Tashaki Miyaki :: "Cool Runnings"

First album Vampire Weekend meets the cool, critical distance of early Beach House with LA dream-pop outfit Tashaki Miyaki and their debut single, "Cool Runnings". Alternating between the baroque and the mildly grungy, the slow-dance jam opens with the optimistically fecund, "I see a good thing coming." The idea, the listener can conjecture, challenges us to get past our panic, to stop running from the things that might quite reasonably make us happy. The band sings, "I hope we're always lovers", before clarifying the idea, "if we stop running, we can try", making the title a grammatically incorrect instruction: "Cool Runnings", stop it, turn and face front, connect and engage, a beautiful edict in the Age of Moving On.

Mvscles :: "Somethin"

Matt and Kim meets Wet, or Beach House meets Mates of State: The currently unsigned Mvscles bob along with effortless boy-girl vocals and bright synthesizers on latest single "Somethin". Recently freed from a difficult label scrap, the band craft this summer jam - seasonally inappropriate but perfect for a business model like the music industry who will get around to marketing this in a few months - with more than a little reverence for UB40's upstroke Caribbean synthesizer pop. The modulated call and response "oh oh ohs" need only three notes to worm their way into your short term memory and the small cavern of your heart reserved for inappropriately brief affection.

Yohuna :: "Apart"

A dreamy tide sweeps over Yohuna's bedroom slow-jam, "Apart". The song builds a tiny guitar and keyboard palace, a miniature and slightly cloying Beach House that will remind the listener of the cough-syrup anthems of Yohuna collaborator, Emily Reo. In a universe like "Apart", distant and vaguely drunk the panorama of its own small geography, the smallness and the compartmentalization can feel appropriate, even familiar. You've been here before, you think, like slipping into an old sleeping bag or stepping foot into the kitchen in your parents' house after a long hiatus. For all its small world, "Apart" isn't really about distance as it is about overcoming it.

Emily Reo :: "Peach"

Emily Reo has one of the best bedroom albums of 2013, and maybe one of its finer efforts period with her latest LP, Olive Juice. Like its namesake, Reo's laptop jams - think Grimes meets Beach House - emerge as punch-drunk and unsettling. The use of auto-tune is decidedly unironic as her glitchy, pretty symphonies spin from her fingers. On "Peach," she channels the melody from Maurice Williams and the Zodiacs' 1960 single, "Stay," updated here with an anxious and drugged out modernity. The chorus is a beautiful mess, the loops and electronics fighting each other to the point of near dissonance, Leo stuck in layers at the center, nearly buried in the hum. Rival for the best song on the record, "Coast" stutter-steps its way through seven-and-a-half minutes that are as good as any released this year. There is opportunity cost to be sure, but everyone should be listening to these songs and this record. It holds the power to transmute, full of contemporary sorrows and sticky melodies.

Social Studies :: "Paint"

Social Studies, a San Francisco outfit, find a roots-y tear in the Beach House dream-pop fabric. Natalia Rogovin sounds both fragile and resolute in the more propulsive moments of "Paint", vaguely provincial, against the backdrop of a meditative keyboard arrangement. Finally spilling over in the song's last minute, a guitar line chases the blinking keys at the top of the room, Rogovin marching away beneath doing a Victoria Legrand impression without a shred of irony or any bad footnotes.

Pure Bathing Culture :: "Dream The Dare"

Chasing and expanding the Beach House legacy of dreamy and detached pop songs possessing an ineffable human pathos, Pure Bathing Culture exceed these references and footnotes on "Dream The Dare", the band's most expansive and fully-rendered work to date. Mixing sweeping guitars and the liquidity of a dripping drum sample, the vocals rise beneath the listener on lyrics like, "Give me forward motion." The melody is downright baroque: decent, delicate and measured. As the chorus peppers back and forth between pitches - the kind of tonal modulation that makes pop music so immediate and so pleasing - vocalist Sarah Versprille suggests a transcendence of limitations, a sort of transmutation of the "withered words" and caged chests that we hide in and behind. Vaguely existential in the grand humanist tradition of "feeling everything all the time", Pure Bathing Culture builds a mountain of dreamy pop on "Dream The Dare", one of the best hooks and best songs of the year.

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.

