Those of us over here in the tiny corner of America known as Brooklyn tend to forget that we are in a tiny corner of America. Not that Brooklyn doesn’t have all sorts of cultural weight. When I first moved here, a Finnish girl I’d just met asked me if Roberta’s was really as good as everyone said. At the time I didn’t even know what Roberta’s was, and I was amazed to find out it was…a pizza place in Bushwick (Granted, it’s an amazing one, and calling it a pizza place doesn’t really do justice to how nice it is, but still). Because NYC is home to so many writers and publicists and videographers, and because everyone loves to publicize their friends, bands from Brooklyn, like pizza places, tend to take on cultural significance all out of proportion to their skill.

But while teenagers the world over thrill to the thought of Williamsburg, there is a quiet, steady stream of good music coming from the substantially larger Rest Of America (it’s true! Look at a map!) . Places such as Cincinnati, whence we have The Seedy Seeds, a duo-turned-trio currently composed of Margaret Darling, Mike Ingram, and Brian Penick. Their PR material is blessedly brief (we’re talking two sentences, one of which is about their dietary preferences), but I can tell you that what The Seedy Seeds do best, aside from write cheery pop songs with thoughtful lyrics and dreamy vocal harmonies, is swirl electronic and acoustic elements together in such a way as to make them sound like parts of a whole. The roles of the two types of instrument aren’t segregated at all. Live drums lock into drum machines to form a percussion section, as if the drummer had one arm in each world; banjo and Korg share the stage at live shows; synth bass bubbles under acoustic guitar strums; human grunts become sampled percussive sounds, landing squarely in the territory between acoustic and electronic sound; accordion and violin surge in to replace synth pads; Casio handclaps abound. This whole complicated balancing act is then laid at the feet of songs that are unapologetically hooky and fun, with lyrics that at first appear planted squarely in the heart-on-sleeve world of boy girl synth pop, but which reveal layers of ambiguity on further listens.

Ampeater A-Side “Verb Noun,” drawn from the band’s hot off the presses Verb Noun LP, contains a moment that perfectly captures this acoustic/electronic melting pot. At 3:23, the drums drop out, leaving the vocals to rise above a pointillist forest of pizzicato violin, banjo plucks, and staccato synthesizer notes. The three sounds, spread across the stereo spectrum, mimic and mirror one another so closely that I’m still not actually sure which notes come from which instrument, and whether what I’m hearing as a synth is really a synth or whether it’s another violin track or even some speedy, clean picking on the banjo. Of course, the beauty of the moment is just that: it doesn’t even matter which sounds are acoustic in nature and which electronic. They all twine together so perfectly that they become one instrument, an instrument we’ve never heard before. The song itself goes through a number of phases of instrumentation, but wastes no time in snagging your ear on suspended bass and violin lines, light hearted acoustic guitar, expansive drums propelled along by the propulsive kick drum on the upbeats, and Darling and Ingram’s voices woven together in pristine harmony. The Seedy Seeds are not fucking around: this is a pop song.

“Verb Noun” is such a pop song that it doesn’t even really seem to have verses, leaping from one soaring chorus-like melody to another for its entire duration. Along the way there are gushes of harmonized violins (note the way they move parallel to the vocals in the just verb noun you’ll agree section, serving almost as a chorus of vocal harmonies), assorted unidentifiable percussion (cowbell?), a banjo breakdown, lush call and response vocals, and a half-time drum machine beat laid over a full drum kit (which creates a strange slow-motion effect during the fade).

B-side “Telephone the Constrictor,” from 2010’s Roll Deep EP makes heavier use of electronics, with the whole song built around a thumping disco-derived chorus and an oscillating organ sound that calls to mind a ringing phone. Most of the percussion in the first verse is derived from voices (appropriate to the title/theme), whether they be Ingram’s chopped up vocals or some Graceland-style grunts, which fit into the song as snug as a puzzle piece despite being, on the surface of things, a totally bizarre choice. Like so much of what The Seedy Seeds do (see: banjo breakdowns), it is somewhat counterintuitive, yet it’s pulled off with enormous enthusiasm and energy, as if it never occurred to the band that most synth-pop eschews appalachian instruments for a reason. And the charm of the band, which is winning and substantial, derives directly from that surefooted fearlessness.

It would be a fallacy to claim at this point a really substantial disconnect between bands from Cincinnati and bands from Brooklyn. All of us who are online are part of the same community and we mostly hear the same music from some combination of the same sources. Still, there is something so unselfconsciously nerdy and fun about The Seedy Seeds that feels like it probably never would have coalesced in the style-obsessed northeast. They like hooks and choruses and sus chords and accordions and banjos and cuteness (not for nothing is their label called Eurodorable) and drum machines and  why on earth would they not put all of those things together? Listening to this single, I think we can safely say that there’s no reason at all why not.

And finally, for those of you who, like me, might read about this particular combination of instruments and attitudes and react with jokes about Hey can I get more iPod in my monitor and what might politely be called skepticism, let me hit you with a quote from Sean Cannon of Buzzgrinder, on the Seeds live show: I assumed that a band using an iPod, accordion, kazoo, guitar and banjo had to be kitschy and, well, not too great. I was humbled. They tore it up.

Catch the Seeds on the next leg of their Verb Noun tour:
March 4^th, North Star Bar, Philadelphia, PA
March 5^th, Union Hall, Brooklyn, NY
March 7^th, Great Scott, Boston, MA
March 8^th, Pianos, New York, NY

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Some music lolls gently in the background. Some music sits still. Some music serves to bring a degree of class to the social calendar of the captains of High Culture and High Finance. Shapers make none of that music. The Chicago four piece are gleeful collagists, roping in everything within their reach: improvised music; gleeful math rock; softly glowing, ambient synth jams; somber, sparse psych tunes laden with vocal harmonies; rolling afro-cuban percussion; David Byrne-style shout vocals. And none of these things are segregated neatly into their own tracks. They’re combined with a free and generous hand, mixing and overlapping so much that you forget they wouldn’t ordinarily share a record label, let alone a song. Shapers bandcamp page tags them as post-genre, which in most cases would be either dry irony or unwarranted cockiness, but the slurry of influences on the band’s debut full-length Little, Big makes one of the strongest cases for that particular phrase I’ve yet heard.

More impressive yet, the band, composed of guitarist Zaid Maxwell, synth player Amelia Styer, bassist/guitarist Steve Reidell, and drummer Todd Waters, manages to escape the trap that so many genre-hopping, odd-meter-loving bands fall into. Shapers aren’t weird for weird’s sake. They use their sharp left turns in service of their songs, turning stylistic fragments into coherent pieces with a solid sense of form that feels both natural and surprising. Though you never know quite where the band is going, you never doubt that they know. Because of how integrated their influences are, they also manage to control and vary the tone of their songs perfectly. The songs aren’t merely exercises in complexity, they range from ecstatic to grave (in spite of titles like “Hot Gravy Available” and “When I Was A Zygote,” Shapers is not one of those emotionless proggy bands who ignore mood-setting altogether, usually with tiresome results) and they never put you down in the same place they picked you up.

The two songs on their Ampeater single land on the thrashier end of the Shapers spectrum. A-side “Virginia Reel” starts high and climbs higher. The song finds the band launching into a minute of some of their poppiest material, the juxtaposition of Maxwell & Styer’s gentle, high vocals and the barreling bass & drums sounding almost like Yo La Tengo. As the chorus kicks in, Styer’s multitracked voice provides a lovely cushion for Maxwell’s falsetto. As soon as the chorus fades, just as our Pop Pavlov Instinct kicks in and we start drooling in anticipation of another verse, a synth gradually wanders away from the western scale and then gradually multiplies into a dense thicket of atonal keyboards and riotous guitars. Waters bursts into a series of acrobatic fills and cymbal-smashing as the guitar/synth cloud gets louder and denser, louder and denser, and the whole thing lasts about as long as the entire verse-chorus structure that kicks the song off. Finally, just as the song is about to snap, it bursts into a new section, arcing even higher in energy with another wordless melody from Styer floating over the boiling rhythm section. The song never pauses to catch its breath. It must be tremendous fun live.

B-side “Happy Birthday Polliwog” finds Maxwell shouting rather than cooing, and the band wasting no time in slamming through a 7/4 chorus with ferocious energy. The time disintegrates and reforms at a dizzying pace, and the second chorus is over before we even hit the minute mark. Listening to the beginning of “Polliwog” feels like riding a bucking bull, exhilarating, disorienting, and somewhat terrifying. The song then pares itself down to a tense eighth note pulse of floor toms and guitar clicks that rise and fall like deep breaths. Again, the climax comes from a long, dissonant instrumental, here created by the superimposition of several rising chromatic lines of different length, mostly fives, which overlap and shift against one another to form a sort of musical moire pattern, where the change occurs in how the parts line up rather than in the notes themselves. Again, just at the moment of collapse, there’s an echo of the intro and it’s over, leaving you to your own devices to stop your head from spinning. Songs like this are too compacted with material to be absorbed fully the first time; they demand and reward repeat listening.

