Harriet :: "No Way Out"

Harriet, an LA band with former ties to PAPA and Dawes, already have one of the best songs of the year, the seminal and eruptive, "I Slept With All Your Mothers." While this debut single was covered in a fun bitterness, on new release, "No Way Out", singer Alex Casnoff describes a moment last April when he ingested far too much weed and his heart stopped. It is considerably more elegiac. He was rushed to the hospital, dosed with Ativan, doctors and nurses saving his life. It's the same piano-base of "Mothers," though more episodic and sparse, a progression toward literal death and then the slow march away. Casnoff outlines this feeling of dying: "you've seen how your body reacts, you've lost control, your body is nowhere," he intones before describing, quite literally, his experiences in the hospital, a doctor who gave him water, someone calling his name. "No Way Out" isn't an anti-drug polemic, rather a mediation on powerlessness against the backdrop of a specific and almost cataclysmic error. The final movement is vocoder harmony, Casnoff and many layers of his own voice singing, "if you hold on, it'll be alright."



Download: Harriet - "No Way Out"

CHVRCHES :: "The Mother We Share"

Riding down the back of Purity Ring and the intentionally bizarre Grimes, CHVRCHES (a Latinized "Churches") craft one of the best synthesizer singles of 2012. "The Mother We Share" explodes into a glittering chorus of fist-raising Kate Bush-lite vocal loops and buzzing keyboards that recall a far poppier version of the Knife. Vocalist Lauren Mayberry does the vulnerability trick well, howling a barely post-adolescent soprano at the maw of synthesizers and digital flourishes that threaten to drown her, managing to tame them all into time and rhythm for a refrain that takes the listener to the top of the room. It is a binary cacophony brought into step. The next movement, a major label deal, is sure to follow in 2013, hacking off a piece of what the Good Natured, another precocious girl-fronted synth outfit, never quite delivered. For CHVRCHES, as Mayberry sings in the chorus, "the way is long but you can make it easy on me," the way just got a lot shorter and easier for these veterans of other bands who now have nothing but bright lights ahead.

The Little Ones :: "Argonauts"

All the way back in 2005, The Little Ones stormed into the early music blog scene with "Lovers Who Uncover", a song that boiled over on falsetto chorus that bemoaned everything with a sighing, "oh no". The bridge invoked a different faded glamor, "way back when we were the latest around," before the lead guitar line and a series of fist-punching "hey's" papered over this richly modern anxiety. Now, seven years later, The Little Ones prepare their second LP, The Dawn Sang Along, a title that invokes at least something of a second coming for one of the original buzz bands that never quite panned the way they perhaps should have. First single and lead track of The Dawn... is the very fun, "Argonauts", a track rooted in ebullient vocal loop. Most revealing, the band opines about being "back again" and "the chance to get it right", before the arrangement washes away into a sea of warm guitars and super-treble organ chord. It is a reintroduction, and a promise to resume the chase of that which eluded them, a golden fleece if we take their metaphor at face value.

You Won't :: "Who Knew"

One of the great conditional love songs of 2012, You Won't craft a breezy earworm melody on "Who Knew", all centered on the word "if". Surrounding the great unrequited questions of why things don't work out, the band builds a series of increasingly absurd counterfactual scenarios ("If I was a cute little kid", "If I was a middle aged man", "If I was 103", "If I was Marty McFly") backed by flickering mandolin and a breathing, moaning accordion. The chorus, "All along I did what I could, but you tell me my timing's no good," is the real killer, the sense that under all these lighthearted hooks lies something darker. After all, what could have happened, all these compounded hypotheticals, never did, two people stuck out of time and all wrapped up in the word "maybe".

Despite all these conditionals, the band definitely plays the Bell House on December 1st.

Mesita :: "XYXY"

A bit of downtown lounge-act veneer covers the surface of Mesita's latest single "XYXY". Following early 2012 LP , The Coyote, and its shimmering first song, "Ken Caryl", which recalled the better-than-the-best-of Loney, Dear, "XYXY" taps a different vein, though no less satisfying. The aesthetic here is loaded with splashy drums and little lyrical admonishments like, "you were not the thing I'm dreaming of," as Mesita sends a fuzzy melody against a sparse piano and watches the unfolding drama. Episodic in nature, "XYXY" pulls back into measures of isolated piano before unleashing itself again with a drum fill and James Cooley's signature warble. Think Tom Vek doing a lounge set, and then embrace the long, slow, outtro of keys and drums, a relaxed end to a spasmodic and mercurial arrangement of forces.

Teen Mom :: "I Wanna Go Out"

Teen Mom's "I Wanna Go Out" drops messily in medias res, like a rehearsal the listener stumbled into, the bass, drums and guitar eventually finding a synchronicity. Of course, this is a useful descriptor for a band who's instrumentation resembles so firmly the Police, and maybe more accurately the arrangement tension in "So Lonely". Teen Mom, a Washington, D.C. act, however, draws much more on an independent, college radio aesthetic than Sting's wanton talent for writing radio singles. The chorus, a shabby and fuzzy winner, is also the title lyric, a falsetto lilt from singer, Chris Kelly. The conclusion churns as a crashing final act. The rolling snare leaving little doubt this is sonically darker than the lyrically morose Police sound it draws so self-consciously from.

Paradise :: "Endless Wave"

Paradise's debut single, "Endless Wave" opens with a buzzing synth chord that harkens everything from Stars' "Fixed" to Phoenix's "1901". The electronic rock geography isn't incorrect either, though "Endless Wave" draws a great deal on the surf-rock reverb for the buried, echoing vocals. It also doesn't hurt this beach-aesthetic that the main lyrical edict is "all aboard, my friends, here comes the endless wave" and the song's middle section owes its layers more to Pet Sounds than any synth rock encyclopedia. A well-arranged cacophony, "Endless Wave" is one of the most promising debut singles of 2012, no more clearly reduced than the 1.36 mark when the song unleashes into an ambitious middle movement that is one part Brian Wilson and one part the finishing kick of "All My Friends". Major label A&Rs take notice, spin your chairs around twice and give this a serious listen: Paradise, four kids from London, are going to be very hard to miss over the next year. Better yet, New York, they play Glasslands on November 13.