New Hands :: "Whichever Way You'll Have It"

Cheery synthesizers and rolling drums announce the arrival of New Hands' latest single, "Whichever Way You'll Have It." Finding its legs behind a bass line and vocal that owe a great deal to New Order, "Whichever Way" ebbs and flows between a more skeletal series of verses and a swirling chorus. The hook is the an offshoot of the title, the provocative and maybe pedantic, "Would you have it any other way?" Answering their own question in a final movement that recalls elements of the sublime Future Islands, the band insists, "I'm alive and I can't say no," a resigned bit of fatalism with a glistening post-punk veneer.

Cold Showers :: "BC"

When everyone got sad it meant no one got really sad anymore. Depression became the new uncouth, so common it was borderline impolite, and a huge drag as so many other Americans learned to play next to the abyss. Everyone was having such a good and bad time, Brett Easton Ellis could write a novel about it. After all, depression is at an all-time high, tripling in the last two decades. We, literally, are three times as sad as we were in 1992. It's easy to feel divided about this. Cold Showers do their best interpretation of the downcast New Order aesthetic on lead single, "BC," which is just as frigid as a group of angular guitars and washing synthesizers can be in a solidly post-1980s age full of misplaced optimism and kids in florescent tank tops and face paint. Our profound cultural sadness, the old stomping grounds for bands and artists of all ilks, has been replaced with a permanent adolescence where everyone has both a really great and a really terrible time. Everyone and no one feels sorry for themselves, but no one feels bad for anyone else. Empathy is at an all-time low. So lead lyric, "oh, woe is me," represents a brand of stylized and entirely morbid moroseness we have largely forgotten. It hangs a pallor over the whole affair, a downcast notion only enforced by its repetition. Like the darker New Order singles - "Isolation" is decent point for comparison - there is no dynamic shift between verse and chorus on "BC," just a slicing orthogonal of refrain into the vanishing distance. It is a world unto itself, just enough for you to feel bad about yourself and someone else at the same time.

She's So Rad :: "Confetti"

The montage always works best in slow motion. Nothing lands in this half-speed universe, objects taking off and soaring in infinity. She's So Rad from Auckland, New Zealand have a perfect handle on this aesthetic, slowing their lead single, "Confetti" down a third from what most modern record producers would recommend. "Confetti" slides along with the Dramamine haze that would have never survived most band's rehearsal phase, let alone the increased tempo, audio compression, double-tracked vocals and a chorus that has to appear in the first 40 seconds at the recommendation of the staff of most modern music production houses. This is more languid until it isn't. When the drums hit, they come from every side, an ode to the early New Order singles to which this song's rhythm section owes so much. The power lies squarely in the lyrical imagery of the title, a confetti cannon exploding as the credits roll, the BMPs slow, everything suspended and spinning in defiance of all conceivable natural law.