Bend :: "Short Crush"

Like a wedge finding the weakness in a small fissure, the keyboard pop coming out of the minds of the current crop of adolescents and post-adolescents is both tiny and potentially huge. Built in the ashes of a post-Postal Service world, the bedroom jams of burgeoning LA two-some - currently at USC and Vassar College  respectively - Bend represent the smallest of impulses on the appropriately titled, "Short Crush". Soft 8-bit breakdowns lay beside a snapping loop and pretty boy-girl duet, all accented with the type of lyrics that make most intimate sense to 19-year-olds who wrote them. But if "Short Crush" lacks a certain universalism, it still manages to strike a deep sonic chord with anyone who ever loved Give Up, a new generation of painful bedroom pop for the kinds of thoughts and minor terrors that, understandably, never left the bedroom in the first place.