Jon Lawless and Mary Cassidy :: "Best Jewel Thief In The World" [Feat. Torquil Campbell of Stars]

Jon Lawless and Mary Cassidy collaborate with Torquil Campbell of Stars on Prefab Sprout cover, "Best Jewel Thief In The World". Campbell is a near evangelist for Prefab Sprout's 1980s Britpop jams and turns up here with gravitas and delicacy in duets with Cassidy. Lawless and Campbell first connected when Lawless spun a Prefab song at a party and Campbell rushed over to high-five him, asking, "How old are you?" - two brilliant musicians separated by nearly two decades of age and united in the love of a marginally famous band from the 1980s. "Best Jewel Thief In The World" is nominally about a transcendent cat burglar spanning the roof tops, lyrics like, "Down below, down below, what do any of those assholes know?", and Lawless crafts a simple acoustic progression that sustains the organizing allegory about theft and beauty. It's about hiding in plain sight, it's about the heists that happen right in front of us, it's about love. "Rooftops are for dreamers" Campbell sings, reorienting the listener to consider the narrator: Only he can see the thief.

Big Deal :: "Dream Machines"

All unfiltered bombast on "Dream Machines", Big Deal drape themselves in a blighted, shouting fatalism. "Dream Machines", slamming with double-tap drums and a boy-girl duet sounds like Joy Formidable (and it's worth noting that Big Deal are the heirs to this throne) covering a Stars joint, dream-pop holding a long kiss goodnight with shoegaze. One of the biggest songs of the year, it's a world of moral victories and letdowns, as singer Alice Costelloe leads from above with lines like, "Nothing here is built to last / what you wanted and what you chose / you can't have both." Instead of a shrugging conclusion, there lies triumph in the big, crunchy chord progression and Costelloe's duet with partner Kacey Underwood. Finding both union and beauty in the noise, singing to one another, "What's mine is yours is yours is mine," before concluding, "We'll grow our hair / cut our ties." As the arrangement surges around them, we presume these two are planning to leave everything but each other.

Top 50 Songs of 2012 :: [10-2]

Welcome to our annual countdown of the 50 best songs of the calendar year. Songs must be from an EP, LP or demo released during 2012 and no band may appear twice. Today, we count down 10 to 2. 

10. A.C. Newman feat. Neko Case - "Not Talking"



What separated Newman's 2012 release, Shut Down The Streets, from being a New Pornographers record remained unclear, especially with a Neko Case appearance on the debut single, "Not Talking". What remained certain was this: when Case and Newman collaborate, the results are magic. A whirling melody and Newman's typical austerity dissolved into Case's transformative duet. It was about a lonely, reverse-engineered Eden. "Rescue teams will look for days/I like the way things are/They should abandon the search," they sang, providing the outlines for exile of these two massive talents. It was allegedly about redemption, a bridge about distance, Case and Newman soaring out over the arrangement with sturdy wings, but it was clear these two were happier out there alone.


9. Father John Misty - "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings"



The most memorable drum and guitar line of 2012, Father John Misty built a house of death on America' far western boundary with "Hollywood Forever Cemetery Sings." "What are people gonna think?" Misty posed to the woman in question, though he suffered from no reservations of formality when dishing up one of the most satisfying sexual lyrics of the year, "I laid up for hours in a daze retracing the expanse of your American back." It was all love and funerals, digging in the dirt, girls along for the ride, making out and up in cemeteries in Los Angeles.


8. Sun Kil Moon - "Sunshine in Chicago"



Mark Kozelek has never lost sleep over forthrightness. In 2012 "Sunshine in Chicago" was no exception, a bracingly honest take on getting old. He admits to getting an STD in Chicago in the 90s, though this somehow comes across as dulcet as the admissions of his own father's exile to Chicago in the summers to relieve a crowded house. Nominally, it is a walk through a sunny Chicago, but it is Kozelek's talent for blighted imagery that takes us to his father, a more-famous career with the Red House Painters, and that line about "guys in tennis shoes." Few other artists do place, minutiae, and lyrical imagery as well as Kozelek, admitting to being both crushingly sad and entirely fine with getting older, all in the span of a walk down Lincoln Avenue on a sunny afternoon.