Surely Shapers won’t appeal to everyone. Some people want music to murmur sweet nothings in their ear after work while they’re cooking dinner. Still, there is something to commend music that demands attention, that doesn’t sit back and allow itself to become background, especially in the age of the mp3, where music is playing around us more often than ever before and yet listened to less. Because these songs repeat themselves so little, they require constant attention. It’s almost like listening to a conversation, where if you lose the narrative, you have to ask for it to be repeated. Coming straight into the middle of either “Virginia Reel” or “Happy Birthday Polliwog” would drastically alter the song, something that is also becoming less common at a time when form is increasingly determined by the limited capacities of looping and sampling. Sit and let the shapes of these songs hold your complete attention for a full six minutes. Let them work on you. You won’t be quite the same afterwards.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

I’m going to call it right now. Busman’s Holiday are the American Kinks of the 21^st century. What the hell does that mean? Well, aside from the obvious connections (they perform a beautiful and faithful Waterloo Sunset on their free EP “Old Friends” and the obvious differences (no electric guitars, fewer band members), here’s what that means: Busman’s Holiday specialize in story songs with acrobatic, catchy melodies and witty lyrics that flesh out archetypes as deeply middle-class American as the Kinks were middle-class British. To be sure, you will find in these songs everything you’ll find in most good pop songs: love, loss, lust and outer space, to quote the band’s press kit. But rather than coming at the material in the straight-forward I’m a dude singing about my life fashion, Busman’s Holiday prefer to clothe their emotions in the garb of struggling novelists, pining geriatrics (the A-side and B-side of this single, respectively), dying aliens, midlife crisis suffering car salesmen, recently fired corporate hotshots, &c.

Busman’s Holiday also share with The Kinks some serious attention to humor (can you even count how many puns are tucked into “The Last Waltz”?), and an ability to be funny without disrespecting their characters. If you laugh, you’re always laughing with, never at. It would be beyond easy to make the narrator of “(William Crescent Gets) Fired” into a big joke, a money-grubbing sap who chose the wrong path in life and got what he deserved for putting all his eggs in a corporate basket. But the song doesn’t do any of these things. In fact, it becomes an unlikely fight song for redemption. When William Crescent sings to his old boss I’ll be ahead of the rest I’ll be the best I don’t care I’ll be underrated, you want to cheer him on. It doesn’t hurt their cause, musically speaking, that the brothers Rogers (Addison on a drumkit with a suitcase bass drum, Lewis on guitar) have an astonishing grasp of melody and form, as well as the kind of pristine, telepathic harmony singing that only siblings (and occasional husband-wife duos) seem to be able to master.

A-Side “Daniel’s Lament” follows the progress of a novelist’s attempt to evade a sophomore slump. And there actually is progress in the songs narrative. In the first verse, with our narrator (Daniel, presumably) suffering from writer’s block, the song is certainly a lament: I’ve lost my touch / what will I do? But by the end of the song, Daniel has fought his demons and the novel is worth that much more to him for it: this book has turned my whole world around / I was lost / but now am found. I don’t know when the last time was I heard a song that actually changed in mood from the first to the last verse. Storytelling in song has generally fallen out of fashion these days (except for R. Kelly, bless his soul), but while most of their musical contemporaries rely on vague evocations and endlessly repeated choruses, Busman’s Holiday are writing songs that never stop moving. What really stands out about the lyrics of “Daniel’s Lament” is the wisdom couched in the story. Daniel’s struggles are essential to his success. He succeeds by shutting himself up in a room and working until he gets it done. Hardly the drama you’d expect from a pop song, but it rings all the more true because of what seems like humble subject matter.

And all that is not to even mention the music. From the very first line of the melody, you can hear that the Rogers’ have not only fantastic singing voices (pitch-perfect without sounding glossy or otherwise losing human texture) but a sense of melody that is as unusual as it is lovely. The song’s opening guitar pattern is something we can almost hear without hearing. Pleasant, propulsive, but we’ve heard similar things, and we can’t help but immediately begin to place other, familiar melodies over the top of it. But the second that twisting vocal melody enters, there’s no other song this could be. The verse melodies then proceed to hit the upbeats so hard they practically overturn the song. The whole piece immediately feels as if it’s headed somewhere. By the time the bouncy bass clarinet joins in we’re sure, and when it pours into the lovely chorus melody, we’ve arrived. There is so much attention to detail in the way the word “round” at the end of the chorus so easily and gently modulates, leaving us with a jarring leap back to the original key at the start of the next verse. The Rogers brothers build their songs with an enormous amount of care, and it shows.

B-side “Ode To Sophia” is a goofy, sweet banjo love song narrated by an 89 year old who’s been pining for the same woman since the second World War. In spite of the silliness of the song, there is something moving about the idea of the wish being fulfilled after so long, meaning a great deal less in some ways and a great deal more in others. True to form, the vocal harmonies all ring true, and the harmonic structure of the song is full of twists and turns that are rooted in Tin Pan Alley rather than indie rock. The song also contains a jazz joke so unbelievably nerdy that I’m not even going to explain it because then you will know that I got it and everyone will be embarrassed. No, let’s just forget it.

Addison and Lewis spend a great deal of their time on the road busking (hence the suitcase bass drum), and it comes through in their music manyfold. First, playing outside is the ultimate vocal training. There are no vocal monitors, no walls to bounce your voice back to you, and you have to fill the biggest room in the world with your voice. It’s like swinging a baseball bat with a donut. Three donuts. Made of lead. After that, the bat itself feels like a twig. So it’s no wonder the Rogers’ can sing so deftly and powerfully after years of busking. The other relevant element of street performing is that your audience is not only not made up of paying customers, it’s made up of people who are probably on their way somewhere and actively do not want to stop and be entertained by some kids with a guitar. This means it requires a hell of a lot of showmanship to win their ears in the first place, and even more to keep them there. There is a mention of vaudeville in the bands bio, and this is where it comes in. If you want busy people to stop and listen, you have to make them smile, and a touch of humor will do that like nothing else. But after that, Busman’s Holiday knows how to keep you there with a color-saturated melody or a deft arranging touch. These gentlemen are on a mission to win over the world and they just might be able to do it.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Writing pop songs is a lot like baking desserts (bear with me). A novice would assume that the thing to do is to go heavy on the sugar and just make the damn thing as sweet as humanly possible. I mean, that’s what people go to desserts for, right? Sweetness and excess. However, an expert knows that the touch of salt or mint or basil is what makes for a truly superlative pastry experience. To really appreciate the sweetness of a dish, one needs a hint of something savory and unexpected. The same goes for pop music. Yes, of course, you can’t have a pop song without hooks, just the way you can’t make dessert without something sweet. But great pop songs are always garnished with just enough spice to keep you coming back over and over again. (Two examples off the top of my head: 1. The way the melody in Phosphorescent’s “Pictures of Our Torn Up Praise” pulls back so hard against the tempo that it almost doesn’t keep up with the chord changes. 2. The way Van Morrison sings the entirety of “Who Was That Masked Man?” in falsetto.) Large doses of refined and unmodulated white sugar are what get you factory pop music, and if that’s your bag, you are probably not here on this website reading this essay.

Now, I don’t know if Boston indie pop quartet Hands and Knees can bake a cake (for some reason I want to say no, but there’s no relevant information in their bio. I’ll have to tell them to update it), but I do know that they can write a bouncy power pop song that doesn’t cloy even after you’ve listened to it about 20 times in a row. Their Ampeater A-side “Dancing On Your Tears” is a perfect example, building catchy pop music out of unusual six and nine bar phrases, which phrases consist of brief guitar stabs, counterweight bass syncopation, playful drum fills, and the slurred twin vocals of Carina Kelly & Joe O’Brien (when they’ve been in a band long enough, two people can adopt the exact same vocal ticks to the point where they can double vocal lines that seem undoubleable). Some pop songs are weighed down by their artistic ambitions, but here the two are perfectly in sync. “Dancing” bounds and cascades along with so much enthusiasm precisely because it’s so formally off-kilter. The six bar verse phrase always ends just before you expect it to, crashing headlong into the beginning of the next phrase before you even know what’s happening. Then, in the chorus, the elongation of the lyrics bread and butter (buh-huh-ter) during the break stalls the bands re-entry just enough to make you feel like the rug’s been pulled out from under you, only to fly back into another rambunctious verse. Even the simplest part of the song, the lyric-less bridge, runs out two bars earlier than you’d expect, only multiplying the momentum. All this form-play might sound complicated, but the song leaps along with the boundless energy of a new puppy, and you’d never notice a thing unusual about it until you’d already heard it countless times.

B-side “The Moonlight Is Wicked” is simpler formal fare for the most part, but devastatingly catchy and dotted with major two and three chords that spice up the tonality nicely. It also features some lovely jangle-twang lead guitar over the tagged ends of the choruses and the couplet you like simple fun / I like depression, the brilliance of which speaks for itself. The rolling rim-click percussion in the verses lets the song breathe and hang back until the repeated, saucy you’s bring it to a boil and shove us on into the blissful chorus. It’s a song that’s full of indie pop touchstones: the duel boy-girl vocals, the guitar hook answering the chorus melody, the silly humor of the verse lyrics. Even the verse progression is tried and true. If I wanted to bust out a second totally unnecessary culinary analogy, I’d liken a song like “Moonlight” to a perfect pasta sauce. It’s nothing you’ve never seen before, yet when it’s put together with enough time and care, it can be the most satisfying meal you ever ate. Seriously, be careful with this one, folks. Once you pipe it into your head, it will not want to leave.

