32ft/second

Modern Merchant :: "Like Minded"

2013-06-20T05:00:00.000-04:00

Playing a languid form of the outsider pop that has recently charmed audiences with its deftness and lilting harmonies, Modern Merchant, a Brooklyn four-piece, offer their voice to the chorus on "Like Minded". A bit like Local Natives set in a sultry lounge scene, the band crafts a sparse guitar lick to offset the languorous vocals, eventually soaring with the addition of synthesizers at the edges. The arrangement glides along without obvious friction, a pleasant male-female duet announcing the second movement, a mildly more urgent take on the original conceit, rich and moving harmonies set against a stirring progression. More than just one song, the band's most recent EP, For The Fields, is as good an extended player to come out of Brooklyn this year, offering odes to Grizzly Bear and the aforementioned Local Natives, without feeling a bit derivative.

Keebo :: "Follow"

2013-06-19T05:00:00.000-04:00

A fuzzed-out, mid-tempo jam, Keebo's most recent offering "Follow" sounds exactly like what you might think. The chorus, relying heavily on the title lyric, chases itself between lead and backing vocals. Glittering lead guitar is offset by a feedback heavy low-end, a sum-total that sounds like Beth Cosentino trying to cover "Cut Your Hair"; and this is more of a compliment than it might sound.

Lolo :: "Weapon For Saturday"

2013-06-18T05:00:00.000-04:00

With a brashness usually reserved for rap music and the wide-screen bombast of the title sequence of a Bond flick, Brooklyn's Lolo rips the doors off the industry with debut single, "Weapon For Saturday". Channeling dense visual metaphor - other than the title lyric she suggests she is, " the baddest car in parking lot", "the house that fell on the bitter witch", "the corporate guy with the biggest tip", "the fastest horse in the Derby race", and this doesn't even address Lolo's most reaching comparative lyric, "I'm only the face of every woman" - the singer manages to tangle with a restless becoming, the attempt to be everything menacing at once. It works. A bit campy, to be sure, the surging strings and the 3am Adele impression, but "Weapon For Saturday" is that rare piece of major label pop you hear before it becomes major label pop. If this proves to be the path for Lolo, this will be the sound of the takeover before the takeover.

Wise Blood :: "Alarm"

2013-06-17T05:00:00.000-04:00

Chris Laufman, the keyboard mastermind behind the bedroom jams of Wise Blood, settles the listener into an immediate claustrophobia on "Alarm". The first lyrics, "I can't think/Someone's sitting right in front of me/I need some personal space," become the hook, a modern dystopia full of crossed fingers, local news reports about arson, tense and dissonant woodwinds in the bridge. For an artist that digs obfuscation (see every promotional photo ever) as much as illumination, it makes sense that a song that sounds this breezy would cover such terribly anxious ground. "Alarm" has the potential to unsettle at a gut level, though a saxophone loop and Laufman's laconic vocal indicate that all isn't lost, even if the walls, ceiling and floor appear to be closing in.

Big Deal :: "Dream Machines"

2013-06-14T05:00:00.001-04:00

All unfiltered bombast on "Dream Machines", Big Deal drape themselves in a blighted, shouting fatalism. "Dream Machines", slamming with double-tap drums and a boy-girl duet sounds like Joy Formidable (and it's worth noting that Big Deal are the heirs to this throne) covering a Stars joint, dream-pop holding a long kiss goodnight with shoegaze. One of the biggest songs of the year, it's a world of moral victories and letdowns, as singer Alice Costelloe leads from above with lines like, "Nothing here is built to last / what you wanted and what you chose / you can't have both." Instead of a shrugging conclusion, there lies triumph in the big, crunchy chord progression and Costelloe's duet with partner Kacey Underwood. Finding both union and beauty in the noise, singing to one another, "What's mine is yours is yours is mine," before concluding, "We'll grow our hair / cut our ties." As the arrangement surges around them, we presume these two are planning to leave everything but each other.

