The third glimpse at Milagres stunning new LP, Violent Light, "Sunburn" is one of the album's slowest songs, and, perhaps, most reflective of the band's interest in the intersection of the natural and the modern. Kyle Wilson's crystalline falsetto soars on the hook: "I'll be the bird flying up into the sunburn/ I'll be the zeros and the ones of your favorite picture," an Icarus-sized problem about our aspirations for measures of permanence, maybe a "hopeless fever", in what he calls "a world of plastic". The synthesizers wash over the arrangement like a dusting of pollen, a digital overripe quality of late spring with the world poised to bloom and explode in the same moment. We fly, our wax wings cast as the fragility and power of our ingenuity at once.
Brooklyn's Milagres return for their sophomore LP on Kill Rock Stars, Violent Light, with debut single, "Jeweled Cave". While the record is a diverse and ranging ride, "Jeweled Cave" channels the glam-rock aesthetics of the Bowie catalog, ringing synthesizers and a pleading, pathological chorus, "We were in love!". Nothing but green lights lie ahead for the band - the first two tracks released, "The Letterbomb" and "Jeweled Cave" perhaps the most immediate and bombastic cuts on the record but not the deepest or the best. If you enjoy the first few glimpses of the new, arguably more capacious version of Milagres, wait until you hear "Perennial Bulb" or "Terrifying Sea", the type of band that uses the word "torpid" in their lyrics without blinking, a small band moving toward the top of the room.
Iowa isn't a declaration of independence, no statement of rebellion, full of blighted triumphs. Like the rest of the American middle west, it is a profoundly liminal place, neither here nor there, a once proud frontier now tied to heavily subsidized monoculture farming or four decades of disappearing manufacture. Unless an avid reader of Kinsella's Field of Dreams, no American child fantasizes of growing up and moving to Iowa.Western Affairs, a dream pop band not from Iowa, address this sort of grinding sacrifice on their debut single that carries the name of the state in question. "Iowa" is soaring slow-drive pop, initially recalling the spacey keyboards of Milagres' "Glowing Mouth," still aimed at the sky but the part you look at when searching for moral victories. Lyrically, this is a depressing ride full of cold comforts like, "You gave it your best shot" and "You gave up your life to be with me," though it's unclear if the latter is an admonishment or a gratitude. This is the type of interstitial tension that carries a Washington, DC band to address Iowa, the setting for when things both are and are not.
Opening for New York's Milagres was a gracious Danish artist who plays under the moniker Indians. Without necessarily delving into the bizarre irony of a northern European playing in New York under the name Indians - he could have been Dutch and named his band Lenape Stuyvesant - suffice it to say Indians possesses great affection for New York City. His last song was explicitly about New York, and he waxed philosophical about the city's charms two other times in between his pretty, looping keyboard creations. The audience felt guilty - or what guilty would look like after three drinks - like one of your college friends just informed you how "cool your parents are." You shuffle your feet and demure. These people know New York is transformative, and they know they take it for granted. Indians doesn't, sounding a bit like a more lonely Porcelain Raft, and his car service is coming to get him at 11:30. New York will have to wait.
Milagres took the stage as a surprisingly tight five piece. Their debut record for Kill Rock Stars, Glowing Mouth, dealt almost exclusively in a distended series of keyboard arrangements drowned in high-fret board guitars. They were the Antlers without taking themselves so seriously. On this night they sound phenomenal, featuring one of the better drummers in the independent rock music and layer upon layer of keyboards, vocals and guitars. On record it can be a beautiful, occasionally challenging listen, but live the music is sharp and urgent. The band opened with "Gone," playing "Lost In The Dark" and "Here To Stay" along the way, crafting the dualism of grieving departures and settling down for good. Appropriately, Milagres closed their main set with album opener "Halfway," a final moment of indecision. The chorus suggests, "I could be halfway from anyone," as Indians packed his gear into the trunk of a black cab. On this night, Milagres, one of the better indie rock bands you can see live, was happy to be trapped by the same city Europeans are loathe to leave.
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 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 40-31.
We make a lot of jokes about modern independent rock sounding like someone took one too many cold pills. Milagres sat just on the edge of sea sick with "Glowing Mouth" - and maybe think of this as more recovery than desire to plumb the depths - a bit of Dramamine pop, spinning, tippy and a little weird. But, the refrain, "Son, you better get used to believing in things that you can't see", a fractured falsetto, stuck out as one of the best of the year. The other side of the couplet was about things seen and said in the dark, a perfect analogy for buzzy, slow-drive pop song, all florescent lights and fog on the car ride home.