Here Is Your Temple :: "So High"

Here Is Your Temple set off lead single, "So High," as mixture of crystalline chiming synths and a menacing low-end anchored by a fuzzed bass line. Paying passing homage to the distant, moral-victory pop of Beach House, singer Emily McWilliam touches down cold and tremulous, a restrained and chilling force, allowing herself only a modicum of release on the song's icy refrain. She stares deeply into the austere abyss on the song's signature lyric, "talk about what the TV don't know," as tragic and modern as tragic and modern gets. Itching at the edges lie odes to Fleetwood Mac and the Shout Out Louds, McWilliam positioning herself centrally amidst the rolling drums and the echos of an arrangement concerning itself with the very meaning of being so far away.

Top 50 Songs of 2012 :: [10-2]

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 10 to 2. 

10. A.C. Newman feat. Neko Case - "Not Talking"



What separated Newman's 2012 release, Shut Down The Streets, from being a New Pornographers record remained unclear, especially with a Neko Case appearance on the debut single, "Not Talking". What remained certain was this: when Case and Newman collaborate, the results are magic. A whirling melody and Newman's typical austerity dissolved into Case's transformative duet. It was about a lonely, reverse-engineered Eden. "Rescue teams will look for days/I like the way things are/They should abandon the search," they sang, providing the outlines for exile of these two massive talents. It was allegedly about redemption, a bridge about distance, Case and Newman soaring out over the arrangement with sturdy wings, but it was clear these two were happier out there alone.


9. Father John Misty - "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings"



The most memorable drum and guitar line of 2012, Father John Misty built a house of death on America' far western boundary with "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings." "What are people gonna think?" Misty posed to the woman in question, though he suffered from no reservations of formality when dishing up one of the most satisfying sexual lyrics of the year, "I laid up for hours in a daze retracing the expanse of your American back." It was all love and funerals, digging in the dirt, girls along for the ride, making out and up in cemeteries in Los Angeles.


8. Sun Kil Moon - "Sunshine in Chicago"



Mark Kozelek has never lost sleep over forthrightness. In 2012 "Sunshine in Chicago" was no exception, a bracingly honest take on getting old. He admits to getting an STD in Chicago in the 90s, though this somehow comes across as dulcet as the admissions of his own father's exile to Chicago in the summers to relieve a crowded house. Nominally, it is a walk through a sunny Chicago, but it is Kozelek's talent for blighted imagery that takes us to his father, a more-famous career with the Red House Painters, and that line about "guys in tennis shoes." Few other artists do place, minutiae, and lyrical imagery as well as Kozelek, admitting to being both crushingly sad and entirely fine with getting older, all in the span of a walk down Lincoln Avenue on a sunny afternoon.


7. The Zolas - Knot In My Heart"



The most unexpected and infectious chorus of the year, The Zolas' "Knot In My Heart" proved to have staying power behind their one monstrous hook. It was the Spoon song for the year we didn't get a Spoon record, a bit of angular and restless piano-pop that held incredible darkness beneath an ebullient surface. The "knot" wasn't real, though it probably felt that way. The band unleashed lyrics like, "it's hard and weird not to know how your day begins, though I'm lying next to someone new" a simple and crushing aside. The final twist saw the arrangement at full bore, sparse piano chords insistent over the top of the repeated and eponymous lyric. It both ripped and could rip you apart.


6. The Vaccines - "Aftershave Ocean"



The magical realism emerged as a thick stew on the Vaccines' non-single, "Aftershave Ocean." It was their best song from a frankly forgettable sophomore record that will undeniably result in people getting fired at Columbia Records. "Aftershave Ocean" was undeniably excellent, a weird mixture of elements of 2001 Strokes and 1968 Beatles. The guitar line chased the melody, Justin Young singing throwback pop lyrics like, "You're coming up for air/happier down there/in your aftershave ocean." It wasn't clear what it all meant, some weird lines about self-denial, "pulling the wool over," life being difficult to face and indulgence, but the impression was something more like, "Yellow Submarine," the escape that promised better times below the surface of some magical place.


5. Nite Jewel - "One Second of Love"



A whirring synthesizer back-beat announced the arrival of the singular Nite Jewel's "One Second of Love." It featured the chorus of the year, the absolutely best hook, good enough that she only teased the listener with elements of the first refrain, waiting until the 1.21 mark to unleash the complete version. It was haunting and cold, singer Romona Gonzalez asking, "Who has one second of love?", an implication that this might be more fleeting than we were lead to believe. The middle section darkened further, before a final movement, spacey synths soaring to meet the chorus of their maker, Gonzalez, alone in a layered duet with herself, asking her most pressing question.


