The 1975 :: "Chocolate"

Major label veneer is equal parts drawback and payoff, a duality that Manchester, UK band The 1975 ride right down the back of on latest single, "Chocolate". Relentlessly poppy, "Chocolate" pumps with the type of ebullient energy that Phoenix channeled on "Lisztomania", all but daring you to hate it for appealing to such a wide audience; they challenge you to charge them with - what? - too much ambition? Sure, it's easy to make a crack about Kings of Leon here, angular little jabs about what a dumb song "Sex On Fire" is, or how "Use Somebody" set rock music back at least two decades. "Chocolate" features at least one line that indicates a certain self-awareness, a salvaging of the commercialization impulse, "Think about what to do/think about what to say/think about how to think," a downright meta-critical analysis of the pop trope, in some sense setting us free from thinking too hard about what it all might mean on our end. They know; we're all in on the joke. This all goes a long way round to say, "Chocolate" feels less than credible the entire time it's on you stereo, but you absolutely won't turn it off. Contained in a lyric, it is: "Her hair smells like chocolate," a primacy as visceral as it is appealing.



The 1975 plays Mercury Lounge on 3.27 for a show that will be very sold out.

The Traps :: "Calypso"

While the fundamental conceit of The Traps' "Calypso" faults on two levels - 1. It draws on Homer's Odyssey, a historic stay-away when it comes to independent rock bands and 2. It owes ludicrously to Phoenix - the song still succeeds against these steep odds. Perhaps, these twin absurdities conspire to create a sort of charming escapism, a buzzing bit of synth rock, the band describing Calypso as a "lioness" as their arrangement heaves and tweaks behind them. This isn't a think piece, the moral ambiguities of the original text left firmly on the side, no relativism of what it meant to be the title track woman, keeping her protagonist for just long enough, only to be turned down for the indomitable and too-trusting Penelope. These, we suppose, are needless revisions, and "Calypso" is so obviously supposed to be fun, full of sunny guitars, keyboards and shouting vocals.

Teleman :: "Cristina"

London three-piece Teleman's debut single, "Cristina" opens with the intimate, "I'm coming back to where I started," an odd aside for a band only at its very beginnings. It is reversed remembering, the past pitched as cloistered and bizarre on lyrics like "I never meant to be the bad kid" or the intensely adolescent, "turn the lights on, throw everything around your bedroom." Of course, the glossy arrangement, a sort of cold medicine, plaintive Phoenix, eventually centers on the song's most important line, "some thing's just take you right back, you forget you've got to go soon." The past, for all its hemming in, reminds us again to leave. The last line, "why not let the music play, there's nothing in the way now," reveals this compartmentalized remembering has had its moment and is now gone.

Paradise :: "Endless Wave"

Paradise's debut single, "Endless Wave" opens with a buzzing synth chord that harkens everything from Stars' "Fixed" to Phoenix's "1901". The electronic rock geography isn't incorrect either, though "Endless Wave" draws a great deal on the surf-rock reverb for the buried, echoing vocals. It also doesn't hurt this beach-aesthetic that the main lyrical edict is "all aboard, my friends, here comes the endless wave" and the song's middle section owes its layers more to Pet Sounds than any synth rock encyclopedia. A well-arranged cacophony, "Endless Wave" is one of the most promising debut singles of 2012, no more clearly reduced than the 1.36 mark when the song unleashes into an ambitious middle movement that is one part Brian Wilson and one part the finishing kick of "All My Friends". Major label A&Rs take notice, spin your chairs around twice and give this a serious listen: Paradise, four kids from London, are going to be very hard to miss over the next year. Better yet, New York, they play Glasslands on November 13.

