"Friends"
from the album Friends
2009
iTunes



Luke Top was born in Tel Aviv, Israel to an Iraqi refugee and a Russian-born aviator. Music making was adopted at an early age, serving as the buffer between a distant home turf and a newly adopted land of milk and honey: Southern California. Balancing the collision of identity, religion, and western culture was (and is) a process that has found an artistic culmination on Luke Top's first full-length musical album, Friends.

Mostly self-recorded in a backyard bungalow, it stays true to Luke's formative roots in California while expanding its imagery beyond the simple evocation of one particular time and place. Up to this point, Luke could be seen and heard in a number of musical configurations throughout the world. Most notably, longtime touring and recording collaborations with friends like Cass McCombs, Papercuts, Foreign Born, and also as co-founder of the L.A. based Afro-Hebrew dance band Fool's Gold.

"Doubtful Comforts"
from the album Blue Roses
2009



The words haunting and ethereal are often over used when describing music, but that is exactly what the debut single is by Blue Roses, entitled "Doubtful Comforts." Blue Roses is one Laura Groves from Bradford, U.K., and she has previously released a single under her own name entitled "I Am Leaving." "Doubtful Comforts" was released this spring with the full-length Blue Roses due on July 21. "Doubtful Comforts" is a sparsely minimal and tender song with an atmosphere of magical tranquillity to it. With a softly sung choir girl vocal and music box ghostliness, its closest cousins are Bjork when she's not messing around with beats and noise or the elfin wonderment of Joanna Newsom. It's a song to be played in the dark of night when all is still, with Laura capturing your heart as she sings "When you come home tonight my love, will you take me out somewhere, you're so good at getting my hopes up where they don't belong, I can't reach them." It is bewitching and perfect in its composure.

"Under Control"
from the album Cope™
2009
iTunes



DJ Adam Freeland, recording under his last name alone, has finally released his second full-length album, Cope™. Teaming up with Kurt Baumann for vocals and guitar work, Freeland stays well within his breakbeat roots while taking a romp through the many permutations of electronica and pop. With a full coterie of guest musicians [Tommy Lee, the Pixies' Joey Santiago, the Distillers' Brody Dalle], he creates an intriguing collection of songs that are more rock than dance, more driving than grooving. Influences abound: "Under Control" sounds like a perfect LCD Soundsystem track, "Rock On" is oh so Beck-ish, and "Silent Speaking" could be off of any number of Delerium discs...but all of this is a good thing. Freeland and Baumann tie it all together with distorted guitar synths and a constant energy that demands a fast car with a booming stereo and windows down, especially on "Only a Fool (Can Die)," which teams them up with Jerry Casale of Devo fame. At over six minutes, it is the longest and flat-out best song on the album. If there is any real weakness on Cope™, it is the opening track, "Do You?" The listener has to get through this rather repetitive, non-melodic, simplistic opener to get to the good stuff, and this is unfortunate. It would be a shame to dismiss this very solid collection because one never got past the first song.

"For You"
from the album Because I Was in Love
2009
iTunes



On her heartbreaking debut, Sharon Van Etten makes a strong case that sometimes the quietest storm is the most devastating of all. Because I Was in Love introduces the Brooklyn-based singer-songwriter as a lonely heart who stays up into the wee hours obsessing over what went wrong, a bottle of red slowly going down. Van Etten accompanies herself mostly on acoustic guitar, with the occasional electric and organ adding to the late-night aesthetic, and she submerges her unvarnished voice in layers of ethereal harmony. Recorded by Espers' Greg Weeks in his Philadelphia studios, the album isn't exactly lo-fi, but it is so resolutely spare and confessional, it could have been made in Van Etten's bedroom. She establishes a pervading sense of melancholy with her opening salvo: "I wish I knew / What to do with you / But the truth is / I ain't got a clue," she sighs in two breathy lines on "I Wish I Knew." Forlorn and wistful, the song puts Van Etten in the canon of Cat Power, Julie Doiron, and long-lost folkie Sibylle Baier, but it's clear Van Etten is drawing on her own heartache. It didn't kill her, but rather inspired this burnished gem.

