Long Walks On The Beach :: "1st Times (You and I)"

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 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 forgotten world, the band opens the song in the simple past tense, "I saw you", a glance, here and after hermetically sealed against time.

Top 50 Songs of 2012 :: [50-41]

Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2012 and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 50 to 41.


50. Swim Good - "Totally A Mess Wild"



A spiraling and looping beat, this First Rate People offshoot delivered a song about being out of control that was tautly and intentionally organized. The initial duet was the charmer, playful and biting in the asking of questions like, "Are you ashamed of the things that you do?"


49. Little Legend - "Saints"



This group of Wisconsinites brought the house when it came to blue-collar rock in 2012. "Saints" proved to be nothing like its title, lines about being born under bad signs and with fires lodged firmly in the skull. It was all whiskey and cigarettes, full of small sins and resolute sinners


48. Teleman - "Cristina"



Bits of Phoenix crept into the corners of Teleman's debut Moshi Moshi single, "Cristina". The cruise-control set at something closer to residential speed limits, "Cristina" glides around under its own power: glossy, love-sick and circular.


47. Long Walks On The Beach - "We're Growing Up"



Long Walks On The Beach made lo-fi sound high on the vaguely seasick "We're Growing Up." Frantic and breathless, the band grappled with the developmental process in a string-soaked universe where "crowds swell" without urging and people "hang tough" in the tape fuzz.


46. Mike O'Neil - "Henry"



Mike O'Neil built the most marketable chord progression of 2012 on "Henry;" it was a wonder it didn't find a multitude of advertising syncs. "Henry" wasn't intentionally commercial, but its breezy arrangement and lilting piano were made for the selling of consumer durables on your television.


45. farragoes - "The End of the Affair"

"The End of the Affair" was a summer single that name-checked Dostoevsky, snappy enough to sing along and dark enough to drive a listener to review their copy of Notes From Underground, somewhere gathering dust on a bookshelf. It was electro-pop with a cynical twist, sounds made for May and lyrics for the middle of a winter that never ever ends.


44. The Shins - "No Way Down"



In an election year, the Shins surprisingly shitty LP, Port of Morrow included one of the sharper, and least obvious political songs of the campaign. All about Mercer's weird liberal guilt and his effervescent liberal anger, it was at once a stab at elites, and a polemic spoken in their language. Beautiful and self-consciously hypocritical, "No Way Down" emerged as a song about "a tiny few having all of the fun," marketed in Starbucks outlets and served with five dollar coffees, a v-neck sweater song all about the 99%.


43. Warships - "Sleeper Hold"



Rooted in a lonely guitar lick, "Sleeper Hold" eventually gathered warmth before spilling over in one of the year's most affirming choruses. It wasn't all rainbows and lollipops, the lyrics were largely about sleeping alone, but the layered and soaring vocal of the refrain was enough to carry the light up out of the darkness.


42.Wildcat! Wildcat! - "Mr. Quiche"



Wildcat! Wildcat! will have a far bigger 2013 than anyone is ready for, a fact evinced by debut single, "Mr. Quiche." It sounded like the making of an indie rock slow-jam, lyrics about "lonely days" and a keyboard progression that practically exploded off the fingers. Two distinct movements, one sparse and the other lush, "Mr. Quiche" eventually erupted into falsetto final act before falling away to nothing.


41. Band of Horses - "Shut-In Tourist"



"Shut-In Tourist" exercised form and function in the same moment, the chorus' only and intensely memorable lyric was the repeated, "so I repeat what you said." The band sang the lyric four times in each refrain, the refrain repeated three times, and then a fourth for posterity only. That's 16 chances to sing "so I repeat what you said," which was, luckily, one of the better, if smaller, hooks of the year.

Luke Reed :: "At The Harbor"

Luke Reed, an artist with the scant outline of a digital footprint, makes a tidy slice of fuzzy pop on "At The Harbor." In the spirit of Long Walks On The Beach, Reed drowns surf-guitar riffs under some deep-end reverb, adding a fuzzy, sing-song melody to sail over the top of the arrangement. It all takes place in less than two minutes, an odd antecedent to Reed's most gripping lyric, "I've been waiting for a long time," a song about summer sand castles and girding yourself against old heartbreaks in the face of new loves. It is a bit fleeting as Reed shambles, "I want to stay like this forever," knowing, in all probability, he can't.

Long Walks On The Beach :: "We're Growing Up"

There is no good way to leave the world and only few good ways to get old in it. Long Walks On The Beach, one of our favorite projects for myriad reasons, offer a case for maturity that is both clear-eyed and stupidly romantic. The lyrical references chart territory regarding the power of "moonlight", and lines like "in our dreams, the crowd swells" all over shabby guitars and crystalline strings. The final shambling conclusion brings the arrangement to a moment of self-actualization around the tautology of the title, "We're Growing Up". Never has this felt more true and more valuable and, blessedly, without the specter of nagging injuries, day jobs, consumer debt, the grinding uncertainties of adult life that never make the cut at college commencement addresses. If there exists a good way to get old, this is surely it, three minutes of perfect pop music and a sense that all cannot be lost when so much unfolds to the vanishing points forward.

Long Walks On The Beach :: "Literally Crazy For You"

A wise person once told me that any good writer should only use the word, "literally" less than four times in a lifetime, making it like the "I love you" of the grammar world. It is too often used to emphasize, like a zombie version of "really" or "so", instead of its intended purpose of proving you aren't being figurative or remotely metaphorical. Making it the "love" of the grammar world. Considering that Long Walks On The Beach qualifies as good writing - and here we would footnote earlier slam-dunk single, "I Didn't Want To Make Out" - we assume on "Literally Crazy For You", he is talking about the one woman who can make you actually, clinically, insane. This is powerful no doubt, as mastermind Fritz Kramer mumbles asides about being put into a straight jacket and taken away. Now the use of, "literally" rings rye, an unblinking, "no seriously, I'm crazy for her," as friends shuffle their feet and change the subject to local sports or something dubious that happened during college. The shabby guitars turn out another glimmering piece of pop, a story in three parts: loud, quiet, and loud. The details are exact, one of the few times where it's worth saying what actually happened. Make this count or count how many you have left.

Long Walks On The Beach :: "I Didn't Want To Make Out"

Parsing the difference between "making out" and "kissing" is at the heart of the appropriately named and crushing, "I Didn't Want To Make Out". Certainly one of the most infectious slices of indie pop music of the last 12 months, Long Walks On The Beach earn your ears (and maybe your hearts) with chimes, shabby guitars and one of those mournful choruses that echoes from the garage all the way to your bedroom. It's a raspier, more soulful Oberhofer, but without the time signature changes or the magic realism. This is just jangly heartbreak, like some suburban kid recording his disasters in the form of Camera Obscura cover songs into his Fisher-Price tape recorder at three in the morning - rough, pretty and more than a little broken up.