellectual community obsessed with post-modernism and a neo-romanticism that mostly involved things like Sex in the City. We aren't bad at love, we're just younger than you think. We will live far longer than we are comfortable with. In fact, it is possible we will see 105. Shot backwards through this space-time, we've been allowed infantalization longer and longer until we devolved into being these mostly taller children. We aren't bad at settling down. We are just young at love and life. Sounding a bit like Belle and Sebastian, Dominant Legs will bear this out for us. We might not remember how to be impressed, but I can assure you that this is impressive.

Listen :: Dominant Legs - "Young at Love and Life"

On The List :: Noah and the Whale @ Mercury Lounge [11.3.09]

This review runs on Bowery's Houselist Blog

It’s hard to say what this crowd came to see. Charlie Fink, lead singer of Noah and the Whale, sort of shuffled to the stage with his five-piece band fully intent on playing large swatches of their new album, First Rites of Spring, ostensibly a love note and a gigantic fuck you to Fink’s ex-girlfriend and former bandmate, Laura Marling. The record is a gut-wrenching exegesis on breaking up, and Fink is more than intent to play it the way a mechanic can stare into the bowels of your car and tell you, quite simply, your engine doesn’t work. Except that it’s Fink who is broken, which is exactly what the crowd has shown up to see. The band opened with “Blue Skies,” arguably the most uplifting of Fink’s tragic masterwork. Of course, this would be like saying The Old Guitarist was the most uplifting painting of Picasso’s Blue Period.

There are aspects of schadenfreude at work here. You couldn’t say Fink looked sickly or drunk or morose or any of the other signifiers that usually typify modern human breakups, and yet the music told a different story. Playing “Our Window,” which vividly describes the night of their separation, Fink was either completely satisfied with his documentation of this event or he’s still actively hurt by it. Either way, we’ve all stopped to watch his emotional car accident, beautifully scored as it may be. What’s that say about us, members of the nearly sold-out crowd, who came to witness this? Were we hoping to be healed in this fire? As the band ripped through the end of “First Rites of Spring,” you felt Fink connect for the first time with this catharsis we’ve come to be a part of. It was the last song of their main set and then they moved into “Shape of My Heart,” from their first album. It had a different tone but given the circumstances, whatever the shape of Fink’s heart, it was almost certainly still broken.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "In Steps"

In the pantheon of "bands with names that are sentences," Letting Up Despite Great Faults bleed as the most poetic. "In Steps," the first track on their self-titled album is no less esoteric, if also immediately approachable. A humming, almost self-consciously Nintendo synth line is our first tone, backed quickly by a lazy guitar riff and a drum beat, all at the pace of a summer jog. It's like a Phoenix song spent too much time in the sun or like a Postal Service song fallen in glue and then accidentally rolled in glitter, "In Steps" is polished and bright in a way that is entirely unplanned. Late summer fades into fall and theoretically, you chase south in a game of chicken and equilibrium with the equator. Letting Up Despite Great Faults is the warm little center of the universe. And you are close to the heart of it.

Listen :: Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "In Steps"
Listen :: Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "The Colors Aren't You Or Me"

Stricken City :: "Small Things"

There is a thin line between suggestion and ultimatum. We've all been a part of a suggestions that are more than just requests and we've all been part of ultimatums with no punch. A few months ago, we sort of asked that you listen to Stricken City. Well, now we're demanding it. Since this is all happening over the Internet, this would qualify as a demand with no punch. But when you're dealing with a shimmering, thudding post-punk record like Stricken City's Songs About People I Know, I would rather traffic in unenforceable ultimatums than equally unpowerful requests. "Small Things" doesn't follow the strictest song-structure but after milling around in a few different melodies, it finds itself as a wailing, surging, pointed anthem in the final 90-seconds. Somewhere between an ask and a tell, Stricken City is a command you can't possibly enforce. But it is way more than suggested.

Listen :: Stricken City - "Small Things"

Phantogram :: "When I'm Small"

For fifteen seconds at the beginning of Phantogram's "When I'm Small" I have this panicked feeling that someone made a dub-step version of Cold War Kids' "Hang Me Out To Dry." The lazily threatening bass-riff, the thumping drums - it all feels like indie rock for a nightclub. The hooting vocals chirp over the top and this thing sounds equal parts dangerous and delicate. Of course, the album is titled Eyelid Movies, implying that once the lights (or the lids) go down, the show is just beginning; that the line between wakefulness and subconscious fantasy is no more than a blink away. None of this leaves us feeling comfortable as we drop into nothing. The old epistemological questions persist and our waking dream continues.

Listen :: Phantogram - "When I'm Small"