The Ampersands :: "Try This"

Buzzing power-pop shuffles through a sea of keyboards and fuzz on the Ampersands' first single, "Try This" from second LP, This Is Your Adventure Too. Recalling the abrasive and infectious pop of a band like the Features, "Try This" evolves from its lead keyboard line, a drunken circus melody, into memorable chorus where a female vocal emerges from behind the curtains to provide the central interogative, "Why don't you try this or you'll never know?" It's circular logic, to be sure, but the come-hither, nearly fecund tone of the chorus sets itself against the stomping and granular verses, a pleasant dichotomy. Like the instructions of the refrain, the listener is sort of helpless in the face of the hook, drawing gravity from splashy high-hats and even a bit of cowbell.

Listen :: The Ampersands - "Try This"

On The List :: A.C. Newman @ Bowery Ballroom [10.22.12]

[Ed.note: This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents House List. On an unrelated note you may notice our publication is back to posting its own crappy cell phone photographs which is a real underdog story.]

Two days after the close of the CMJ Music Marathon, the celestial music solstice marking the independent-music calendar’s embrace of unknown and rising stars, The Bowery Ballroom reserved its confines for one of the Old Guard. Carl Newman, playing as A.C. Newman behind his third solo record, took the stage as the Establishment, a man prodigiously talented enough that he began releasing solo material to accent his work with his larger and more well-known collective, the New Pornographers. The question was: What made this not the New Pornographers? Newman seemed almost self-consciously aware—this is a singer who proved he remembers his fans’ different haircuts from show to show and year to year—of being simply an alternate version of his parent band. And apart from that band, he was, in some sense, a more intimate version of himself. Neko Case was replaced on tour with the resplendent bangs of Megan Bradfield, and Newman opened with “I’m Not Talking,” the first single from Shut Down the Streets, a definitively separate take on the power pop that made the singer deservedly famous.

While Newman’s solo career and shows remain distinct, the bond between singer and audience blurred from the start. Newman resembles his fans, and his fans resemble him, a coincidence that probably isn’t one. Middle-aged men with close-cropped hair and thick-framed glasses who knew all the words to “On the Table” and “Secretarial,” songs that Newman, a middle-aged guy with close-cropped hair, sang back (or first) with no sense that snake might have been eating itself. Of course, Newman, arguably the best ear and pen for rugged pop songs since Stephen Malkmus, paid this only passing mind. Following the whistled bridge of “Drink to Me, Babe, Then” the crowd applauded, and Newman, recognizing this recognition of some minor bit of brilliance commented, “It’s one of the great marvels of modern man, how I whistle in key,” pausing only to add, “Proof that there is a God,” much to the delight and murmuring of his hyper-literate and (possibly) largely atheist fan base. It was a bit of faux self-aggrandizement, a bit of sarcastic evangelism, a joke only these people could fully appreciate—a joke they themselves might have made.

Newman closed the main set with “Come Crash,” his best love song and one he “wrote for my wife, two years before I met her,” and “Miracle Drug.” The band returned after a stomping bit of encore applause to play “Strings” and “Town Halo,” the latter producing the closest moment to transfiguration behind pounding keys and its shuddering bridge. It was, of course, what these people came to see, a singer apart from his band, perhaps even a little closer to his fans than he, or they, would be entirely willing to admit. So he returned to his earlier comment, a quick eulogy for a fan’s Mohawk, now shaved off, a previous haircut cataloged and remembered by the singer. The fan yelled, “Things change,” although he and Newman were both still here.

Listen :: A.C. Newman - "I'm Not Talking"

Soda Fabric :: "Antonia"

An endless summer of warm guitars, Soda Fabric's debut single, "Antonia" combines both surf-pop and the angularities of post-punk. It appears, from the traffic on their Facebook page, that Soda Fabric is from Israel, though the band claims to be from "Atlantis", a winking nod to the watery hooks and thick reverb of "Antonia". Sounding a bit like a more holistic take on the coastal bombast of French Films, the band has another, even better single, "Wrong Flight" waiting in the wings, an encouraging sign for such a young group. The success of both lies in the creation of chasing melodies and shout along good-time choruses. "Antonia", finally winds up on the lyric, "she's so in love," a crashing conclusion and a few gasping guitar spikes, a shortening of days and the final breaths of summer.

Olympic Swimmers :: "Knots"

A ripping little arrangement, Olympic Swimmers' single "Knots" rolls along on a firm bass line and the fractious vocals of lead singer Susie Smillie. At times "Knots" speaks in the language of dream-pop, winsome guitars locked in an ethereal struggle for existence, while at others Smillie's voice breaks upwards into a crystalline falsetto and recalls, bizarrely, a less thrashing Ritzy Bryan of Joy Formidable. Scottish pop sensibilities - Olympic Swimmers, another in a long line of great Glasgow bands - color the edges, everything a bit shrouded in a reverb and touches of fuzz, but with enough clarity to describe the architecture of moral victories in grey cities so twisted and tangled, you might reasonably never find your way out.

Listen :: Olympic Swimmers - "Knots"

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.

Bogan Via :: "TES"

Brooklyn by way of Phoenix (or something) Bogan Via continue to craft their love-sick synth slow jams on latest single, "TES". "Strange how it kills," mourns singer Madeleine Miller as an arrangement of synthesizer stabs and bass unfolds like a chemically compounded version of Beach House. The lonesome lyrics and the Dramamine-paced BPM add up to something completely broken and more than a little pretty. Miller sings at herself in a duet of layer vocals, occasionally adding band-mate Bret Bender in something that resembles Mates of State or Matt and Kim if either duo broke up and continued to make music in spite of and in homage to their lost relationship. Keyboards, like little lasers, point to the scene of the damage. Miller coos, "pray for better luck tomorrow," even though the best of what's around is already here.

Listen :: Bogan Via - "TES"

Haerts :: "Wings"

Like the parable of Icarus - a story with such aching implications five years ago and such troubling realities today - the notion of flying too high has always rooted itself in a delayed fatalism. It poses a reconsidered ambition. It reminds us of the thin air up there, the men who died on Everest and the people who dreamed too big or read The Great Gatsby with too literal an eye. Haerts, a band with slightly stronger than wax wings and a single of roughly the same name, "Wings", aim themselves directly into the stratosphere, or the end of Armageddon, or the career arc of Passion Pit - hell, you can pick the visual metaphor here - a sort of silly and precious desire to transcend themselves in a single moment. "Wings" becomes form meeting function, an act that is a soundtrack to itself and vice versa. With production duties handled by the indomitable St. Lucia, the guitars are warm and the hooks glide as if in zero gravity, no sense that this projectile of ambitions will prove problematic, or any notion that when up this high, you would ever have to come down.