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.

HAERTS :: "All The Days

A rapid-fire combination pops from the tams as HAERTS' singer Nini Fabi scoops her way up - and the height is considerable as the arrangement is in full-bloom - to the top of the refrain on latest single, "All The Days". Possessing the ambient power of all great pop music, it describes a place that is no place, a time that is no time, quite literally "All The Days". Cribbing the charming, now Taco Bell-approved sonics of St. Lucia (who also acts as co-writer and producer here), the creepy vocal loops of Kate Bush and the synth dessert of Men At Work's globalized drum-fills, HAERTS cuts across genre lines with their pan-location pop. "All The Days", like "Wings" before it, won't necessarily be the song that breaks the band into the mainstream, but the next one, the first single from their full-length due later this year, will almost certainly transition this band from one that sounds like it could be anywhere, to one that is, in fact, everywhere.

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.

Amanda Mair :: "Doubt"

There is first the girl. Then, there is what people say about her. Last, there arises some vaguely Hegelian synthesis, a tacking jag between these two tangents. Bursting on to the scene last spring with the inspired single, "House", Amanda Mair garnered as much attention for her music as she did for her age. She was - and is still - just 16 years old. Perhaps her age shouldn't have mattered, the secondary option of journalistic focus being her uncanny sonic resemblances to Kate Bush (it has been the Year of Kate Bush for, like, two years now). On latest single, "Doubt" one of only a few recorded tracks completed for our friends over at Labrador, Mair deals a slice of glittering and brittle pop. Her vocals are equal parts smokey and unobfuscated, asking unblinkingly in the bridge, "Will love destroy me?", a question that demands both blurred edges and hard lines. The chorus posits the vaguely tautological, "I wanna become what people become", a dangerous upward arrow and one Mair immediately denies with, "but I know I'll stay here." It is this expression of stasis that land us in the midst of galloping drums, heavenly synths and the voice of a girl that can't possibly be this good. These are the things that have nothing to do with age or another girl who wrote "Wuthering Heights" when she was only 17.

Listen :: Amanda Mair - "Doubt"

The Jezabels - "Endless Summer"

Big news from the Jezabels, one of the best bands on the planet, now officially set to release their debut LP, Prisoner, on September 16. The first peak at the contents of the record is first single, "Endless Summer", opening with the band's trademark rolling drums and menacing keys. The signature is still the mercurial voice of singer Hayley Mary, an instrument with which she rages through the middle of the band's arrangements, pushing out to the edges of her range and modulating between distant pitches with absurd ease and aplomb. Everyone (this writer included) says Kate Bush, but a more refined comparison might make Mary the darker, less-British cousin of The Sundays' crushing singer Harriet Wheeler. And this is the trick,"Endless Summer" appears both dangerous and vulnerable, at once ready to kill and be killed. Come September, I suspect those tables will have turned and the target will be the American music public, set to get absolutely run over by The Jezabels and Prisoner.

Endless Summer by thejezabels

Amanda Mair :: "House"

It is both the year of Kate Bush and the year where an astute observer can rightly ask, "Can someone be inspired by Kate Bush if they were born in 1995?" New Labrador signee and one without a driver's license, 16 year old Amanda Mair spins a percocious and delicate web on first single, "House". What begins as a lilting, anti-lullabye shifts into higher gear, trading reverent hush for rolling drums, surging strings and a melody that easily could have cracked Bush's The Kick Inside in 1978. Of course, today Bush is preparing to release an album of remastered material, backed by a troubled single, "Deeper Understanding" which features a terrifying autotuned chorus and truly bizarre lyrical content addressing our intimacy with machines. Kate Bush isn't even Kate Bush anymore. Amanda Mair will carve out her own version of this legacy of big, orchestral pop, making it less the year of any of set of influences and more the year of whoever is bold enough to pick up and re-light the torches.

Listen :: Amanda Mair - "House"