Wild Ones :: "From Nothing"

Wild Ones alight to boxing up heartbreak into little pop songs. On latest single, "From Nothing" from their delicate and charming debut LP, Keep It Safe, the blinking synths and mild down stroke guitars coalesce behind the adorable vocal of Danielle Sullivan. It isn't a world of good answers, Sullivan cooing, "It ain't lit up" about the sorts of existential darkness that lies at the core of so many human relations. No one has hit this disjointed juxtaposition so well since Jenny Lewis and Rilo Kiley churned out similar sounding music in the early 2000s. The arrangement of "From Nothing" unravels in the bridge before rewiring back toward the final refrains, a layered duet of Sullivan's voice done twice, crystalline delicacy about the dark little centers of the universe.

Wild Ones :: "It's Real"

Heartbreak, like tall ships, can be delicately placed in bottles under the right circumstances. Folded up to pass the knave and then opened up in its container, these bottled ships represent a little slice of something terribly large reduced to manageable size, something that could reasonably be placed on a bookshelf. Portland, Oregon outfit Wild Ones do exactly this on single, "It's Real". Organ and synth chords provide the underlying architecture of what is ostensibly pure indie pop, a digestible blend of Stars and Rilo Kiley circa 2003, a slow-drive disaster made small. The chorus unveils itself with the kind of sheepish look usually closely associated with cute brunettes who wear quirky glasses, a Lisa Loeb archetype, grinning out behind lyrics like, "One more terror night, no I don't think we'll let that happen" and "I'll owe you one next time." Like the ship in a bottle, "It's Real" isn't entirely. It is a to-scale model of something larger, and presumably a bit awful, shrunk to being an anachronism of itself, a pretty, little facsimile of the original to take home.

Listen :: Wild Ones - "It's Real"

Creepy Crawlies :: "Get Buried"

Breezy indie pop from California, Creepy Crawlies traffic in all the right tropes. Playful references to annihilation - "It could be worse, it could be nuclear war" is one notable turn of phrase - mix easily with alternating boy-girl vocals that recall the earliest Rilo Kiley material. The hook, a cloud-clearing chorus that trades droning guitar fuzz for ebullient melody, relies in a certain buy-in from the listener, a desire to playfully bottle terrible emotional geography. The eponymous lyric is instruction, "Get Buried", tongue firmly in cheek, to the worst parts of ourselves. It is also wanton impossibility, the kind of thing that supercilious indie pop can navigate with no consequences, something both fun and entirely unrealistic.

Listen :: Creepy Crawlies - "Get Buried"