WEEKEND VIDEO

"Dance till you're dead!" commands Karen O over the opening notes of "Heads Will Roll," the second song on Yeah Yeah Yeahs' third album. Anyone who has been to one of the Manhattan–born trio's live shows knows that life–and–limb–imperiling body–moving is central to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs experience. But on It's Blitz!, the sound that has heretofore powered the band's art–punk dance party — guitar hero Nick Zinner's jagged riffing — gives way to a new kind of thump. You can hear it in the bass–keyboard surge of "Heads Will Roll"; in the shuddering synths of the lead single, "Zero"; in "Dragon Queen," when Karen O asks, "How are you not going to get high?" over a louche funk groove. It's Blitz! isn't exactly a disco record, but it's as close as Yeah Yeah Yeahs are likely to get.

The turn toward the dance floor makes sense: Yeah Yeah Yeahs are drawing on a tradition of arty New York dance punk that extends from the Talking Heads to TV on the Radio, whose guitarist, Dave Sitek, co–produced It's Blitz!. The big news, though, isn't YYY's groovier sound — it's the heat they radiate. Karen O has always been an enigmatic star, with a wild stage presence that never quite dispelled her air of hipster–diva froideur. But a thaw is setting in. Ballads like the Celtic–flavored "Skeletons" and "Little Shadow," with its swelling church–organ strains, lean toward the grandeur of U2. Even the barnburners have moments of flaming romanticism. "Shake it / Like a ladder to the sun," Karen O cries in "Zero," sounding infected with disco's feel–good spirituality: Now she's a bohemian fairy godmother, counseling transcendence through booty–shaking.

Labels: Videos

WEEKEND VIDEO

Few bands can imbue a line like, "You make me go 'oooh' with the things that you do," with much feeling and subtle emotion, but Camera Obscura could sing stereo instructions and it'd still make your skin tighten and tingle. My Maudlin Career is 45 minutes-plus of blissed-out orchestral indie pop, enlivened with classic Motownisms and overflowing with silvery tones as singer/guitarist Tracyanne Campbell unspools her lazy, entrancing croon and clever-cute rhymes across a night of innocence regained. Liquid-soul surf guitar and dreamy organ work are punctuated by tiny, chiming glockenspiel hits, wrapped snugly in a blanket of twee, placed gently in a Belle & Sebastianet and set afloat on the River Reverb, waiting for some pharaoh's daughter to fish the precious little bundle out of the cattails. My Maudlin Career is anything but — sure, it's sentimental, but never effusively. It's an infectious album that blooms repeatedly throughout, unfolding in muted, endearing aural hues; simultaneously sad and celebratory, and always charming.

Labels: Videos

"The Rake's Song"
from the album The Hazards of Love
2009
iTunes



In many ways, the Decemberists' career path mirrors that of a developing dramatist: First came the catchy one-act set pieces, lovely, lilting indie-pop songs with a baroque bent on the band's early albums. They were followed by ever more involved story lines and themes, resulting in a full-length narrative: the 2007 song cycle The Crane Wife, based on a Japanese folk tale.

The album, their major-label debut, mixed the chamber-pop sound of piano and various stringed instruments with dense prog-rock passages of that evoked nothing so much as the 1973 album A Passion Play. That is to say, the Decemberists are sounding a lot like their generation's Jethro Tull.

The Portland, Ore., band's latest is another album-length fable, this time about a woman named Margaret, her shape-shifting forest-dwelling lover William and various obstacles, an evil queen, a murderous rake between them and bliss.

Not only are there different characters, there are different vocalists to portray them. Decemberists front man Colin Meloy voices William in his reedy tenor, and Becky Stark from the group Lavender Diamond sings Margaret's parts in a high, pretty voice. Shara Worden of the band My Brightest Diamond plays the queen with stern bluster.

The story unfolds over 17 tracks that draw from a broad sonic palette, with acoustic guitar and accordion on the tender "Isn't It a Lovely Night," uneasy discord from violins on "The Queen Approaches" and fast chugging guitars and foreboding organ on "The Abduction of Margaret."