Both of these jams come courtesy of Hands and Knees’ new, as-yet-untitled full length, generously made available by the band for free perusal on their Bandcamp page. The whole record is full of gangly energy, popping snare drums and tasty guitar hooks. But not only that. Something about the album makes you feel like you are listening to your friend’s band, if they suddenly got their shit together and started writing really great songs. Hands and Knees call themselves unfussy, and it’s true. There’s something selfless and eager about these songs. They want to tag along and make your walk to work a little easier. They want to give you something to whistle while you’re making coffee. There’s no frills and no needless obscurity, just fantastic pop music with a dash of the unexpected. Heat and serve.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Villagers’ Conor J. O’Brien will probably draw a lot of comparisons to another well-known singer-songwriter named Conor (doesn’t hurt that he looks a bit like him too), but where Oberst’s music, at least in its prime, was all about catharsis and abandon and wild generalizations and accusations that feel really good to yell (no matter how uncool or over-the-top or not-really-true they may be), O’Brien’s is oblique and careful. Subtle, even. His lyrics slip easily from first to second to third person, and even the first person songs seem somehow distanced, easier to hear as a narrative device than a soul-bearing, this-is-the-deeply-buried-truth-about-Conor-J-O’Brien kind of thing. In fact, O’Brien is more interested in the elusive nature of truth than in any grandiose, whitewashed statements. In the quiet, brooding, sleigh-bell touched “The Meaning of the Ritual” (the gorgeous, delicate home-made animation for which (link) is 100% worth your time and happens to be one of the only videos I’ve ever seen that made a song clearer and more powerful instead of just distracting me from it), he sings: my love is selfish and I bet yours is too / what is this peculiar word called ‘truth’. And again, in Ampeater A-side “Becoming A Jackal”: before you take this song as truth / you should wonder what I’m taking from you. This fixation on the mutability of things dominates O’Brien’s lyrics, and actually makes him more of an inverse-Oberst. Rather than shouting the capital-letter Truth, he’s exploring the multitude of truths. The songs are quite decisive, but I have no idea what I am doing, or where I am going, he says in his absurdist press bio, and though some of it may be a faux-naïf pose (Once the songs took shape, I asked some friends of mine to help me play them to people. When they kindly agreed, I decided that we would present ourselves as ‘Villagers’ – I don’t really know why.), as contrived as any other publicity stance (PR is inescapably fake; even directness becomes a mediated game of authenticity), it’s still rather refreshing to hear someone say that songs should always be treated with humor, no matter the subject matter, or that his goal in songwriting is to surprise himself. Right on, Conor.

The arrangements in Villagers’ songs are equally subtle and delicate, choosing the intimate gesture over the grand flourish so as to keep the dramatic element of the music subdued. O’Brien’s voice burns with a gentle heat, and you’re more likely to encounter gentle piano-guitar or guitar-bass unisons than washes of strings or booming brass (though there are touches of strings and french horn on other tracks of Becoming A Jackal, the band’s Domino LP).  O’Brien has a knack for writing songs that would be perfectly solid acoustic troubadour pieces and then adding just one more section that manages to bring out the the shape of the whole song the way ice brings scars to the surface of your skin.

On “Becoming a Jackal”, a rolling 6/4 tune that manages to seem circular and winding in form without really departing much from convention, this takes the form of the section that begins when I got older. It’s a section that manages to advance both the musical tension of the song and the narrative arc of the lyrics all at once. Finally we get the harmony vocals the song has been hinting at the whole time (with the doubling of key lines like that first always rearranged; the fact that the chorus is sung, doubled, at different places in the stereo spectrum from the verses; and the one tantalizing harmonized line in the second chorus).

At the same time, the story leaps forward. All along the narrator has been daydreaming at the window, both cared for and imprisoned by the song’s you, who in turn is abused by the jackals. Here he finally escapes into the streets, literally following his dream, and learns a new way to move from those jackals. The meaning of the song is elusive, as it should be, but it seems to have at its core a paradox: the need to betray something (alternatively: someone) you once loved in order to grow. It could be anything from rebelling against your parents to “selling out” as a musician, though in this case the next set of lyrics, set against a series of rhythm section breaks that make them stand out like nothing else in the song, implies the latter. O’Brien is literally selling us his fears in the form of songs, but the fact that he knows this and does it anyway gives the line an inverted meaning: releasing songs about how untrustworthy songs are is an act that has to mean he has weighed it out and decided that there is still something important and meaningful that can be conveyed in a song. Once again: right on.

B-side “Twenty Seven Strangers” is more oblique yet, a story of taking a city bus home that simultaneously begs and shrugs off interpretations, but seems to revolve around the anonymity and confusion and powerlessness of city life (anytime anyone sings the phrase fluorescent light you can bet this is what they’re getting at: nothing says urban dehumanization like fluorescent lights). The musical accompaniment is sparse, resigned and melancholy in a lovely way, just like riding home with exhausted commuters in the lighted rectangle of the evening bus. Throughout, reverby wordless vocal melodies, fingerpicked acoustic guitar and minimal drums provide the backdrop for O’Brien’s precise and even lead vocals. Not one thing changes musically in the song until 2:19, when that moment of liftoff arrives (an arranging trick that forces you to really focus on the lyrics up to that point, and also reflects the endless repetition hinted at in those lyrics), just as it does in “Becoming a Jackal”. The harmony vocals and bass finally arrive to fill out the song for the last few lines before a new wordless vocal-piano melody arrives, rising through the crashing cymbals on the first three notes as if it might transcend the song, but then sinking back down in beat-down resignation.

The very end of “Twenty Seven Strangers” is in fact my favorite moment in the entire 7”. The original melody reappears twice. The first time it’s suspended over the full band and drenched in reverb just as it was at the songs start. The second repeat is pared down to just O’Brien’s voice and guitar, the same two instruments with which the song began, only this time his voice is up close, stripped of the distancing effects that hid its texture and flaws. We listen to his voice hold the final, gentle falsetto note and then crackle and sputter out like a guttering candle, the sound of the anonymous soul stepping off that city bus.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Albums, posters & other assorted promotions for Boston’s everything-but-the-kitchen-sink-aw-fuck-it-let’s-mic-up-the-sink indie rock band Hallelujah the Hills all bear the same distinctive collage style. In it, color and grayscale are mixed freely. Perspectives crash into one another, creating a mindfuck of Escher-esque intensity, only without that cute, logic-puzzle element of resolution. Photographs and drawings and computer graphics join forces to create single figures. Ragged edges show. Enormous pencils rain down on a boat that looks to have arrived directly from a renaissance painting. A man drowns another in a pond next to what looks sort of like a filled in multiple choice test. Scientists cribbed from a technicolor film still point to a hand drawn arrow. Stray ink splotches show around the letters that make up the band name, remnants from stamps. It’s loose and surreal and unpredictable, but it somehow manages to sustain a consistent mood: an eerie melange of pulp novels, playful non-sequitors, conspiracy theories and David Lynch’s nauseous unreality, tempered with the occasional moment of beautiful clarity. It’s one of the things I’ve always admired about Hallelujah the Hills, because it manages to be a perfect illustration of what the band sounds like. Rough-edged, surreal, funny, eerie, packed with lyrics that sound like they were lifted from a pamphlet run off in someone’s basement, and dotted with those moments of epiphany (said epiphanies being created by ingenious arranging touches and/or stirring, shouted choruses). For example, there’s the moment in “Allied Lions” (a track from the bands most recent album, Colonial Drones) in which a frothy, building rock song suddenly disappears, leaving the line everything’s a dream except for this moment we’re in now hanging over the void, the lyric broken into three equal parts with audibly different effects on each, collage-style. Then an alarm clock rings.

The art and the songs are both the product of the mind of lead singer Ryan Walsh, formerly of  The Stairs, though the arranging is done by the full band together, who between the seven of them can cover all the usual rock band bases with the addition of trumpet, trombone, cello and sampler. The arrangements are often what catapult the songs out of the realm of rock-with-smart-and-weird-lyrics into a fully formed, coherent, mood-inducing sound, complete with the occasional epic crescendo, for which, as we all know by now, I am a grade A sucker. Take their Ampeater B-side “That Ticking Sound You Hear,” which commences with some minimal two-note guitar strumming, the gentlest mallet-struck cymbals, and a cascading melody fragment that’s Walsh at his softest and most lyrical. After making a brief appearance earlier, muted trumpet and cello appear to punctuate the lines out of context / on a substance with startling clusters that disappear just as fast as they arrived. Like Shai Erlichman’s songs, the moment is memorable for what it leaves out (the parallel clusters that don’t appear after the next two lines) as for what it contains. Soon afterward there is a rising, discordant guitar and trumpet trill which dies into a found sound squeal which abruptly breaks into a bridge that sounds tailor-made for some pounding drums and enormous guitars. Instead, we get more high pitched noises and arhythmic cymbals that fight the core of the song in a way that makes its ominous lyrics all the more ominous, and the full band crash we’d expect is reserved for the very last repeating chorus, where its anthemic potential runs up against the fact that the last repeating chorus is built in elusive five-bar phrases. The arrangement is brilliant because “Ticking” isn’t a song that should soar. It’s the lament of a conspiracy theorist who’s either correct or batshit crazy, and either way things aren’t going to turn out well. Even in the last moments of the song, when the vocals have landed safely on the root, the tension remains in the trumpet, which hangs on the major 7 and refuses to resolve upwards the way our western ears want it to.

Walsh’s lyrics are full of brilliant and rhythmic one-liners like the master painters all look ashamed / they don’t know the thrill of a jukebox fade, which call to mind the non sequiturs of The Silver Jews’ David Berman, with whom Hallelujah the Hills has shared bills (and shares some stylistic markers), only steeped in disaster movies instead of wry, cowboy toughness, and John Ashbery poems instead of whiskey. This attention to words (I have it on good authority that Walsh has been known to perform “Google Purity tests,” a concept coined and invented by Berman which involves searching for lyrical ideas to make sure that they are entirely original) pays off in spades, for where most bands in the indie rock world get stuck exploring the same ideas with the same words and making them sound cool via loud guitars or some such, Hallelujah the Hills’s lyrics are full of couplets that are clever and funny and touching and use words that you have probably not recently heard in a rock song, like, say, documentarian or cohorts, without sacrificing any of the rhythm that lyrics have to have to carry a rock song. AND they have loud guitars. What more could you ask for?

