Porcelain Raft :: "Unless You Speak From The Heart"

Porcelain Raft is sneaking up on everyone and no one with his upcoming album, Strange Weekend. The tiny arrangements and demos released by the band in late 2010, evolved into more spacious, wistful, organ-driven creations. The sonic territory flecks the edges of the reverb-heavy drowned pop of the past few years, but cuts like "Unless You Speak From The Heart" rely on slicing sharp craft and breezy hooks. In short, this is the Youth Lagoon of the coming months, save a more upbeat ethos. In that very modern way, critics and listeners have both a sense that Strange Weekend,"will be good" and a willingness to be surprised by its goodness. This is the new magic trick, knowing the Prestige is coming - a quiet, little record about quiet, little heartbreak - and still being impressed when it arrives.

Listen :: Porcelain Raft - "Unless You Speak From The Heart"
Listen :: Porcelain Raft - "Put Me To Sleep"

Tiny Victories :: "Lost Weekend"

Tiny Victories self-actualize in the second verse of "Lost Weekend". The arrangement whirrs around them and the snapping rhyme whips, "I know you, you got a stereo heart. You got an ache in your mind, and that's a bad way to start." It's a dreadfully simple way to get kicked in the teeth. The loops and structural architecture call on the recent work of Clock Opera, a simple chiming melody turned into a glittering array of twinkling synths. Predictably, this moment of meta-cognition only preludes another, the crashing conclusion of all these disparate motifs organizing themselves behind the lives drums in a seething final movement. The lyric-less final act proves appropriate for a song about "spend[ing] a lost weekend walking around in your head." Just because the band self-actualizes doesn't mean the listener always gets to join them. For now, they suggest, it will be enough for you to wander.

Listen :: Tiny Victories - "Lost Weekend"

Buried Beds :: "Ivory Towers"

It is easy to forget at this advanced cultural moment in 2012 that the Garden State soundtrack meant a great deal in 2004. It proved as divisive as it was exciting, an argument for or against its existence boiling down to whether or not you already owned the first Shins LP. It didn't change anyone's life, we hope, but it did change the landscape for independent music. Buried Beds' latest single, "Ivory Towers" taps this moment, a tender mash of the harmonies that forged Simon and Garfunkel's work and some of the self-serious cuteness that made the early Shins releases so charming. Both these references make "Ivory Towers" easy to dismiss, another delicate, little pop song that runs exuberantly downhill and features lyrics like, "Wear your honor, not your armor." But there existed a time when discovering something that sounded like this, even on the soundtrack to a staged solipsism like Garden State, would have meant a great deal to you. There is no going back, we suppose, but you can relive the perfect dark of 2004 for four minutes with Buried Beds and "Ivory Towers".

Listen :: Buried Beds - "Ivory Towers"

La Sera :: "Please Be My Third Eye"

Riding a year on the heels of La Sera's (nee Katy Goodman) first LP and fun, beachy singles, the part-time member of Vivian Girls is back with "Please Be My Third Eye" from her forthcoming sophomore record. This, considerably scuzzier than previous college radio sway, "Devil's Hearts Grow Gold" and "Never Come Around", features insistent guitars and attention-deficient drums. Goodman finds herself pleading the profoundly Eastern title lyric, asking another to be her enlightenment. And in a world of visions, Goodman needs no visionary. It is playful, in a Western context like asking for someone to be your transfiguration. In this case, she is her own clairvoyant, a rye seer ready to fall in love.

Listen :: La Sera - "Please Be My Third Eye"

The Denzels :: "Rae Rae" and "Black Girls"

 Music for a doom-and-gloom 1950s high school dance that you never attended, The Denzels craft a brand of rock that represents an odd mixture of thrown-back influences and post-punk updates. On "Rae Rae", the chorus breaks on the laissez-faire, "I like you/I want to keep it that way", as an angular guitars rip towards the ceiling and the drums do a Box Step in the center of the dance floor. A bizarre merging of the earnest 50s and the Robert Smith 80s, this a sock hop with eyeliner (apologies to Michael Stipe). "Black Girls" taps similar sonic territory, biting at the edges on a brilliant baritone hook around the stretched out lyrics, "Nobody cares for you." It stumbles and shakes to the finish, a bit of shabbiness inside of something that feels, at once, very intentionally old and very impressively new.

The Denzels - Rae Rae by Low Life Inc

The Denzels - Black Girls by Low Life Inc

Dozens :: "Forget Me"

Opening with a group of siren synthesizers, Dozens appear to raise the alarm from the very outset on "Forget Me". What follows listens like one of those emotionally sordid tales full of "too much wine", words that can't be taken back and, of course, mix CDs. The title lyric betrays some of the initial thrust of the chorus, a trampoline trip to the top of the room as synths erupt around the melody like all these brightly colored elastics. The main idea, a hope to be forgotten, is a paper tiger, a straw man, meant for destruction. Even as the band churns around the the hooky, "I was hoping you would forget me", the arrangement's ebullience tells a different story. It would make things easier, to be forgotten, but it isn't the salve for this narrator. It is a declaration of independence inside of a hymn for co-dependence, a delicate little distinction as the singer intones, "I still wouldn't take back what I said to you last night" right after the sublime surrender, "just give me some time to come around." She's back in the picture; don't say you weren't warned.

 

Ottilia :: "Forty Million Light Years"

She's in your ear, you think, or is it your head? Close enough to make you pleasantly claustrophobic, 17-year old sensation, Ottilia and her perfect first single, "Forty Million Light Years" whisper an instantly memorable melody and a vocal so charming you'll struggle against your vocabulary to say anything besides, "precocious" and "phenomenal". A flecking guitar line that recalls the work of Phoenix on "Lisztomania" mixes easily with Ottilia's disarming vocal singing vaguely fatalist lyrics like "Walls keep closing in and I can't win." She manages to save the listener and herself right before the chorus kicks, posing the coquettish, "But then again..." before trailing off into a refrain you'll find yourself singing without meaning to. It's glossier than Ellie Goulding's "Wish I Stayed" demo that seized the music industry by the throat in 2008 but the potential is the same, a young, big voice who can craft pop with the ease with which you make your morning coffee. With "Forty Million Light Years", Ottilia does a similar removing of the ceiling on what could be a mercurial rise in 2012 and beyond, all of which is close enough to be in your head already.