It's a far-reaching and ambitious album, stronger than its predecessor and full of gallant wordplay and vivid imagery — so vivid, in fact, that a stage adaptation (with papier mache trees and vaudevillian costumes, naturally) seems like a natural next step.

"Vulture"
from the album The Bachelor
2009
iTunes



Leading up to the release of his fourth album, The Bachelor, Patrick Wolf has been treading perilously close to the line that separates a healthy kind of artistic self-indulgence from unchecked egotism. From picking a feud with Mika on his (admittedly hilarious) MySpace blog and announcing a retirement that ended up being shorter than Jay-Z's, to making claims that he wanted his fans to buy "shares" of his new album, Wolf's attention-whoring and petulance might overshadow his work were The Bachelor not so brilliant.

Supposedly written during a period of romantic disillusionment, the album filters Wolf's bitterness through his outsized dramatic flair. Opener "Hard Times" starts off as an homage to Joy Division before exploding into a chorus of jagged strings and sarcastic gospel choirs calling out for revolution. The twitchy, stuttering "Oblivion" and haunting "Theseus" are highlighted by spoken-word passages from actress and fellow kook Tilda Swinton; it's the kind of stunt that would smack of pretension on almost any other album by almost any other artist, but Swinton's recitations work in the heady context created by Wolf's theatricality and his willingness to draw from such a broad spectrum of pop-culture influences.

That Wolf is something of a scavenger is the focus of the album's phenomenal first single, "Vulture," on which collaborator Alec English deconstructs what sounds a lot like Muse's "Supermassive Black Hole" over some Depeche Mode-style electronic loops while Wolf obliquely recounts the breakdown he suffered on his last tour and yelps about out-of-control forest fires and rotting flesh. His campy affect on the song and throughout its decidedly NSFW video give the single something of an ironic remove, but tracks like "The Sun is Often Out" and "Who Will" find Wolf more emotionally naked and vulnerable.

The Bachelor's overall tone reflects a nihilistic view of both romance and humanity, making for an about-face from the relative sunshine of 2007's The Magic Position, and this tone is reflected in some of Wolf's most ambitious, baroque compositions to date. While his understanding of pop conventions is always impressive ("Damaris" swells to vertiginous heights in its sweeping, melancholy refrain, and the title track cleverly subverts a ragtime-inspired piano figure), The Bachelor isn't exactly accessible. But accessibility is incidental to an artist like Wolf and to an album as dense and accomplished as this. The only real complaint about the project is Wolf's claim to have shelved its supposed companion piece, The Conqueror, though whether Wolf was serious about that is anyone's guess.

"False Alarm"
from the album Magnolia
2009
iTunes



Since founding American Analog Set in the mid-'90s, Andrew Kenny has lent his services to acts ranging from Styrofoam to Broken Social Scene. It would make perfect sense, then, for his new project's debut album to be all over the musical map.

But it's not. Kenny keeps things incredibly low key. The tunes are soft, but not generally somber. "False Alarm" and "The Other One" are catchy sing-a-longs, driven by Kenny's airy tenor and understated acoustic guitar. Both "Hailey" and "Hometown Fantasy" would sound even better when played around a campfire.

It's not always sunshine for the Birds, however. Despite the beautiful boy/girl harmonies, the phrase "I hope you choke" (from "Choke") is still rather menacing and "Anna Paula" has a similar dark feel. But Kenny doesn't say blue for long — the album end with two beauties, "Seven Seventeen" and "Bad."

If quiet is the new loud, this is album will blow out the speakers

"Headlock"
from the album Braveface
2009
iTunes



Esser — Ben Esser to his nearest and dearest — is 23 years old, hails from Essex, and sports the best quiff since Morrissey. He also has two tattoos, one "good" and one "bad," on either side of his neck.

Predictably, certain music magazines have called him the "male Lily Allen" based on the fact that he's white, young, and, well, English. Sure there's a whiff of ska on some songs, and he chooses to sing in a simple, conversational style, but he also touches on garage rock, dub, electro, and R&B. And on "Satisfied" he attempts what may well be a soundtrack to a lost Chaplin film.

