TRAILS AND WAYS :: "Tereza"

A modern day Rousseau would probably reflect on our current age with, "Music is born free and yet everywhere it is in chains." Bassist and vocalist Emma Oppen sheepishly coos her response, "It was just just my nature," in the chorus of TRAILS AND WAYS' fine first single, "Tereza," seemingly liberating herself and everyone else. An awesome "shrug" of a lyric, a sort of implicit helplessness or explicit freedom, Oppen and her bandmates from Oakland seem beholden only to themselves as dreamy soundscapes ebb and flow in time with oblique lyrics like, "I made myself a shoreline without water." The genre references footnote Radio Dept. and School Of Seven Bells (with either the treble or the opiates turned way up) though the over-arching sentiment is a sort of Je ne sais quoi, an arrangement with a friction coefficient of zero, gliding from shore to shore under a force, contract and authority all its own. Oppen suggests this freedom is hard-wired, and its hard to argue as the song, quite literally, washes away in the final seconds.

Donora :: "And Then The Girls"

These days cultural critique can feel a bit like form meeting function. "Society has gotten too loud," you scream, predictably, into some digital megaphone. "Things have gotten too fractious," you note, obliquely, in between attention-deficit monitoring of multiple social networks. "No one has time for big ideas anymore," you trail off; people are done listening and you have no useful second movement. So, you double-down on your contrarianism, becoming oppositional and distant, unaware, or perhaps helpless, that this is - that you are - now the new, ever-shifting majority. And then along comes a song like "And Then The Girls" from Pittsburgh band Donora. The opening ratatat lyrics recalling Le Tigre and La Roux ("Derivative," you sigh) as synths swirl around like a bunch of drunks in the middle of 2nd Avenue waiting for the sunrise ("Lyrical metaphor, how modernist," you think). And then it comes, a chorus so unrestrained and joyful it reminds you of the way you remember your early 20s (not how they were, the romantic memory leaves the right amount out). It is instantly one of the most satisfying moments in pop music in 2012, something strong enough to silence your interior monologue, for once, making you shut up and sing along.

Listen :: Donora - "And Then The Girls"

Dan Griffin :: "Yulia" [Wolf Parade cover]

It's no long list of great songs about death in space. David Bowie's "Space Oddity" and the Long Winters' "The Commander Thinks Aloud" both address this area with deft; Bowie spitting a magically real heartbreak about the relationship between Major Tom and Ground Control; John Roderick of the Long Winters documenting in the assumed first-person the last moments of the Space Shuttle Columbia, ending with the repeated and echoing lyric, "The crew compartment's breaking up." Wolf Parade's "Yulia" off their tweaking and perfect 2010 record Expo 86 addresses an apocryphal Soviet legend of cosmonauts hurriedly sent to beat Apollo 11 to the moon, their capsule shot a few degrees off course, sentenced to miss the lunar body and spin endlessly into space. It certainly adds some weight to Dan Boeckner's final lyrics, "There's nothing out here, nothing out here." On this re-imagining, Dan Griffin parses "Yulia" down to its sparest iteration, vocals and acoustic guitar later backed with a cello in the final chilling movements. It is as beautiful as it is tragic. Like Bowie and Roderick's space disasters, this is destined for fatalism, bits of aluminum spinning in infinity.

Listen :: Dan Griffin - "Yulia" [Wolf Parade cover]

Theme Park :: "Two Hours" [RAC Remix]

Theme Park's lead singer warbles, "Can you feel anything?" in the moments before his band's lead single, "Two Hours" begins getting the RAC remix treatment, a re-imagining of the original that all but destroys any chance at the opening interrogative being true.  For a band that was once derided as little more than a Talking Heads cover outfit, "Two Hours" is a remarkably clean and expansive arrangement, glittering with keyboards and melody. Of course in the world of RAC if some is good, more is better. The synths shift toward the irrepressibly ebullient, jumping at the ceiling of limits as we imagine the audio board level lights looked when this remix began to coalesce: greens, yellows and reds, more reds. The final movement is the right one, drums rolling into synthesizer whirlpools rolling melody and the song's final lyrics, "It's bringing me down." Like so many things, even the second time, it's fantastically not true.

Farragoes :: "The End Of The Affair"

Think of the Postal Service and then update Ben Gibbard's vocals with a dose of Morrisey's literacy and the moroseness of Jens Lekman. This brings you close to Farragoes, a synth-pop collaboration between Tom Avis and Jeff Craley, the parallels to the aforementioned mail-reliant project running deeper as one half of the band resides in Toronto and the other in DC and most of their music comes together in stems and pieces over file-sharing websites. But, you can't very credibly call your band, Mediafire without trafficking in a soul-sucking brand of irony; it isn't 2003 anymore. On the band's completely excellent single, "The End Of The Affair" the synth loops yelp and peak, crashing into each other with the coherence and elevation of carbonation creeping up the inside of a glass. This provides the architecture for love-sick lyrics about baseball teams that never win, songs that aren't as good the second time around, discomfort with the phrase "halcyon days" and the song's best lyrics, a rhyming couplet about Virginia Wolfe impressions in an airport lounge tied to "now I'm reading Notes From The Underground". A Dostoevsky reference is the perfect closer, ironically its second lyrical appearance, before the arrangement unwinds its parts and disappears.

Listen :: Farragoes - "The End Of The Affair"

Future Of What :: "I Wait For You"

One of our favorite New York musicians is the indomitable Blair Gimma, formerly of her eponymous project, Blair. Moving to this past winter and the recordings for a new project, one that boasts "no cymbals", Gimma now fronts a group called Future Of What. The band already played their first show, opening for Free Energy last week at Rock Shop. The vibrating and breathy first taste of the band's EP is "I Wait For You", the rugged Liz Phair-footnotes of Blair's debut LP transformed into a slick and heart-sick synth jam. The outcome bubbles to the surface as a satisfying slice of pop rooted in Zoob Tube synths and the title lyric. Blair's vocals, always a mixture of the intimate and the distant, offer the perfect gloss to this bit of ebullient new wave. The band's Moonstruck EP is due out June 26, something that makes them, like the title lyric, something to wait for.

Pure Bathing Culture :: "Ivory Coast"

The children of the 1980s are in a long kiss goodnight. We grew up at breakneck speed, developing a bizarre brand of generational still birth. We knew we hadn't torn down the Berlin Wall or sat at lunch counters in solidarity for civil rights. We watched Hitler get killed in a Tarantino movie. We never had a dare-to-be-great moment. We never really stuck it to the system. It ate at us, surely, and then we aged out of wanting to do it at all. We are in the act of becoming "the establishment" to a generation of Clinton-era kids who are, quite impossibly, more confused and disoriented than we could have dreamed. (They will be the ones who have to figure out how to rebel against nothing.) But there was still this love thing, one of those ineffable capital-L things that managed to transcend a cultural malaise, that managed to connect us to everyone else by invisible wires; our struggles became common, unifying even. Pure Bathing Culture, a beautiful band from Portland, Oregon wax philosophical about this type of unreasonable affection, the kind of thing that still inspires the human capacity for wonder. Or, put another way, "Ivory Coast" possesses just enough magic to make us forget about the above paragraph, what we might have been or where we're all going.