Home Alone :: "Sleep.Walk.In"

In a bit of plagiarism that trends toward the reverential instead of the felonious, Toronto's Home Alone re-appropriates the guitar melody from Santo and Johnny's 1958 hit, "Sleep Walk" for the reverently named, "Sleep.Walk.In". Of course, if the original conjured something vaguely pacific - all sunshine, mournful afternoons and a lilting umbrella in your rapidly sweating glass - the recasting, off a cassette released EP appropriately titled Teddybears and Weed, chases the melody back to the overgrown bedroom. Home recording at its best, Home Alone's "Sleep.Walk.In" proves rugged, shabby and a bit brilliant, the product of languid mornings and interminable late afternoons, the sleeplessness and exhaustion of a post-adolescence spent on shag carpet with thoughts the size of your parent's subdivision.

The Lawlands :: "Elsewhere

San Franciscan indie pop outfit The Lawlands craft single, "Elsewhere" as the crux of a teleological crisis. Do the traveling circuses of our lives have any intentional destination? Do these moveable feasts have a meaning in their movement? Full of Smiths-indebted affectation and Magnetic Fields-inspired baritone, "Elsewhere" crashes around with a dark purpose: the doubting of place and purpose. Vocalist Anthony Ferraro describes these sojourned locations as powerline jungles, brilliant darkness, echoing wastelands, an aggressive modernism with a flippant hook, "by the time you arrive/we'll have evacuated elsewhere." The interstitial proves more disorienting, the ends we seek either transformed, obfuscated or somehow unrecognizable in the very arriving at them. In essence, by the time you get there, it won't be there anymore.

Here Is Your Temple :: "So High"

Here Is Your Temple set off lead single, "So High," as mixture of crystalline chiming synths and a menacing low-end anchored by a fuzzed bass line. Paying passing homage to the distant, moral-victory pop of Beach House, singer Emily McWilliam touches down cold and tremulous, a restrained and chilling force, allowing herself only a modicum of release on the song's icy refrain. She stares deeply into the austere abyss on the song's signature lyric, "talk about what the TV don't know," as tragic and modern as tragic and modern gets. Itching at the edges lie odes to Fleetwood Mac and the Shout Out Louds, McWilliam positioning herself centrally amidst the rolling drums and the echos of an arrangement concerning itself with the very meaning of being so far away.

Jon Lawless and Anna Wiebe - "Go For Broke!" [ft. Nicole Jasper]

The First Rate People collective continues to churn out genre-bending singles, this, "Go For Broke!", a collaboration between brainchild Jon Lawless and Anna Wiebe. It is an archetypical FRP ballad, a loose association of keyboards, a progression bent on resolution, yelping loops hiding in the corners, and a lilting and confessional vocal from Wiebe. Lawless enters late, a half-spoken bridge about the heat of being overly invested, the object of this investment being Wiebe's risk-adverse lyrics in the hook. It is ultimately about the power and perils of restraint, an unlikely angle for a group so bent on allowing any good idea into their music, an even less likely vessel, the relative quietude of "Go For Broke!".

Smith Westerns :: "Varsity"

The Smith Westerns have always sought to define musical laissez-faire, a sort of a shabbiness that they redefined as cool. The image was manufactured, an intentional brand of performance art, the process of trying to not try. After all, a band simply couldn't build compositions as lush and winking with so much nostalgia by accident. On latest single, "Varsity," the band sounds like a opiate-laced Pains Of Being Pure At Heart, the pre-chorus lyric, the shrugging, "I guess that's a point of view," before the synthesizers metamorphose to the top of the room. Still barely beyond college-aged, Smith Westerns traffic easily in unremembered nostalgia, the memories of things that just happened or never happened at all, shot through a hazy filter and packaged for consumption. Like the crafting of their image, it sounds intentionally, difficultly languid, a prettiness that isn't a bit insouciant.

A Q U I L O :: "Calling Me"

Like a slightly more austere Wildcat! Wildcat!, Britain's Aquilo (or A Q U I L O for maximum visual impact) make a version of this same genre of glittering, slow-drive pop. While flashing ode to the big tents under which James Blake, the xx and the WEEKND have re-appropriated, and in some cases bastardized, the weird R&B fever that took hold in 2011, Aquilo show more interest in a cloud-clearing chorus on lead demo, "Calling Me." It is bifurcated to be sure, verses at one timbre and refrain at another, but the design is an intentional dualism: at once elegant and memorable.

Walker Lukens :: "Kindle to Your Fire"

It isn't quite the dulcet hook-loop of Animal Collective's "My Girls" that seized nearly everyone who heard it in 2009, but Walker Lukens' "Kindle to Your Fire" channels the same type of big tent vocal, wrapped in a melody designed to be staircase on which the listener will traipse up and down. "Kindle to Your Fire" roots in something less specifically glittering, more organic, maybe richer even, as Lukens wails the title lyric into a World Music-indebted arrangement. The loop is a vocal, Lukens singing a modulated series of tenor, "oh's" from the outset through the conclusion. It swells, you knew it would from the very adding of the initial layers, before eventually retreating into the first vocal loop which bore its existence, a story of creative destruction, high tides and the recidivism that always follows.