Given that most American high school students are assigned The Great Gatsby as part of their junior year English curriculum, it is appropriate that an immensely precocious singer, Eloise Keating, only 17 and a Brit, has already written a song inspired by the novel. Aesthetically, it's part Kyla La Grange - you could make an argument for Lana Del Rey, but why? - and part early Ellie Goulding. The arrangement roots in unexpected steel drums and an austere piano progression, featuring Keating's lilting croon, scooping between pitches in the chorus like a little ship buoyed by the waves. It's a beautiful and promising introduction to Keating, an artist who still might be a year away for the American music consumer, but who will certainly beat on backwards into the future. Fitzgerald's novel regards the specific terrors of the lost self, the inability to recapture the past, the deep sadness of now. Keating, conversely, lays firm claim on what is to come.
Kyla La Grange absolutely dominated 2011, and she returns with the blinking neon of new single "Cut Your Teeth". The bombast of her previous work - see, "Walk Through Walls" as both lyrical and arrangement evidence - is replaced here with a winnowing synthesizer riff and La Grange's brittle and brilliant voice. The title lyric is an aphorism and double entendre for the allegedly value and definite cruelty of experience. The closing sequence features La Grange bobbing and weaving through the synths, a hall of mirrors where her last lyric, "you never knew my name", hits like a fist.
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 2011, no band may appear twice. Each post title contains a lyric from one of the ten songs to follow, a hint and a hook that stuck out clearly in this group. Today, we count down 20-11.
20. Kyla La Grange - "Walk Through Walls"
In a hospital waiting room last January I opened an email from the publicist of a heretofore unknown British singer, Kyla La Grange. It was singer-songwriter stuff, I thought. In short, this would be instantly detestable. And then, like the great Eli Cash suggested, what if it wasn't? What if a tiny blonde girl with a guitar wrote the single biggest chorus of 2011? "Walk Through Walls" was built for the sky, winking influences to Kate Bush (see: "It's the year of Kate Bush" joke, on going, 2005-present) and so full of life that it could not be ignored. "Walk Through Walls" suggested an ability to transmute physical spaces which was exactly what the waifish La Grange did in 2011. But she didn't just walk through these barriers, she began by destroying all of them.
No one had more fun in 2011 than Capital Cities and their horn-heavy, electro-single, "Safe and Sound". It was a slam the first time you heard it, instantly singable, ebullient and entirely sunny. But this was back in June, before M83 would use a huge sax in their biggest song, before the Rapture would do the same on their promotional single. If it was going to be the Year of Unironic Use of Brass/Woodwinds In Pop, Capital Cities had the jump on everyone.
St. Lucia is going to absolutely kill you in 2012 with a debut EP due out just after the first of the year. In 2011 the tropical single "All Eyes On You", a song that could easily slip into a Tom Cruise montage from the first half of Cocktail, came burning out of speakers and headphones with an aural portrait of something equatorial (even the band name notwithstanding). "All Eyes On You" was built on a series of lazy bass pick-ups, enough synth and keys to bankrupt your local Guitar Center and a hook so breathless and modular it fit into your heart and mind like a lost puzzle piece. Though the visual metaphors were all Caribbean, you were only taking a vacation from the rest of the synth-bands you thought you liked before you heard this.
17. BIGKids - "Drum In Your Chest"
I will confess I know next to nothing about BIGKids other than they send great personal emails and their single, "Drum In Your Chest" got more plays in a week than half the other music I listened to this year. The song was so damn simple, three or four lyrical couplets and a driving and metronomic chorus. The lyrics address our certainty that our breathing is controlled unconsciously, suggesting the sublime, "Will you remember to take another breath/when your heart's beating like a drum in your chest?" You chuckle. Of course, you would remember to breathe. Goofy, you think. But this is before the four-minute-twenty-second sprint that is "Drum In Your Chest", a single strong enough to make you reconsider basic bodily physics. Thus the stakes are set: you might not necessarily survive this. The band, I presume, welcomes this, a single built to dance to, a single built to kill.