Wildlife Control :: "Analog or Digital"

The great musical watershed of the past three decades is no more directly phrased than by Wildlife Control on debut single, "Analog or Digital". The title, thankfully and consciously, lacks a question mark, though the interrogative is perhaps tacit. There is no such indecision in the music where the driving guitars rip like a Tom Petty arrangement that chased an amphetamine habit cross-country from behind the wheel of small, small vehicle. Or maybe it sounds like a Phoenix song with no esoteric side. All of it is the foundation for a song about favorite songs, headphones and girls who know records that other girls don't know. In essence, an overly romanced depiction of right now. The gift here, from the band's debut self-titled record due on July 31, lies in the resolution, "it doesn't matter if she's analog or digital," squaring the circle on the grandest and silliest of questions in the span of one refrain. It is a summer song, an instant favorite whether it ends up as zeros and ones in your pocket or a vinyl LP on the shelf of some girl who is as relevant as it also doesn't matter.

Listen :: Wildlife Control - "Analog or Digital"

Jmo :: "Don't Let It Get Away"

Something intentionally borrowed and lifted, but unalterably satisfying, Jmo's latest single, "Don't Let It Get Away" attributes to Phoenix, Richman, and the Strokes. The stuttering rhythms of the drums and guitars mix with a fuzzy, distant vocal that certainly recalls Casablancas circa 2000. As a final act, Jmo, the recording avatar of Brooklynite Jeremy Coleman of Murder Mystery fame, "Don't Let It Get Away" runs to high fret board conclusion, the title lyric cast in repeat as, of course, the song shuffles playfully to its conclusion. While Coleman urges recapture, he is in the process of retreat. Perhaps, this is an appropriate coda for a song with such an excellent list of footnotes, a desire to seize and hold juxtaposed with creation of new, green real estate. Either way, "Don't Let It Get Away" is as fun a rock song to emerge from a denizen of New York since Darwin Deez suggested similar source material on "Radar Detector". In the spirit of possession, Jmo has "Don't Let It Get Away" and its Cars-influenced b-side, "The Strangest Places People's Minds Go" for free download below.

Maps & Atlases :: "Winter"

Setting guitars racing off to lead the melody is a good start for Maps & Atlases latest single, "Winter" from coming LP, Beware and Be Grateful. Proving something of a competition, the disparate parts of the arrangement flirt and flick off one another like little droplets of mercury. Backing vocals chase the lead guitar line, a tumbling and ebullient affair, the effect being a pebbled surface of so many notes bubbling to the surface at once. For a point of reference, think of Phoenix making a more organic and folk-driven slice of pop. All in all, it represents an architecture of elevation, a hopeful construction about the most dire of seasons.

Listen :: Maps & Atlases - "Winter"

Ottilia :: "Forty Million Light Years"

She's in your ear, you think, or is it your head? Close enough to make you pleasantly claustrophobic, 17-year old sensation, Ottilia and her perfect first single, "Forty Million Light Years" whisper an instantly memorable melody and a vocal so charming you'll struggle against your vocabulary to say anything besides, "precocious" and "phenomenal". A flecking guitar line that recalls the work of Phoenix on "Lisztomania" mixes easily with Ottilia's disarming vocal singing vaguely fatalist lyrics like "Walls keep closing in and I can't win." She manages to save the listener and herself right before the chorus kicks, posing the coquettish, "But then again..." before trailing off into a refrain you'll find yourself singing without meaning to. It's glossier than Ellie Goulding's "Wish I Stayed" demo that seized the music industry by the throat in 2008 but the potential is the same, a young, big voice who can craft pop with the ease with which you make your morning coffee. With "Forty Million Light Years", Ottilia does a similar removing of the ceiling on what could be a mercurial rise in 2012 and beyond, all of which is close enough to be in your head already.

Capital Cities :: "Safe And Sound"

Remember the first time you heard "Kids" or "Sleepyhead"or "1901"? Each of these summer anthems were so transcendent that in retrospect you don't need to attach band names, only the years 2007, 2008, and 2009 respectively; the songs spoke for themselves and the bands blew up. In 2011, it will be Capital Cities, a Los Angeles electro pop act with a buzzy summer jam, "Safe And Sound", replete with a hefty downbeat and an airbrushed trumpet hook. Easy rhymes like "even in a hurricane of frowns/we'll be safe and sound" or "in a tidal wave of mystery/I know you'll be standing next to me" and lyrics that run in exact time with the 4/4 time signature make "Safe And Sound" instantly digestable, the kind of lather, rinse, repeat pop that is so intensely satisfying. In the first lyric, "I could lift you up," served over stomping synths, arrives as the thesis statement. Even three years later everything is still going to the beat.