A-side “Introductory Saints” (another classic Hallelujah the Hills title) showcases the less moody side of the band, laying those propulsive lyrics over a bouncy backbeat, garnished with some some light country (those twangy lead lines over in your left ear, the way the melody dips from the root up an octave at the end of the chorus, that last ringing major 6 chord) and soul-pop touches (organ smears, those repeating guitar stabs in your right ear, the fat brass longtones), and ending in the Hallelujah the Hills staple of an enormous, rousing gang-vocal chorus (something about Walsh’s trebly voice becomes electric when he jumps up the octave into a shout at a climactic moment; it always gets me, (you can also hear it leaping out from the gang vocal mix on Titus Andronicus’ The Monitor). From the first line, this song really brings out the way Walsh’s lyrics fit together just loosely enough to leave endless space open for potential meaning. The opening couplet of Gentlemen / he said forever opens so many possibilities it’s easy to project your own meanings onto it, something that’s so often true of his songs.

Hallelujah the Hills have released these two songs to celebrate their departure on a summer tour opening for Titus Andronicus (who members of Hills will also be joining onstage to provide cello, brass, keys and gang vocals), a one two punch you’d be wise to check out. With so many members, Hallelujah The Hills have the ability live to create an enormous, euphoric wall of sound, especially when all of the members are not only playing at top volume but shouting a big, unison hook that hangs over the entire room. You’ll find it hard not to feel the upward pull of those enormous clouds of melody, and it will bring a little joy to your heart.

Tour dates
July 8 – Allston, MA – Great Scott
July 9 – Brooklyn, NY – Union Hall
July 10 – New Haven, CT – Lily’s Pad*
July 11 – Northampton, MA – Pearl Street*
July 12 – Albany, NY – Valentine’s*
July 13 – Buffalo, NY – Ninth Ward at Babeville*
July 14 – Toronto, ON – Horseshoe Tavern*
July 15 – Grand Rapids, MI – Intersection Lounge*
July 16 – Chicago, IL – Subterranean*
July 18 – Youngstown, OH – Lemon Grove Cafe
* = Opening for Titus Andronicus

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Everything about Shai Erlichman’s latest release, the Season Of Increasing Light EP, is suffused with dreamy, warm light, like a washed out old photograph of someone backlit by the sun in a forgotten summertime living room. From the title to the hopeful lyrics to the spacious open arrangements and generous (but not too generous) reverb, the EP’s four songs glitter with warmth and an energy that remains simultaneously relaxed and controlled. Recorded live in a room (more bands do this please) by Greg Beson of Manners at the Whitehaus art collective in Jamaica Plain, MA, these recordings are one of the best examples of matching aural texture to songwriting that I’ve ever heard. The muted, mallet-struck drums (Mickey O’Hara) and gently reverbed guitars and keys (Jake Estner & Adam Coggeshall, respectively) provide a perfectly expansive, airy backdrop for Erlichman’s songs, which are catchy and harmonious, like all great pop songs, but rigorously minimal and stripped down to their absolute cores. The spacious feeling this minimalism imparts to the songs is crucial to their relaxed, sun-faded beauty, and contrary to what you might think, making music this simple and beautiful is incredibly difficult.

(Note: the descriptors in this piece might call to mind a lot of recent blog-hyped, lo-fi, summery rock music; think of Erlichman’s music as what those bands would sound like if you could actually hear their songs through the cavernous reverb…and if they wrote good songs).

With that lo-fi crowd Erlichman shares an admirable lack of overblown or maudlin moments, but unlike the sloppy looseness of those bands, nothing on this recording is extraneous or without intent. He uses a dynamic trick I’ve seen a number of times lately (most effectively and recently in Twin Sister’s music, both live and recorded), and one I think more bands would be wise to adopt: rather than starting out at a deafening volume with everyone playing full blast and then attempting to somehow top that at the climax of each song, he lowers the entire dynamic and density level of his set to allow the shape of the songs to emerge powerfully and naturally. It’s so effective, especially on a song like A-side “Mornings When”, which starts out with a stark, droning five-note guitar riff over which a hypnotic and asymmetrical melody slowly unfurls. The first third of the song consists only of vocal variations over this riff (Erlichman has an amazing ability to generate endless melodies over the simplest backdrops), eventually backed by a gentle mallet backbeat and some floating keyboard and guitar drones. When the song finally breaks into a turnaround, it only lasts for two bars before returning us to where we started, building tension slowly and luxuriously. The gorgeous and brief climax occurs over a second repeating guitar figure, over which O’Hara’s drums play time only on the first half, leaving the second half suspended in shimmering cymbal rolls like dust motes floating in the morning light. It’s a gesture of restraint that perfectly suits the song. If the drums had played a backbeat over the whole section, you’d never have noticed anything amiss, but this gesture of removal is so much more original than any addition could be. It lets the song breathe, even as the vocals explode into a high, open harmony on the words there are and then slowly recede into a third elegantly simple guitar riff.

Erlichman’s lyrics, often composed simply by improvising until something sticks, are oblique and non-linear, as you might expect from lyrics composed that way, but they’re not at all throwaways. They evoke unusual and delicate moods, moods you never would have thought could be the centerpiece of a deeply moving song. “Mornings When” finds him sitting at his kitchen table watching the morning sunlight pour in through the window, having a simple breakfast, and it manages to express the  wonderful pleasure of simple things like eating alone in sunny kitchens (encapsulated in the beautiful line I will sit and feel what belongs), a pleasure that is inseparable from its own transience (the line I will sit and feel what is gone). It’s a small moment that’s enormous in feeling.

B-side “The Season” adds to the hazy guitars and sparse drums a pleasant rhythmic tension between 6/8 and 4/4 (notice that the drum part often gently fights against the triplets in the guitar by playing what sounds like a straight backbeat) and a darker tone. Somehow, against the minor key arpeggios of Erlichman’s guitar, the lines everyone, everyone is happy / and everyone, everyone is needed sound ironic (in the traditional sense of the word, not the trucker hat sense), and something about the way the lyrical sentences never seem to end, running on and on and then trailing off mid clause at the end of both the first chorus and second verse, gives the song an ominous feeling like a day where the heat coming off the sidewalk is so intense it distorts the air. A lyric like the cannibal claws of super applause will have me reveals all the assets of Erlichman’s stream of consciousness style of writing. The rhythm of the words is beautiful, and while I can guess at what they might mean, there is something chillingly mysterious about the phrase that you never quite get with more straightforward lyrics. Like “Mornings When”, the dynamic climax to the song is brief (making use of that same technique I mentioned earlier): the words like a howled out up an octave before the song dissipates. Note the simplicity of Estner’s tremolo guitar here, which provides a minimal but essential counterpoint to the vocal melody, especially during the louder second verse and the final chorus, where it plays a gently descending figure.

The songs on Season of Increasing Light, like much of my favorite music, reveal themselves slowly and gently, over the course of many listens. Their restrained beauty and subtle optimism gets better and better with repetition. The other side of that coin is that you should probably sit and listen to these songs once or twice without sending that gchat message or reading that messageboard beef (or, uh, this article). It’s summer now; I advise you to load these songs on your portable audio device of choice and take a walk out in the season of increasing light. It’s the perfect setting for these delicate, hazy heart-swelling songs.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

It’s representative of how weirdly smashed together all of our culture is that a band as back porch sounding as Baltimore’s Man&Dog could have gotten their first big push in an Urban Outfitters contest. It would be bad faith, by which I mean bullshit, for me to say that this makes them any less legit than any other band, for while there are a lot of folks out there trying to make pop music that is Art, they are all still trying to make popular music, and a UO contest is as good a shortcut to renown as any. And though the band sounds like a couple of kids straight out of the midwest, with our unlimited access these days to any kind of music we might desire, aesthetics (in Man&Dog’s case the dropped ‘g’s and acoustic strums and growly vocals) have largely become a choice, rather than the inheritance they used to be.

Man&Dog may eschew the electronic textures usually associated with their city, but there is plenty that’s worthwhile and modern in their music.  First, (it’s terrible that I have to say this, but I do) they can actually play their instruments and sing exactly the way they are now doing through your headphones (check out some of the videos of the band playing their songs, there are no recording tricks going on here). Second, the band exists in a lyrical world that, for all its treetops and rolling seas, also includes modern things like turnpikes and prescription pills. Images of the natural world will never lose resonance for us, having roots deeper than anything we could possibly impose on them, but still it can be tiring to hear people who have clearly lived their whole lives in cities and art school dorms rhapsodizing about sparrows and fig trees (I guess it’s touching in that it’s such a clear manifestation of a longing for something more solid and pure than the relativistic cultural chaos in which we’ve grown up, but it’s still hard to take seriously), so it’s nice to hear that Man&Dog are right here in the modern world along with the rest of us. And third, the band plays with form in the pop song in a way that doesn’t interfere with the pure pleasure of big choruses and vocal harmonies, but takes those things and subtly stretches them out in unobtrusive yet satisfying ways. It makes the bands songs stand up to a lot of repeated listening without becoming cloying.

As I mentioned, these tracks sound almost exactly the way the band sounds live (although guitarists Sean Mercer and Danny Townsend, who share lead vocal duties, seem more tempted to burst into solos in the live setting) to the point that if you told me they’d been recorded with the full band all together in a room, I’d believe you. This is a huge compliment. Man&Dog know what they are doing. When I saw them play live, there was an atmosphere of playfulness that only exists in bands who are infinitely comfortable with one another and with their instruments, which makes it kind of astonishing that they’ve only really existed since the spring of 2009. Midway through the set, the band had a brief conference and then paraded through the crowd over to a beat up upright piano to play a song they’d apparently written on a break from painting a house together (which sounds so made up that it’s obviously true), a song they’d never played live before, and, leaning aimlessly on the piano and wall nearby, they proceeded to nail the harmonies as if they’d been playing it for years. It was a gorgeous moment, somehow made even more gorgeous by the drunken audience murmur that threatened to drown the unamplified sound.