Island Boy :: "Heart Attack"

2013-06-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

Built on a simple guitar progression and a reliable snare drum, Island Boy launches "Heart Attack" into an echoing stratosphere of pop. It adds complexity, a chorus that explodes out of the speakers like the best parts of the Small Black catalog, all whipping synthesizer drums and vocals drowning in layer upon layer of reverb. The final movement grows no bigger than the original conceit, it merely reaffirms the idea: a long slow jam for someone with far too much to think about. Like the cover art, it is a flight over water, pensive and relentlessly existential.

Waylayers :: "The Hook"

2013-06-11T08:24:00.001-04:00

With an ode to the synth and bass pick-ups of the Killers' "Human", Waylayers produce a similar progression with remarkably more muted results. "The Hook" is all pent up aggression, lyrics about resignation not transmutation, a shrugging and pretty, "give into the fault lines", as good a visual metaphor about geology as you'll get in 2013. While the arrangement, soaked in ethereal synthesizer and guitar, never fully takes off, never delivers the moment of explosion that the listener might suitably be expecting from all this build up, "The Hook" proves interested in something a bit more midtempo. The last line of the chorus reflects this quiet escapism, "I'd rather live my life inside my dreams." There will be no slamming conclusion, no miracles here, just the rigid and relentless plate tectonics grinding slowly beneath our feet.

Amity Beach :: "Sunday Nights to Infinity" and "Avalanches" [Premiere]

2013-06-10T05:00:00.000-04:00

We are proud to hold the world premiere of the latest double-sided single from Amity Beach, a band with a name that evokes one of the most famous tropes of summer - a marauding, homicidal shark set against the pragmatic and alarmist town sheriff. These are, after all, the two narrative thrusts of the season: societal moralisms in direct conflict with unrestrained id, anarchy at war with the social contract, a shark come to terrorize your town. Amity Beach manages to find a sweet medium here, structured pop constructions with nothing but brilliant carbonated chaos in the middle. On A-Side, "Sunday Nights to Infinity", Amity Beach finds itself at the intersection of slamming guitars and ebullient keys, a late-night anthem about backs pushed like bulwarks against mounting responsibilities. It is one part Surfer Blood, one part Fang Island - especially in the guitars in stomping second movement - like Los Campesinos, an attempt to sound like everything is happening all of the time. "Avalanches", the B-side, recalls Beulah, a horn-drenched summer jam engaged in perpetual lift-off. The band does nothing to declare a winner between these twin impulses to build and destroy, but instead of blindly rooting for the town, Amity Beach admits with two of the best songs of the summer that - just a little bit - we might be pulling for the shark too.

On The List :: The National @ Barclays Center [6.5.13]

2013-06-06T17:13:00.000-04:00

This review runs live and first on Bowery Presents' House List blog with great photos from Brian Reilly.

Last fall, New York magazine wondered if Brooklyn was finished. The cover story featured Barclays Center, a veritable spaceship of urban development that landed at the intersection of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues. But the arena as a new Brooklyn icon wasn’t truly finished until the National, a band whose Midwestern-displacement story mirrors many of the borough’s residents, took to its stage last night. As their fans—a bearded and craft-brew-swilling demographic hybrid of DIY and yuppie—clapped along, the band, avatars of Kings County’s mixture of aspiration and crooked shame, opened with “Don’t Swallow the Cap,” the sound of everything Brooklyn could and couldn’t be.

The early part of the set saw the National run through material from their latest, Trouble Will Find Me, mixed with songs from their previous two records, High Violet and Boxer. Playing “Bloodbuzz Ohio,” “Mistaken for Strangers” and “Sea of Love” (before which they facetiously said, “We’ve played 35 venues in this city, and it’s great to be back here where it all started”), the National proved to be in sharp and slicing form, tumbling tom-tom drums colliding with Matt Berninger’s graveled baritone. The quintet then performed “Sorrow,” which they “knew better than any other” song, after playing it for six straight hours straight as p erformance art at MoMA PS1 just a few weeks ago. Somewhere someone bit into an artisanal sausage and washed it down with an IPA just as the song about being absolutely miserable forever rang through the rafters. It was Brooklyn, old and new, misery and joy, on display in the same moment for the band, clad in black and backed by a string and horn section.

