Multiple artists
Track reviews
WORDS: JAY LOWE
American Music Club – “All the Lost Souls Welcome You to San Francisco”
American Music Club is back! They haven’t released an album since 2004’s Love Songs for Patriots, and their newest, The Golden Age, is only their second in the last 10 years. The oft-dubbed 'slowcore' group welcomes the jaded lost souls to San Francisco with their first single from their upcoming record. Oh yeah, according to Wikipedia, AMC’s guitarist/accordionist/keyboardsist is a bus driver. How many bands can claim that on their resume!?
Distorted guitar drawn out like taffy on a warm Californian day keeps this slow groover together, while layers of soft harmony and hapless organ arpeggios provide just enough forward motion to keep your bicycle from falling over. Listen to this song while the sun is on your skin.
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These United States – “First Sight”
Recalling the experience of love from beginning (at first sight) to the end, when, like a home run, love is “going and gone,” this track comes from the forthcoming A Picture of the Three of Us at the Garden of Eden, the brainchild of D.C.’s “gonzo-journalist-turned-troubadour” Jesse Elliott, set for release in March 2008. The album features almost 30 collaborators from D.C. and the Midwest, apparently. “First Sight” at least is demonstrably compelling, and sounds like pearls dropped on piano strings backing a voice made of broken glass glued back together. You feel at least three kinds of sorry for this guy at once, inspired both by plaintive lyrics that try to obscure real human pain behind bouncy word play and by the sad, almost resigned melody that threads its way through keyboards, acoustic strums and those glued together pieces of glass. "Any while it's alright to hold tight, don't try to hold on," he sings, which just makes you want to hold on all the harder.
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I Concur – “Oblige”
“American indie with an English twist.” If that doesn’t get your indie rocker cowboy boots a-tapping, then maybe the link at the bottom of this blurb will. I Concur is one of the newest comers to the British indie rock scene, and this track, taken from their second EP, Lucky Jack/Build Around Me (released on March 10) showcases what happens when four guys from Leeds spin indie rock and post-rock together. At times surprisingly close to the more emotional dips of 00's pop-punk, the song is saved from sentimentality by an absolutely gorgeous imposition of celestial guitar and drums like boulders caroming down a mountainside. You know that one part of Radiohad's "Airbag" where Jonny Greenwood's guitar swoops in and makes you forget you ever cared any other music before? Take that back a notch or two and throw it on an Explosions in the Sky record, and you have the reason this song rocks.
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Theoretical Girl – “The Hypocrite”
This electronic single is sure to be the dance hit of the year. North London’s Theoretical Girl bills herself as a solo artist backed by a band called The Equations. On this track, you can hear how the two mesh to make electro-pop England style. The Hypocrite is a dark and dancey tune with bass that is just shy of fuzzy. It’s fuzzy like wool—a bit scratchy and uncomfortable but warm just the same. The song's narrator seems to want to tell you up front to watch out, don't let her fool you into thinking she's a safe bet, and to "do as I say, not as I do," and there's something definitely disturbingly disarming in how nice it is to hear that up-front as opposed to, say, months after it's too late.
Those gurgling eight electric bass notes drag the listener through scenes of dysfunctional relationships abstractly described in downward-tending arcs. Once the beat drops, though, it's hard to care. There's something to be said about the joyride of a slippery slope.