A-side “All Day With No Rest” is a lovely melancholy strummer with a perfect chorus that hangs weightless above the rolling guitars like clouds in the summer sky (Man&Dog have a knack for this kind of chorus; check out their song “Brakeman” for another example). The way the melody first resolves down on hide and then up on die is the kind of little touch that makes pop songs so wonderful. There’s also something badass about the second-person lyrics that fits neatly with the roughness of the voices (roughness being something that I mean only to refer to texture, for the singing is seldom even an iota out of tune, even when they break into the big, three part parallel harmonies). One of the remarkable things about “All Day” is that while it tumbles along with the ease of any number of folk rock songs, the form is actually quite unusual. Instead of simply pinballing between verses and choruses, the band trots out five different sections over the course of four minutes, with subtle alterations in feel (notice, for example, the way the tambourine enters on the I don’t need your medicine section, and the way Eric Piccirelli’s upright bass deviates at the same moment from its countrified one three pattern to one that matches the new strumming) and yet the song never sounds patched together or composed. It sounds just as natural and easy as if they wrote it while, say, mowing the lawn.

B-side “A Boat’ll Abide” has a little bit less country and a little more indie rock to it, from the even eighth note feel and the asymmetrical drum part to the fact that it starts with a field recording of the announcements in a German train station. The verse includes a curveball of a second chord that the band navigates seamlessly and melodically before the thumping bass drum enters to propel it into the chorus. My favorite moment is the second iteration of the chorus, in which the band suddenly drops out, leaving the line we are puzzling people to rise up like a mountain from the map of the song. Lyrically, like “All Day,” “Boat” hints at love and mortality but remains just vague enough to seem wiser than any single plucked line could illustrate (it’s also a well known fact that anything sounds profound if it’s rendered in heartbreaking four part harmony). There is a warmth that radiates from both songs, something that comes partially from the acoustic, strumming in the park sound of the instrumentation, but partially from the attitude of the lyrics. The songs touch on seriousness, but they’re never mired in it. They find space for wordplay (the puddle/puzzle jump in the chorus of “Boat”) and optimism (There’s a road just a little bit farther). It’s a mix of dark and light that makes Man&Dog perfect for spring and fall. They encapsulate the hopeful melancholy of the changing seasons that is so addictive.

It’s no coincidence that Man&Dog conclude their bio, after the usual list of their accomplishments, with the note that they are working on expanding the range of their music in the time to come. The fact that the band openly talks of wanting to do more than they’re currently doing is wonderful and rare. This should be the ambition of all bands: to make something better than what they’ve already made. Thankfully, Man&Dog know this, and these great songs will only be the start of a long arc of great songs.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Both the songs on Will Stratton’s second Ampeater single deal with the confusions of love lost and found. It’s pretty traditional ground for pop songs, but unlike most pop music, which revels in the heat of the moment, in emotions flattened and compressed into universal banalities, these songs are deeply personal and contemplative. Rather than wallow in the first overheated flush of love or self-pitying pall of loss, they look backward with a subtler, more mature brand of anger or desire.

Anchored by Stratton’s breathy vocals and intelligent lyrics (whether they’re hovering in a sea of dreamy electric guitars as on A-side “Lying in the Dark” or riding a wave of fierce fingerpicking, as on B-side “Do You Remember the Morning”), they don’t pretend to resolve into easy, clear emotions but instead draw out the contradictory feelings that are always a part of love affairs, whether or not we like to admit it to ourselves at the time.

In “Lying in the Dark”, a song that revolves wholly around the untrustworthiness of truth, Stratton’s narrator seems torn between flinging hurtful words at an ex-lover who has clearly hurt him and revealing the honest but now tainted.  At different points in the song, he tells her why didn’t I just tell you/ you’re pretty but I never felt a thing / ’cause that would be a lie and then follows this confession with and every night I’d pray/for something interesting to say/but you never even caused a single spark. Which of those statements is true? Both, perhaps. It’s complicated and full of uncertainty and unresolved emotions, just like actual relationships. This willingness to explore what is ambiguous and shifting is one of the things I admire most about Stratton’s songs, as the way we experience the world doesn’t digest so easily as the radio would have you believe.

Nearly the entire song is underscored with hazy electric guitar picking and light, simple drumwork, which forms a soothingly repetitive backdrop for the lyrics, but instead of just allowing this delicate frame to carry the song gently into and out of your ears, Stratton uses it to set up a moment of supreme yet subtle drama in which, after the second verse, literally everything drops out except for one electric guitar. This guitar plays a fiery solo that pushes and pulls the time and meter, adding and dropping beats and notes in a way that conveys the depth of the emotion at hand, the shaky ground described. It sounds almost as if it is brimming over with anger, a violence that Stratton’s voice never touches, and when the rest of the instruments return, exactly the same way they left, it leaves you with the feeling of having just watched someone who is usually extremely composed burst out shouting in the middle of an argument and then just as quickly return to normalcy. The light drums and airy guitars sound the same but they are not the same.

This single also carries on the motif I mentioned in the previous review of stretching Stratton’s previous records’ pretty, fingerpicked folk songs, expanding the forms and techniques enough to make them slightly more elusive and thus even more rewarding upon repeated listens. This experimentation with form stems from Stratton’s interest in capital-c Composition (you will recall from the last review his familiarity with all sorts of modern classical composers I hadn’t heard of, and I will add here that he studied the subject at Bennington College), something that started all the way back in his high school days:

Ever since I fancifully started considering myself a composer of serious music when I was in high school, I have led a dual musical existence, where on a good week I would write (meaning make up and remember through repetition) a little ABAB-form song about love or loneliness or fate or whatever, and the next day I would write (meaning actually write down) a spiky, meandering, Gnossienne-ish miniature for piano. Things approached a more absurd disconnect when I was working on my second record, because I was recording songs that were more polished and preening than anything I had ever attempted before, and at the same time I was composing some pretty strange music heavily inspired by people like George Crumb and Earle Brown, music full of heavy silences and seagull glissandos and indeterminate notation.

The songs here haven’t ventured into Crumb territory yet, but they take the ABAB pop song format and remove the rigidity of tempo and exaggerated differences between verses and chorus.  Instead of marking each section as clearly as possible, they flow naturally and organically from section to section, and only by stopping and thinking about it can one see the seams. “Do You Remember the Morning” begins with the title phrase, built up in fragments of increasing length from do you to do you remember the morning, all of it hanging over some low, rubato guitar chords. Stratton really likes to play with rhythmic accents as well as meter, and you can hear that here in the way he emphasizes the upbeat of the first note of each bar, around 1:25. These strange emphases take a song built on just acoustic guitar and vocals, like so many others, and turn it into something that maintains a sense of mystery and intactness, aided by immense skill of Stratton’s guitar playing. The whirling solo brings out some of the same intensity of emotion here, again serving as the emotional apex of the song, yet here the energy is more positive, desire rather than recrimination (okay, maybe a little bit of both. After all, love is complicated).

Talking about Forest Fire last week, I mentioned how exciting it is (not to mention how much it speaks of the viability and importance of the musician in an age of endlessly reproducible digital recordings) to hear a band who take advantage of the opportunity, as human beings with instruments and imaginations, to play their songs differently each time. Stratton is a perfect example of someone who falls into that category, as evidenced by his recent WNYC Spinning On Air performance, which includes alternate versions of each of the songs on this single (“Lying in the Dark” winds up in a whole different time signature and “Do You Remember the Morning” is slightly accelerated and a bit more frenetic). As I said in the first piece, maturity and musicianship aren’t exactly the things that set the blogs a buzzing, at least not as much as they ought to, but when it comes to making music that has staying power and significance beyond what the latest hyphenated genre trend happens to be, Will Stratton is a pretty great person to be right now.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

Forest Fire, on the other hand, have inverted the entire hype system with what at first seems like a curiously self-negating approach to being an internet-age band. They don’t have a bio or a label (though I’m sure they’ve had plenty of offers in regards to the latter, and Infinite Best has reissued their highly praised debut album Survival on vinyl), and their MySpace url is fuckforestfire. It’s puzzling at first for a journalist who is used to parsing through endless band bios jammed full of unwarranted comparisons and mushroom-cloud sized hyperbole in search of some straight biographical info, and it is terrifying that it took me as long as it did to realize that they do this because it gives writers no choice but to pay attention to the music, music being the thing that bands play if you’ve forgotten, which I pretty much had. And it works because the music is really, really good.

The no-bullshit attitude of the band matches their sound perfectly: their songs are tough and simple and not at all flashy. Mark Thresher’s vocals echo the slurriness of Marc Bolan, only a little more pissed off and less hung up on sex, and the songwriting shares some qualities with electric T. Rex as well, turning unadorned and deliberate (and often deliciously slow) strumming patterns into memorable rock songs, songs which function not as fixed pieces to be mechanically repeated, but as templates for the band to play with live. It really says something wonderful about a band when every version you can find of a particular song sounds different.  For instance, an early live video of B-side “Fortune Teller” (which incidentally starts with one of my new favorite first lines: I only wanna seem good in front of the right people.) adds some eighth-note soul piano, electronic drums, punchy alto sax, and swoopy keyboards. Thresher is also laudably unafraid of letting his voice be heard, especially live, where he sometimes backs off from the mic to let out a full-voiced shout that almost makes him sound like a lost member of The Band.

