Swimming Lessons :: "Double"

An effervescent slice of electronic pop, Swimming Lessons meanders pleasantly through debut single, "Double". The percussion resonates as carbonated, an ever-rising loop of chiming sounds and loops - a snare sound for organizational purposes only - mixed with Ben Lewis charming, echoing vocal. The Leeds outfit gives hints of the Clock Opera empire that never was, and windows to the better sides of Ernest Greene's work in Washed Out. None of it necessarily aims for the ceiling. "Double" gives little hint of unchecked ambitions, rather a frictionless slow-drive through electro-pop tropes that sound as familiar as they are pleasing.

Dead Mellotron :: "Weird Dreams"

Sure, it takes 45 seconds of distant guitar highway noise for Dead Mellotron's "Weird Dreams" to get underway, but eventually it unfolds in the tradition of slow-drive singles like Washed Out remix Small Black's "Despicable Dogs". The first drum hits even recall moments of "Where Is My Mind?" for their shared shrugging sense of the impending disaster. This most definitely isn't the part where you feel better; it's where you learn to live with feeling worse. "Weird Dreams" rings with bits of both shoegaze and dream-pop, airplane hanger acoustics and underwater reverb, a world full of buried vocals and snapping drums.

Waylayers :: "Magnets"

An enormous introduction, East Londoners Waylayers breach into the pop view finder with latest single, "Magnets." With shades of the chillwave fever - hell, they even say "I feel fields all around me," which is more than enough for Earnest Greene to cry, "Derivation!" - and shades of the angular pop music of Foals and Two Door Cinema Club, "Magnets" is an upbeat and unselfconscious record about connection and connecting. Ostensibly concerning finding "magnets" within and getting in touch with the "fields" all around us, Waylayers stomp their way to the conclusion only after creating a digital layer of the electrons that swirl around us, the invisible vibrations that make the world hum. "Magnets" is an absolute burner, snapping down-beat and spaceship guitars, a single built to pull with a sort of impossible and unseen gravity.

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Visions"

Letting Up Despite Great Faults practically monopolize the market for great, fuzzy, summer pop. This is saying something in an era where making a photo pretty involves using a washed out filter, where making pop music involves similar haze, where a band actually named itself Washed Out. Put another way, in the last three years lo-fi synth pop was to indie rock what drone strikes were to American foreign policy: ubiquitous, effective and debatably good. But, remarkably, LUDGF avoided sounding predictable, even if they trafficked the same territory as so many other bands. Perhaps it was their album art which frequently featured isolated appendages of what you imagine are quite attractive brunette girls, or perhaps, more importantly, it was their ability to drive their sonics under a layer of fuzz but never to lose the hooks and melodies that mark the boundaries of good pop music. On "Visions," the lead track from forthcoming LP, Untogether, the band features the same methodical guitar, fuzzy synthesizers and a satisfying launch sequence as the band tumbles into the body of the arrangement. It sounds exactly like everything else, and still manages a certain singularity in a sea of bands held under the water and neatly browned in the sun.

On The List :: Washed Out @ Bowery Ballroom [7.11.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery Presents House List blog.

Ernest Greene of Washed Out had already defeated more than the odds when he took the stage at a sold-out Bowery Ballroom on Monday night. As a part of the chillwave explosion of 2009, Greene immediately made a name for himself with an excellent EP and at least one transcendent remix of Small Black’s “Despicable Dogs.” However, pursuant to any excellence in a narrow vein, the question was never was Washed Out good? It was would Washed Out last? In this way Greene was the greatest deflector: a Sub Pop deal and an excellent LP in stores, proof that genre labeling was as curly and foppish as his haircut. Washed Out, a project that came to define, if not necessarily completely encapsulate a genre, had become more than that.

Greene played a mixture of old and new material, perhaps resisting the urge to play all the songs of his recent and critically acclaimed debut LP, Within and Without. Its sexual cover art aside, fans were treated to the album’s best track, “Amor Fati,” late in the set, the kind of slow build that both reflected and didn’t entirely embrace the found-art projections retreating behind the band and up into the rafters. This took place between the antihistamine version of older single “Feel It All Around” and the encore, “Eyes Be Closed.” It was the kind of thing that could easily be taking place in a Ridgewood, Queens, factory loft, but instead, Greene clapped his audience into rhythm, played his delicate creations against an arty backdrop and, perhaps, reflected on how talented you need to be to transcend a passing fad. And, with that, he retreated backstage.

