bare pale :: "new start old end"

With a sound that mostly recalls the skuzziest end of dream pop, something a bit further left-wing than Yuck or a DIY, nihilist take on Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, bare pale, a London outfit, crafts a brilliant slow-drive on recent release, "new start old end". A cold medicine guitar interplays with a lazy drum riff, both of which grow in strength, if not in any particular insistence or urgency. Maybe a slow dance in an era that's forgotten the slow dance, or the soundtrack to the last prom that bare pale certainly never thought to attend, "new start old end" is shot through with nostalgia, a dreamy and half-remembered world.

Smith Westerns :: "Varsity"

The Smith Westerns have always sought to define musical laissez-faire, a sort of a shabbiness that they redefined as cool. The image was manufactured, an intentional brand of performance art, the process of trying to not try. After all, a band simply couldn't build compositions as lush and winking with so much nostalgia by accident. On latest single, "Varsity," the band sounds like a opiate-laced Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, the pre-chorus lyric, the shrugging, "I guess that's a point of view," before the synthesizers metamorphose to the top of the room. Still barely beyond college-aged, Smith Westerns traffic easily in unremembered nostalgia, the memories of things that just happened or never happened at all, shot through a hazy filter and packaged for consumption. Like the crafting of their image, it sounds intentionally, difficultly languid, a prettiness that isn't a bit insouciant.

The Vestals :: "Perfect Pain"

Emotional rock never dies, it just changes its delivery system every few years. The Vestals, a band with a churning and consumptive first single, "Perfect Pain," traffic in this maybe-insipid sentimental geography and the chorus is the archetype, waxing, "Say you'll stay the same/please don't change/it's a perfect pain." The refrain is rooted in three notes, the band modulating between them as the the arrangement, a chunkier Pains Of Being Pure At Heart or maybe We Were Promised Jetpacks playing twee music, unloads a carbonated strum pattern and chord resolutions that feel necessarily life affirming. It's so serious, it's nearly silly, a diary read at Marshall Stack volume, break up emails shouted aloud years later, and yet "Perfect Pain" is full of hooks and winning melody. Pop is, after all, a mirror. If this is a bit embarrassing in its lyrics, so are we all.

Permanent Collection :: "One Thousand Sins"

Teenagers can stand almost anything except hypocrisy. They can understand the world is unfair. After all, with the exception of certain ethnic minorities in certain societies, life is most broadly unfair for teenagers. They can understand the cruel Utilitarianism - that which is best for most is best for all - of democracy and modern government. They can understand that life is occasionally short and extremely difficult. But don't lie to them or spout values that run contradictory to your behavior. They can endure almost anything but this sort of contradiction. Permanent Collection, a band from San Francisco who aren't teenagers but reflect on the impulse nonetheless, set this sort of "do as I say, not as I do" platitude in their sights and ripe for destruction. The sound is like a careless and shoegazing indie pop, like Pains Of Being Pure Of Heart if they sincerely believed their own name and sang in a shabby baritone. The band's debut LP, Newly Wed Nearly Dead is being readied for release.

Listen :: Permanent Collection - "One Thousand Sins"

California Wives :: "Marianne"

The surprise isn't how charming and singable California Wives' music can be, it's how easy they make it all sound. Like you and three acquaintances could go down to Guitar Center, learn a few chords, pick up some equipment and then sign a deal with Vagrant Records. On "Marianne", they update their stylistic direction from inheritors to the Stills' throne to something closer to Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - and here it doesn't help that the second word of the first verse is "heartbreak" and fourth, "teenage". The big chiming synthesizers in post-chorus back the band's trademark driving guitars (see: "Blood Red Youth" and "Tokyo") all around fatalist lyrics like, "They will find you out, even though you tried". The chorus, one of those refrains still rooted in proper nouns for when bands are young and still write about cities and girls, is charming and accessible, a final trip through those big guitars and huge booming synths, democratic enough to feel like anyone could have written them and elitist enough that no one did.

Thrushes :: "Trees"

Thrushes' latest mp3 release from their excellent, new record Night Falls is the spinning and soaring "Trees." Sounding a bit like Pomegranates covering Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, echoing and fuzzy guitars sail over pounding drums. The final question, "Are you the same?" will go completely unanswered as Thrushes explore the lusher ends of shoegazing rock, like kids who grew up listening to The Pixies but ended up reading Cortazar in college.

Listen :: Thrushes - "Trees"

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.

Pains Of Being Pure At Heart :: "Everything With You"

Pains Of Being Pure At Heart are equal parts expected and experimental and have a habit of playing only at Cake Shop. Other than that, they sound a little bit like shoegazing Smiths cover band. I mean, face it, if there was one band in the world that you would trust to play a rocked-out "Girlfriend In A Coma," it might be POBPAH. And maybe that's a way of writing them off - comparisons have a way of doing that - but I mean it in a good way. Isn't that how the old saying goes: 'tis better to be a Smiths cover band than to have totally sucked and never played Cake Shop at all?

Admit it: you can't listen to these verses and not want to sing, "shyness is nice and shyness can keep you from doing all the things you like to." It's almost the same melody. But, there's an edge here: fuzzy guitars and shiny synths. A little bit darker and not quite as cheeky. Maybe even a little experimental. So if there's something you want to try, ask me. I won't say no. How could I?

Listen :: Pains Of Being Pure At Heart - "Everything With You"