His debut album Braveface (out in the U.S. on August 11) is restless, settling on a sound only to master it and move on by the time the next song rolls around. Miraculously, the whole thing hangs together perfectly, each song complementing the last, and what should be a mess of disparate influences becomes a cohesive whole.

Lyrically it's surprisingly melancholy, the focus being either the loss of a relationship ("Work It Out"), the struggle to keep a partner happy ("Satisfied"), or sheer frustration at how things have turned out (the brilliant "Headlock," with the classic line "bury me in sand like a knackered stallion").

"Leaving Town," the album's bold opener, is a rush of Graham Coxon-like buzz-saw guitars, paranoia and resignation: "There's a fire in my heart and it's breaking me down." Such a morose outlook is tempered by the perfectly pitched chorus of 'la, la, las' that rises and falls throughout.

The title track is the album's pure pop moment; over a summery groove and skittering beat, Esser muses on the merits of pretending in order to keep the peace. Again, the musical perkiness is offset by the lyrics, "When you feel like you've had all you can take/ Tie a brick to your ankles and jump in the lake."

"Seductive" hooks ooze out of every song, from the simple chorus on the heart-wrenching "Bones," to the futuristic space pop of recent U.K. single Work It Out, to the dark, undulating closer, "Stop Dancing." Previous single "I Love You" houses a verse as catchy as any chorus, and even the relatively straight forward "This Time Around" features a gorgeous breakdown midway through, co-producer Lexxx (Golden Silvers, Crystal Castles) piling on the backing vocals over some fuzzy guitar stabs.

As with pop peer Frankmusik, Esser is able to create inventive but immediate pop songs, ones that sound loved and cared for. Choruses are unashamedly signposted throughout, the melodies never clouded in unnecessary studio trickery or hampered by clunking lyrics.

History may consign him to the box marked "pop stars who told it how it was" alongside The Streets and Lily Allen, but Esser deserves to be cherished with whoever gets picked to represent maverick pop at its best.

TONIGHT AT SUMMERFEST
"The Way We Get By"
from the album Kill the Moonlight
2002
iTunes



September 19, 2002:
In many important ways, Kill the Moonlight is an exercise in restraint: its songs simmer close to the surface, perilously approach a spilling-over at the 3 minute-mark, and then are finally tamed by the men at the stove's controls. These men, the Austin quartet known as Spoon, definitely know how to bring a pot to boil. So take heart rock fans. No need to throw away that fluorescent orange child's tee-shirt. Darling, you don't need to go and cut your hair, just because Pavement abandoned you — Spoon has returned with a worthy follow-up to last year's Girls Can Tell... and they're going to kill you (relatively) softly.

If you haven't heard, the always imaginative music critics of America describe Spoon as "Modern Lovers meets Wire" in the new millennium, and its frontman/chief singer-songwriter Britt Daniel as equal parts Elvis Costello and Frank Black. Now, I don't know about all this, but I do know that Moonlight puts me in a tough spot about explaining how good it really is. It's that rare record that's equal parts innovation and familiarity, or what one might refer to as a perfectly designed and executed experiment in indie aesthetics. Never inaccessible, but always pushing some part of the sonic envelope, Moonlight balances sharp hooks and even sharper lyrics with interesting rhythmic pulses, quirky production, and a stripped down sound that stirs the soul with cathartic longing. It's not that the songs don't provide a release (i.e. they do rock) — it's just that the energies provided by the guitars, the drums, the constant piano and occasional sampling work off each other instead of on top of each other. The overall volume never gets high enough to invoke chaos, prevalent in the work of, say, a Wire circa Chairs Missing. In this sense, Moonlight will not satisfy a listener's hunger for heaviness or complexity. Rather, it relies on a kind of space and a unique, refined sense of style that worked so well for Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.

