Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Postcard"

In their most angular and insistent work to date, Letting Up Despite Great Faults builds a wall of fuzzy synthesizers on "Postcard". Buried in miles of reverb and feedback, the vocal acts as lead instrument but nothing else, only hints of consonants and vowels hanging at the edge of hearing, a few lines like, "find you" just clear enough from the maw to discern. The breathy snare is ceaseless, even as the arrangement wanders through a protracted outtro, the final, mildly abrasive tones behaving in eulogy for a lost, sunny and barely understood thing.

Smith Westerns :: "3am Spiritual"

A shimmering and delicate slice of the late stages of a summer night, Smith Westerns latest single, "3am Spiritual" possesses only a few moments of bombast. The chiming synth and guitar progression that follow the band's carefree group vocal, "whoa ... yeah", exactly the kind of non-answer that the second-half of a parabolic evening demands. Better yet, the second movement, a keyboard interlude lifted right from Win Butler's "We Used To Wait", seemingly doubles the layers of the refrain, a last languid look down a nostalgic hallway. The band sings, "You don't look like you used to be," a type of easy sadness so uniform, it can't possibly be original or surprising. And yet, pitching themselves as the last heirs to a fragile and nearly deceased world, Smith Westerns have one of the better songs of the year, an invented moment in the last iterations before dawn, the unremembered guitars of the 1970s slow-dancing with the anachronistic, gauzy synthesizers that never seemed to exist until now.

TV Girl :: "She Smokes In Bed"

Self-destruction is as dangerous as it is attractive. It's a trope: the poisonous girl with the laissez-faire attitude, a person unbound by the constraints of risk-adverse modern society. She's uninsurable; she's a walking liability; she's fascinating. Or, rephrased and writ-large as a visual simile, "She smokes in bed", the title lyric of latest TV Girl single. With a bass line that very nearly has a voice booming along at the bottom of the arrangement, TV Girl craft "She Smokes In Bed" as a breezy take on the sample-heavy, industrial-pop of a band like the Big Pink. The band refuses to answer the essential problem - with all the rhetorical niceties stripped away, "She's a nightmare" - instead descending into a series of weightless "ba's", maybe the only response for someone who cares so little and still manages to be the fecund and imploding star around which so much interest orbits.

HAERTS :: "All The Days

A rapid-fire combination pops from the tams as HAERTS' singer Nini Fabi scoops her way up - and the height is considerable as the arrangement is in full-bloom - to the top of the refrain on latest single, "All The Days". Possessing the ambient power of all great pop music, it describes a place that is no place, a time that is no time, quite literally "All The Days". Cribbing the charming, now Taco Bell-approved sonics of St. Lucia (who also acts as co-writer and producer here), the creepy vocal loops of Kate Bush and the synth dessert of Men At Work's globalized drum-fills, HAERTS cuts across genre lines with their pan-location pop. "All The Days", like "Wings" before it, won't necessarily be the song that breaks the band into the mainstream, but the next one, the first single from their full-length due later this year, will almost certainly transition this band from one that sounds like it could be anywhere, to one that is, in fact, everywhere.

Le Fever :: "White Hearts"

A glittering ode to the sound of the Shout Out Louds, Le Fever, a Stockholm outfit, disburse a meticulous and somber bit of pop on latest single, "White Hearts". Featuring down-tempo lyrics like, "Monday morning, what a joke" and the final, admittedly-adolescent crusher, "that you love him and you never loved me", the band courts the sort of fragile, heartsick Northern European pop that has found such an audience on the other side of the ocean. The melody runs downward, each stanza of the verses beginning at eye-level before heading relentlessly to the floor. Even the warm synthesizers, Cure-guitars and sharp snare drum do nothing to regain uplift, another in a long history of happy-sounding songs that instead encounter the inviolable depths of human relations.

Pure Bathing Culture :: "Pendulum"

It's a bit of form meeting function, vocals rising and falling in a swaying downbeat, as Pure Bathing Culture arrive at the chorus of lead track, "Pendulum" from forthcoming debut Partisan Records LP, Moon Tides. Like some lost 1980s revivalists who awoke in a universe of swimming pastels and Beach House songs set down 10 BPMs, Pure Bathing Culture prove expert at providing a type of modern moral-victory slow dance. "Pendulum" is a sweeping arrangement, an aperture opened wide, a melody focused on the natural rise and fall, the rhythmic cycles that so fascinate the band. The human experience filtered through this lens becomes an exercise in repetition, release and return. This, too, shall pass, only to emerge again, like Teen Dream washing up, over and over, on a foreign shore.

Let's Be Loveless :: "Video Song"

Brooklyn's Let's Be Loveless draw portions of their name from the second My Bloody Valentine LP and their sound from across the dream-pop and shoegaze landscape. On debut single, "Video Song", vocalist Abby Camaya channels one the band's stated and most pleasing influences: The Sundays. Though "Video Song" is darker by far, a bass line that rumbles with a vague if unyielding menace, the breezy vocal, even on lines like "Give me some time to work this out" is every bit Harriet Wheeler. With an album release show at Muchmore's on July 10th, it will be something like you and them in the summer time, as Camaya calls wilting from beyond the leading guitars.