Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Postcard"

In their most angular and insistent work to date, Letting Up Despite Great Faults builds a wall of fuzzy synthesizers on "Postcard". Buried in miles of reverb and feedback, the vocal acts as lead instrument but nothing else, only hints of consonants and vowels hanging at the edge of hearing, a few lines like, "find you" just clear enough from the maw to discern. The breathy snare is ceaseless, even as the arrangement wanders through a protracted outtro, the final, mildly abrasive tones behaving in eulogy for a lost, sunny and barely understood thing.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Bulletproof Girl"

Letting Up Despite Great Faults are something of a one-trick pony. They craft these post-chillwave jams for listeners tied intimately to the notion of grinding and pretty failures. "Bulletproof Girl" is no different with lyrics like, "I can see every word bounce off you" and "If I fall, would you take me down?". The keyboards glow with intentional florescence, an arrangement of growing insistence that arrives at the band's best chorus, rising to the hum of highway noise and a final conditional, "If I find my way back ... ." The girl in the title is immaculate, not privy to nicks and dings, the object of getting lost and realizing only too late that you had no weapons against her.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Visions"

Letting Up Despite Great Faults practically monopolize the market for great, fuzzy, summer pop. This is saying something in an era where making a photo pretty involves using a washed out filter, where making pop music involves similar haze, where a band actually named itself Washed Out. Put another way, in the last three years lo-fi synth pop was to indie rock what drone strikes were to American foreign policy: ubiquitous, effective and debatably good. But, remarkably, LUDGF avoided sounding predictable, even if they trafficked the same territory as so many other bands. Perhaps it was their album art which frequently featured isolated appendages of what you imagine are quite attractive brunette girls, or perhaps, more importantly, it was their ability to drive their sonics under a layer of fuzz but never to lose the hooks and melodies that mark the boundaries of good pop music. On "Visions," the lead track from forthcoming LP, Untogether, the band features the same methodical guitar, fuzzy synthesizers and a satisfying launch sequence as the band tumbles into the body of the arrangement. It sounds exactly like everything else, and still manages a certain singularity in a sea of bands held under the water and neatly browned in the sun.

Top 50 Songs of 2011 :: 50-41 [They're setting fire to my face]

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 and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 50 to 41.

50. California Wives - "Tokyo" 

Nothing felt more neon than California Wives' "Tokyo" in 2011. It was nothing but synths and guitars, a chorus rooted in a geographic tautology, "They're building houses and lights in Tokyo." The brilliance was relative and it was made manifest in the metallurgic guitar chords and keyboard progressions. It all felt like little dabs of mercury slipping around the surface of a table.

49. All The Apparatus - "Let's Go Ride Bikes"

All Apparatus appeal to anyone who enjoys the work of Los Campesinos and anyone who enjoys fun. But you don't need to be watching that "Grab Some Buds" Budweiser commercial to feel like even your most asinine behaviors hold a life-and-death importance. For this Portland band, it is the simple act of riding bikes outdoors that doubles as a thesis statement, a raison d'etre. It is youth in revolt; youth screaming a silly chorus; youth playing big horns, guitars and chimes. It is unanxious youth in an age of increasing anxiety.

48. Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "Sophia In Gold"



We were arguably more into Letting Up Despite Great Faults' cover art on their 2011 EP, a sepia toned shot of some girl's knees, than we were into their music. This is compliment to that girl's knees and "Sophia In Gold", a snappy little slice of electro-pop that reminds the listener of a more seriously heartsick Jimmy Tamborello. LUDGF finally quit on the girl, whoever she is, saying, "I can't say your lines for you." This is a final act, to be sure, and a good one at that.

47. Ducktails - "Hamilton Road"

Certainly the most underrated chorus of the year belonged to Ducktails, a Real Estate side project, and their song "Hamilton Road". Nothing sounded more like a lazy summer afternoon played over a broken stereo as the band mushed through the awesomely singable, "We sit by the water". It wasn't even two-and-a-half minutes, and it didn't need to be.

46. The Echo Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

First, The Echo Friendly isolate the guitars, then add a clap track and the most distant male and female vocals of the year. If it sounds obliteratingly sad, it is. They're talking to each other, ostensibly about, well, the "Same Mistakes", but it never feels conversational. These two parties divert and merge with each other like two lost sides of a double helix, intersecting for a momentary duet before chasing each other away again.

45. Deleted Scenes - "Bedbedbedbedbed"

We loved that Deleted Scenes gave the world such a head-nodding single in 2011 and we loved that they gave us the central lyric five times in a row. No one made a better case for the lack of a need for a space-bar as the band reflected on a woman who pulled their act together, cut their hair and made them get out of bed in the morning. It sounded like The Shins on too much cold medicine which was entirely great.

