Blood Cultures :: "Indian Summer"

Drunk on its own falsetto, Blood Cultures debut single, "Indian Summer" weaves in lazy figure-eights before unleashing bombastic synth stabs that provide a menacing low end. It is this combination of the lighter than air - synths that feel like they'll float away - and the absolutely crushing - "I'll have to let you go, let you go" - that makes "Indian Summer" one of the strongest debut demos of 2013. It is the Knife's "Heartbeats" gene spliced with Passion Pit, the silky harmonies of bands like Grizzly Bear thrown in for good measure. A&Rs should sit up in their chairs and wonder what it would take to sign this heretofore anonymous New Jersey resident, quite possibly the next big thing to break in 2014.

CHVRCHES :: "The Mother We Share"

Riding down the back of Purity Ring and the intentionally bizarre Grimes, CHVRCHES (a Latinized "Churches") craft one of the best synthesizer singles of 2012. "The Mother We Share" explodes into a glittering chorus of fist-raising Kate Bush-lite vocal loops and buzzing keyboards that recall a far poppier version of the Knife. Vocalist Lauren Mayberry does the vulnerability trick well, howling a barely post-adolescent soprano at the maw of synthesizers and digital flourishes that threaten to drown her, managing to tame them all into time and rhythm for a refrain that takes the listener to the top of the room. It is a binary cacophony brought into step. The next movement, a major label deal, is sure to follow in 2013, hacking off a piece of what the Good Natured, another precocious girl-fronted synth outfit, never quite delivered. For CHVRCHES, as Mayberry sings in the chorus, "the way is long but you can make it easy on me," the way just got a lot shorter and easier for these veterans of other bands who now have nothing but bright lights ahead.

Machine Birds :: "If I"

One part Imogen Heap and one part the Knife, Machine Birds are a sparse and beautiful keyboard outfit from Norway. On "If I," a glowing synthesizer progression pulses like those lonely red lights they put on smoke stacks to warn low-flying aircraft. And it would be easy to see vocalist, Maria Skranes perched up there, alone, bemoaning the terrible counterfactual landscape below. Each lyric in the first verse is rooted in the conditional of the title, lines like, "If I let you know how I feel, would it make a difference?" It all builds to a chorus of the same icy synths, accented with Skranes shimmering and crushing vocal describing the disaster as, "I can't compete with her/you made up your mind a long time ago/that I was never an option." What follows the first chorus is a rich and distended bridge, a middle section nearly meditative enough to lose the initiative of a break up song for a relationship that never was, eventually doubling back to the mournful first conditional idea, "If I," this last time with a layered, Vocoder duet. The final chorus is a killer and the last lyric, "Why can't you choose me?" is a loose rhetorical question, a sigh at the end of a well documented descent. Stream the radio edit below and download the full version here.