Both of the tracks from this Ampeater single are songs that appear on the band’s aforementioned Survival LP, but these are live-recorded (and even more stripped down) versions that the band did for a Rough Trade bonus EP. Bands often expose their weaknesses in live and stripped down settings, revealing songwriting that turns out to be pallid without fluttery arrangements, guitar solos that reveal that the album’s solo was the best take out of 50 and vocals that would do better buried to the neck in guitars, but Forest Fire’s songs may even sound better when they’re pared down to almost nothing (not that the album’s arrangements are particularly florid, but still). Something about these versions of the songs pulses with a badass energy that tops even the performances on Survival.

A-side “I Make Windows” starts with some simple flute, tambourine and guitars. The chords are a pattern you’ve heard a thousand times before, but they have that mysterious renewable quality unique to all great rock songs where they somehow don’t remind you of any other song, and when the vocals come sliding in with the title phrase, it’s just perfect. Forest Fire are careful not to put anything unnecessary in their songs, and the twangy electric guitar that fills in a few of the empty spaces leaves just as many alone, because that spaciousness is a crucial part of the song, in the exact way that the line that starts the second verse is followed by about 12 seconds of open space. It takes a lot of maturity to let the songs unfold at their own pace, whatever that pace may be. The additional vocals on the chorus are perfectly understated as well, only leaping out of unison and into harmony occasionally, keeping the song tight and tough where, with the wrong choices, it could have been anthemic in the worst way (imagine the hugest production you can, with like 40 people singing that chorus and an orchestra and lots of booming drums). The guitar solos that follow each chorus walk the fine line between melodic lines and spiney, dissonant bursts, and the fact that they do so in the most exposed setting possible makes them even more impressive.

“Fortune Teller” starts with that perfectly incisive first line, which, like much of “I Make Windows” unfolds with a surefooted slowness and let’s you know that there’ll be no wasting words here. The song then then climbs in tension to the line why not kill someone you hate?, which I’m going to maintain is a pretty bold idea to express in a rock song, especially when your band isn’t one that specifically gains cred from being edgy or buries its lyrics in layers of noise. It’s a hair out of context here, but to me it sounds like an expression of the frustration of being forced into all sorts of stupid social niceties.  The phrase gatling gun social skills touches on a certain violence and coldness that lies underneath all the phony handshaking and schmoozing required of most of us every day. A slightly out of tune toy piano is sprinkled throughout the song, one of the only arranging touches besides the shakers and tambourine that carry the rhythm, lending the whole thing a slightly creepy air that fits with the sharp darkness of the lyrics. In both songs, Forest Fire pull off the other rock n roll mystery trick of making things that are out of tune sound totally legit and not fishy at all.

Forest Fire deserve your ears not because they don’t have a band bio or because I find thoughtless internet music writing irritating, but because they write fantastic, subtle songs and perform them without holding back. They are one of a dwindling crop of bands finding listeners almost solely on the basis of their music, and that means a lot at a time like this.

Gabe Birnbaum

[[[Download the 7-inch]]]

I discovered The Wave Pictures when I volunteered to cover, for another illustrious internet publication, Brooklyn Vegan’s pre-SXSW party at the Knitting Factory. At first it was pretty much as expected: swarms of overzealous photographers, PBR sponsorship, lots of dazed-looking but pretty people, an opening act that was competent but forgettable. Nothing to complain about, but also nothing to really justify all the hullaballoo. I often have this feeling at shows, especially shows where higher-level or hyped bands are playing and something of grand significance is supposedly going on. It’s a natural reaction, I think, after reading so much fawning praise of bands, to see them live or hear a song and think “this is it?” This tends, for me, to lead to lots of abstract and bloated pondering about whether the world really needs this many god damned rock bands and what the hell we’re all doing standing in this room on a Monday night not talking to each other and just sort of waiting for something to happen.

Then The Wave Pictures came on and I forgot all about that. Instantly. It may sounds like I am setting up some sort of self-convincing journalistic hyperbole in which The Wave Pictures are the saviors of modern music. I am not. Modern music is just fine. What The Wave Pictures are is a really fantastic live band made up of three men from London who are talented and instantly likable and who possess an amazing ability to make you smile. They also saved me from my own mind and turned my Monday night into a really lovely evening. When I said in the other Illustrious Internet Publication that I didn’t know when the last time was that I saw so many people beaming at an indie rock show, I was telling the truth. Partly, this was due to frontman David Tattersall’s wonderfully witty lyrics (take the song, for example, in which he starts the chorus with the lines I hate your mother and I hate your father, correcting them on the second go round to okay, I don’t really hate your mother, but I really hate your father), which come rapid-fire and display his talent for coaxing serious emotion out of details that are mundane enough to be completely believable. The first song they played at the Knitting Factory had me perplexed at first, with lyrics about two lovers holed up in an apartment doing things like melting chocolate on cookies and writing their names on banana peels, which sounded inconsequential until I heard the line where he discovers “how boring we’d become”, which revealed to me that the song was actually about how inconsequential those acts are, about the stuffy ennui of a failing relationship.

The band is a trio, composed of guitarist/songwriter Tattersall (who can rip some unbelievable solos live but tends to refrain on record), bassist Franic Rozycki and drummer Jonny Helm, and their live and recorded association with songwriters like David-Ivar Herman Düne (of Herman Düne) and John Darnielle (of The Mountain Goats) makes immediate sense and will help you to place them on the band spectrum. All three acts are notable for complex but direct lyrics delivered over relatively unadorned pop songs (The Wave Pictures strike a rock’n’roll/early punk balance that recalls Jonathan Richman), and all three feature singers whose flawed voices suit their songs perfectly: Darnielle’s nasality makes his vivid stories more disarming and affecting than a drippy croon would; Düne’s accented English only enhances his naïve sincerity (especially when he sings “baybeh”) ; and Tattersall’s dryly vibrato’d voice fits his Oscar Wilde witty self-destructiveness perfectly.

A-side “Just Like a Drummer”, from the band’s Moshi Moshi debut Instant Coffee Baby, is a lovely, lazy pop song, the kind in which The Wave Pictures specialize, complete with strumming that’s muted on the backbeats and charmingly amateurish gang vocals that lend the end of the song an air of hugeness without overwhelming the song (the WPs songs are full of this kind of vocals; they sound like a first take of a bunch of friends clustered half-drunk around a microphone). It’s a perfect compliment to the balmy weather we’ve been having lately, and while the lyrics are surprisingly inscrutable for a Wave Pictures song (they appear to be about living with a writer) they contain some really striking images. The longing in the idea of falling for a woman glimpsed not even on the street but on the street in a film carries a lot of melancholic weight, and the image of the morning sun as a pack of orange spaniels nosing and squirming through the room precisely conveys the irritation of being woken up unwillingly by the sun.  Also, the rhythmic cadence of a line like “the whites, the wine and the weed” is immensely pleasurable. The naturalness with which Tattersall manages to toss these things off is almost the most impressive part.

B-side “Strawberry Cables” also manages to be intriguingly oblique, melding what appear to be images of a lonely fat kid eating candy in front of the TV (a lifetime without hips has two potential meanings here) with a chorus that makes the whole thing sound like a song of lost love. The line the world might hate me but it revolves around me now is one of the little revelatory moments that Tattersall excels at slipping into his songs, encapsulating the impulse nearly every aimless act of teenage violence. What’s most arresting about this song is the melody of the chorus, which is full of both melancholy and determination, underscored by the gentle and marchlike brushwork and bassline. It sounds as if it ought to gently parade along forever.

Between songs at the live set, the band expressed their utter relief at finding themselves back in civilization after four days in Florida (this immediately endeared them to me, Florida being the only state in this lovely country I don’t much care for). They’d played a rockabilly bar the night before for about five people, and a woman had come up to Tattersall before the show and said, What kind of music do you guys play? Is it country or rockabilly? as if those were the only two types of music that existed. They were thrilled to play and we were thrilled to listen, and that’s all you could ask for to banish heavy questions about the meaning of live rock shows. And you’re in luck. They’re coming to your town soon. You should go give them an audience; they will make your Monday night.

Gabe Birnbaum

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I once read an essay that conjectured that the moments we feel most fully alive and present in the world are the moments in which we get closest to the impossible. For example, what if you turned around right now and Bill Murray was in your bedroom, staring at you, eating an apple? You would probably remember that moment for the rest of your life, and it would certainly put a thrill into the rest of your day, if not your week or month. Think of all the conversations you would have about it (“I have no idea how he got in! And then he just climbed out the window, never said a word!”), whereas if you turned around and found the pile of dirty clothes you left there yesterday, you wouldn’t even remember that moment ten minutes later. This idea has stuck with me since then (it’s not unlikely that I’ve mangled or misunderstood it in some way, but if so then it is now my idea) and it resonates with my experience of music as well as my experience of life. The music that always grips me in the most visceral and immediate way is the music that sounds impossible, that generates in me a feeling of joyful surprise. Sometimes it happens in straight-up pop music, if I hear a new three chord song that sounds so eternal and so unique I can’t believe it wasn’t already written decades ago, or an unconventional yet lovely chord progression or melody. More often it only lasts for a moment, a rhythmic hitch in the chorus of a song or one bar of sublime and strange harmony. These are the moments in pop songs I play back over and over again, but in other modes of composition, minus the familiar pop anchors, the feeling of being in wonderfully unfamiliar territory can last for far longer.

Bing and Ruth, the compositional outlet for Brooklyn-based pianist David Moore, manages to reach and sustain this feeling of the impossible impressively well. His lovely, winding pieces manage to achieve some of the same hypnotic and otherworldly qualities as electric and electronic music despite the fact that they are built almost entirely out of acoustic textures (my first, probably simplistic, reaction to hearing Bing and Ruth was to think “acoustic Stars of the Lid”). The key to the otherworldliness in Moore’s work is the combination of disparate instruments to form singular, unified sounds that seem entirely alien to the instruments we think we know so well. For example, there is a wash of sound in B-side “go on.” which sounds to me like clarinet, cello and bowed cymbals, but part of the beauty and the fun of the music is that it’s very hard to tell just by listening what is making the strange sounds that you are hearing.

