Wild Ones :: "Rivals" (Trails and Ways Remix)

Two of the best independent pop artists operating on the American West Coast, Wild Ones and Trails and Ways unite on "Rivals" to recast the original with more dreamy guitars and a fist full of blinking, opiate synths. Wild Ones, who do a quite nice renovation of the Rilo Kiley idea, built "Rivals" to be a tiny keyboard jam with wistful guitars inserted at intervals. Trails and Ways have none of it, filling the guts of "Rivals" with flickering guitar riffs and an over-sized back beat. The result is a measure of extra bombast for a band, Wild Ones, who do small so well.

TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Mtn Tune"

"You deserve some kind of warning," comes the cooing chorus of TRAILS AND WAYS latest single, "Mtn Tune." It is a strange thing to hear from a band who seemingly emerged from the primordial independent rock stew in the past three months. They could have warned us their guitars would have a voice all their own, distinctly equatorial and pleasantly warm to the touch. They could have told us they would have these inexorable, strange pop songs. In short, we could have been warned. Topically, and now part and parcel of the band's mercurial rise to notoriety this spring and summer, "Mtn Tune" is either about mountain top removal coal mining or falling in love at metaphorical high altitude, which both strike this writer as exceptionally dangerous, systemically bad ideas. At their best - and this counts - the band exudes a clean fecundity, alluring and not a bit sordid. "Mtn Tune" is pop that doesn't need a warning label, though it does its fetching sort of damage all the same.

TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Miracle" [Ghost Beach cover]

One of the best new bands of 2012, TRAILS AND WAYS, released a split single with Ghost Beach yesterday. The A-side features a TRAILS AND WAYS cover of the Ghost Beach synth anthem, "Miracle," though here it is recast with a first verse in Spanish and some bossanova inflections that imply an ambigious internationalism. (You win the office pool if you had "bossanova" as the next surprisingly successful World influence to crack independent rock.) The strength of "Miracle" lies in the chorus, a slice of pop that can burn off any early morning marine layer. The other half of the single finds TRAILS AND WAYS stunner single, "Nunca" turned out and remixed by Ghost Beach into the kind of thing that only makes sense being played at enormous volume in the three hours before sunrise.

TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Nunca"

TRAILS AND WAYS return with a second promotional single from their coming LP, Trilingual. This, entitled, "Nunca", Spanish for "never", opens with tape fuzz and street noise before breaking into an ebullient, warm guitar hook, like Vampire Weekend drenched full of sunshine and dried in the breeze on a clothesline. The aesthetic moves south from there, featuring an increasingly Brazilian bossanova influence that the band says was inspired by a warm day in Sao Paulo spent listening to Drake. And the vagaries of R&B creep their way in at the edges, a male-female trade-off that sounds like Stars with Amy Milan transplanted toward the equator. But the guitar hook carries the arrangement, one of those sounds that explains the reasoning for indie rock imperializing World Music in the first place: pretty and exotic without losing its urbanity (here to mean: "sophistication" not as a synonym for "urban"). The party, the Good Life, is out there somewhere, likely south and it sounds exactly like this.

TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Tereza"

A modern day Rousseau would probably reflect on our current age with, "Music is born free and yet everywhere it is in chains." Bassist and vocalist Emma Oppen sheepishly coos her response, "It was just just my nature," in the chorus of TRAILS AND WAYS' fine first single, "Tereza," seemingly liberating herself and everyone else. An awesome "shrug" of a lyric, a sort of implicit helplessness or explicit freedom, Oppen and her bandmates from Oakland seem beholden only to themselves as dreamy soundscapes ebb and flow in time with oblique lyrics like, "I made myself a shoreline without water." The genre references footnote Radio Dept. and School Of Seven Bells (with either the treble or the opiates turned way up) though the over-arching sentiment is a sort of Je ne sais quoi, an arrangement with a friction coefficient of zero, gliding from shore to shore under a force, contract and authority all its own. Oppen suggests this freedom is hard-wired, and its hard to argue as the song, quite literally, washes away in the final seconds.