Take, for example, the songs that Merge's promo material calls the hit singles of the record. "The Way We Get By" lays down the piano hook (played in cheery Ben Folds fashion by Eggo Johanson) from the outset, but waits a solid minute before John Clayton's beefy bass tones and Jim Eno's mid-tempo drumming kick in. Combine these elements with tongue-in-cheek lyrics like "You bought a new bag of pot... said let's make a new start" and hand-clapping, and you do, in fact, have your radio-friendly single. But Moonlight features more than just pop brilliance. The human beat box rhythm of "Stay Don't Go", chopped up and sampled beat of "Paper Tiger," and extreme panning in the mix of "Don't Let It Get You Down" are all examples of Spoon's adventurous side.

"End in Flames"
from the album Leave Ruin
2009
iTunes



Timothy Showalter, or Strand of Oaks, is a Pennsylvania-based school teacher and bus driver who this year released his debut album, Leave Ruin. The record is a collection of nine well-crafted folk tunes that have a worn, familiar feel to them despite this being Showalter's first effort. His string of personal tribulations and unique experiences seems to have gifted him with a world-weary, yet hopeful perspective that makes the album so earnestly compelling.

Showalter's classic folk presentation is, at times, reminiscent of songwriters like Neil Young or Bob Dylan, though Strand of Oaks carves out a sound that uses these influences as a guide and not as a blueprint. The opening three tracks are arguably the album's strongest; "End in Flames" is both sad and sweet, "Two Kids" is a brief, delicate love song to a single mother, and "Lawns Breed Songs" is an honest plea from son to father. Not every track succeeds so completely, but Leave Ruin contains no filler, either. The songs vary greatly in length, with the shortest at two and a half minutes, and the longest at an even nine. Along with the subtle variety in style, the song structures add some needed diversity to the album.

Showalter's voice is soft, but not wispy or delicate, and it carries an incredible sense of emotion into each of his tunes. At times, Leave Ruin is regretful, "Sorry you missed the test, sorry you missed the dance, sorry your mom hates me so much, 'cause I'm everything she wants in a man," occasionally hopeful, "I hope someday to whisper and say that you're the one that I rely on," and sometimes just sad, "my head doesn't pound with my heart, I fuck up before I even start." Musically, the songs benefit from full, fleshed-out arrangements that add to, rather than distract from, his captivating stories, with piano, banjo and drums surrounding the simple acoustic guitar riffs.

What Showalter offers throughout the album is not a musical breakthrough or reinvention of sound, but a set of stories and narratives grafted with his own personal touch, and that's what great songwriting is all about. Leave Ruin might not create much of a stir this year, but the album is a quiet gem deserving of any attention it receives.

"When the Devil's Loose"
from the album When the Devil's Loose
2009
iTunes



Singer/songwriter A.A. Bondy's choice to embark on a solo career was just something to do. The former Verbena guitarist/vocalist said there is a new dynamic as a solo artist, especially an independent solo artist, that is hard to explain.

"First off, when I write the songs, I don't have to see if anyone else likes them," Bondy said during a phone interview from Charlotte, N.C. "If I was on a bigger label or in a band, then there would be all this other stuff surrounding songwriting.

"But now, with the songs I write, I feel, I don't know, like I'm finished building a frame of a house and stepping back to look at it. It feels complete to me. It's like a gift to myself."

After releasing his debut solo American Hearts in 2006, it was released by Fat Possum in 2007. The album was mostly acoustic singer/songwriter fare with a couple of electric tracks thrown in the mix, said Bondy. "I didn't really think of what it was going to be," he said.

However, when it came time to record songs for his new album, When the Devil's Loose, which will be released on Sept. 1, Bondy did mostly electric. "It wasn't that big of a deal to me," he said. "I played them the way I thought they would sound best. And it so happened that they are more beefed up than the so-called 'country sound' on my last album.

"I think that everybody wants to do something different and to have the freedom to do whatever they want inside of what they do," he said. "Well, at least I do. I like making things interesting. At least they're interesting to me."

However, doing different things musically doesn't mean they have to be polished. "I'm not one of those people who plays things hundreds of times to get it right, unless something else is happening during those 100 times," Bondy said. "In fact, after a couple of times, if it doesn't work out, then it's old.

"Some of my ideas die a horrible messy death, but others blossom and become the thing I want to follow to see how they come out."