Challenger :: "Are You Scared Too?"

Challenger, a band who released an incredible debut single, "I Am Switches" over the summer, returned with the release of their full length, self-titled debut this past Tuesday. Second track, "I Am Switches" is movie music with three distinct movements: an opening description of the problem, a down-tempo middle section where things look bleakest, and a rousing and ebullient conclusion. The middle third is dark, unfettered elegy, a vocalist left alone with one long, held chord, before the arrangement takes on a bit of Paul Simon-Graceland bass, and a soaring final sequence of keys and a guitar solo that jerks the telemetry skyward. It requires a bit of patience, certainly, but the rewards are manifold. The next song on the record after "Are You Scared Too?" is the aforementioned and explosive "I Am Switches," a song that erupts with as much force as any this year. Challenger does each of these tricks with equal impact, crushing sadness and relentless hope, often in the same song.

Listen :: Challenger - "Are You Scared Too?"

Shout Out Louds :: "Blue Ice"

The Shout Out Louds return nearly three years after the somewhat underwhelming LP, Work with "Blue Ice," a sweeping bit of widescreen pop. If Work was world-weary and a bit too intentional, the band here sounds committed to something more earnestly down-tempo. Adam Olenius, the mumbling soul of the band's truly excellent Our Ill Wills and Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, the voice who launched a thousand Morrissey and Cure comparisons, is his usual distant and morose self (see "Parents Livingroom") on "Blue Ice" . He braces his vocal against a playful piano riff and a flickering guitar line, as the slow-drive arrangement describes a sort of cold clarity in form and function. The band will have a full length out on Merge early next year, "Blue Ice" only a teaser 7", not possessing half the bombast and grandiosity of whatever will serve as the first single. Expect Olenius, for all his thoughtfulness and pacing here, to again find stirring moral victories - this is, after all, a band who wrote a song entitled "The Comeback" - somewhere up in the sky.

Teleman :: "Cristina"

London three-piece Teleman's debut single, "Cristina" opens with the intimate, "I'm coming back to where I started," an odd aside for a band only at its very beginnings. It is reversed remembering, the past pitched as cloistered and bizarre on lyrics like "I never meant to be the bad kid" or the intensely adolescent, "turn the lights on, throw everything around your bedroom." Of course, the glossy arrangement, a sort of cold medicine, plaintive Phoenix, eventually centers on the song's most important line, "some thing's just take you right back, you forget you've got to go soon." The past, for all its hemming in, reminds us again to leave. The last line, "why not let the music play, there's nothing in the way now," reveals this compartmentalized remembering has had its moment and is now gone.

Veronica Falls :: "Teenage"

Veronica Falls' "Teenage", a jangly little single, inspires nostalgia in more than just its name. For the teenagers of the 1990s, this all feels like a lost submission to the Reality Bites soundtrack, Winona Rider issuing winsome and distant stares from a softly lit and unintentionally ironic Volvo passenger seat. Narrowing even further, Veronica Falls sets the scene as "driving late at night", all dashboard glow and passing headlights, where you can "listen to the music you like," which the listener almost certainly has to presume is "Teenage."

Stepdad :: "Must Land Running"

One of 2012's most self-assured and brash singles, Stepdad unleashes the organized cacophony of peeling synths and buzzing keys on "Must Land Running." It is widescreen pop that boils over on the self-actualizing lyrics of the chorus, "Feel it all / feel it all around you / take it back / take it back with you." The keyboards, and it feels like there are fifty of them, climb to the top of the room, flickering against the top of the arrangement like a million summer moths around a bare porch light bulb. "Must Land Running" represents a bombastic and enthused thesis statement for a band who seems to be going for broke in every song on their debut LP, Wildlife Pop. The band, unironically, after unpacking the necessities of water and food on "Must Land Running," jubilantly declare, "There is life!", a statement that would be absurdly tautological or corny if, in this case, it weren't so damn true.

Mystery Pills :: "Anti-Pattern"

Only a noticeable minority, at least outside the old Confederacy, refuses to embrace the triumph of science and reason. This is progress, even in the anti-intellectual bastion of the United States. Still, this inexorable march toward truth is kills a bit of the mystery. It kind of sucks to know how the transfiguration works; the inexplicable ends up becoming the banal. Bedroom jammer Mystery Pills, the work of Raj Dawson, embraces a bit of this duality, a plea for the strange, that which isn't beholden to an algorithm or a matrix of outcomes. In some sense, he flat rejects it in the blipping chorus of "Anti-Pattern", shouting, "Hey, we never needed you anyway," at the assortment of "mathematicians" who couldn't grasp the temple he was building. It is all playful to be sure. Dawson embraces numbers and predictive validity as much as the next person with a high school education. But in an age of definites, Mystery Pills, like the implications of their very name, embrace amorphous aesthetics, the beauty in the unknown.

Ra Ra Riot :: "Beta Love"

Ra Ra Riot jag in a new direction on latest single "Beta Love", afraid and ebullient for the future of their band and their sound. Put another way, it's a long way from the strings-first rock songs they arranged at Syracuse. They played in basements before storming the New York rock scene in late 2006 with a set at Canal Room that offered a take on orchestral rock that put even Arcade Fire on notice. And then the band struggled to bring their intensity to the studio, to record accurately the ruckus from the stage. It never quite happened, save maybe on the bouncy, Honda-approved single, "Boy" from their 2010 LP. On "Beta Love," treble is the move. Buzzy keyboards strain against their outer markers and Wesley Miles, one of the best voices in indie rock, eventually ends up soaring almost into auto-tune and, finally, lands awash in layers upon layers of his own voice. The strings make their requisite appearance, a charming bit of the baroque in "this city of robot hearts" as Miles describes the hyper-modernity of "Beta Love." It is pretty and a little disturbing, smiling into the void, synths aimed at the sky and neon lighting what little we can see, the language and fear of the future in the same song.