Sam Billen :: "Different Lives"

Sam Billen is certain that he and a certain someone will meet again someday. These are his words, not mine and they might be a little cloying. The narrative structure of the echoing electro-pop of "Different Lives" isn't anything aching complex. Boy meets girl. Boy moves out of poisonous urban area to something rural and quaint with girl. Boy and girl stay up all night writing music. If only the movie ended there.

And this is where I'm filling in some of the gaps: Girl decides this is nice but not necessarily where she pictured herself at 25. She questions where this relationship is going. Boy fosters all the usual explanations. Boy says they're meant to be together. Girl furrows her brow and looks kind of sorry. Girl moves away. Boy is completely miserable. Girl spends gratuitous time "finding herself." Boy eventually and inexplicably defends these choices using phrases like, "her journey" and "different lives." Girl thinks twice about boy because it's not like he was Goebbels or something. Boy has largely moved on but still, as Billen says, is certain he will meet girl again. Girl doesn't think about these things unless she is alone. Boy makes electro-pop record. We'll assume the girl never hears it.

Listen :: Sam Billen - "Different Lives"
Listen :: Sam Billen - "Made Concrete" (Republic Tigers cover)

Marina and the Diamonds :: "Hollywood"

Marina and the Diamonds have been on our radar for a long, long time. In fact, it dates to a demo version of "Obsessions" we put on a mixtape in early 2008. The immediate feedback was something like, and I'm paraphrasing here, "It's good but it seems like a roughed around Regina Spektor." Well, it was a sort-of compliment and amazingly short-sighted. Today, we are leveled by the video for her latest single, "Hollywood" from coming epic, The Family Jewels. We don't write about much that has a chance to smash radio but this, this is going to be big. This song has a chance to go top ten at AAA and Hot AC radio. This song is about to be everywhere. But today, it's just here, for the moment, at less than 300 plays on youtube. Watch this blow up, I promise.



A more coherent, analytic assessment reveals why this is ready to explode. It has instantly singable lines with some cultural signifiers dropped in (the Shakira/Zeta line). It addresses the rapid decline and yet complete attraction of the American Empire. She is a Marie Antoinette for an infected American monarchy. And she's Welsh. Marina, as it happens, is stunningly beautiful and seems to relish every minute of the breath before being super-famous. Because that's what this is: The minute before things get completely out of control and you're suddenly performing at huge venues and playing late-night shows and the VMA pre-show. This is that moment, a breath before one of the most memorable choruses of the year. Soak. it. in.

Listen :: Marina and the Diamonds - "I Am Not A Robot"

Frightened Rabbit :: "The Twist" and "Head Rolls Off" [Live on Daytrotter]

I spent at least three of the last six hours in the back seat of a car, traveling at, quite frankly, unsafe speeds on a road that seems to relish claiming the wreckage of poor driving decisions and ill-advised lane-changes. Seat behind the driver, head leaned against the window, you aren't far from the mortality of the jersey barrier directly to your left. It hums by at furious, unfeeling speed, maybe thirty-six inches from your ear. If you're paying attention, you realize the finer than fine line between your continued living and your completely plausible and possibly imminent death. But, to dance with death means that death is dancing with you, moving to your coordinated floor plan; to court disaster means that disaster can't secretly be courting you. To live thirty-six inches from your own demise, if you wait and watch for it, is a moment where you can feel really alive. Undoubtedly, we are here and we are lucky for it.

Listen :: Frightened Rabbit - "The Twist" (Live on Daytrotter)
Listen :: Frightened Rabbit - "Head Rolls Off" (Live on Daytrotter)

Frightened Rabbit :: "Living in Color" and "Nothing Like You"

Back in 2007, Frightened Rabbit took a blunt object to our brains and hearts. Lyrically, it wasn't always the most nuanced (neither were our responses) and musically, it wasn't ground-breaking but none of that seemed to matter. From first interacting with "Modern Leper" to discovering "The Twist" and, in my group of friends, a new way of talking, "New band, new song, twist song, twist band, twist sandwich" (Looking at you, Nate), it was the perfect record.