Listen :: Capital Cities - "Safe And Sound"

Top 50 of 2009 :: 5-2 [Give me a lake I can dive into]

5. Wild Light - "California On My Mind"

In the way The Who used to talk about, music and place and circumstance can intersect in a powerful way. When charging out of San Francisco last March, listening to Wild Light's debut record that Columbia had so nicely sent over, I was caught at the intersection of place-specific lyrics, my disposable income, wanderlust, some record industry contacts and one great song, "California On My Mind." With its seminal lyric and instruction, "Give me a lake that I can dive into" and its vulgar interjection, "Fuck California," Wild Light issued a site-specific instruction. We lost a friend to California this year and I spent a lot of time there. In another year, these would be confounding variables but, in 2009, it was the right confluence of place and time.

4. Phoenix - "1901"

The opening minute and 19-seconds of "1901," are good but not obviously epic. But at 1:19 something changes. The arrangement, running like an escaped inmate, shifts into another gear. The synths notch up a key and the guitars churn, while the lyrics insist, "Falling, falling, falling." Phoenix had officially taken synthesized rock as far as it could go. It is borderline nonsense but it recalled something I read in 2003 about Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out." What made the song so seminal was not that it was empirically good; it was that it could have been just good and it they pushed it to be great. You probably remember where you were the first time you heard the second movement of "Take Me Out." You will remember the second movement, the last step of the chorus, of Phoenix and "1901."

3. Metric - "Gimme Sympathy"



Emily Haines went to South America to write Metric's latest record, Fantasies. We knew this because the band and their publicity staff released a video of Haines, perched soulfully at a keyboard, playing supposed lead-single, "Help, I'm Alive." Of course, sitting at track six on the record was a different song, "Gimme Sympathy." Haines encourages us in the song's first lyrics to, "Get hot, get too close to the flame/wild, open space." It is a meditation on youth, risk and chance. "We're so close to something better left unknown," Haines reflects, before asking if we'd rather be The Beatles or The Rolling Stones. We are encouraged to choose the former, as she asks us to play, "Here Comes The Sun." It might take a trip to Argentina to pull that off.

2. The Big Pink - "Dominos"

It was a text from a friend who saw The Big Pink at Bowery Ballroom. It was a colleague singing the lyrics to me from a mixtape I'd made her. It was a tweet from a photographer friend who saw the band at Lit. They all reflected the dumbstruck inarticulateness that comes when you've seen something so massive, so comprehensive, that you can't quite describe it to others. You hang clauses and you don't finish sentences and you use words like, "Whoa," with no ironic implications. For me it was in July when "Dominos" kicked its way out of my headphones. Since, the industrial-pop hasn't left my side, finding its way into my life at odd junctures and with consistent ferocity. Of course, if words don't totally do "Dominos" justice, you won't have heard it here first.

Phoenix :: "1901"

There's always something triumphant about new music from a band called Phoenix. Even if they haven't been away that long and even if there's no tragedy - it always seems like an improbable comeback. Remember 2002's "If I Ever Feel Better?" Like a blazing rip from nothing. Like an elevation from an earthquake. Like a free download from the band's website.

And "1901" we can assume is about what the chorus says: "fallin', fallin" - which we can assume is a French Disco-pop way of saying, "we're back, baby." It opens with ominous synth-stabs before a lighter-than-air drum beat demands, "hey, are you going to keep up here?" Because before you know it, the song is galloping along with promises like, "I'll be anything you ask and more." Really? Wow. That's a lot to handle. But for a band as polished and temporarily perfect as Phoenix, we can guess they deliver. Until they touch down, blow up and disappear only to return. It's the modern rhythm of all things.

Listen :: Phoenix - "1901" (click through to the band's site, no email address required)