Lovers :: "How Beautiful You Are"

Is it a metronome or a heart monitor on the fritz? The first notes in Lovers' "How Beautiful You Are" plink out as a tiny, beeping loop. This emerges as the foundation, laying out just at the fringes, for a delicate, compartmentalized love song. The Neutral Milk Hotel-inspired melody - and it is the tonal stepping stones in the chorus that could easily be replaced with Jeff Mangum's howl - centers on the title lyric, a breezy acoustic guitar progression. Unlike Mangum's "Song Against Sex", this is lighter fare, more likely a hymn for human contact without feeling grimy or unduly salacious. The incessant loop from the song's opening never leaves, inspiring a sense that this is at once measured and musical and might also make your heart move a little out of time for the next two minutes plus.

Listen :: Lovers - "How Beautiful You Are"

Capybara :: "Late Night Bikes"

The recent resurgence of marketing youth culture took firm hold of commercial advertising, threatening to become an ingrained cultural value. If you weren't those shirtless kids dancing around a campfire with face paint on (wearing Levis), or taking a video-graphed (Flip Camera) road trip across the country (in a Honda Element), you were supposed to think you could be. Companies weren't marketing their products, but rather they were selling you a vision of yourself. It didn't hurt that the soundtrack to these ads was invariably a hooky, credible independent band. We were easily bought. But, these romantic generalizations - in essence, we are all independently wealthy, wear skinny jeans, are attractive and intensely creative - held a power that transcended mere dollars. It spoke to our most nostalgic selves. We have taken a late night walk down the double yellow lines of a deserted street. We have ridden bikes through the dead of night in Pacific Beach, San Diego. We have driven cross-country. We have smiled broadly in this sepia-toned movie made just for us. We are these people. Capybara not only might find their latest song, "Late Night Bikes" getting the sync-treatment (a Nissan Leaf commercial, perhaps) but they are absolutely rooted in the realities that make the above paragraph possible. "Late Night Bikes" sounds expansive and warm; it is catchy and, in places, perfect. It's road music for a generation of kids who have done nothing but move, sliding in long, languid figure-eights under a street light in a parking lot, down a lonely highway and through a few weird decades.
  
Listen :: Capybara - "Late Night Bikes"

Now, Now :: "Dead Oaks"

The terrifying hum of adolescence is easily forgotten by the adult world. And not the type of "teen movie" nostalgia where some terrible pop song blares as a bunch of fresh faced kids head to the beach in a Jeep Wrangler. The buzz of adolescence was that constant yearning, unsettled and uncertain, everything in mind and body running at 100 miles-per-hour. It was awesome; it was uncomfortable. Everything was new and important. I suspect you've lost any connection to this in a sea of expense reports, company emails, jobs that start relentlessly at the same time every day and a relationship that is the picture of stability. There was a time when you felt very differently. Now, Now, a band who recently signed to Chris Walla's Trans-Records, are allowed direct access to these moments of youth, at once energetic and anxious. "Dead Oaks" roots itself in a down-stroke guitar line, one that might remind you of "Since U Been Gone" if you listen to it right, before bubbling over into a chorus about not sleeping enough. The duet emerges as a perfect "up-a-third" pairing, making the band's stylistic references footnote somewhere between early Rilo Kiley and Tegan and Sara, a short burst of pop that fades as quickly as it arrived, rife with teenage sensibility. "Dead Oaks" rings heartbroken, love-sick and completely hopeful, a cocktail of emotions you may not have experienced since the Clinton years. It was that buzz, the radio static that never quieted, and when you closed your eyes that guitar line was still there, whether you wanted it or not.

On The List :: Dreamers of the Ghetto @ Mercury Lounge [12.8.11]

This review runs live and in color on the incomparable Bowery Presents House List Blog. Photo courtesy.

Romanticizing the awfulness of the American ghetto experience isn’t necessarily new, although perhaps the modalities have changed in 2011. Even Lupe Fiasco suggested that if urban life threatened any lionizing appeal, it was certainly outweighed by practical realities. Dreamers of the Ghetto entered themselves into this conversation with a stunning debut record, Enemy/Lover, and a fall tour in support of U.S. Royalty that stopped at Mercury Lounge last night.

The four-piece Dreamers evokes a certain grittiness that befits the moniker—they’re underdogs dreaming of getting out or they’re solid outsiders dreaming of what happens within in the walls and streets of the American ghetto. Either way, the band pits wailing guitars against detached synthesizers, alongside pathos-rich vocals. This combination transmutes the band into the rarefied air of aspirational visionaries, hope-in-unseen believers armed with instruments.

