Handsome Furs :: "Repatriated"

What if you got lost and never came home? Wolf Parade side-project Handsome Furs, the brain child of Dan Boeckner, reflects on this question, eventually arriving at a new set of conclusions. Home has nothing to do with residence or passports or jingoism, it is a concept of the heart, and for Boeckner this center has moved to where the blaring pop music comes out of Chinese bodegas (you can't make this up; it is in their press release) and the places where hi-fi spins out of cranked, tinny speakers, calling revolution. The icy synths recall his Wolf Parade work but the back beat represents something playful and insistent. This matches Boeckner's intense final declaration, "I'll never be repatriated." He isn't coming home, this much is obvious. He belongs to something else.

Listen :: Handsome Furs - "Repatriated"
Listen :: Handsome Furs - "What About Us"

French Films :: "Convict"

French Films only release new music on the eve of summer. Now, rather than explaining what makes latest single, "Convict" so compelling - the backing vocals, the rollicking bass line, the fuzzy vocals, I could go on - I will make a few dying, seasonal metaphors. These will all boil down to the simple fact that in the northern hemisphere, it is getting warmer outside and isn't this just the perfect song for (fill in the blank) the million different things you'll do under such temperate circumstances (insert reference to rooftops or sunsets here)? Of course, this will be no good without a cursory reference to other bands that play similarly summery music, and here I suspect calling French Films a "mod-squad version of the Drums" would suffice. None of this would remove the simple fact that "Convict" is an obliteratingly perfect song for summer. But, I would be remiss if I didn't at least provide a second layer of meaning: a criticism of the analysis recast as the new analysis. Got it? Now, if you're doing your job, you'll reject such bifurcated meta-bullshit and listen to the five kids out of Finland who make music like the sun is never going to set on the rooftop of your perfect summer afternoon.

Convict by French Films

Auditorium :: "Sunday"

Will Sheff's "The Presidents Dead" remains one of the best (and weirdest) weekend songs of all time, describing the dilating wake up; bacon hissing, coffee great, spring on the wind, all against the backdrop of a fictional assassination. Auditorium opens "Sunday" with a similar lyric, "Sunday, we woke up and you made us coffee/I don't tend to drink it/but everything that touches your hands/is slowly becoming the things that I want and need to be part of the plan." This is, of course, not love in a time of loss, but rather love on Prospect Park West, where the city sings and skies open up with the massing crowd, one that we imagine is now moving and singing in time. Opening whistles evoke a Chutes Too Narrow-era Shins but Auditorium spins something far more baroque and layered. The instrumentation boils down to compartmentalized acoustic guitar progression with the fireworks taking the form of three and four part vocal harmonies. Think of Fleet Foxes directed to singing original a cappella arrangements in the archway of their college dormitory, and, oddly enough, this is a compliment to Auditorium's throw back pop. Blinking awake, scents of coffee from the kitchen, sun blazing optimism through the curtains, it only takes 2:03 to realize how perfect this all is.

Kyla La Grange :: "Been Better"

Second single from new UK burner Kyla La Grange will be out on Chess Club on July 11th but it will hit the Internet earlier, considerably - this morning, in fact. "Been Better" stomps furiously out of the gates, an ode to the gripping conclusion of "Walk Through Walls" single b-side "Courage". La Grange, as always, feels built to blow the doors off any spatial constraints, somehow bound to find the swollen and thrashing boundaries of whatever arrangement she builds for her listeners. Lyrically, this is a declaration of independence, a favorite topic of this moment in the singer's early career. She proves more than willing to channel her own emotional nadirs in the hopes of inverting them into apexes; what Issac Brock deemed, "taking heartache with hard work." This trick isn't new, but the tiny blond girl holding all of the cards (and the talent) knows how to play it well.

Been Better by kylalagrange

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"

Under Electric Light :: "Someone Somewhere"

Entering like a dull highway hum, the Montreal pop-shoegaze outfit Under Electric Light eventually lives up to its name with a glittering array of synths drifting over a low fuzz. "Someone Somewhere" communicates a sort of wistfulness in oblique lyrics like, "It's not as easy as I thought to be someone else", to go with the - and this seems to happen all at once - shiny and dull tones of electro-pop drenched in haze. Of course, this isn't terribly experimental, one of those perfect songs that comes on during the first hour of an overnight drive, your car and the sun crashing westward into the horizon. If you enjoyed the work of a band like Pallers, Under Electric Light will be the perfect antidote for whatever long-form thoughts you're working through. On, "Someone Somewhere" the chorus, just a slight and still obvious elevation, echos memorably from the back of chamber, "I don't mind what they see" as a new and casual refrain, perfect for the moment between personal triumphs and hiding your head in the sand.

Listen :: Under Electric Light - "Someone Somewhere"

On The List :: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. @ Mercury Lounge [5.11.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery's House List Blog.

Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. sound-checked in street clothes but took the stage in stock-car jumpsuits last night. The band’s name already steeped in a few layers of irony, this represented its traditional performance attire: a winking ode to a NASCAR culture that we can only assume the group has absolutely no serious interest in. However, on this night at a very sold-out Mercury Lounge, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. possessed a second wrinkle, unzipping their race suits to unveil real business suits, one of them of the three-piece variety. The two frontmen sealed this reveal with a completely straight-faced handshake, lips pursed and brows furrowed for maximum impact—a kind of poststructuralist irony so serious that it could never be, and so planned and willfully wry that it could not help being all business.

Opening with “Morning Thought,” the first single off the forthcoming LP, It’s a Corporate World, Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. pounded through an arrangement of delicate two-part harmonies and slamming drums. The main lyric, “I’m not thinking about it,” proved to be a useful antimantra for a band that so carefully plans so many of its moves (and here it is worth noting that the group tours with gigantic homemade wooden letters that light up and spell “JR”).

The band then shifted back into material from last year’s outstanding Horse Power EP, playing “Simple Girl,” blending immediately into “Vocal Chords,” a love song that doesn’t feel solipsistic or indulgent, resting instead on inevitability: “Well, it’s got to be the way it is.” The fourth song of the night was unknown to the crowd, a cut off their upcoming LP, but in the bridge the band ad-libbed the now-famous “New York, I love you,” a reference to the now-defunct LCD Soundsystem’s ode to the city of the same name. It was a slice of earnest irony before the band played a completely self-serious and quite excellent cover of the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows.” It would have been absolutely serious if everyone in the crowd hadn’t been smiling so hard.


Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. - Morning Thought by Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr.