Adam Lempel and the Heartbeats :: "Echo"

Sounding loads like A.C. Newman and the New Pornographers, Adam Lempel, the brains of the band, Weekends, spins a bit of solo brilliance on "Echo". Soliciting vocals from Amanda Glasser, here playing the moral-authority-Neko-Case-role, "Echo" spins over a cello-drenched arrangement, engineering the effect of the title lyric, "like an echo, I follow you around". Perhaps comfortable with a modicum of obsession, or maybe with its mutuality as Lempel and Glasser sing to each other in duet down the back stretch, "Echo" rings as dully sweet, not certainly creepy.

Top 50 Songs of 2012 :: [10-2]

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 2012 and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 10 to 2. 

10. A.C. Newman feat. Neko Case - "Not Talking"



What separated Newman's 2012 release, Shut Down The Streets, from being a New Pornographers record remained unclear, especially with a Neko Case appearance on the debut single, "Not Talking". What remained certain was this: when Case and Newman collaborate, the results are magic. A whirling melody and Newman's typical austerity dissolved into Case's transformative duet. It was about a lonely, reverse-engineered Eden. "Rescue teams will look for days/I like the way things are/They should abandon the search," they sang, providing the outlines for exile of these two massive talents. It was allegedly about redemption, a bridge about distance, Case and Newman soaring out over the arrangement with sturdy wings, but it was clear these two were happier out there alone.


9. Father John Misty - "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings"



The most memorable drum and guitar line of 2012, Father John Misty built a house of death on America' far western boundary with "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings." "What are people gonna think?" Misty posed to the woman in question, though he suffered from no reservations of formality when dishing up one of the most satisfying sexual lyrics of the year, "I laid up for hours in a daze retracing the expanse of your American back." It was all love and funerals, digging in the dirt, girls along for the ride, making out and up in cemeteries in Los Angeles.


8. Sun Kil Moon - "Sunshine in Chicago"



Mark Kozelek has never lost sleep over forthrightness. In 2012 "Sunshine in Chicago" was no exception, a bracingly honest take on getting old. He admits to getting an STD in Chicago in the 90s, though this somehow comes across as dulcet as the admissions of his own father's exile to Chicago in the summers to relieve a crowded house. Nominally, it is a walk through a sunny Chicago, but it is Kozelek's talent for blighted imagery that takes us to his father, a more-famous career with the Red House Painters, and that line about "guys in tennis shoes." Few other artists do place, minutiae, and lyrical imagery as well as Kozelek, admitting to being both crushingly sad and entirely fine with getting older, all in the span of a walk down Lincoln Avenue on a sunny afternoon.


7. The Zolas - Knot In My Heart"



The most unexpected and infectious chorus of the year, The Zolas' "Knot In My Heart" proved to have staying power behind their one monstrous hook. It was the Spoon song for the year we didn't get a Spoon record, a bit of angular and restless piano-pop that held incredible darkness beneath an ebullient surface. The "knot" wasn't real, though it probably felt that way. The band unleashed lyrics like, "it's hard and weird not to know how your day begins, though I'm lying next to someone new" a simple and crushing aside. The final twist saw the arrangement at full bore, sparse piano chords insistent over the top of the repeated and eponymous lyric. It both ripped and could rip you apart.


6. The Vaccines - "Aftershave Ocean"



The magical realism emerged as a thick stew on the Vaccines' non-single, "Aftershave Ocean." It was their best song from a frankly forgettable sophomore record that will undeniably result in people getting fired at Columbia Records. "Aftershave Ocean" was undeniably excellent, a weird mixture of elements of 2001 Strokes and 1968 Beatles. The guitar line chased the melody, Justin Young singing throwback pop lyrics like, "You're coming up for air/happier down there/in your aftershave ocean." It wasn't clear what it all meant, some weird lines about self-denial, "pulling the wool over," life being difficult to face and indulgence, but the impression was something more like, "Yellow Submarine," the escape that promised better times below the surface of some magical place.


