GROUPLOVE :: "Itchin' On A Photograph"

GROUPLOVE's Atlantic/Canvasback LP will be out later this summer with lead single, "Itchin' On A Photograph" due June 19th. If we recall all the way back to the band's first single, "Colours" when there were only a few of us writing about this curious little LA outfit with the big song and the sticky hooks, it was 13-months ago and even then they seemed destined for this type of break out. "Itchin' On A Photograph" is rooted in a simple downward progression, some hand claps and, most importantly, Christian Zucconi's soaring vocal, one of those busting-the-veins-in-your-neck, half-screams that takes us to the top of the room and stays there. This is the summer where a ton of kids who have no idea who this band is will learn of and then love them. This is the summer where you, if you've been with them since last spring, will need to stick by the band because their ethic has always been about communal understanding of affection. It will be a season of the more the merrier. This is, as always, just the start of something and the end of something else.

beat radio :: "beautiful one"

Latest beat radio single, "beautiful one", strays as close as possible to being a straight forward love song. Written by the band's lead singer Brian Sendrowitz for his wife - and this grants the chorus something stronger and more enduring than your average, hey-pretty-lady pop - it represents an immediate and linear understanding of love, like one of those things you write on the back of a receipt because you absolutely don't want to forget it. The second verse veers into Sun Also Rises territory, with a quick meditation about a Spanish matador, the power of glances, the implied deftness of raising the stakes and dodging the blow. All of this is draped in the wax-paper vocals and chimes of beat radio's perfect indie pop, making it an imperfect love song wrapped in a superlative, "I always thought you were the most beautiful one," a straight line between the beginning and ever.

Listen :: beat radio - "beautiful one"

Amanda Mair :: "House"

It is both the year of Kate Bush and the year where an astute observer can rightly ask, "Can someone be inspired by Kate Bush if they were born in 1995?" New Labrador signee and one without a driver's license, 16 year old Amanda Mair spins a percocious and delicate web on first single, "House". What begins as a lilting, anti-lullabye shifts into higher gear, trading reverent hush for rolling drums, surging strings and a melody that easily could have cracked Bush's The Kick Inside in 1978. Of course, today Bush is preparing to release an album of remastered material, backed by a troubled single, "Deeper Understanding" which features a terrifying autotuned chorus and truly bizarre lyrical content addressing our intimacy with machines. Kate Bush isn't even Kate Bush anymore. Amanda Mair will carve out her own version of this legacy of big, orchestral pop, making it less the year of any of set of influences and more the year of whoever is bold enough to pick up and re-light the torches.

Listen :: Amanda Mair - "House"

Fucked Up :: "Queen Of Hearts"

Has rage ever sounded so sweet? Or has love ever sounded so angry? The last of the the four pre-release singles from Fucked Up's coming 18-track punk opera, David Comes To Life, "Queen Of Hearts" is undeniably the most romantic of the bunch. Of course, the word, "romantic" is used loosely, as Damien Abraham screams lyrics like, "Hello, my name is David," an introduction to the central character in a story about lost love in an lightbulb factory town in Thatcher-era Britain. Abraham continues in brutal didacticism, "Your name is Veronica. Let's be together 'til the stars go out," a bristling roar before the arrangment shifts gears and gives way to the same intoxicating (and lilting) female vocalist, Maddy from Cults, also featured on "The Other Shoe". She offers a term of engagement no less terminal than "til the stars go out", singing, "let's be together until the world swallows us." The arrangment rips along like a terribly serrated Hold Steady track, only with Craig Finn held hostage in Abraham's basement, traded out for road gravel vocals and a blurry, narrative love story. But, love is nothing if it isn't yelled at the top of your voice; no one said it had to have an ounce of melody.

Listen :: Fucked Up - "Queen Of Hearts"

[Elevator] Theme Park :: "Milk" and "A Mountain We Love"

An exciting and very new band out of the UK, Theme Park have only been making their exotic pop since the beginning of this calendar year. However, the first two available songs, "Milk", available for stream and download below and "A Mountain We Love", the video for which you find above and rife with 1990s found footage, represent one of those intensely strong entries that we find ourselves linking back to 18-24 months later. Put as a simple English sentence: Theme Park isn't on anyone's radar right now (a cursory search of blog aggregators reveals that this will be the first post about the band), but they are about to be. The flavor is that miasma of international style that David Byrne (Talking Heads fans will either find this music charming or offensive, always hard to tell) used so successfully, with the same bright guitars and poly-rhythmic impulses with which Two Door Cinema Club more recently architected their rise out of Northern Ireland. The arrangements dilate and weave themselves together like one of those dexterous little girls doing Cat's Cradle over and over and over. You will be hearing a great deal more about Theme Park, popsmiths with a slight eye for the weird and hooks that are only just beginning to take hold.

Listen :: Theme Park - "Milk"

Interview :: Mikel Jollett of Airborne Toxic Event [5.3.11]

Mikel Jollett, writer and singer behind Airborne Toxic Event, charged into the crowd no less than three times last night at Piano's, possessed with all of the energy of the same guy, though then considerably less traveled and famous, who took the stage in the same place three years ago. As part of the band's "origins" shows, they've returned to all the small clubs they played when they were first touring as a band, you know, before KROQ added "Sometime Around Midnight" and before everyone had the same thought all at once: Is it possible he wrote this song for and about me? Earlier yesterday, Jollett reflected to us about life in his band, making his new and outstanding record, All At Once and what it means to make music. Our questions and his answers after the jump.

On The List :: Lord Huron @ Mercury Lounge [4.28.11]

This review runs live and in color on Bowery's House List blog.

It was after 11 p.m. at a rapidly filling Mercury Lounge and we were at least three layers down in the world-music permafrost. The first dulcet tones of Lord Huron’s stunning single “Mighty” played over the PA as the band marshaled itself slowly and even a little deliberately to the stage. The sound was post-colonial, of the same type that Paul Simon used so effortlessly on Graceland and Rhythm of the Saints—the same beautiful simulacra of Eastern and Southern Hemispheres that Vampire Weekend used later, although with an admittedly updated set of influences.

Lord Huron, an L.A. band I’m certain a hack music publicist would describe as Silverlake Soweto, proved to be both of and above this venerable cannon of White Guys Playing World Pop. “Mighty” swelled big enough, like many of the band’s compositions, to melt any frosty comparisons to old bands, even if the derivation was obvious and unhidden. The crowd rollicked to the band’s first two songs, the aforementioned “Mighty” and the upstroke “Into the Sun.”

The sound was very nearly too big, given that many of the melodies rely on group vocals of two or more members, in addition to some of the delicacy of the recordings turning into more punched-up electric numbers live. But Lord Huron slowly screwed themselves into tighter and tighter progressions, shedding some of the early muddiness for clarity and crystalline Afrobeat guitar lines. On “Son of a Gun,” vocalist Ben Schneider turned a pedantic cliché into something meaningful, his brand of graciousness and earnestness not necessarily practiced and also entirely intentional. Most important, given the tradition of world music being co-opted by the West, this didn’t feel a bit dishonest, even if the themes were unapologetically neocolonial.

Listen :: Lord Huron - "Mighty"