Slam Donahue :: "Bug In The Sun"

The good times always run out, the fun always ends. The universe does its readjustment work like an absent-minded-but-now-very-angry parent returning home to find you on the garage roof drinking light beer. Get down from there. A girl you hung around with who was too cool, the stupidly easy summer job you had, your heater betting on football that winter, they each regressed to the mean. The universe isn't super attentive, but it also doesn't miss. One minute you're buying the home of your dreams, the next Lehman Brothers is taking on water and a global financial crisis is underway. Your mortgage broke the world. One decade you're an undefeated superpower, the next you've got too much debt in China and a foreign policy that would make Ruyard Kipling blush. Coming screaming from an imagined boombox, Brooklyn's Slam Donahue build "Bug In The Sun" as an ode the front side of this carefree living with a brief sideways glance for everything contained in this paragraph. A Brooklyn band with slamming guitars and hooks that catch like Burmese tiger pits, they try their best to paper over what anyone who has lived in New York City has felt: This can't possibly last. "We made some bad decisions, but everything always ends up fine," they wax before asking, "And I wonder if we get another shot?" The implication is what they already know, the last lyrics, "What's done is done is done."

Western Affairs :: "Iowa"

Iowa isn't a declaration of independence, no statement of rebellion, full of blighted triumphs. Like the rest of the American middle west, it is a profoundly liminal place, neither here nor there, a once proud frontier now tied to heavily subsidized monoculture farming or four decades of disappearing manufacture. Unless an avid reader of Kinsella's Field of Dreams, no American child fantasizes of growing up and moving to Iowa.Western Affairs, a dream pop band not from Iowa, address this sort of grinding sacrifice on their debut single that carries the name of the state in question. "Iowa" is soaring slow-drive pop, initially recalling the spacey keyboards of Milagres' "Glowing Mouth," still aimed at the sky but the part you look at when searching for moral victories. Lyrically, this is a depressing ride full of cold comforts like, "You gave it your best shot" and "You gave up your life to be with me," though it's unclear if the latter is an admonishment or a gratitude. This is the type of interstitial tension that carries a Washington, DC band to address Iowa, the setting for when things both are and are not.

Listen :: Western Affairs - "Iowa"

[via] Indie Music Filter

Howth :: "Secret Goldmine"

Ever since the collapse of the mercantilist economic systems of the late 18th-century, most intellectuals accepted the notion of national success in the marketplace was tied to more than accumulation of precious metals. Sitting on a pile of gold, or anything else for that matter, bucked the rules of supply and demand that governed these post-Enlightenment economies. And though it took nearly two centuries even Nixon took the United States off the gold standard in the 1970s with almost no fanfare. Now, the only fixation with gold arises from the far right wing, uber-Atlas Shrugged demagogues. But these are matters of national economic policy, not emotional, metaphorical geography. In these areas, Howth, a New Jersey folk band (How else can you explain both silky harmonies and slices of E-Street sax?) suggest the privilege in being "your secret goldmine" on their song of roughly the same name. The chorus is overlaid with a delicate female duet, indicating that being an outlet of emotional prosperity, in this sense, should be mutual. "Secret Goldmine" resounds as a beautiful and pebbled arrangement, set against hushed and downcast vocals, in moments sounding like a whispered Ra Ra Riot. Underpinning the whole matter is the notion of something scarce and rare becoming something private and kept, a love with enough kick to reverse of the last 200 years of economic philosophy.

Listen :: Howth - "Secret Goldmine"
Listen :: Howth - "Joseph"
Listen :: Howth - "Wind Blows Cold"

The Mean Season :: "Hearts"

In one of those lyrical turns of phrase that evokes Ben Gibbard's deconstruction of the glove compartment on "Title and Registration," Washington, D.C. band The Mean Season aim directly for the chest on lead single, "Hearts" from the band's eponymous EP. The "inaccurately named" thing here is love, or whatever the Western World approximates as love, something between Russell Stover heart-shaped candy boxes and the marriage plots that dominated literature and then reformed as women's magazines. The central couplet in "Hearts" is the destructive and deeply revisionist, "Who decided it was such a perfect symbol for love?/It's only an organ pumping your blood," as a tidy indie rock arrangement unfolds around a distant and resolute female vocal. There is no good answer to who chose our hearts as our avatars for our loves, but your gross, bloody, perfect little fist hammers in your chest, four chambers, each as necessary as the one beside it. You know, something to keep your fingers warm.

Listen :: The Mean Season - "Hearts"

Phantasms :: "Starboard"

Sounding a bit like the moment your daytime cold medication syncs with a too-big-to-fail cup of coffee, Phantasms unleash a buzzing and pretty single, "Starboard." The low-fi sonics prove almost too much, a sort of spinning nausea, before the chorus turns up and Sarah Atchison's lithe vocal marks the outline of a futuristic ("anachronistic" might work here too) take on the type of pop Beach House made deservedly famous. The outtro is a symphony of all these brittle Casio keyboards, marching in time to the snap of a packaged snare, a eulogy for something perhaps, a focused final movement from what felt, initially, like barely concealed cacophony. This is beauty, unconventionally framed.

Daytona :: "Undertow"

When Pela said, "yeah, there's an undertow, but it ain't got me" in 2007, the implied assumption was it would have gotten you by now. It was New York after all, an inverted version of Sinatra's "If I can make it there ..." thesis; if I can make it there, I'll be dragged out to sea. Pela, it is worth noting, is now We Are Augustines, opening for the Counting Crows, an undertow of an entirely different variety. Another Brooklyn band, Daytona, who sound a lot more like Beach Fossils, have a debut single with the same notion, "Undertow" and lyrics like "you'll never make it out alive" and "when the undertaker reads your palm and says, 'My son, you're going to die.'" The fear is tacit, even in the first movement where a waltzing tempo and fuzzy guitars collude to make it seem like all your Instagram photos are going to add up to more than solipsism, your twenties as a slow dance. The second movement is splashy, all flecking guitars and depressive lyrics leading to an updated Chopin's Awakening where the deadly current isn't in the water but you end up there anyway. If there's an undertow, it already has you.

The Lovely Bad Things :: "I Want You To Go Away"

This was the year that Beth Cosentino's love for the West Coast had her writing slow songs. California finally made the gittery, faux-edgy garage pop girl go soft. It was as pretty as it was unsettling. The Lovely Bad Things, who I presume take similar thesis-statement license with their name as Cosentino does with Best Coast, aren't there yet. Lead track, "I Want You To Go Away" means exactly what it says, emphasizing the notion of separation with unacademic dismissals like, "I don't give a shit." This line rhymes with the pedantic and satisfying, "I don't know what I'm searchin' for but I know that you're not it." Garage pop that refused to trade its edges, "I Want You To Go Away" is a soaring break-up song, written in the basement with a chorus that heads for the roof, backing vocals chasing up the same musical thirds as the thrust of the melody. The final tones are the echoing of fuzzy guitar reverb, the last sounds rattling around the contours of a relationship that is absolutely - with punctuation - over.

Listen :: The Lovely Bad Things - "I Want You To Go Away"