16. Beirut - "East Harlem"
"East Harlem" is a swimming trip through Beirut's Zach Condon's magically real universe on the Upper (and he means higher than you're used to) East Side. It was a much more credible take on Billy Joel's "Uptown Girl" narrative. Here, he is a downtown boy, but that doesn't mean what you think either, and Uptown has been retrofitted to be Spanish Harlem. The moment to watch in "East Harlem" is the arrangement shift at the 2:10 mark, a swinging engagement full of horns and the ever-present, foundational piano progression. Condon looses himself on a series of couplets that begin with, "the sound", suggesting it is tone alone that can save us. Sound. It is your breath at the door, he says. It is what will bring him home. Sound, he presumes, still has power, and in the second movement of "East Harlem", Condon presumes absolutely correct.
15. We Are Augustines - "Chapel Song"
Like Pela,before it, We Are Augustines do their best work introducing a lyric and then repeating it with increasing degrees of insistence. On "Chapel Song", the best song off their great 2011 LP, Rise Ye Sunken Ships, the band channels its origins as the aforementioned Pela, a group who once made a mountain out of saying, "Yeah, there's an undertow, but it ain't got me" twice in a row. This go round, We Are Augustines exploded "Chapel Song" into a repeated voice-quivering pathos around images like "shaking like a leaf" and "lying through my teeth". You have to say it twice, at least, and louder the second, to make it all work. The final edict, more recently appropriated by a company selling outerwear on television, "tear up the photograph/'cause its a bright blue sky" repeats no less than five times, each more meaningful than the last. We assume you'll need to listen to this at least as many times.
The inevitable march of the drums in Dreamers of the Ghetto's seminal album closer "Tether" feels almost fatalist. The song directs itself less six-feet-under and more miles high. The resignation of the central lyric, "it's just another door/tether on the other side" belies the vitriol and energy in the vocals and arrangement. The edge appears at the song's midpoint where those marching drums attach with an abrasive down-stroke guitar chord. The synthesizers wash over the song's architecture at the 4.40 mark, maybe the single finest and biggest moment in music in 2011. It is spacious and grandiose as the band wails to the finish line, but neither of these qualities feel a bit out of place or even dishonest. In the end you were supposed to arrive here anyways.
13. Cults - "You Know What I Mean"
Cults asked listeners if "You Know What I Mean" in 2011 and they found mostly people did. Using conversational platitudes as song titles isn't new, but the Cults version connected to a bombastic and effusive single. Sure, the melody was cribbed from the Four Tops' "I Can't Help Myself (Sugar Pie Honey Bunch)" and, yes, they were one of those bands that went from a few blog posts to a Columbia Record deal in no time flat, but what made "You Know What I Mean" great had nothing to do with hype or criticism. The swinging snaps and wailing vocals would appear nowhere else. It was fragile and reactionary in the same breath, brittle and resolute. It was, ultimately, something intensely familiar.
As a sense of foreboding seized our collective consciousness, Damien Abraham and Fucked Up cut through the fuzz and penned a song about "The Other Shoe" where the main lyric was, "We're dying on the inside". It was still hardcore, the band hadn't changed drastically since the seminal Chemistry of Modern Life broke them from relative obscurity in 2008. This, "The Other Shoe" was their thesis statement for their punk opera LP, David Comes To Life, a song that mixed big arena drums, delicate female vocals, screaming choruses and huge soaring guitars. In short, no one went more for broke than Fucked Up in 2011, making a great record about a fictional lightbulb factory (you can't make this up) and absolutely slaying on "The Other Shoe". The key part of, "We're dying on the inside" was that Abraham didn't make it a terminal diagnosis; they were marching orders and a call to arms.
From the same East London folk scene that birthed Mumford and Sons, Noah and the Whale and Laura Marling came Dry The River and their surging single, "New Ceremony". It was acoustically rooted, to be sure, but the song found its sea legs at the 1.30 mark when the pre-chorus spun, seemingly, out of nowhere with elevating strings and a vicious hook. This was only portentous of the chorus itself, a top of the room melody built to break most vocalists, a refrain that dumped its personal effects on the table, turned its pockets out and said, "This is all I've got." This was the sort of song that rhymed "prison kiss" with "dying wish" without batting an eyelash. There was something to be said for this brand emotivism in 2011 with no critical voice necessary.
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.
