Bend :: "Short Crush"

Like a wedge finding the weakness in a small fissure, the keyboard pop coming out of the minds of the current crop of adolescents and post-adolescents is both tiny and potentially huge. Built in the ashes of a post-Postal Service world, the bedroom jams of burgeoning LA two-some - currently at USC and Vassar College  respectively - Bend represent the smallest of impulses on the appropriately titled, "Short Crush". Soft 8-bit breakdowns lay beside a snapping loop and pretty boy-girl duet, all accented with the type of lyrics that make most intimate sense to 19-year-olds who wrote them. But if "Short Crush" lacks a certain universalism, it still manages to strike a deep sonic chord with anyone who ever loved Give Up, a new generation of painful bedroom pop for the kinds of thoughts and minor terrors that, understandably, never left the bedroom in the first place.

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.

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]

Resistor :: "Lighting And Distance"

In the spirit of Dntel's blip-pop, Philadelphia's Resistor builds arrangements bordering on 8-bit cacophony, like a keyboard graveyard where at night the electronic carcasses come to life to haunt one another. "Lighting and Distance" pokes and prods itself toward a crystalline chorus of, "so tell me lies, little lies", a satisfying and hook-driven slice of treble before breaking down into a baroque chord resolution ("and the sun will always rise") like Louis XIV furiously writing revenue policy on a Casio. If it is instantly digestible and a healthy share anachronistic, it is rich for its knowingly blind optimism: satisfying, mercurial and more than a bit wry.

Farragoes :: "The End Of The Affair"

Think of the Postal Service and then update Ben Gibbard's vocals with a dose of Morrisey's literacy and the moroseness of Jens Lekman. This brings you close to Farragoes, a synth-pop collaboration between Tom Avis and Jeff Craley, the parallels to the aforementioned mail-reliant project running deeper as one half of the band resides in Toronto and the other in DC and most of their music comes together in stems and pieces over file-sharing websites. But, you can't very credibly call your band, Mediafire without trafficking in a soul-sucking brand of irony; it isn't 2003 anymore. On the band's completely excellent single, "The End Of The Affair" the synth loops yelp and peak, crashing into each other with the coherence and elevation of carbonation creeping up the inside of a glass. This provides the architecture for love-sick lyrics about baseball teams that never win, songs that aren't as good the second time around, discomfort with the phrase "halcyon days" and the song's best lyrics, a rhyming couplet about Virginia Wolfe impressions in an airport lounge tied to "now I'm reading Notes From The Underground". A Dostoevsky reference is the perfect closer, ironically its second lyrical appearance, before the arrangement unwinds its parts and disappears.

Listen :: Farragoes - "The End Of The Affair"

The Echo-Friendly :: "Same Mistakes"

The brightness knob, the one that controls everything (just invented, just now), is going to be dipping toward dim on The Echo-Friendly's "Same Mistakes". Your dashboard lights, your desktop background, your kitchen track lighting, your city's skyline, all toned down around a graveled male vocal. Of course, this wouldn't be fun if "Same Mistakes" turned all lights down until they were off, and here comes a female voice to pull the dimmer up, brightening and lightening in time. The major turn, beyond a slow-drive piano progression, is the interplay between these two - dim, bright, dim, bright - a slower, more organic version of the idea that drove the Postal Service's "Nothing Better". It's gut punch pop: dark and light, nodding your head in the throws of a disaster.

Listen :: The Echo-Friendly - "Same Mistakes"

James & Evander :: "Constellating"

There won't be another Postal Service record, the delicate opening keyboards of James and Evander's single, "Constellating" informs us. A bubbling - and here, I mean figuratively, like watching carbonation work its way up the side of a glass - analog synth progression enters second, as the advance guard of a swelling arrangement, thudding drums, and one of those glittering second movements that are the raison d'etre of electro pop. This is the Oakland duo's first foray into making music with lyrics, in this case regarding human connections, all these invisible threads so easily forgotten. And here we assume they've divined their title, a cosmic connect-the-dots, taking individual balls of incandescent gas and forging them into shapes; one of those silly and desperately important projects that we carefully practice losing after our youth.