Baby Pink :: "Cellar Door"

Critics can't decide whether to bet on the return of emo or the return of 1990s alternative rock. Baby Pink cast their creative lot with the latter on best-song-to-date, the reverb-pedal-heavy, "Cellar Door" throwing itself back to the British invasion of Oasis and Blur. Even their press photographs scream 1995. But will Baby Pink be TRIBES or the Vaccines, will they be Oasis or Spacehog? The final movement of "Cellar Door", the two most pleasing words paired in English, bodes well, the band rolling over the lyrics, "Just shake little baby, just shake for me" until it becomes marching orders, maybe even the sound of an old thing that could well be the next one.

Isle of Rhodes :: "Ocean"

In an unscientific study it was discovered that only three or four Americans hate the song "In The Meantime" by Spacehog. Put another way: mid-90s alternative rock, the last evolutionary moment before mainstream rock and roll was hijacked by Korn and Limp Bizkit, never really died. It is a gone and mildly unremembered era, a time when "Wonderwall" was the single best rock song ever written and people, honestly, wrestled with and parsed visual metaphor like, "slowly walking down the hall, faster than a cannonball." Brooklyn's Isle of Rhodes makes music in a similar aesthetic, and "Ocean", the lead track from the band's debut All Rivers and Oceans, sounds like something that could easily have dominated college and alternative radio formats in 1994, and maybe even 2012. It would need a radio edit, to be sure, as its five-minute run time would only have been rivaled in length by Blur's "Girls and Boys" (cut down from 4:50 to 4:18 for US single release, which, unsurprisingly went to number four on the US modern rock chart in '94). But, "Ocean" has a hell of a chorus - "We want an ocean" - a soaring and catchy hook that sticks on impact, something so repeatable that you could easily forget that Isle of Rhodes records as a two-piece, neither of which is a guitar. "Ocean" represents a gorgeous slice of nostalgia when John Major and Bill Clinton shook hands and the Atlantic Ocean was only a puddle to be jumped by the next great rock band that sounded like this.