4. Beach House - "Myth"



It was a lighthouse warning, an iron triangle, a pot and pan beginning. It was something you couldn't quite place, that ringing sound that began Beach House's stunning achievement, "Myth." That banging, inexplicably folded into the arrangement, like an auditory announcement in the fog that lay ahead. It was beautiful, intentionally and creatively gauzy. Victoria Legrand, in her usually haunting voice, suggested, "what comes after this/momentary bliss/ consequence of what you do to me" as if to say to the world they pushed back in their chairs, something this pretty has to come at a cost. Dreams this big, lies this wide, fog this rich, it must fall apart somewhere. It was maybe a bit much, but like only a few other songs this decade, you'll likely remember where you were when you heard "Myth" for the first time. There was no denying this truth, a banging reminder of where you were on their drifting sea of melody and self-deception.


3. Stars - "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It"



Leave it to Stars to hit us with a lyric like, "take the weakest thing in you/and beat the bastards with it," a neo-Breakfast Club call for weird dignity in an increasingly individualized and lonely world. For Torquil Campbell, his weakness was that he was frightened and high, twin admissions at the center of "Hold On When You Get Love ...". Amy Milan was reduced to a Kate Busy-like feature in the chorus, her tweaked and soaring vocal offering a counterpoint to Campbell's confessional Moz. The marching orders were everywhere, the title, the chorus, the ratatat drums calling us to attention, the way they slammed in and out of the chorus, the Cure guitars. It was big and bold and beautiful, a bit silly and a bit saccharine, but love can be like that. Stars remained appropriately at the center of the melodrama, maybe the song of their career, one that Campbell admitted had a "pretty melody," but wouldn't help you leave the party at the right time. This was presumably a cautionary tale of the infidelities that happen after midnight. It was an admission; they could tell you what love sounded like, but they couldn't make you do it.


2. Alt-J - "Breezeblocks"



No one knew what to do with Alt-J in 2012. People compared them to Radiohead. Critics swooned. Pitchfork left them out of their top 50 albums. It was a cacophony as loud as the disparate influences on their record. This writer nearly had a meltdown listening to their debut LP, An Awesome Wave, and its best song, "Breezeblocks" the first time through. There was so much to it, two distinct movements, each a bit bizarre, describing first a murder and then a cannibal's desire to eat the object of your love. The final lyrics, almost done in a round fashion, "Please don't go/I'd eat you whole/I love you so," layered and layered, the drums gaining in intensity and the arrangement swelling behind the band until it was almost maniacal. Perhaps this was suitable for a song about holding the object of your desire down with concrete blocks, a winking and intense idea for what would become the band's "radio single" at college radio in the US. The weirdness worked, and Alt-J held us all under the water, or maybe it was us that killed them. Either way, we were kept together in a weird, pseudo-fetishy way, held down with weights and bound to the bottom.

Gems :: "All I Ever Wanted"

Sounding like Beach House's Victoria Legrand playing songs from the Sundays' back catalog, DC's Gems launch a beautiful and troubling single, "All I Ever Wanted." Far from triumphant, the cut features male and female vocals in the verses, building toward breezy and brutal chorus. Guitars wash against the shores of a playful bass line in the distance, all a set up for the final movement. "Too much to bear," sings Lindsay Pitts, making clear the implied counterfactuals of the refrain. This is no happy ending, nor is it about getting the one thing you wanted. It does outline the architecture of dusty mornings and moral victories lying somewhere about in the ashes.

Bogan Via :: "TES"

Brooklyn by way of Phoenix (or something) Bogan Via continue to craft their love-sick synth slow jams on latest single, "TES". "Strange how it kills," mourns singer Madeleine Miller as an arrangement of synthesizer stabs and bass unfolds like a chemically compounded version of Beach House. The lonesome lyrics and the Dramamine-paced BPM add up to something completely broken and more than a little pretty. Miller sings at herself in a duet of layer vocals, occasionally adding band-mate Bret Bender in something that resembles Mates of State or Matt and Kim if either duo broke up and continued to make music in spite of and in homage to their lost relationship. Keyboards, like little lasers, point to the scene of the damage. Miller coos, "pray for better luck tomorrow," even though the best of what's around is already here.

Listen :: Bogan Via - "TES"

Phantasms :: "Starboard"

Sounding a bit like the moment your daytime cold medication syncs with a too-big-to-fail cup of coffee, Phantasms unleash a buzzing and pretty single, "Starboard." The low-fi sonics prove almost too much, a sort of spinning nausea, before the chorus turns up and Sarah Atchison's lithe vocal marks the outline of a futuristic ("anachronistic" might work here too) take on the type of pop Beach House made deservedly famous. The outtro is a symphony of all these brittle Casio keyboards, marching in time to the snap of a packaged snare, a eulogy for something perhaps, a focused final movement from what felt, initially, like barely concealed cacophony. This is beauty, unconventionally framed.

