Grand Resort :: "Night Is Dark"

The bedroom pop of Brooklyn's Grand Resort, like the best of all small projects, holds the ability to create a universe in its entirety. Like Youth Lagoon, and others before him, the delicacy, the hands-on lushness of Grand Resort's "Night Is Dark" lies in its slow construction, a sort of musical diorama that feels both complete and entirely limited. But this discretion is the important twist, a meditation on optimism and transcendence, immortalized here as, "Take me away, far away."

Listen :: Grand Resort - "Night Is Dark"

Deleted Scenes :: "English as a Second Language"

The way to the top is a peculiar journey. First, you identify a style, then you perfect it. In the pursuit of this perfection, you become a parody. People glance at your work and think, caustically, "They would do something like that." You move from climber to monolith, a literal becoming of the object of your desire. If it can happen to Hemingway, it can happen to anyone. James Mercer of the Shins finally succumbed to this fate in 2012. Jettisoning his entire band and trading his anxieties (see: Wincing The Night Away) for sureness, Mercer released his slickest and more commercially accessible album yet, the quixotically titled, Port of Morrow. It was James Mercer playing what he thought James Mercer would play. It ended up next to the other impulse purchases of nuts and mints at your local Starbucks. You may own a copy. This type of pinnacle is, at the very least, lonely - being the band with the album at Starbucks - but, this type of inverted ascendancy leaves a trail. Deleted Scenes and their stunning next single, "English as a Second Language" are rooted firmly in the tradition of the strange-pop that Mercer made so popular in 2003, but they confront none of the same pratfalls as the Shins of 2012. "English as a Second Language" retains much of the pleasant weirdness and off-beat hooks of early Shins material, here featuring an unavoidable f-bomb and a final movement that kicks the doors off the arrangement, a move Mercer would never have chanced. It is a charming, fun and dark, a band on their way up, whatever the risks.

Listen :: Deleted Scenes - "English as a Second Language"

The Hague :: "Everyone"

Even for the least cynical listener an opening lyric like, "Love is complicated and cruel" rings as a bit of platitude. After all, another small rock song about small heartbreak is like another big Michael Bay movie with big explosions. We have seen this movie before. For The Hague, a bunch of seemingly earnest Pacific Northwesterners, their lead single, "Everyone" for forthcoming LP Black Rabbit runs deeper than this initial lyrical foray. "Everyone" rather immediately spirals into a melody backed by a string arrangement that implies a street full of spinning people, maybe even a full cast, our narrator now cast a legitimate protagonist in a musical where people wear dark jeans and have tattoos. Some of this Central Casting is in the chorus where the band shouts, "Everyone in this town looks like everyone in this town", turning a song about a small heartbreak into a song about heartbreak in general. The first verse lyric of "you were selfish and now you're alone" changes noticeably to a final verse about everyone quitting, fires of pity and regret, a platitude that actually works here. The particular becoming the general is another rock music trope, my pain is your pain is everyone's pain, a sort of Kantian imperative where one sadness is writ large for "Everyone." The antagonist here is accused of the worst of crimes in the grammatically incorrect last lyric, "you wouldn't know nothing about that." This, unlike the rest, is specific.

Listen :: The Hague - "Everyone"

Bogan Via :: "Kanye"

A high school acquaintance of mine relays the following story about meeting Kanye West. I suspect many people have a similar version with personal specifics. On the night his second LP, Late Registration dropped, West shuffled past my former high school classmate at the release party. After exchanging pleasantries, West said, "Have you heard my new record?" Before allowing time for a response, he answered his own question, "It's fucking incredible." This moment, and thousands of others like it, lodged Kanye firmly in the consciousness of the modern music fan, a brand of excellence and arrogance of the type that yields single-name soccer players and single-name musicians. Kanye. Or consider Bono, who once leaked his own music by listening to it at volume with the windows of his French villa conspicuously open. It resounds with arrogance bordering on the sublime. After all the anxiety, relativism and pragmatic thinking, it is a relief to hear confidence in art. Brooklyn-by-way-of-Phoenix band Bogan Via have released a single, "Kanye" that reflects this cultural evolution. But instead of brashness, they hollow out the center, replacing it with minor key synthesizer progression and lyrical urgings like, "Give your heart to everything, you gotta move when the move seems right." The vocal duet and somber mood evokes something caught between Mates of State and Beach House's records before you knew about Beach House. This is a diet of sadness, the knowledge that so many have put hope in your arrogance, alone in a tower of your own making, sentenced to a lifetime of the same conversation and your same trope answers. Here, this is beautiful, but they already know that.

Listen :: Bogan Via - "Kanye"

Lovepark :: "How Do I See?"

Riding a warm and sparse guitar line into a falsetto chorus, Lovepark craft an extremely promising first 7" single, "How Do I See?" The band hails from Brighton, the place that Kele Okereke once encouraged us all to go for the weekend, a cultural mix between the rough ex-fishing towns that exist everywhere from Marseilles to New Bedford with a side of the devastating vacation-blight of Coney Island. "How Do I See?" exhibits some of this same dualism, the first two hooks phrased as "Because it feels good" and "How does it feel now?". The arrangement slows and expands around the central theme of how anyone ever manages to move forward and on. It is the kind of question that can be of aching importance when you are from a place most people just visit, where their transience is your permanence. But this is no blue-collar anthem, no silly "Downeaster Alexa" with a British accent. Rather, the band sounds careful and deliberate as they explore juxtaposed elements like, "in the middle of the night, a thousand scorching suns", a song about the desires to leave cast against the realities of leaving, the brightness of midnight sunshine.

New Beard :: "Doom"

"I heard that you and your band sold your turntables and bought guitars", muttered James Murphy on "I'm Losing My Edge." But even Murphy, waxing philosophical about the complimentary New York trends of house, rock and rap, never could have foreseen a band that sold their bass guitars and bought a tuba. This is the gimmick - without being derisive - for the whimsical and straight-faced indie pop from Brooklyn's New Beard. The low end you hear on "Doom" is exactly this tuba, firmly divorced from the kid in your high school orchestra who either had a poor sense of humor or a good one. The band's debut full length is out Tuesday, and single, "Doom" resounds as a circus tent of baroque melodies, strings, and a winking Metal guitar progression that ties the arrangement together at the very end. It all sounds like Wes Anderson movie that left the set and walked right into non-fiction. Then again, perhaps, this is Brooklyn, the serious turned ironic and the ironic turned kitsch, unblinking as you burnish the shine on your tuba.

Listen :: New Beard - "Doom"

The History of Panic :: "The Chase"

Modern love songs are often and best written with dual perspective, a sort of twin cinema, the bias and narrative of a protagonist offset with the opinion of another. The Postal Service described this methodology with crushing clarity on 2003 release, "Nothing Better" where Ben Gibbard's romantic solipsisms were redirected by Jen Wood's corrections, a style immortalized for all time with, "I feel I must interject here." The rest was history. If love and loss are done by two people, perhaps they are best sung this way. Sounding an awful lot like Stars - also pioneers of this boy-girl synth pop, The History of Panic craft a big, buzzing, boy-girl single, "The Chase" of this same archetype. Of course, "Nothing Better" was a cautionary tale where "The Chase" is more of a conversation, the male narrator, here History of Panic's mastermind Gerald Roesser, still playing the role of the bleeding heart against the distant laissez-faire of their counterpart. The key difference being, "The Chase" ends with the open-ended conditional, "If we want to ..." as the vocals merge briefly into a duet before the individual recidivism again creeps at the corners.

Listen :: The History of Panic - "The Chase" [Vimeo]