44. Gauntlet Hair - "Top Bunk"

Gauntlet Hair are one of those awesome college radio bands with a good gimmick (the reverb thing) and an uncommon boldness. "Top Bunk" snapped like their previous work, only this time it changed time signatures with the effortlessness of Art School Rock. It spun off the rails toward the end, grinding the echo-chamber to a halt. The original statement of purpose still stood: We can make huge music with three guys and an effects pedal.

43. The Radio Dept. "The One"

The Radio Dept. had their best year in history, releasing a double-disk compilation album featuring the previously unreleased, "The One" to go with a decade of singles. It was a slow-drive version of the band's usual cold keyboard, placed firmly on a reggae upbeat. This wouldn't be the same brilliance as "Heaven's On Fire" but it didn't contend to be so, more victory lap than finishing kick.

42. Yukon Blonde - "Fire"

If Family of the Year was going to break out in 2011-12, then Yukon Blonde was determined to be close behind, maybe even transcendent of their genre rivals. Both bands make pop with a distinctly Western feel, "Fire" featuring some slide guitar and an affinity for the apocalypse that you only find in musicians and certain circles of evangelical believers. Since the band qualifies as solidly the former and solidly not the latter, we assume their references to burning water and faces is purely metaphorical, but entirely sticky, a hook that lodged in your brain like it was its last day on planet earth.

41. Dominant Legs - "Hoop of Love" 

There is a world in which you can argue that Dominant Legs' "Hoop of Love" had the single best chorus of 2011. A shimmering slice of guitar pop, the song has a respectable pre-chorus, a vague portent to the take off that happens in the real refrain. Muttered asides about "keeping my mouth shut" blur into the completely elevating hook where the band yelps interrogatives about who will be the one to do a variety of things; they leave these questions unanswered. This fails to mention the bridge, an updated Belle and Sebastian inspiration, full of a flecking strum pattern and a final taxiing to the runway of "Hoop of Love".

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Sophia In Gold"

The latest from Letting Up Despite Great Faults, "Sophia In Gold" is the second track off the coming Paper Crush EP. A buzzy, slow-drive electro-pop cut, the song showcases upfront synths and warm guitars over the top of buried, whispering vocals. This is the kind of summery music that invented the term "summery music", or the kind of music that Ben Gibbard and Jimmy Tamborello ordained when they starting shipping DAT to one another in 2002. With heartsick lyrics like, "But I can't say your lines", and here the assumptive metaphor is that we're all actors and this all has the distinctive scent of cruel fiction, Letting Up seizes the emotional conch that typifies the best bedroom and laptop pop. Of course, like the best bedroom pop, "Sophia In Gold" is available for free download and Paper Crush drops officially on August 2.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Teenage Tide"

A floral dress confidently above a tanned knee offers both an abstraction and a definitive tableau of a coming summer season. Whoever this girl is, whatever this next turn brings, it will be seen with the impressionists' squint at perfection, utterly blurry and entirely scintillating. Letting Up Despite Great Faults made no mistake with the cover art on their woozy new EP, Paper Crush, or new single, "Teenage Tide". The sound washes some of the color back into the picture, trafficking dizzy melodies and feedback while still discovering a late back beat and soaring guitar lines that wouldn't be uncomfortable in Robert Smith's notebook. The band's song writing has here jagged away from some of their early chillwave flirtations, choosing instead the twee-post-punk direction of another wordy band, Pains Of Being Pure At Heart. The soft focus of LUDGF's obvious influences take nothing away from "Teenage Tide", one of those finger-tapping, windows down singles in the spirit of "In Between Days", "The Boy With The Thorn In His Side" and "Young Adult Friction". You know, the songs you put on the mixtape for the girl in the cover art.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults - Teenage Tide by lettingup

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "In Steps"

In the pantheon of "bands with names that are sentences," Letting Up Despite Great Faults bleed as the most poetic. "In Steps," the first track on their self-titled album is no less esoteric, if also immediately approachable. A humming, almost self-consciously Nintendo synth line is our first tone, backed quickly by a lazy guitar riff and a drum beat, all at the pace of a summer jog. It's like a Phoenix song spent too much time in the sun or like a Postal Service song fallen in glue and then accidentally rolled in glitter, "In Steps" is polished and bright in a way that is entirely unplanned. Late summer fades into fall and theoretically, you chase south in a game of chicken and equilibrium with the equator. Letting Up Despite Great Faults is the warm little center of the universe. And you are close to the heart of it.

Listen :: Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "In Steps"
Listen :: Letting Up Despite Great Faults - "The Colors Aren't You Or Me"