7. The Zolas - Knot In My Heart"



The most unexpected and infectious chorus of the year, The Zolas' "Knot In My Heart" proved to have staying power behind their one monstrous hook. It was the Spoon song for the year we didn't get a Spoon record, a bit of angular and restless piano-pop that held incredible darkness beneath an ebullient surface. The "knot" wasn't real, though it probably felt that way. The band unleashed lyrics like, "it's hard and weird not to know how your day begins, though I'm lying next to someone new" a simple and crushing aside. The final twist saw the arrangement at full bore, sparse piano chords insistent over the top of the repeated and eponymous lyric. It both ripped and could rip you apart.


6. The Vaccines - "Aftershave Ocean"



The magical realism emerged as a thick stew on the Vaccines' non-single, "Aftershave Ocean." It was their best song from a frankly forgettable sophomore record that will undeniably result in people getting fired at Columbia Records. "Aftershave Ocean" was undeniably excellent, a weird mixture of elements of 2001 Strokes and 1968 Beatles. The guitar line chased the melody, Justin Young singing throwback pop lyrics like, "You're coming up for air/happier down there/in your aftershave ocean." It wasn't clear what it all meant, some weird lines about self-denial, "pulling the wool over," life being difficult to face and indulgence, but the impression was something more like, "Yellow Submarine," the escape that promised better times below the surface of some magical place.


5. Nite Jewel - "One Second of Love"



A whirring synthesizer back-beat announced the arrival of the singular Nite Jewel's "One Second of Love." It featured the chorus of the year, the absolutely best hook, good enough that she only teased the listener with elements of the first refrain, waiting until the 1.21 mark to unleash the complete version. It was haunting and cold, singer Romona Gonzalez asking, "Who has one second of love?", an implication that this might be more fleeting than we were lead to believe. The middle section darkened further, before a final movement, spacey synths soaring to meet the chorus of their maker, Gonzalez, alone in a layered duet with herself, asking her most pressing question.


4. Beach House - "Myth"



It was a lighthouse warning, an iron triangle, a pot and pan beginning. It was something you couldn't quite place, that ringing sound that began Beach House's stunning achievement, "Myth." That banging, inexplicably folded into the arrangement, like an auditory announcement in the fog that lay ahead. It was beautiful, intentionally and creatively gauzy. Victoria Legrand, in her usually haunting voice, suggested, "what comes after this/momentary bliss/ consequence of what you do to me" as if to say to the world they pushed back in their chairs, something this pretty has to come at a cost. Dreams this big, lies this wide, fog this rich, it must fall apart somewhere. It was maybe a bit much, but like only a few other songs this decade, you'll likely remember where you were when you heard "Myth" for the first time. There was no denying this truth, a banging reminder of where you were on their drifting sea of melody and self-deception.


3. Stars - "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It"



Leave it to Stars to hit us with a lyric like, "take the weakest thing in you/and beat the bastards with it," a neo-Breakfast Club call for weird dignity in an increasingly individualized and lonely world. For Torquil Campbell, his weakness was that he was frightened and high, twin admissions at the center of "Hold On When You Get Love ...". Amy Milan was reduced to a Kate Busy-like feature in the chorus, her tweaked and soaring vocal offering a counterpoint to Campbell's confessional Moz. The marching orders were everywhere, the title, the chorus, the ratatat drums calling us to attention, the way they slammed in and out of the chorus, the Cure guitars. It was big and bold and beautiful, a bit silly and a bit saccharine, but love can be like that. Stars remained appropriately at the center of the melodrama, maybe the song of their career, one that Campbell admitted had a "pretty melody," but wouldn't help you leave the party at the right time. This was presumably a cautionary tale of the infidelities that happen after midnight. It was an admission; they could tell you what love sounded like, but they couldn't make you do it.


2. Alt-J - "Breezeblocks"



No one knew what to do with Alt-J in 2012. People compared them to Radiohead. Critics swooned. Pitchfork left them out of their top 50 albums. It was a cacophony as loud as the disparate influences on their record. This writer nearly had a meltdown listening to their debut LP, An Awesome Wave, and its best song, "Breezeblocks" the first time through. There was so much to it, two distinct movements, each a bit bizarre, describing first a murder and then a cannibal's desire to eat the object of your love. The final lyrics, almost done in a round fashion, "Please don't go/I'd eat you whole/I love you so," layered and layered, the drums gaining in intensity and the arrangement swelling behind the band until it was almost maniacal. Perhaps this was suitable for a song about holding the object of your desire down with concrete blocks, a winking and intense idea for what would become the band's "radio single" at college radio in the US. The weirdness worked, and Alt-J held us all under the water, or maybe it was us that killed them. Either way, we were kept together in a weird, pseudo-fetishy way, held down with weights and bound to the bottom.