5. Nite Jewel - "One Second of Love"



A whirring synthesizer back-beat announced the arrival of the singular Nite Jewel's "One Second of Love." It featured the chorus of the year, the absolutely best hook, good enough that she only teased the listener with elements of the first refrain, waiting until the 1.21 mark to unleash the complete version. It was haunting and cold, singer Romona Gonzalez asking, "Who has one second of love?", an implication that this might be more fleeting than we were lead to believe. The middle section darkened further, before a final movement, spacey synths soaring to meet the chorus of their maker, Gonzalez, alone in a layered duet with herself, asking her most pressing question.


4. Beach House - "Myth"



It was a lighthouse warning, an iron triangle, a pot and pan beginning. It was something you couldn't quite place, that ringing sound that began Beach House's stunning achievement, "Myth." That banging, inexplicably folded into the arrangement, like an auditory announcement in the fog that lay ahead. It was beautiful, intentionally and creatively gauzy. Victoria Legrand, in her usually haunting voice, suggested, "what comes after this/momentary bliss/ consequence of what you do to me" as if to say to the world they pushed back in their chairs, something this pretty has to come at a cost. Dreams this big, lies this wide, fog this rich, it must fall apart somewhere. It was maybe a bit much, but like only a few other songs this decade, you'll likely remember where you were when you heard "Myth" for the first time. There was no denying this truth, a banging reminder of where you were on their drifting sea of melody and self-deception.


3. Stars - "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It"



Leave it to Stars to hit us with a lyric like, "take the weakest thing in you/and beat the bastards with it," a neo-Breakfast Club call for weird dignity in an increasingly individualized and lonely world. For Torquil Campbell, his weakness was that he was frightened and high, twin admissions at the center of "Hold On When You Get Love ...". Amy Milan was reduced to a Kate Busy-like feature in the chorus, her tweaked and soaring vocal offering a counterpoint to Campbell's confessional Moz. The marching orders were everywhere, the title, the chorus, the ratatat drums calling us to attention, the way they slammed in and out of the chorus, the Cure guitars. It was big and bold and beautiful, a bit silly and a bit saccharine, but love can be like that. Stars remained appropriately at the center of the melodrama, maybe the song of their career, one that Campbell admitted had a "pretty melody," but wouldn't help you leave the party at the right time. This was presumably a cautionary tale of the infidelities that happen after midnight. It was an admission; they could tell you what love sounded like, but they couldn't make you do it.


2. Alt-J - "Breezeblocks"



No one knew what to do with Alt-J in 2012. People compared them to Radiohead. Critics swooned. Pitchfork left them out of their top 50 albums. It was a cacophony as loud as the disparate influences on their record. This writer nearly had a meltdown listening to their debut LP, An Awesome Wave, and its best song, "Breezeblocks" the first time through. There was so much to it, two distinct movements, each a bit bizarre, describing first a murder and then a cannibal's desire to eat the object of your love. The final lyrics, almost done in a round fashion, "Please don't go/I'd eat you whole/I love you so," layered and layered, the drums gaining in intensity and the arrangement swelling behind the band until it was almost maniacal. Perhaps this was suitable for a song about holding the object of your desire down with concrete blocks, a winking and intense idea for what would become the band's "radio single" at college radio in the US. The weirdness worked, and Alt-J held us all under the water, or maybe it was us that killed them. Either way, we were kept together in a weird, pseudo-fetishy way, held down with weights and bound to the bottom.