Dreamers of the Ghetto closed the night with the breathy, seductive chorus of vocals of “Connection,” “Regulator” and the band’s thesis statement, “Tether.” Each song featured a central lyric loudly repeated and launched like projectiles into the minds and chests of the assembled audience: “When you’re gone I know you’re with me” (“Connection”), “I love your face/ I think you’re striking” (“Regulator”) and the fantastic and final “It’s just another door/ Tether on the other side” (“Tether”). Somehow these dark dreams of American terrors became beautiful; love, loss and fear of the urbane metastasizing into wide-open hymns and singable refrains. It was a dark pathos to be sure, but pathos all the same.

Listen :: Dreamers of the Ghetto - "State of a Dream"
Listen :: Dreamers of the Ghetto - "Tether"

On The List :: We Barbarians and Tribes @ Mercury Lounge [12.8.11]

We Barbarians are the best band playing in New York City right now. The crowd at the Mercury Lounge on Thursday, an odd assembly of label heavy-hitters and interns from Island and Universal Records (a function of UK headliner Tribes), didn't at first embrace this reality and then couldn't help avoiding it. A&Rs in their leather jackets, ill-fitting jeans and awkwardly young choice of shoes began to tap their feet. The room filled around the sound that We Barbarians projected from the stage. They joked, as the seven-o'clock band, that they were glad the audience left so much room in the front, that awkward horseshoe that performers hate and crowds can't seem to help, because their bigger crowd was coming later. In a sense, they were correct. This is a band that has something much, much larger on the horizon, and perhaps if we have left some room, it is only for the moment. They played their entire Headspace EP and two other songs and like that, they were gone.

Tribes, a hotly-buzzed outfit from London took the stage next and it was immediately clear where the English press derived their fervor. In much the way that Silversun Pickups stuck their increment borer in the tree of American Alternative Rock, Tribes have done a similar thing with Alternative Britpop of the 1990s. The extraction reveals the tree's rings, the passage of time and how fresh and familiar the dulcet tones of 1996 can sound in 2011. For their first New York show, the band played their single, "Sappho" third, a song destined to survive and thrive on British radio and potentially jump the ocean. A pristine brunette in the front row, and more importantly someone who did not work for the band's label, knew all the words and moved herself to the center. For the purposes of monetizing, this is never a bad thing. Tribes closed the night with their second best song, "We Were Children", a song sporting the type of chorus the will quite rightly make famous, first sung lightly and then wailed at full volume. "These things happen", the band serenade us, "we were children in the mid-90s." And this, broadly defined, was true.

Listen :: Tribes - "We Were Children"
Listen :: We Barbarians - "The Wait Is Over" (Delta Spirit Remix)

Interview :: Dreamers of the Ghetto [12.8.11]

Storming out of Bloomington, Indiana spitting a brand of rock with more pathos than anything else you heard in 2011, Dreamers of the Ghetto arrived in New York last night for the first of two shows. Their record, Enemy/Lover rings as one of the finest debuts of the year, a mixture of gravel vocals, detached synths and slamming guitars. The band took a few minutes out to answer our questions about the things critics miss, the power of beer and Chinese food and if laughter counts as an enhanced interrogation technique. Our questions and their answers after the jump. Dreamers of the Ghetto play Mercury Lounge tonight with US Royalty. 

Polica :: "Lay Your Cards Out" (feat. Mike Noyce)

If you know well the distinct pleasure of evading the police in a foreign country, you know well that the first syllable is the critical one. You don't need to know German to know what someone screaming, "Polizei!" means. Likewise, "Policia" means something to you even when, linguistically, it maybe shouldn't. For Polica, a Minneapolis band with a sound that will remind you of a frustrated and sultry Phantogram, this is, perhaps, the point. This is identification done by aesthetic faculties, an instant moment of recognition, something vaguely transcendental. "Lay Your Cards Out" is a tidy little jam with ratatat drums down the stretch and a female vocal built for seduction on lines like, "take a moment, lay your cards out" and such simple axiomatic prescriptions as "get your head right". The arrangement builds and crashes around this vocal, alternately reserved and edgy. The reverb is unsettling, a different cocktail of mood stabilizers than Phantogram but no less interesting. Certainly a band to watch, a bit of menace, immediately recognizable like a siren screaming from a foreign car.



[via] Indie Music Filter