On The List :: Skyes @ Cameo Gallery [2.28.14]

It is both metaphor and cold reality to be the 8:30 band on a Friday night. You're just starting out, and everyone knows it, whether they know you or not. Skyes, a Brooklyn four-piece, with ambition that easily outpaces their current Q-rating, took the stage at Cameo Gallery without saying a word. Singer DA Knightly would thank the crowd after the night's penultimate song, introducing the band for the first time, maybe unnecessarily. The set spoke for itself.

Any discussion of the rising stock of a band like Skyes begins and ends with Knightly. Toting what may well be the best voice in Brooklyn, she is a mixture of mad scientist - punching keys on one of the two iPads on stage while also playing a keyboard - and organic sprite, seemingly possessed by the nature and power of the band's arrangements, maybe even by her own voice. Opening with the propulsive, "Secondhander", this writer began to do the math: This is likely their second or third best song in their own estimation, still with hit-in-waiting "A Girl Named Jake" saved for the latter portion of the set. Labels should sit up in their seats and take notes. To my eye there weren't industry people in the audience (always look at the back: too well dressed, maybe a leather jacket if they're in their 40s, usually talking through some part of the set), but there will be in the future. The sound that came through the admittedly splashy acoustics of Cameo proved big enough to fill far larger rooms, a throwback to industrial pop bands like Garbage and Metric, a stadium-sized aesthetic playing in room that fire codes around 100.

The middle of the set dragged a bit, and the band should look to free Knightly from her keyboard duties, but the closing three songs would evangelize anyone. Running through "A Girl Named Jake", "Burden" and an as yet untitled closer large enough to sink Williamsburg into the East River, the band announced its arrival with its departure for the night. On record, "A Girl Named Jake" sounds like a Kate Bush research project, updated for the 2014 listener. In person, the sound is bigger and more ambitious, Knightly hitting intermediate pitches with deftness and sophistication. When she finally introduced the band, a bit of superfluity when you're playing mostly to friends and friends-of-friends, the scattered audience of beards, shoulder bags, and asymmetrical hair cuts already knew. It stood as an introduction nonetheless. She and the band should get comfortable with this part, the introduction; they're going to be meeting a lot more people.

Skyes :: "A Girl Named Jake"

Opening with unsettling Kate Bush vocal synths, Brooklyn four-piece Skyes bursts onto the scene with their debut single, "A Girl Named Jake". Easily one of the better singles of the year, vocalist DA Knightly unleashes withering professional blight on lyrics like, "After shows, drink 'til you die" and "As your days go by, just cope 'til your young body dies." Suffice it to say, if the synths don't kill you in the final movement, Knightly is interested in your metaphoric and literal death throughout "A Girl Named Jake". The stunning last go, a stuttering re-imagining of the chorus, sends Knightly out of over a bed of buzzing low-end electrical wires and the keyboard obligatos that nearly made you say, "It's in the trees!" at the outset.

The Jezabels :: "The End"

I still remember seeing the Jezabels at CMJ in 2010, the band that arrived at the festival with the best recorded material and the best chance of latching on with a major. Of course, they didn't, and it wasn't the fault of the live show, singer Hayley Mary operating as a force of nature on shitty PA systems across Brooklyn and the basements of the Lower East Side. The band won't play the 2013 iteration of CMJ but releases latest single, "The End" as their return to recording and return to form. "The End" is breathless ride through Mary's upper register, glowing synths and racing guitars providing the antidote for lyrics like, "You gave me your hand/ I gave you dirt." This here-it-is-you-get-nothing sentiment rings triumphant through the chorus, emerging with a clear sense that "The End" is essentially about closing the loop on one epoch and beginning another. Mary sings, "I want to know," and we all do too.

CHVRCHES :: "Recover"

If there was one band in the world more ready to break out in 2013 than CHVRCHES, it certainly isn't obvious, even at this advanced stage of human history where everyone seems to know everything instantly. Channeling the best parts of the Kate Bush experience (read: cold synths, weird flourishes, not dressing like a Wiccan spirit), the band exploded into our collective consciousness last year with the stomping "Mother We Share". "Recover" represents something of a different animal, though vocalist Lauren Mayberry's fragile, resolute soprano still lies at the center of the arrangement. Her breakable, but never broken, vocal allows a certain battering here, and, finally, a bit of strength in the unknown.

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.

Pretty Heart :: "Fraud"

The bombastic creep-pop that spills out of Pretty Heart's (nee Morgan Hollinger) "Fraud" is one part Kate Bush (it is, after all, still the Year of Kate Bush, 1979-present) and one part School of Seven Bells. Full of hooks and intentionally unsettling moments, Pretty Heart taps the same pathos that allows Ellie Goulding to say things like, "Do you want my heart between your teeth?", a sort of destructive but very serious approach to love and loss that feels important in an age of emotional unavailability. Love sounds like a dark, weird murder on Pretty Heart's debut EP, Half Asleep, a collection of songs that reflect both a tactile bedroom sensibility, an intimacy in the shadows. "Fraud," the most approachable of the seven track on Half Asleep is rooted in a dressed up keyboard progression and then accented with Hollinger's controlled and confessional vocals, layered into a dizzying and glittering array. It is either the biggest bedroom record of 2012 or a record that will only be in the bedroom until absolutely everyone hears it.

Stars :: "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It"

Stars have been making music just long enough to risk being a footnote. You know, reference material, the kind of thing you cite in an academic defense of some new, and presumably, better band. Their last album, The Five Ghosts, found Stars playing itself a bit. This is, of course, the grand risk of being first and being good: You one day find yourself playing yourself asking, "What would we do here?" and either railing against or falling mercilessly into this pit of self-parody. Imitation of self is the direct antecedent to artistic atrophy, a very cruel and very public version of your grandmother's advice about you continuing to make that face and your face staying that way. This raised the stakes and lengthened the odds for Stars coming release, The North. The first single, "The Theory of Relativity" risked everything contained in this paragraph, a titan of indie rock seemingly adrift, until the second taste of the record, "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It" released this morning. It is full of bleeding hearts and Cure-style guitars and a lyric, "Take the weakest thing in you and beat the bastards with it" as close to both a great turn of phrase and marching orders as we get in 2012. Amy Milan shows up late to do a sort of Kate Bush turn in her upper register while Torquil Campbell outlines the architecture of a pro-love polemic below. It is all in the title, predictable in a sense but spacious and propulsive like all great pop music, buzzing against killer lines like, "if I'm frightened if I'm high, it's my weakness please forgive it." As for Stars, if their weakness was that they started to look too much like themselves, here they prepare to beat you with impunity.

The Jezabels :: "Try Colour"

The Jezabels are releasing their second free mp3 off their enormous debut record, Prisoner. This cut, "Try Colour" is another one of their shuddering, spacious tracks, almost in the spirit of "Hurt Me" from last year's She's So Hard EP. Singer Hayley Mary shines again, a menacing and brittle presence, uttering lyrics like, "Stuck like the star light, you pick your own fire, baby", at once sensual and distant. The final movement brings together thundering drums, rippling guitars and Mary's confessional lyrics, "In my dreams I've been a stranger." The arrangement washes away, unsettled as a matter of course. This band will be back in the States soon enough and you will have to reconcile whether you are in the small but growing group of people who have experienced them in person or if you still haven't seen Hayley Mary turn herself into the human torch on stage. I'll bet you a whiskey they close with Prisoner-closer, "Catch Me" and the biggest 30-seconds of music you'll hear in 2011 as they storm out of the bridge. But try, "Try Colour" for now while you reason out which side you're on.

Listen :: The Jezabels - "Try Colour"