A.C. Newman :: "I'm Not Talking"

A.C. Newman has softened considerably since his abrasively poppy solo record, 2004's The Slow Wonder and his early New Pornographer's concoctions. For illustration, and this is an arbitrary comparison to be sure, cast  "All For Swinging You Around" from Electric Vision against  "Valkyrie At The Roller Disco" from most recent Pornographer's LP, Together. The recent vision is substantially less electric, full of keys, organs and mandolin, Newman turning toward the folk sensibilities of his band mate Neko Case's solo efforts. Latest single, "I'm Not Talking," the first from Newman's forthcoming third solo LP, Shut Down The Streets trends in the same direction. It is a heart breaker, unsurprising from a song writer who turned something as simple as Christine crashing on your floor into an emotional genocide, but, "I'm Not Talking" is largely a soft sell duet between Newman and Case - what separates this from being a New Pornographers song existing in name only. The letdown, always the soul of Newman's inverted pathos, is still in play, an existential promise of silence until such a time as the narrator can be redeemed, making this a softer punch but a punch all the same.

Listen :: A.C. Newman - "I'm Not Talking"

Top 50 of 2009 :: 20-11 [You've been acting awful tough lately]

20. Neko Case - "People Got A Lotta Nerve"

Neko Case is to animal metaphors what Siegfried and Roy are to dangerous jungle cats. She manages to compare love to a taming of a wild, completely undomesticated animal. "You know, they call them killer whales," Case elaborates, "but you seem surprised when it pinned you down to the bottom of the tank where you can't turn around?" The supposition is that if you jump in tank with a deadly animal, you might want to table your shock when it is ripping your face off. Case declares herself a "man-eater" in the chorus and we are hardly prepared to judge. After all, we put her songs in our music library, we let her in, and maybe we should just be happy to still be alive.

19. Marina and the Diamonds - "I Am Not A Robot"

In one of my favorite running jokes of 2009, a friend of mine would send me texts every month, simply reading: "Guess what?" Of course, it was a paraphrase of Marina's signature lyric from "I Am Not A Robot." She was baiting me and to lose this game, I needed to send back a genuine, "What?" But for me to win, I would need to reply, "I'm not a robot," correctly completing the phrase. Over time, the question never changed but the answers evolved. Guess what? "I AM a robot." Guess what? "We are all robots." Guess what? This song is a crushing examination of our humanity and how quickly we can become romantic technocrats. Guess what? We aren't robots, no matter how hard we try.

18. Everything Everything - "MY KZ, UR BF"


In an email I sent to one of my A&R friends at Sony, I described Everything Everything as Passion Pit, but from the other side of the pond. Their first single, "Photoshop Handsome" indicated promise, but follow-up "MY KZ, UR BF" (or "My Keys, Your Boyfriend") proved that this band is going to make its money by packing enough hooks that you can't reasonably breathe. With vocals that bounce like an attention-deficit rubber ball and a chorus with elements of a head-nodding epic, "MY KZ, UR BF" is nearly radio-ready. 2010 is going to be a big year for these kids and it starts right now.

17. My Jerusalem - "Sweet Chariot"

My Jerusalem offered up "Sweet Chariot" in 2009, a rich mixture of Wilco, The National, and Beulah. Organ, rich strings, shabby guitars, and 3am-Marlboro-Red vocals collide in a tweaking, shaking chorus. The best moment, however, is the eponymous bridge. "We will not suffer the mistakes of our fathers/Sweet chariot take us away" becomes the repeated edict to go with a tide of building sound. The strings churn from the below and finally, a double-tapped rhythm section as we reach a thrashing catharsis. Just like that, the song fades into nothingness and is gone.

16. Emanuel and the Fear - "The Rain Becomes The Clouds"

There is this moment in "The Rain Becomes The Clouds" somewhere in the final third, right before the final chorus where the singer intones: "As winter ends and spring begins/with summer winds off in the distance/pushing in, they move us." Focus on "move us." The singer's voice tumbles down three or four notes in an eye-blink. The strings are soaring behind him as he continues to insist in the chorus, a metaphor rooted in the water cycle, that "the rain becomes the clouds." Emanuel and the Fear sound like a Rufus Wainwright take on Sufjan Stevens but with something more hopeful, more desperate and more propulsive; something designed specifically to move us.