Blonds :: "Time"

Exploding with sweeping melody and a pleasant aphorism, "Time is on our side," New York's next big band Blonds release next single, "Time." Coming off the popularity of sultry one-off, "Run," Blonds continues down the road of the one word title, this time with less bombast but no less pathos. Where "Run" erupted into big sky of a chorus, "Time" glides along under its own power, metronomic drums marking the only measure of insistence behind a song that is ostensibly about ignoring just these sorts of chronological pressures. There are elements of the Beach House formula here, and more than enough for fans of a bands like Tennis or Cults, though the impulse for Blonds always trends toward something cinematic. Consider the first lyrics, "Sleep in cars, explode like stars," a couplet with enough generality to appeal to anyone who was ever under 25 and had the kind of halcyon youth - or imagined they did - the band outlines here. "Time" all but suggests the listener project him or herself into the narrative, replacing the general with specifics, a place where the tempo slows and the clocks wind at a more reasonable pace.

Bogan Via :: "Kanye"

A high school acquaintance of mine relays the following story about meeting Kanye West. I suspect many people have a similar version with personal specifics. On the night his second LP, Late Registration dropped, West shuffled past my former high school classmate at the release party. After exchanging pleasantries, West said, "Have you heard my new record?" Before allowing time for a response, he answered his own question, "It's fucking incredible." This moment, and thousands of others like it, lodged Kanye firmly in the consciousness of the modern music fan, a brand of excellence and arrogance of the type that yields single-name soccer players and single-name musicians. Kanye. Or consider Bono, who once leaked his own music by listening to it at volume with the windows of his French villa conspicuously open. It resounds with arrogance bordering on the sublime. After all the anxiety, relativism and pragmatic thinking, it is a relief to hear confidence in art. Brooklyn-by-way-of-Phoenix band Bogan Via have released a single, "Kanye" that reflects this cultural evolution. But instead of brashness, they hollow out the center, replacing it with minor key synthesizer progression and lyrical urgings like, "Give your heart to everything, you gotta move when the move seems right." The vocal duet and somber mood evokes something caught between Mates of State and Beach House's records before you knew about Beach House. This is a diet of sadness, the knowledge that so many have put hope in your arrogance, alone in a tower of your own making, sentenced to a lifetime of the same conversation and your same trope answers. Here, this is beautiful, but they already know that.

Listen :: Bogan Via - "Kanye"

Beach House :: "Myth"

Beach House returns with a bullet in first release, "Myth" from coming May 15th LP, Bloom. It goes without saying that Teen Dream was one of the best records of 2010 and the band brings back their specific brand of heart-sick, echoing pop on "Myth", this time a downward progression with an elevating, made-for-television-montage final movement. The scope is a little bigger and a little cleaner, the same moment in the final act of "10-Mile Stereo" that brought you to the brink of something. The arrangement reverberates with real space, a place where someone can resolve chord progressions with this level of absolute satisfaction.

The Moor :: "Warm Winter"

Finding a seat between Beach House and Warpaint on the team bench for far away feeling pop, The Moor make their entry into your hearts with their debut, self-titled record, out this Tuesday. Lead promotional track, "Warm Winter" that has all the sickly, unsettled feeling of one of those out of place February days where the temperature climbs into the low 60s and everyone wonders if the world slipped officially off its axis. It is, of course, never quite so drastic. The cold returns but, here, before it can, the chorus is a charming pop daisy, replete with backing vocals and a clapping beat. The vocals are that female type that whisper close to your ear, and yet feel like they could be thousands of miles away, buried under wax paper microphone, reverb and a reference to butterflies that you'll either catch or you won't.

Warm Winter by themoor

Top 50 Songs of 2010 :: 5-2 [Now we're screaming, "Sing the chorus again"]

5. Tokyo Police Club - "Breakneck Speed"



It was a comparatively laid back song from a frenetic band that dominated the spring and summer of 2010. For a record that began with ambient beeps, Tokyo Police Club's Champ had its first single sitting tight in the three hole waiting to stumble out with shabby guitars and slurring lyrics exploding into a sea of hi-fi guitars. These dynamic shifts proved to be the genius of "Breakneck Speed," especially with its driving metaphor, motif and lyric, "It's good to be back/good to be back," opening at the 1.12 mark and defining the emotional character of a band releasing their first record since 2007. It was one of those fist-swinging, life-affirming, shout-along moments, "It's good to be back". You couldn't sing it loud enough.