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.

On The List :: Stars @ Webster Hall and Mercury Lounge [9.22.12]

Stars is Torquil Campbell's band now and everyone knows it. Maybe it always has been, but the transition became official - or at least undeniable - at somewhere north of 1am at the Mercury Lounge, the most crowded of all the crowded rooms on New York's Lower East Side. Campbell stared into the stage lights, dressed in his full Morrissey-lite regalia of a blazer with pushed up sleeves and thick glasses that he lifted to make funny faces at the soundboard. Amy Milan, Campbell's bandmate, and the shining light of all the female voices in independent rock over the last decade, was noticeably absent, having already left the stage before the night's last song. Campbell didn't look relieved or triumphant, his affection for Milan is obvious and immutable, but he allowed himself a moment of strangeness, alone at the middle of the band he started and Milan helped make deservedly famous. To be clear, this was no power struggle. It was something more complicated, sweeter, more grinding, the second set in the span of a few hours, the story of a band releasing their sixth LP depending on who, and if, anyone is counting. Campbell, alone, led the band in a long slow cover of "This Charming Man", and Milan, presumably, grinned from somewhere not the stage.

Stars were performing rare double duty. First, a 9pm sold-out gig at Webster Hall, a venue that was literally transitioning into a nightclub for thousands as the audience left, where they played for 90 minutes, and a smaller set of rarities that kicked off at 12:45am at Mercury Lounge, a room that fire codes south of 200 people, all in celebration of the band's latest album, The North. It was a gear problem at the very least. Stars tour with an enormous amount of equipment, the product of a rich sound, strong record sales and the natural accumulation of a band approaching their third Presidential election on tour. An incredulous member of the Diamond Rings, the very excellent fellow Canadians who opened for Stars at Webster, mused to me, "I really have no idea how they'll get their stuff down to the second gig." It was a structural problem Stars fans didn't have, walking 11 blocks south and two avenues east in the two or so hours between shows. Milan asked the audience at the Mercury Lounge how many had attended the Webster show earlier in the evening, an unscientific poll that indicated it was something like half. A better question would have been how long it had been since Stars had played a room this small. Campbell, as if paying this uniqueness homage, yelled, "We're gonna play a bunch of shit we haven't played in years!" Milan elaborated and cleaned up, "I mean, you don't want to hear the same songs we just played, right?" Someone in the audience yelled, "Elevator Love Letter!", the song that made the band famous, that they had played at Webster and would not play at the second set.

Campbell is at home on stage, an emotional universe with customized physics, a quirky guy who has made a career being very earnest in public. His wireless mic has a piece of green tape with "Torq" written on it, a nickname that sounds like "Turk," when people say it quickly. He was late to the Webster Hall sound check on Saturday afternoon, a gesture that was surely more pell-mell than rock star righteousness. He is reported to be hugely generous and funny, and in front of his audiences he gives the impression of a guy going every direction at once, a bit of unrestrained ebullient id set against Milan's pleasant and organizing superego. He speaks as directly as he can before the last song at Mercury Lounge, "Thank you, we love you; thank you for spending money on our band. You make our lives possible." This brief monologue, an odd lifting of the most obvious curtain in independent rock, was perfect for an audience who spent 30 dollars on Webster tickets (though fans received a free digital copy of The North at Webster and the Mercury Lounge show was free) and endured seven dollar beers at both venues. It was a winning moment, not the reason that people love this band, but the correct and honest response to that love. Earlier, as they took the stage, a breathless girl in the balcony at Webster Hall leaned over to a friend and whispered loudly, "Set Yourself On Fire is my favorite album ever." Both nodded gravely, elegiac even. Nearly everyone in the audience feels some variation of this exact sentiment.

This all makes the night feel both public and private. Stars' fame practically relies on members of their fanbase having an intimate relationship with their music, a bedroom band who happily soundtracked and counseled a million heartbreaks. In public all these threads braid, all these fans who have had this overwrought and important experience with the music, all these fans who know the words to "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead" the way school children know the Pledge of Allegence; it is both celebratory and a little intense, like an emotional, music jingoism, punk music for people that don't like punk music.