Moore is also unafraid of allowing his music to unfold naturally and gradually, which accounts for the longer track times and the sense of luxurious pacing. Exploring for three minutes the sound of two clarinets slipping in and out of tune with one another with an aching slowness (as on the very start of “go on.”) is something that takes a bit of compositional bravery, but it more than pays off. As with much minimalism (this is, in fact, one of the points of Cage’s often mocked “4’33″”, which causes the audience to listen not to silence but to the ambient and human sound in the concert hall), the simplicity and clarity of the ideas causes the audience to listen with an intense focus seldom given to music that dances and cavorts for attention. The sound of the accelerating and decelerating beats, generated by the two tones as they drift apart and then back together, is a fascinating and strange one, putting the focus not on the pitches of the two woodwinds but on the rhythms generated by their intonation differences (Beats are natural sound interference generated by two tones which are very close together but not quite in unison. They sound like a rhythmic swelling, almost like tremolo, the speed of which varies by how close the two tones are to one another). Around this locus, Moore gradually adds other instruments, culminating in the arrival of his piano, which plays a gentle, steady, three-chord pattern. Over this pattern there are fragments of lovely, melancholic piano melodies set against drones created by the intersection of bowed cymbals with bowed strings and analog synths with mellow clarinets, combining pitches and textures from different instruments into one sound that is unrecognizable and inimitable. The description may sound labored but the music is anything but. The effect is stunning, and it’s only enhanced by the moments when you hear a human voice or a cello emerge with a clarity that’s hauntingly brief. The way the song melts back into a single note at the very end (this time cello overtones and voice, I think) is a moment of delicate and perfect symmetry.

The A-side “Rails” drawn from the band’s forthcoming City Lake album, begins with some Reichian clapping, overlapping different claves like puzzle pieces and then matching them with a piano figure that neatly parallels their rhythms. Like the much sparser piano figure in “go on.”, this serves as an anchor for the rest of the song and a springboard for overlapping vocal, string and reed melodies, which sit just far enough back in the mix that you have to really focus to draw them out. They always seem to dance away from your ear, and just as soon as you catch on to one it disappears and you find yourself suddenly drawn to a different melody. Nothing ever seems to repeat, and the song has a lightness to it that would almost make it sound improvised if it weren’t so carefully woven together. It really ought to be said that the musicians who give life to Moore’s pieces are immensely skillful and subtle (for those keeping score, or trying to discern various instruments, the lineup is as follows: Becca Stevens, Voice; Jean Rohe, Voice; Jeremy Viner, Clarinet; Patrick Breiner, Clarinet; Greg Heffernan, Cello; Leigh Stuart, Cello; Jeff Ratner, Acoustic Bass; Chris Berry, Percussion; Myk Freedman, Lap Steel; and Mike Effenberger, Analog Synth). Everything is in its right place, and all the sounds blend effortlessly together. Without such tightly, expertly controlled performances, the pieces could never reach their deeply textured heights.

My favorite moment in “Rails,” one which gives the listener a thrilling weightless feeling, is right around 4:20, when the floor tom and bass that have been with us for minutes suddenly drop out and a thick, clustered chord, composed of nearly every instrument in the band, swells and swells as if to burst. It’s a fantastically tense moment, and when the bass and drum come back in it’s with the same subtle part, understated as everything else in Moore’s music, yet in context, buoying up that thick cloud of sound, it feels absolutely triumphant, like the biggest sound in the world.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Inserting moments of musical unrest into pop music without disturbing the graceful flow that makes pop songs so pleasurable is an incredibly difficult task. Even brief moments of dissonance can be distracting (occasionally one gets the feeling that they are intentional distractions from poor songwriting) or come off as forced, an insincere attempt to make a band sound more interesting or difficult than they really are.  It requires a remarkably gentle touch to make dissonances and rhythmic quirks not only slip by without disrupting the song, but actually lock in and sound as if they are essential and natural, and this is, in fact, just the thing Tavo Carbone of Brooklyn’s Horse’s Mouth excels at.

Carbone’s songs are short and restless, full of small idiosyncrasies and twitches (beats added or missing, lush vocal harmonies appearing and disappearing just as fast, tempos that lurch and accelerate).  You may feel like you’ve had your fill of idiosyncratic Brooklyn rock bands (lord knows I get that feeling sometimes), but the members of Horse’s Mouth are probably not quite what you are picturing after that description.  There is nothing irritatingly or safely cool about them.  Horse’s Mouth is actually refreshingly and genuinely nerdy.  In live videos, they are mostly clad in white t-shirts and jeans and Carbone himself sports an unassuming Monkees-style bowl cut, opening his mouth cartoonishly wide and bowing his head to hit the lowest notes.  After all, the band draws as much influence from showtunes (bear with me) and classical music as they do from the staples of indie pop.  Their Ampeater B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window” actually ends with a loop from a familiar-sounding orchestral piece.

A Brooklyn native, Carbone met his bandmates, drummer J.J. Beck, bassist Matt Scott, violinist Heather Sommerlad, and multi-instrumentalist Michael Chinworth, at Bennington College, a school in Vermont that has produced other Ampeater favorites like Trevor Wilson (AEM022) and Will Stratton (AEM70).  Carbone actually has quite a lot in common with Wilson, from his tightly coiled vibrato and theatrical delivery to his compositional and conceptual ambition.  The members of Horse’s Mouth have been playing Carbone’s songs together in various forms and with various other musicians since 2005 (including, at one point, a 17 piece orchestra), though Horse’s Mouth as a band only officially dates back to 2008.  You can hear the chemistry between the musicians almost immediately upon listening, and especially on watching some of the live footage shot by Connor Kammerer and Pixelhorse. The live performances are impressively faithful to the record without losing any of the feeling of fun and spontaneity that comes from the itchy arrangements.

A-side “In the Woods” (both songs in today’s single are drawn from the band’s new album Sophia, which will be released later this month in CD and DVD form, the latter featuring original films made by 12 videographers, one for each song) opens with a sprightly picking figure on the electric and a drumbeat that matches the guitar’s rhythmic accents precisely.  The verses each close with a lovely, harmonized “not old enough to know”, on the last word of which the vocals begin in a tense minor 7^th before leaping up to catch and hang on a high falsetto harmony.  It’s one of those effortless little moments of dissonance that provide the tension and release in Carbone’s songs, rather than the usual gradual emotional crescendo thing, which is okay too, only significantly more expected.  Also notice the way the lovely spiraling violin figure that leads us into the instrumental verse is cast into bold by the drums brief disappearance, and the way the drums are called back by a handclap (the only one in the entire song).  The most unexpected moment of unease comes during the very last descending “know”, where instead of resolving to the root, Carbone’s vocal melody rolls down through perfect consonance before landing on the flat two, a half step up from the one of the final chord.  It’s probably the most dissonant note you can sing over a minor chord, and it has an intensely disquieting effect as the last note of the whole song, especially the way Carbone coats it with pretty vibrato, as if it’s the most beautiful note in the world.  Yet this is actually the very thing that sells it on the recording: it doesn’t sound like it’s an ugly note to him.  It sounds like the note that he wanted the song to end on.  On the album (which drops on March 20^th and which I haven’t heard in its entirety), each song is strung into the next, so perhaps this final tension is a way of moving into the next song.

B-side “Thin Branches Against a Window,” after a brief organ intro, again matches the rhythmic emphases of the guitar to the drum part, giving the song a lilting, dancy feel that unifies it with “In the Woods” somewhat, though this song is much more of an exercise in constant motion.  Before the first verse even starts, it careens off into a very brief sort of Deerhoof interlude, which pockmarks the song periodically, in which the tempo abruptly and completely changes and the drums play a couple of quick, skittering fills.  The song rarely stays in any one meter for more than a few bars, sticking mostly, but not entirely, to 4/4 during the verses and otherwise jumping around like a madman, a feeling that is countered only by the calm and stately violin parts.  After the one moment where everything coheres into what sounds as if it’s going to be an actual chorus (repeating melody and lyric, 4/4 time, descending harmony), the meter changes and the violin and guitar spin out of control, everything clashing and then somehow resolving into what sounds like a loop from a Schubert record, which finally plays itself out into three acoustic guitar arpeggios and…the sound of a bird chirping?  It’s an unbelievable amount of stuff crammed into less than three minutes, and when faced with it it’s easy to overlook the loveliness of the chiming guitars and glockenspiels that underscore the verses.

I’ve mentioned before how music that maintains its mystery is often far more effective, and Carbone does exactly that here, giving us lyrics oblique enough to mean a great many things and music that skates through so many moods and meters and feels that it’s hard to say just what exactly makes it feel coherent, though certainly something does.  Perhaps it’s the common sounds of each member’s voice (they all sing, excluding Beck, the drummer), or the distinctly personal style each has on his or her instrument.  Perhaps it’s that all Horse’s Mouth songs feel odd in precisely the same way, the product of Carbone’s unique and unified vision, impossible to pin down completely but evocative and pleasurably strange, like a fairytale landscape (not one of the neutered ones where everyone is nice and boring, but the Hans Christian Andersen kind, where little girls get their feet cut off with axes).