As we inch closer and closer to Kyla La Grange's debut LP at the beginning of next year, she has yet another single ready for release in October, "Heavy Stone" with B-side, "Lambs". Available for streaming and free download below, La Grange is again in top form, though it almost risks redundancy to pay her these types of compliments. In her textbook style, "Heavy Stone" opens with a brittle guitar riff before processing in seemingly inexorable fashion toward a crashing final 30 seconds, the drums finding a new and resolute down beat as strings rise and churn behind the little woman with the enormous voice. Of course, it wouldn't be a La Grange song without a vicious lyrical twist. Over and above lines like, "I want to see myself painted in an invisible grey" and the cruel bridge, "We will remain unfinished puzzles as we sit", she closes with the last line of the chorus, all but that brittle guitar stripped away, the final denial, "I am carrying my cold heart home." Somehow even in this moment of narrative slinking away, gutted, La Grange still feels firmly in control, a master of big, heart-broken pop.
Second single from new UK burner Kyla La Grange will be out on Chess Club on July 11th but it will hit the Internet earlier, considerably - this morning, in fact. "Been Better" stomps furiously out of the gates, an ode to the gripping conclusion of "Walk Through Walls" single b-side "Courage". La Grange, as always, feels built to blow the doors off any spatial constraints, somehow bound to find the swollen and thrashing boundaries of whatever arrangement she builds for her listeners. Lyrically, this is a declaration of independence, a favorite topic of this moment in the singer's early career. She proves more than willing to channel her own emotional nadirs in the hopes of inverting them into apexes; what Issac Brock deemed, "taking heartache with hard work." This trick isn't new, but the tiny blond girl holding all of the cards (and the talent) knows how to play it well.
Kyla La Grange is both precocious and arriving in New York for the first time on Sunday. Her excellent single, "Walk Through Walls" is already one of the best of 2011, firmly establishing her as someone to watch as she works towards a full length record later this year. La Grange took some time out to reflect on her writing process, if New Yorkers are assholes and her strength as a swimmer. She plays Communion NYC on Sunday at Public Assembly in her first New York show before a run at SXSW.
In what risks useless hyperbole, Kyla La Grange releases the excellent B-side "Courage" to accompany her bulletproof single, "Walk Through Walls". "Courage" is a more methodical affair, progressing, as it seems La Grange is built to do, relentlessly skyward. At first, the tragedy grinds at the pace of a funeral procession haunted by plinking keys and morose tams. But the arrangement swells and she breaks. La Grange speculates about a hole in our soul, the hundreds of implications under our skin and the easiest way to wreck her with a hand through her hair. She laid her heart bare, she tells us, before pleading with the void for courage. The song's final act is full and flecked with a string section articulating just the dreadful power La Grange has at her disposal. She wails against her own backing vocals - an argument she and we can't lose - and a guitar sails down the fret board in final flurry. For a song about bravery in the face of something terrible, this, again, sounds perfect.
If you don't have a certified crush on Kyla La Grange, you aren't looking hard enough. With a debut 2011 go-for-broke single, "Walk Through Walls," La Grange stunned us with a Kate Bush impression and a chorus designed to not care if it burns up on re-entry. On older, more plaintive "Vampire Smile," La Grange still has her trademark edge with lyrics like "I'm going to get so drunk on you and kill your friends" and the confessional "I want a scar that looks just like you." She is brittle and dangerous at once, building a sprawling middle section from the foundation of a tiny acoustic guitar progression. Though there are streaks of masochism here, assumed and metaphorical pain, La Grange isn't scaring anyone off. It's still her year.
Kate Bush introduced herself to so many with the simple and esoteric greeting, "Heathcliff? It's me Cathy." With no Bronte references for the UK's Kyla La Grange, the introduction will be a stunning and soaring first single, "Walk Through Walls." Featuring pounding drums of the kind of tribal menace that absolutely made Florence Welch, and a withering vocal in the spirit of Bush and PJ Harvey, La Grange has her own single by the hair with no interest in letting go. For the chorus, she rides her voice to the top of arrangement with a destructive and life-affirming lyric, "Get up, get up, get up/my heart is heavy." In the spirit of La Grange's sonic cousins The Jezabels, this is wide open, go-for-broke pop. Soon enough, Kyla La Grange won't need to introduce herself to anyone; everyone will already know her.