Stars, in this sense, are less a real band than they are a collection of memories their fans have about listening to their music. The live show is this memory come alive. The band opened their Webster Hall gig with latest single, "Theory of Relativity," a song that relies almost entirely on this type of unremembered nostalgia with Campbell channeling Moz, "back in lame grade 10, I was a total devestator, baby/ down in the school yard they all fell to their knees " before closing the loop with, "but it can't be '93, sadly, 'cause I wish it could forever/you call it luck, I call it tragedy." This is the central contradiction, not only that Campbell was aged 21 in 1993, a good bit of magical remembering, fans and a band caught between an intense remembered self and the colder realities of the present. Campbell's success and his ascendancy in the band is that he believes this remembered self can't die if you keep writing the right song about it. He is the keeper of our story. Milan, too, traffics in this imagery but with a few more reservations. The band's web address and Twitter handle are the appropriately democratic, "You Are Stars."

It is not all winsome reminiscence though. Polemical and a bit silly, Stars played their most didactic song ever, "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It" in the middle of their Webster set, eleven years of emotional catharsis, wrapped into one fortune cookie message. It is also one their finest creations of pop music and one of the best songs of 2012. Campbell is his most powerful self, both brittle and relentless, equally fervent on apologias like, "If I'm frightened, if I'm high, it is my weakness, please forgive it," and its corrolary, "take the weakest thing in you and beat the bastards with it," the closest thing the Stars crowd gets to marching orders. Everyone was a little drunk, if not necessarily high, and increasingly resolute.

The Mercury Lounge set was lodged firmly in the past, the place where Campbell is most comfortable. After the crushing and new "A Song Is A Weapon," the band played exclusively from the back catalog. Running through "Your Ex-Lover Is Dead", "One More Night" and "Calendar Girl", the last song before Milan left the stage, it was a memory of a time when Milan had as much skin in the game as Campbell, where they shared catharsis like thirsty elementary schoolers perched around a water fountain. And then it was Torq's turn. The North bears much more of his voice and influence than the band's previous work, and no one seems to entirely mind, least of all Milan. Campbell is, after all, fantastically talented and writes the songs his fans want to hear and remember hearing. He writes the music of the selves they want to remember being. This risks naming the elephant in the room, what we all came to see, a decade in the mirror with the truly ugly bits edited out and all the pain recast as moral victories. Milan headed to the back of the room and Campbell closed the show with perfect pathos; it was a charming man playing, "This Charming Man," a song of the story-keeper's remembered self.

Boys and Girls Living Together :: An 8tracks Mix

Boys and Girls Living Together from 32feet on 8tracks.

Last summer 8tracks asked us to curate a summer mix for them, which we did and got us involved in their personalized take on Internet radio. After a long layoff, we returned to 8tracks this afternoon with a mix exclusively concerned with boy-girl pop music. Not surprisingly, most of this music is about break ups. Called "Boys and Girls Living Together" it comprises some of the best pop conversations between male and female vocalists (a trend that we traced to Human League's sex-power treatise, "Don't You Want Me"). The requirements were that each vocalist had to sing at least a verse or a bridge, not just the hook in the chorus. If you enjoyed the Postal Service's brutal "Nothing Better" or the masochism of Stars' "Elevator Love Letter," you already know this aesthetic well. Stream the mix above and take a spin around 8tracks and let us know what we missed.

Stars :: "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It"

Stars have been making music just long enough to risk being a footnote. You know, reference material, the kind of thing you cite in an academic defense of some new, and presumably, better band. Their last album, The Five Ghosts, found Stars playing itself a bit. This is, of course, the grand risk of being first and being good: You one day find yourself playing yourself asking, "What would we do here?" and either railing against or falling mercilessly into this pit of self-parody. Imitation of self is the direct antecedent to artistic atrophy, a very cruel and very public version of your grandmother's advice about you continuing to make that face and your face staying that way. This raised the stakes and lengthened the odds for Stars coming release, The North. The first single, "The Theory of Relativity" risked everything contained in this paragraph, a titan of indie rock seemingly adrift, until the second taste of the record, "Hold On When You Get Love And Let Go When You Give It" released this morning. It is full of bleeding hearts and Cure-style guitars and a lyric, "Take the weakest thing in you and beat the bastards with it" as close to both a great turn of phrase and marching orders as we get in 2012. Amy Milan shows up late to do a sort of Kate Bush turn in her upper register while Torquil Campbell outlines the architecture of a pro-love polemic below. It is all in the title, predictable in a sense but spacious and propulsive like all great pop music, buzzing against killer lines like, "if I'm frightened if I'm high, it's my weakness please forgive it." As for Stars, if their weakness was that they started to look too much like themselves, here they prepare to beat you with impunity.

