Le Fever :: "White Hearts"

A glittering ode to the sound of the Shout Out Louds, Le Fever, a Stockholm outfit, disburse a meticulous and somber bit of pop on latest single, "White Hearts". Featuring down-tempo lyrics like, "Monday morning, what a joke" and the final, admittedly-adolescent crusher, "that you love him and you never loved me", the band courts the sort of fragile, heartsick Northern European pop that has found such an audience on the other side of the ocean. The melody runs downward, each stanza of the verses beginning at eye-level before heading relentlessly to the floor. Even the warm synthesizers, Cure-guitars and sharp snare drum do nothing to regain uplift, another in a long history of happy-sounding songs that instead encounter the inviolable depths of human relations.

Here Is Your Temple :: "So High"

Here Is Your Temple set off lead single, "So High," as mixture of crystalline chiming synths and a menacing low-end anchored by a fuzzed bass line. Paying passing homage to the distant, moral-victory pop of Beach House, singer Emily McWilliam touches down cold and tremulous, a restrained and chilling force, allowing herself only a modicum of release on the song's icy refrain. She stares deeply into the austere abyss on the song's signature lyric, "talk about what the TV don't know," as tragic and modern as tragic and modern gets. Itching at the edges lie odes to Fleetwood Mac and the Shout Out Louds, McWilliam positioning herself centrally amidst the rolling drums and the echos of an arrangement concerning itself with the very meaning of being so far away.

Shout Out Louds :: "Blue Ice"

The Shout Out Louds return nearly three years after the somewhat underwhelming LP, Work with "Blue Ice," a sweeping bit of widescreen pop. If Work was world-weary and a bit too intentional, the band here sounds committed to something more earnestly down-tempo. Adam Olenius, the mumbling soul of the band's truly excellent Our Ill Wills and Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, the voice who launched a thousand Morrissey and Cure comparisons, is his usual distant and morose self (see "Parents Livingroom") on "Blue Ice" . He braces his vocal against a playful piano riff and a flickering guitar line, as the slow-drive arrangement describes a sort of cold clarity in form and function. The band will have a full length out on Merge early next year, "Blue Ice" only a teaser 7", not possessing half the bombast and grandiosity of whatever will serve as the first single. Expect Olenius, for all his thoughtfulness and pacing here, to again find stirring moral victories - this is, after all, a band who wrote a song entitled "The Comeback" - somewhere up in the sky.

On The List :: Shout Out Louds @ MHOW [3.1.10]

This review and some fantastic images run on Bowery Presents' House List.

It seemed like the stakes were unnaturally high. The Shout Out Louds were back from the brink of dissolution, back in the city they hadn't seen in nearly three years with an audience maybe worse for wea. But, lead singer Adam Olenius has always been a dealer in pain. Only now on a sold-out Monday night, Olenius seemed aware of himself as fractured, aware of his crowd as broken and in need of pathos. Dressed in black and sporting the type of beard that says, if we are to believe The Royal Tenenbaums, "I just tanked a tennis tournament and the woman I love doesn't love me back," Olenius emerged in the flesh, entirely prepared to live or die with us.

The material off the band's latest effort, Work is darker in nature, driven at the soul of what almost killed this group in 2008. Olenius strolled out to album opener, "1999" and as locked in the past as the song's titled suggested, lost somewhere before things went black. But slowly he and his band mates found their stride, sounding explosive and pitch-perfect on "Tonight I Have To Leave It." Minutes later, the band hammered through latest single, "Fall Hard," an ode to mutualism in the face of fatality. Olenius was hardly prepared to give in, directing the band through a fuzzy, shabby-in-places rendition of "The Comeback."

The Shout Out Louds left with "Show Me Something New" and second-album b-side, "Hard Rain," prompting Olenius to say, "This is for our Mercury Lounge days." As much as the band was tied to their past, they were locked in Olenius dark and very present return. For their latest record, written in a tiny apartment, alone in Australia, it rang with appropriate measure. The lights went down, Olenius held his hands up and the audience was left with nothing but buzz and echo in the darkness.

Listen :: Shout Out Louds - "Walls"

Shout Out Louds :: "Fall Hard" [Video]

We posted new Shout Out Louds cut, "Walls" a few weeks back. It clearly wasn't going to be the first single. With a flurry of press releases today, the band officially returned a video for first single, "Fall Hard" from the band's third LP, Work, due on February 23. "Fall Hard" is a horn-infused, high-hat-heavy, boy-girl racer. The threat of the chorus, "And if you fall hard/I fall harder," is certainly a bit of mutually assured destruction. Lead-singer, Adam Olenius looks a little worse for wear, but intentionally so. Call it exactly what we need for the warmest part of the winter.

Shout Out Louds - Fall Hard from Merge Records on Vimeo.

Shout Out Louds :: "Walls"

Two years ago, I heard the Shout Out Louds were breaking up. At the time, I was preaching the gospel of their second-record, Our Ill Wills, with such ferocity that a narrative movement like a break-up seemed not just inconceivable - it was flat wrong. Of course, in the grand spirit of the hype machine, no such break up was afoot. It was something else. Shout Out Louds frontman, Adam Olenius, a Jason Schwartzman upgrade, went to Australia and parked himself in a one-room apartment to write a follow-up while the rest of the band recouped in Sweden. It wasn't like the band divorced, they just separated for awhile.

The third record, Work, is set for release in February of next year. But Olenius' work is all ready for consumption. The first song leaked, "Walls" is certainly not the first single but it is a first look. Of course, the whispering, confiding vocals remind us that, yes, it is a Shout Out Louds record. The urgent drums remind us of the more bombastic end of the Cure comparisons that colored the band's first two releases. Ultimately, this is not the final movement for the band. Just a first look at the next thing. And for the fears of 24-months ago, that is just enough.

Listen :: Shout Out Louds - "Walls"