Now, we are headed for a new release from Frightened Rabbit in March 2010. It's rather incredibly called Winter of Mixed Drinks, also a lyric from song "Living In Color." Like most things the band does, it appears overly emotional, destructive, solipsistic and crushing with shreds of a building pathos. With first single, "Swim Until You Can't See Land" already in the can and hitting the web, this week two more tracks filtered out during a live session on the BBC. "Living in Color" and "Nothing Like You" are the logical next step: A little more guitar driven, a bigger sound, something you could throw at an incredible engineer and mixer and make sound like it's going to explode your heart. What do you do with a recording budget that dwarfs your last record? Something like this. Lyrically, it's all still there: "I am floating with my eyes closed/with no sails/I am soaking, I am weathered/by the winter of mixed drinks." Get ready to feel sorry for yourself all over again, world - Frightened Rabbit are roaring back.

Listen :: Frightened Rabbit - "Nothing Like You" (Live on BBC6)
Listen :: Frightened Rabbit - "Living in Color" (Live on BBC)

Toro Y Moi :: "Blessa"

Eight years ago I was carrying a mix CD that actually contained the song "Raining In Baltimore" by the Counting Crows. Tonight, it actually is raining in Baltimore, 50 miles to the north, and I couldn't careless about Adam Duritz. Even in the damp rain of the eastern seaboard, Toro Y Moi's "Blessa" stumbles sea-sick, warm and colorful from its digital housing. In the spirit of Air France and the new Beach House, this is lo-fi, shimmering, keyboard pop. But this has a different rhythm. It breathes, heaving up and down until there isn't any air left. Loosely, the song is about being blessed. Less connected, this is about a paragraph with a topic sentence that doesn't quite work, about sunshine in the dead of fall, about giving thanks before Thanksgiving. Sometimes, you can look back and laugh and sometimes songs that are about staying warm work the whole year round.

Listen :: Toro Y Moi - "Blessa"

The Ghost Is Dancing :: "Battles On"

High school yearbook pages are deservedly notorious for their questionable content. Mine committed none of the following common mistakes: 1) I did not profess my love to a girl that I would stop speaking to within months. 2) I did not make any inside jokes. 3) I did not post some picture of kids at a party under the supposed coolness of having a "party picture" in the yearbook with the school's name on the front. 4) I did not overly graciously thank people, though perhaps this would have been nice and appropriate. 5) I did not reference any athletic championships or ever use the phrase: "Champs! They can't take it from us, baby!"

I did, however, commit the following act of adolescent solipsism: I made clear my disdain for authority. To paraphrase: you're time is over, old people. Of course, I was singing the anthem of youth, something that can only fade and look somewhat ridiculous years later. So when The Ghost Is Dancing thud through your speakers or headphones, you need to hear it with a more youthful ear. We are fighting against something. These people are ruining our generation. Authority cannot be trusted implicitly. Like a more frustrated and poppy Los Campesinos, this is big-scale pop music, a battle cry for people for who can say, "let's fight those bastards down" without blinking. Pounding drums, a call to action and the youthful mistrust of everyone who has an ounce of power - it's frankly beautiful.

Listen :: The Ghost Is Dancing - "Battles On"

Beach House :: "Norway"

Back in 2006, I was sleeping in what little darkness the enormous windows of my Bushwick loft allowed. A full moon hung over the gravel pit or "rock factory" we joked, outside. I was tucked in, headphones on, listening to glowing, down-tempo keyboard pop from Baltimore. It was Beach House's first album and the sun was going to rise like a blazing ball of fire in a few hours. If I was being honest, I wasn't particularly happy.

Of course it's 2009 and I've switched neighborhoods but Beach House, still very much the same, is back with a record to level us in similar fashion. Teen Dream, due out in late January 2010 is going to be this coming year's Veckatimest; the album people saw coming but didn't realize they would like so much until it was actually in their stereo. Frankly, the honest-to-goodness of this album isn't a surprise, but how good and how dense and how rich is shocking.

The melodies and the narrative come through immediately. The keyboard-rich, almost sea-sick first single, "Norway," isn't the best song on the album but its humming, glowing chorus is the crystalline picture of what makes this record and this band so powerful. The verses, a settled and woozy affair, make me think of 2006 and 2009 and 2010 and where the hell we might be in three years. The moon is up over the east coast and our time is short. Keep that in mind.

Listen :: Beach House - "Norway"