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.

CHVRCHES :: "The Mother We Share"

Riding down the back of Purity Ring and the intentionally bizarre Grimes, CHVRCHES (a Latinized "Churches") craft one of the best synthesizer singles of 2012. "The Mother We Share" explodes into a glittering chorus of fist-raising Kate Bush-lite vocal loops and buzzing keyboards that recall a far poppier version of the Knife. Vocalist Lauren Mayberry does the vulnerability trick well, howling a barely post-adolescent soprano at the maw of synthesizers and digital flourishes that threaten to drown her, managing to tame them all into time and rhythm for a refrain that takes the listener to the top of the room. It is a binary cacophony brought into step. The next movement, a major label deal, is sure to follow in 2013, hacking off a piece of what the Good Natured, another precocious girl-fronted synth outfit, never quite delivered. For CHVRCHES, as Mayberry sings in the chorus, "the way is long but you can make it easy on me," the way just got a lot shorter and easier for these veterans of other bands who now have nothing but bright lights ahead.