4. Beach House - "Norway"

"Norway" made you a little seasick if you listened to it closely enough. The tonal quality of the keyboards warped up and down in pitch only slightly, but it was more than enough for the listener to feel a mild disquiet, take a deep breath and try to focus on the horizon. This was the sound of unsettling. However, Beach House on "Norway", like the rest of Teen Dream, was comfortable in their treatment of troubling themes because the melodies behind these cold medicine keyboards were simple, beautiful pop. Even "Norway," for its challenging verses, is breathless, pulsing and remarkably singable in the chorus. This does not even account for the bridge - and surely, no one wrote better bridges in 2010 than Beach House - and the way it frames the final chorus, a sea of twirling vocals lifting Victoria Legrand up as she moans into the storm. It was enough to just breath it in.

3. The National - "Bloodbuzz Ohio"

The drums announced their return, and in the case of "Bloodbuzz Ohio," the drums did not equivocate the return of the Kings of Indie Rock in 2010, The National. Like a fighter running combinations, the band open "Bloodbuzz" with rapid fire percussion before laying over a steady piano progression, finding in this combination a strange and less stable cousin to "Fake Empire." Berninger fires his lazy wisdom in his head-spinning trip back to the band's roots in Ohio, reflecting both on his impermanence there, "Ohio don't remember me," and the current economic status quo, "The floors are falling out from everybody I know." But there is surprise affection in this return as Berninger muses with regret, "I never thought about love when I thought about home." The power of this nostos carried the National through a tour de force album, a return in its own right to the frustrated brilliance of Alligator, proving that which was left in the dark, behind and forgotten, is not just fuel for reflection, but what moves us onward.

2. Arcade Fire - "We Used To Wait"



One of the most moving songs of the year was about standing still. Win Butler and Arcade Fire crafted the fantastically tense, "We Used To Wait" to address exactly this disjoint. Butler too, along with many of his contemporaries, stares into his personal history with a mixture of fascination and horror. It is his delicacy in handling the source material that sets both song and record apart. Bulter's curiosity is evident, though not particularly judgemental, as he sifts through seemingly bland vignettes of his youth, like the romantic sloth of postal delivery. There aren't easy answers here, suburbia cast equally as terrifying and beautiful. In fact, Butler's complex and divided feelings about his own upbringing, the ability to find richness in superficial American experience, are the soul of The Suburbs and the emotional core of "We Used To Wait." The record's unsettling cover art revealed the key. We are poised behind a car in the driveway of the subdivided neighborhood of Butler's youth. The only glimpse of ourselves will be in the rear view mirror as we move forward (and backward) to explore what is in front of us and what is left inside.

Beach House :: "I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun"

On Monday, the first installment of our Top 50 Songs of 2010 will run, and this song won't be on it. But leave it to Beach House, a band that certainly will be, to sneak one more song into the last days of a year they so singularly dominated. The band's latest offering, dubbed "I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun" sounds like the title of a Robert Frost and Doctor Seuss mash-up. The sonics are the same distant, wistful pop that peppered Teen Dream, only there is a hint of sleigh bells at the edge of the mix. Victoria Legrand haunts the snowscape with her low-end drone, a Christmas for people with a hole in the chest.

Listen :: Beach House - "I Do Not Care For The Winter Sun"

Beach House :: "White Moon"

Nostalgia for something you never knew enough to miss, or maybe nostalgia for something you wished you known well enough to hurt over, Beach House moved into hearts in the last 12-months with a combination of wistful melodies and peeling keys. "White Moon," either a b-side from one of 2010's best albums, Teen Dream, or the down payment on the next one, changes little in the aesthetic, yet offering the haymaker lyric, "do you want me to want to?" in the opening minute. Nearly baroque, the arrangement quietly marches forward like a delicate plow horse in the dream of some rococo dandy. Not that you know what that's like, but you imagine you might already miss it anyhow.



The Beach House Live iTunes Session is out now.

Beach House :: "White Moon" [Live @ Webster Hall]

Beach House, touring behind the first, second or third best album of the year, Teen Dream, debuted a new cut, "White Moon" the other night at their sold-out Webster Hall gig. Crushing front-woman, Victoria Legrand mumbles, "We're going to play a song, we've never played before live." Like all their cold-medicine pop, it shimmers and pulses, revealing glowing vocals and an addictive melody, all sporting a warning label: Do not operate heavy machinery.



Listen :: Beach House - "Zebra" [UK Edit]
Listen :: Beach House - "Norway"