Even a band from Finland with a name about foreign cinema likeFrench Films wore their influences on their sleeves in 2011. "Pretty In Decadence" cribbed style notes out of all the great post-punk pop bands, tipping its cap to Original Gangstas like Robert Smith while managing to put contemporary bands like the Drums on notice not just for plagiarism, but for bad plagiarism. The guitars were warm and bright and the chorus was a shout-along affair with a rich and meaningless edict about "stay[ing] this way baby". We figured, it's been this way since the early 80s, no one is changing.
They Might Be Giants were the band I came to terms with in 2011, fully admitting that they were the favorite band of my childhood. It wasn't that I had somehow forgotten all those memorized lyrics and melodies, but TMBG finally released an album that reminded me of how I felt in 1996 when Factory Showroom landed in my mailbox and I refused to take it out of my portable CD player. "Can't Keep Johnny Down" was as playful as indie rock would get in 2011 with lyrics about soiling your drawers and addressing haters as "all the dicks in this dick town." They Might Be Giants were back, and I was back with them.
When in doubt, do something dark and sordid. Polica, a Minneapolis band with an affinity for shadowy electronics and loop pedals, found a slice of utter brilliance with "Lay Your Cards Out". In essence, it was a pep talk with lyrics about "getting your head right" and the eponymous title lyric's encouragement to be straight forward. The vocal was one of the most sultry of 2011, a woman asking for honesty and telling you to get your shit together at the same time, at once entirely vulnerable and totally uncompromising.
36. Friends - "Friend Crush"
Friends will be the band who slays your 2012 in a way you always hoped Lykke Li would but never did. "Friend Crush" was their first proper single, a loose bass line and maracas covering a pleading vocal and a chorus about being in love with your best friend. It was murder, slowly done, a long form improvisation piece about gaining proximity by factors of half, each time getting closer and closer but never, ever getting there.
Jonquil's "Mexico" rang as a slice of the tropical pop that so dominated the last few years of independent rock music. These references were more obvious; hell, the title was "Mexico" and the sound was as warm as the water would get this year. The band is set to release their full length in 2012 and "Mexico" will be on it, a hand warmer for the winter and all these spinning melodies, like some pinwheel, that only belong somewhere hot and breezy.
Priory's "Lady of Late" was the song I sung to myself most in 2011. The melody had that natural adhesive quality, lyrics and melody firmly stuck on the first listen. The guitars pulled from the 2004 Modest Mouse catalog, but the surging background vocals and the lyrics about some girl who absolutely kills you made these memorable moments. "I went down, I went down hard", sings vocalist Brandon Johnson, a combination of word and tone that never left your brain after you heard it.
Bad Lamps surged out of the gates with an excellent first single, "Never Know The Difference". It was snappy, little pop song about a "little, spotty British girl", a bit of electro-pop with a basic foundation and brilliant execution. It was simple to be sure, an insistent drum loop, a bit of guitar and an arrangement rooted in a series of three elevating chords, but, this simplicity allowed for an impressive series of hooks to spill from verse and chorus alike.
All Tiny Creatures captured Justin Vernon for the hook of their delicate, spinning single, "An Iris". This collaboration might quite rightly leave you questioning: Does All Tiny Creatures really think they're Kanye West? While the band and Mr. West only shared a collaboration with Vernon in common, "An Iris" was built on a twirling guitar loop, an arrangement that recalled some of Clock Opera's original material and remix work. The directionality of the recording spun around in your headphones, Vernon and the band switching left and right channels as if in orbit around your skull.
It was all chorus fromBest Coast on one-off single, "Gone Again". A series of backing "oohs" and the imminently hooky refrain, "I know that you're gone again." The verses felt less like verses and more like B-melodies, like pre-choruses, as Best Coast singer Beth Cosentino sang about the reasons she should be happy (see: getting high) and the reasons she can't be (see: "you're gone again").
Milagres are coming out the other side of something with chirping, slow-drive single, "Glowing Mouth". Sliding along with a melody completely unacquainted with friction, the chorus emerges with an amazingly subtle falsetto hook, certainly one of the best of the year thus far. Despite its seeming weightlessness, the lyrics in the refrain admonish a reminder of faith in an age of uncertainty, a curious plea for meaning in what they call the "darkness". This all gives "Glowing Mouth" an undeniable sense of previous turbulence, recent even, and this the gliding calm after the uproar. It is Grizzly Bear's "Two Weeks" but with a fistful of downers headed for the drain. It feels like a recovery, faith and hope in the unseen.