Gabe Birnbaum

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Stratton was very young when he recorded those two albums (he still is, really), and had he been launched into the slobbery jaws of even indie-stardom, we might not be seeing the kind of growth we can see in his new music, some of which he has kindly allowed Ampeater to convey to you, the people. The appeal of the delicate, melancholy, direct songs of his first two albums is strong, and it hasn’t been banished by any means, but here Stratton begins to mold it into something less predictable and more expansive. I’ll let him speak for himself because he is incredibly eloquent: “There is a single spiritual position that exists in songs like [Nick Drake’s] “Which Will” that is so strong that, when you hear it, it seems like it becomes the only thing that exists in the world(…)That kind of music, written from a place of such isolation, has the illusion of clarity. Maybe it has real clarity, it’s hard for me to say. Either way, I’m tired of being in that place. I want to forge out on my own and wind up some place I don’t recognize. I want to learn to express very specific moments of anger, flirtatiousness, joy–all things that are more or less absent in Nick Drake’s music–with the same sort of gutwrenching precision that he used to express the false sense of omniscience that accompanies deep despair.”

After all that setup, you’re probably expecting some death metal or fifteen minute guitar solos or synthy 80’s pop. Well, there’s none of that, but improvisation does play a key role these songs in a way that it never has before. A-side “Bluebells” commences with an open piano-figure that recalls the beginning of Bon Iver’s “Babys”, but which is harmonically static and probably comes instead from interest in recent minimalist classical music (our conversation was educational for me in this arena, to say the least, but I recommend checking out John Luther Adams, David Lang, Arvo Part, & Gavin Bryars for starters). Over this piano drone, Stratton lays out a few minutes of warm, tumbling guitar, all of which was improvised. He has lately taken to using first takes, saying that “it keeps me thinking on my toes.” This interest in spontaneity is another bold move, directly in opposition to the precise and measured craft of his previous work, yet one which serves the song to the very same extent that Stratton’s simpler pop forms served his earlier work. Here it serves as both a counterweight to the minimal and gorgeous piano/vocals outro and as a kind of mood-setter, capturing an expansive, still feeling that isn’t easily conveyable through traditional songwriting. It’s something we haven’t heard from Stratton before, a sound that seems to call to mind wide open landscapes at dawn, the sun slowly infusing the crevices of rocks with its light.

It’s onto this landscape that Stratton projects his melancholy song, yet there’s something strangely dusty and distant about the sadness in “Bluebells”. The effects obscure his voice just enough to render it ghostly, almost like a voice from the past (you can just barely hear it hovering behind the guitar solos), and the song is narrated in the second person, making it about the listener rather than the singer. It’s a subtly alarming shift, putting us in the position of being hopelessly lost, rather than safely empathizing with a narrator who is hopelessly lost. The clashing guitars that rise up around the four minute mark, crackling and slashing one another like contentious bolts of lightning, infuse the song with a dissonance that, though it disappears quickly, enhances this air of desperation and sadness, especially when we’re lead out into a beautiful piano and vocal section only to hear the line “by now you must have been certain that it had all been a lie”. When the narrator tells us that we still kept searching for our lost love, it’s hard to tell whether it’s sweet or pathetic, and this ambiguity is crushingly sad. Are we deluded or determined? Both? Also to be noted, over the middle section with it’s minimal backbeat, when Stratton is singing “which way did my darling go?”, is the way the bass note on the guitar gradually bends up from the four chord to the five, introducing some dissonant intermediate notes and a sense of unease and muted violence that wouldn’t be present if he’d just played the chord progression straight.

B-side “The Hudson Line” is as close to Stratton’s earlier work as anything he sent us. His voice is stripped of the effects that mask it on “Bluebells” and left to cut clearly over the beautiful lattice of fingerpicked acoustic guitar. It is a love song, yet it’s not so much a declaration of love as an assessment of a love that has come and gone. The moments of sweetness are now tempered by the temporal distance, and the wistful mood is perfectly captured by the lines “all I know all I know all I know / is all greatness is born out of sin / but somehow I saw you”. The narrator’s relationship with the woman is something born out of sin, yet at the same time it seems to be the one thing that transcends this tautology. It’s a sweetness that is rendered all the sweeter by the darkness of the worldview in which it sits. The background against which these lyrics are set is appropriately lovely and delicate, yet it’s easy to miss just how amazing and skillful the rhythmic interplay is between the thumb and the rest of the hand. Stratton, though he’s no show off, is an incredibly agile and creative guitarist, with a sense of play that allows him to slip away from the expected patterns of folk and rock guitar. Aside from providing a harmonic backbone, the guitar here frequently subdivides the bar into uneven groups of threes, giving the song a rolling feeling mirrored in the lyrics about “galloping along the Hudson Line.”

These exclusive tracks represent the evocative songwriting Stratton is known for, only evolved to the next step. Thankfully for us listeners, he is a person who is constantly pushing himself forward, stretching for something just beyond his reach. We have the luxury of being able to sit back and immerse ourselves in the discoveries he makes along the way, the beautiful music that composes Will Stratton’s journey through the world. Stay tuned for another digital 7” in the coming weeks, as well as greater portions of the interview.

Gabe Birnbaum

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Burns describes KASHKA as “the outlet that many of my songs drift into when they feel like they may float away otherwise,” and you will instantly understand what she means.  Rather than the roots and leaves of FCL, KASHKA songs sound like streetlights refracted through icicles. They are wintertime compositions (both were literally written during the darkest evenings of winter), sonically filled out with chiming keyboards, tinkling bells, large spaces, and Burns’ lovely, pure voice, which, aside from carrying the melodies, functions as pretty much the best synthesizer ever, whether she’s creating warm choruses of chordal oohs, fuzzy lead lines between verses, or serenely floating contrapuntal melodies à la a string section.  The thing that carries over from the Lovers is Burns sense of precise and tasteful simplicity.  She knows in either case that her voice and knack for melody will carry the song, and intelligently refrains from throwing any kind of half-baked, overly adorned arrangements into the mix.  Her vocals are mixed to the front, so that they may lift the weight of the song, but they are not pushed as far forward as is common to most electro-pop and they don’t share the ridiculously melismatic neo-soul that tends to make you feel like someone spliced some vocals in from a recent American Idol audition.  In fact, it’s easy not to notice how wonderfully skillful a singer she is until you start realizing how many of the sounds that fill out the airy space of these songs are not keyboards but rather her voice.

Making electro-pop (making good electro-pop, rather) has a couple of inherent challenges, both of which KASHKA rises to effortlessly.  First, for your voice to slot nicely among all the pristine synth swells and gentle blips, it has to be as on pitch and tightly controlled as your SK-1. As you can hear in pretty much any moment of her Ampeater single, this is not a problem for Burns, whose voice is as agile as it is pretty, and somehow never cloying or tiring in the way of so many singers gifted with exceptional vocal cords (this quality probably owes a lot to her aforementioned intelligent restraint).  The second major challenge is that when you’re creating a music that essentially exists only in digital space, and never as a full set of live sounds in a room, it’s really easy to succumb to the temptation to layer the hell out of it (I know this because I pretty much always do so, no matter how pure my intentions are when I set out).  This is true of all recording done mostly by overdubs, but I think it’s a special difficulty with electronic music, which has no acoustic corollary, and in which it is easy to get excited about different synth sounds and just turn everything into consonant-sounding mud, which is one of my least favorite sounds (it is a term that is also applicable to jam bands).  KASHKA never has this problem.  Her music, with its softly muted beats and warm clouds of voices, is perfectly refined and alluring.  There’s not a hair out of place, and there are no screams for your attention, and this is precisely why it holds your ears so easily.

Despite the refinement and unflashiness I’ve been harping on, KASHKA doesn’t come across as sparse or stark because those words imply a kind of spiritual darkness that just isn’t there.  Though the songs are wintry, they are full of the warmth of huddling up by the fire after a long walk in the snowy evening, full of hope in the face of adversity.  The first lyric on A-side “Hands In” is, in fact, “put your hands in my heart tonight / just warm them there,” which is all about love as a balm for cold weather, cold weather being of course a shorthand for the larger cruelties of the world.  The song begins with a quick but relaxed three note keyboard pattern that manages to provide the entire harmony of the verse without ever playing a single chord.  The harmony is so simple that we don’t need any more for our ears to understand exactly where we are, and what’s brilliant about it is that we barely get any more:  another, far quieter, single-note line, some muted percussion.  Eventually some single-note guitar appears, along with some distant jangling bells, a light keyboard melody, and some tom fills that always seem to signal the arrival of hugeness, yet which always lead to nothing, not even a crash on the downbeat.  All these elements slowly and gradually coalesce to create the filled out song, and just at the moment when you hear this, it slips away, leaving only the echo of the bells (which are brilliantly buried in the mix so that you may not have even noticed them until this precise moment).  The only response is to listen to it again.

“Lonely Creatures” begins with an absence as well, withholding all the low end through the first verse to achieve that untethered, airy sound before eventually culminating in the busiest, thickest sound on the whole single, which is of course still rather delicate. My absolute favorite moment in the song only comes once (of course), and it’s right at 2:15, in the middle of the chorus, where Burns comes in with an ethereal ooh which is broken up into sixteenth notes in a way that echoes the rolling beats of the chorus and calls to mind images of rippling water.  But it’s hard to even pick a favorite moment in “Lonely Creatures.” All of the background vocal work is unbelievably beautiful, and so is the third repetition of the chorus line, when it slides up with the ease of warm breath rising into cold air.  The call for all the lonely city-dwellers to come together and create a spark of heat together is a perfect call-to-arms for someone concerned primarily with spreading love and warmth, and though it makes for a stark contrast with the “icy breasts of morning” and catalogues of inhibitions in the lyrics, what stays with you after listening is not the icy expanse of the backing track but the humanity and warmth of Burns’ voice, reminding us that, when faced with the harsh winters of the world, our greatest asset is the heat radiating from our bodies and the love radiating from our hearts.

P.S. If you were wondering how “Lonely Creatures” would sound if you accidentally played Gyorgy Ligeti’s “Atmospheres” over it, the answer is REALLY, REALLY AWESOME.

Gabe Birnbaum

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