15. Egyptian Hip Hop - "Rad Pitt"

Egyptian Hip Hop were neither hip-hop nor were they obviously Egyptian in 2009. In the world of indie rock names, this should not surprise us. What was surprising was the explosion of vocals and melody that stumbled out of the headphone jack. The first lyrics, after a shimmering, post-punk intro, give a mighty debt to New Order's "Temptation" chorus of "Up, down, turn around/please don't let me hit the ground." In the world of Egyptian Hip Hop, the melody is almost identical but the lyrics begin "What are we today?" It is a useful question for a band with a non-sequitur for a name.

14. The Joy Formidable - "Cradle"

The Joy Formidable released one of the best records of 2009, A Balloon Called Moaning, gave it away for free through NME and still didn't get enough press. The signature song is "Cradle" a charging, industrial rock joint. A sing-song melody in the verses gives way to a driving, nearly tribal chorus. The lyrics, hard to make out, are a repeating "My vicious tongue/cradles just one." It is violent and sexual and ambiguous. But when "Cradle" finishes, you only have one moment stuck your mind; the first lyrics, "I can see he says what he means," in perfect, alternating hi-fi.

13. Fanfarlo - "Luna"

"Luna" is a story in two-parts. From the jump, Fanfarlo charges out of the gate like an in medias res Arcade Fire. Instead of waiting for the charging second-movement, "Luna" opens at a sprint. This doesn't leave the band much room to grow, making the whole song into a brilliant comedown. By the end, we've slowed to a near waltz, miles from the initial burst. None of this is to say, "Luna" is poorly conceived. Rather, it is a different construction built heavy on the front and light on the back. But each movement, the slamming first two-minutes and the slow-drive final two-and-a-half, has its own narrative and ultimately leaves us feeling complete.

12. Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - "Young Adult Friction"

From the opening snare hits, through the soaring chord progression, "Young Adult Friction" does more than describe what its lurid and, presumably, metaphorical title intimates. Pains Of Being Pure At Heart seem to describe something less intimate and more public. You feel surrounded by people, by movement, by the thing you came here to see. The plea for earnesty gets deeper in the song's final movement, as they repeat, "Don't check me out/don't check me out." By the final, slamming conclusion and its echoing finale, you've experienced a case for intimacy and a case for public interaction - sitting right next to each other, kissing, we presume, in the privacy of a million strangers.

11. Two Door Cinema Club - "I Can Talk"

A vocal loop is the assaulting opener for Two Door Cinema Club's slamming single "I Can Talk." This is the first unveiling. The track then takes off in a speedy direction, calling to mind the high-fret-board moments of Editors, before settling into the twitchy, angular guitar sound that TDCC is deservedly known for. This is something different, returning to find a massive chorus with the title, "I Can Talk" squarely as its centerpiece. The arrangement rises, the vocal loop returns and these little, almost frail, falsetto vocals scream out from the maw. The down-beat might break your neck because it is, quite simply, one of the biggest moments of year.

Neko Case :: "People Got A Lot Of Nerve"

Neko Case sounds like nothing but destruction, abject sadness, and emotional betrayal. Needless to say, I couldn't be more excited to hear from her again. She's like a little window into disaster. She's like a little postcard from hell. She probably broke my heart. Needless to say, I still answer her calls.

It's been three years since Fox Confessor Brings The Flood and not much has changed. "People Got A Lot Of Nerve" is nothing new. The guitars are still plaintive and leading. The melody is haunting, the lyrics abstract and leveling. Her voice is still a tsunami of low-end sadness. It's been three years and absolutely nothing has changed. So, explain my excitement?

This is a woman who kept me hiding from daylight for the majority of 2006. This is a woman who actively promoted the use of opiates. This is a woman who effectively stabbed me in the chest, left me for dead and then re-appeared out of nowhere to do it again. And I still answer her calls. It's not pretty and on some level it's probably painful. But you let her back in because you still like her. And you never really let her go.

Listen :: Neko Case - "People Got A Lot Of Nerve"