Listen :: Washed Out - "Eyes Be Closed"
Listen :: Washed Out - "Amor Fati"

Washed Out :: "Amor Fati"

By far Earnest Greene's most ebullient track to date, "Amor Fati" is the second insight into what his Sub Pop debut, Within and Without, will sound like when it hits retailers on July 12. Drowned in seasick synths like all his other Washed Out work, "Amor Fati" traffics in a reverent melody cast against a slightly more aggressive BPM setting. Sounding a bit like a Breakfast Club soundtrack for an entirely reversed generation, where the kids are more polished than the music, the intentionally reverb-heavy Greene continues to spin beautifully flawed, cold medicine pop. At this, his most upbeat, you picture skipping detention in your sunglasses to put the finishing touches on your resume and complain about the perils of declining professionalism in the world of secondary education. This is looking cool incorporated. Fists in the air, my friends.

Listen :: Washed Out - "Amor Fati"

Washed Out :: "Eyes Be Closed"

Ernest Greene broke onto the scene in 2009, riding the crest of chillwave hype as it broke on the beach of chillwave backlash, with a name that both referenced what his music sounded like and a coy reference to how little he thought these genre specific terms of relevance mattered: Washed Out. After a slow drive summer single, "Feel It All Around", Greene signed to Sub Pop and prepared to either sink or swim with the legitimacy of a major independent label. By 2011 it had been two years and chillwave was firmly out of the discussion with even the most solipsistic bands of the genre like Small Black removed from the conversation (including by this writer). Ernest Green was, in short, a long shot before he ever released his first full album, one of those typically confusing moments in modern music.

Washed Out proves more durable with first single, "Eyes Be Closed" off coming LP Within and Without, featuring rippling, cold medicine synths and an intentionally undersold hook. The overt sexuality of the cover art grabs all the attention, but it is Greene's big arrangement and pop sensibility in a sea of swimming electronics that endure beyond genre labeling and the attention deficit tastes of this decade. In the final 90 seconds of "Eyes Be Closed", the song swells around the listener, unexpectedly overwhelming and beyond the boundaries of what seemed possible, a triumphant ode to human connection; waking up on the beach in Ibiza in 1988, not entirely sure how you got there.

Listen :: Washed Out - "Eyes Be Closed"

Washed Out :: "You and I" [feat. Caroline Polachek]

On "You and I" chillwave super-producer Washed Out manages to direct the girl who broke a million hearts by singing "I tried to do handstands for you". Polacheck, of Chairlift and iPod commercial fame, is her smokey self, turned loose in the bridge, as a pulsing, pensive progression unwinds into echoing keys and darting arpeggios. Like most of the Washed Out catalogue, it is a slow-drive, glittering, lonely and troubled.

Listen :: Washed Out - "You and I " [feat. Caroline Polachek]

Small Black :: "Despicable Dogs" [Washed Out Remix]

The glo-fi genre holds as much promise as it does confusion. Warm synth-lines, echoing and fuzzy vocals - it doesn't seem definite enough to be promising. But Small Black made their way into our summer as the soundtrack to a departure from Los Angeles. As the 2.30am red-eye sailed out over the city, the song's signature lyric "do it without me/do it when I'm gone" took on added relevance, after all, I was getting out of there. The neon lights seemed to pulse and move with the electronics in my ears, like this was all a high-budget commercial done by a director with a tragic sense of humor and an eye for human drama.

But this experience in late July holds nothing to one I had this morning. Washed Out's take on "Despicable Dogs" is quite simply the most beautiful song I've heard this year. With a wall-of-sound loop and a "We can dance if we want to" allusion, Washed Out have pumped up the Small Black original into something that is as head-nodding as it is completely perfect. The emotional haymaker is still in the chorus where the signature lyric, the one that made Los Angeles harder to leave, comes through a mess of coordinated synth-peels like the quiet return of a past relationship or the departure from a current one. It needs no introduction. You can already feel exactly what this means.

Listen :: Small Black - "Despicable Dogs" [Washed Out Remix]