The History of Panic :: "The Chase"

Modern love songs are often and best written with dual perspective, a sort of twin cinema, the bias and narrative of a protagonist offset with the opinion of another. The Postal Service described this methodology with crushing clarity on 2003 release, "Nothing Better" where Ben Gibbard's romantic solipsisms were redirected by Jen Wood's corrections, a style immortalized for all time with, "I feel I must interject here." The rest was history. If love and loss are done by two people, perhaps they are best sung this way. Sounding an awful lot like Stars - also pioneers of this boy-girl synth pop, The History of Panic craft a big, buzzing, boy-girl single, "The Chase" of this same archetype. Of course, "Nothing Better" was a cautionary tale where "The Chase" is more of a conversation, the male narrator, here History of Panic's mastermind Gerald Roesser, still playing the role of the bleeding heart against the distant laissez-faire of their counterpart. The key difference being, "The Chase" ends with the open-ended conditional, "If we want to ..." as the vocals merge briefly into a duet before the individual recidivism again creeps at the corners.

Listen :: The History of Panic - "The Chase" [Vimeo]

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"

TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Nunca"

TRAILS AND WAYS return with a second promotional single from their coming LP, Trilingual. This, entitled, "Nunca", Spanish for "never", opens with tape fuzz and street noise before breaking into an ebullient, warm guitar hook, like Vampire Weekend drenched full of sunshine and dried in the breeze on a clothesline. The aesthetic moves south from there, featuring an increasingly Brazilian bossanova influence that the band says was inspired by a warm day in Sao Paulo spent listening to Drake. And the vagaries of R&B creep their way in at the edges, a male-female trade-off that sounds like Stars with Amy Milan transplanted toward the equator. But the guitar hook carries the arrangement, one of those sounds that explains the reasoning for indie rock imperializing World Music in the first place: pretty and exotic without losing its urbanity (here to mean: "sophistication" not as a synonym for "urban"). The party, the Good Life, is out there somewhere, likely south and it sounds exactly like this.

On The List :: Stars @ Littlefield [9.26.10]

Exactly two weeks ago tonight, a Wesleyan student set herself ablaze with flammable accelerant on the edge of the school's athletic fields. Her suicide note held the Stars' lyric, "when there's nothing left to burn, you have to set yourself on fire." Stars were scheduled for a Sunday night appearance at Wesleyan and there was simply no way that was happening. A rapidly scheduled show at Littlefield appeared out of thin air. Neither singer, Torquil Campbell nor Amy Millan, would elude to the Genesis of this show, but it was true; a band who have always found their pathos in the tension between darkness and life, between death and love were unfairly face up with the actions of a deeply depressed college student who left nothing behind but their song lyrics. A girl who none of us knew killed herself and here we were, celebrating the smallness of the venue, our emotional connection to the songs, the weird shirtless guy to my right. It couldn't feel totally wholesome, and once you knew there was no going back.

We didn't know her. It was dreadfully sad, that was definitely true. But we were here, and so were they, resolute in each corner, forcefully ignoring how much we previously thought this was all life and death. We were mostly just lucky to all be together.

Against this backdrop these anthems of youth and tragedy did not take new meaning (this would be awful and selfish), but they certainly gained strength behind a largely unwitting audience and a band committed to, as they would say, "play music for people like you, until you don't want hear it anymore." Opening with "The Night Starts Here," the band ripped through a series songs that so inspired a particular fan dancing to stage left that Campbell looked at him and said, "The band loves this guy. Lead by example, sir!" The band then immediately shifted into latest single, "Fixed," a song bristling with synths and melody. Stars turned to the stunning "Take Me To The Riot," "I Died So I Could Haunt You" and "Wasted Daylight" in quick succession.

The night would end with Campbell, effectively alone on stage, singing about the loneliness of the dark. After closing with the crushing "Calendar Girl," Stars returned with an encore that contained a cover of The Smiths', "This Charming Man," an ode to how much they are the quiet center between Morrissey and Ben Gibbard's Postal Service. The band retreated, leaving only Campbell and his keyboardist. The lights were down and thankfully, only some us knew exactly why we were all here. Our local and private griefs evaporated in something larger and finally, we were just lucky to all be here together.