No one, and I mean no one, does looping, dreamy pop better than Gauntlet Hair. Last year's surprise jam, "I Was Thinking" was a snapping, bombastic affair. It nearly wore you out with higher-than-hi-fi guitars and a clap track sharp enough to pop a surprised ear drum. Latest single, "Top Bunk", from the band's coming Dead Oceans release steers their sound in slightly different waters, these with the distinct feeling of a very fun, very liquid stop-motion video. Placed squarely at the center are these cascading guitars, but playfully enough to sound like an M.C. Esher merry-go-round, shot from above, spinning fully to the beat. And round and round you go, a pleasant summer dizziness of too little sleep and sun blasted afternoons. The final movement provides change, bits of relief, and some final shabby guitars to say, well, we've been around now.
Somewhere between the harmonies of O Brother Where Art Thou? and the sparse brilliance of the National, lies a new Dallas band, Air Review. First single, "Waiting Lessons" is a slow build, a traveling song about returns and the aspiration that you might find what you're looking for out there. By the time the band introduces horns over the original piano progression, replete with those signature pebbled drums, you'll be having flashbacks to High Violet or Boxer or Alligator. But Air Review is somewhat lighter fare, still aimed squarely at what feel like American problems of journey and identity. Most recent single, "America's Son" wrestles with exactly these issues of a quest for self, an ineluctable pull, with both songs set against profoundly domestic backdrops. Whether the search turns outward or inside, Air Review have their sights somewhere down the Mississippi, a raft, or across the bay at the light on some girl's dock, that age-old American problem of restlessness, longing and the desire to be made whole.
Nod your heads, people, because time is about to slow down for the next four minutes. Dealing in terms of slow-drive relativity, Oh Minnows latest single, "You'll Never Know Us" might seem a lot shorter or a lot longer than its stated run time. The song is wall of warm synths, backed by an intermittant guitar poking out stepped intervals like a teenager lazily punching holes in drywall. The arrangement glides along effortlessly, and fans of a band like Pallers will find a lot to like in this lack of friction, but eventually builds to a nearly shoegazing middle section before washing away. The band's debut record is out this week on Young and Lost Club (Noah and the Whale, Golden Silvers) and, other than the above cover art that draws too much on this, is an incredibly promising release.
Not surprisingly, Loney Dear, is talking about his fracturing heart. Sweden's best purveyor of sad-sack, beautiful pop, returns with a new record, Hall Music, and appropriately-titled lead single, "My Heart". What begins as a small thing, an almost forgotten riff that it seems Emil Svanagen found at the bottom of a backpack after months of inattention, grows teeth, replete with bells and a rapidly swelling sense of scale. Of course, this is what he does best, building orchestral pop from the ground up and then marveling at you marveling at it. The chord resolution at 2:04 marks exactly this type of understated brilliance, a quiet transition into a final movement full of "sadness", "disappointment" and the final insistance, "I want what I asked for." He resolves to find it, quietly, in an archetecture of his own design where the most obviously broken thing is in the center of his chest.
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.
London's Dry The River have been on stage for less than two minutes when the arrive at their finest musical moment. It is the second half of latest single, "No Rest", an explosive, three-part chorus centering on the unforgettable lyric, "I loved you in the best way possible." In the video for the song, the band members are splashed in the face with water as they scream the lyrics, either a weird appropriation of the American government's response to extremism or a dramatic, visual interpretation of this moment - quite literally their own - where the arrangement has swollen around them and they all spill their guts out.
In full disclosure, it's always a little weird for these comer bands from the UK that play their first few shows in the US. The crowds are thin. The band's equipment is either in jeopardy or isn't totally there. Case in point, Dry The River's front man will break a string for which there is no immediate replacement. The last song is played without a functional acoustic guitar. Further, Rock Shop, a venue that fire codes at 90 is well below capacity. This is no affront to the band, but rather one of those moments that later fans and listeners will look back on and think, "Holy shit, they played Rock Shop? Where was I?"
It's no one's fault really. The average, even the literate, US consumer relies on a sick combination of immediacy and repetition. They will like this when they hear it, but they will also need to hear it a few times before they fork over money to see and be a part of it. Sony Corporate will need to offer the activation energy to address the first and the touring budget to address the second. After that, and what we assume is a few commercial syncs (and here, can you whet your knives on "No Rest" for some NBC show or the conclusion of the next HBO looker?) this band will be primed to sell a lot of records in this country. We may be a little flawed, us, but we will love them in the best way possible.
Of course, these commercial asides, as important as they will be to the band's ability to pay a mortgage, are of little relivance on this evening. They can wait for later. The band plays live staples, "Bible Belt" an awesomely slow build, featuring the astute lyric, "The devil's in the Bible Belt" and first single, "New Ceremony". It would be easy to write this off as another Noah And The Whale, a group of London folk kids with exactly two card tricks, easily figured . But, "New Ceramony" confirms a different antecedent. This band rips. Even in their quiet moments, singing delicate harmonies away from microphones, a trick that Stornowaybrought these shores last summer, they hold a dangerous potential energy, like at any moment they will explode into a second movement, something you may not have seen coming (go listen again to the first minute of "No Rest" and ask yourself if you had any idea what was next). And for an American audience, the few that treked out faithfully to see one of these moments before the moment, it is impossible to fully see the next thing. Dry The River will have an enormous 2012, whether you can entirely understand that or not.
For those of us that moved to New York after college, it became a common refrain to joke about how the city could run you over if you weren't careful. It was beautiful, to be sure, but it had a sandpaper side, or maybe a strange sense of humor, that could leave you living in a rat-trap loft in Bushwick and riding the bus to your low paying job. To cite a smarter mind: You may ask yourself, how did I get here? In the context of Light For Fire's recounting of a summer in Brooklyn, and what sounds like a fantastic destruction at the hands of a girl named "Christine", our gallows humor about New York, told through the lens of later successes, seems downright tame. With sonic references to the taut, straight-faced pop of Spoon, singer, Nicholas Allard, formerly of The Village Green, wrote the body of the lyrics on the plane back to Portland, Oregon, after, we imagine, Christine hit him at highway speed and kept going. The city can do that, especially in the wilds of East Williamsburg, where Allard later confesses, "Bushwick has me by the hand." This is either a compliment or a prelude to a disaster, or both, in a city of sub-orbital highs and industrial wasteland kicks in the teeth.