Following a run of “Squalor Victoria” and “I Need My Girl,” the National ripped through “Graceless,” the down-tempo “Pink Rabbits” and “England.” The crowd waited for one of the five-piece’s signature tunes and perhaps the night’s defining moment, “Fake Empire,” a song ostensibly about the terrible mistakes of the second Bush administration but could just as easily have been applied to the coterminous power and hypocrisy of Brooklyn’s rise to cultural prominence. The band and their fans sang the title lyric with real vigor, staying out sort of late on a weeknight in the moment when Brooklyn found nothing left to do or prove.

First Rate People :: "Dark Age"

2013-06-05T05:00:00.000-04:00

In their most ambitious and expansive single to date, First Rate People layer the synth-stabs in equal measure to elegy on "Dark Age". Full of killer lyrics about a receding youth like, "We were moody and hopeful and green" and "I'm digging the claws in the feeling", the band describes a sort of dissatisfied hyper-modernity, the song's title, this "Dark Age" described as a note on a phone, rhymed with "new keys for a new cage". It's a generational polemic in form and function, lines about the "folly of youth" backed by a relentless synthesizer progression, a modern-sounding song about an unfolding ribbon of semi-bad times. The outtro, the song's closing group harmony, a nearly two-and-a-half minute mediation on the lyric, "I thought you were showing me a home," implies that this descent into darkness that they call aging, has done little to foster a sense of belonging.The listener is left with a few voices, a plucked guitar and an evaporating synthesizer, aging seconds in silence.

Long Walks On The Beach :: "1st Times (You and I)"

2013-06-04T05:00:00.000-04:00

Long Walks On The Beach have been churning out bucolic, Polaroid pop for a few years now. A mixture of leading guitars and fish hook refrains, the band channels a sort of nostalgia that feels just washed out at the edges, a certain prettiness that can only exist after memory performs its grand editorial magic. "1st Times (You and I)" builds this type of artifice, lines like "All I needed was you", interpolated between an urgent drum loop and a leading guitar line that owes more to twee than anything else. A beautiful and forgotten world, the band opens the song in the simple past tense, "I saw you", a glance, here and after hermetically sealed against time.

DJ Natty Heavy :: THE FIRST OF THE MONTH [June 2013]

2013-05-29T21:30:00.000-04:00

DJ Natty Heavy is back with his third monthly compilation mix for your ears, an exclusive to 32ft/sec and we're calling it THE FIRST OF THE MONTH [June 2013], the time when you get paid, or when someone comes to collect, or in this case, both. Natty Heavy is already one of the best spinners of records in the American South, lighting up the airwaves and clubs of Charleston with impunity, and now he brings his talents to indie rock. It isn't his usual wheelhouse - except that he immediately makes a new wheelhouse - mashing up Vampire Weekend with Jay-Z, Skee-Lo and Born Ruffians, Tupac and the Strokes, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and B.o.B., Snoop Dog and Jon Lawless. Tell your friends, and then take cover. It's your just-add-water mix for the increasingly dilated days of June, straight from the South to make a big hot mess out of your Zip Code.

1. Vampire Weekend - "Worship You"/Jay-Z "Dirt Off Your Shoulder"
2. Prides - "Out of the Blue"/ Dorrough "Ice Cream Paint Job"
3. CHVRCHES - "Mother We Share"
4. Skee-Lo - "I Wish"/ Born Ruffians "Needle"/Fatman Scoop "Natty Heavy Bumper"
5. The Strokes - "Happy Ending"/Tupac - "Changes"
6. Yeah Yeah Yeahs - "Sacrilege"/ B.o.B. - "Still In This Bitch"
6. Jon Lawless and Mary Cassidy "Verbs"/Snoop Dog "Sensual Seduction"

Letting Up Despite Great Faults :: "Postcard"

2013-05-29T05:00:00.000-04:00

In their most angular and insistent work to date, Letting Up Despite Great Faults builds a wall of fuzzy synthesizers on "Postcard". Buried in miles of reverb and feedback, the vocal acts as lead instrument but nothing else, only hints of consonants and vowels hanging at the edge of hearing, a few lines like, "find you" just clear enough from the maw to discern. The breathy snare is ceaseless, even as the arrangement wanders through a protracted outtro, the final, mildly abrasive tones behaving in eulogy for a lost, sunny and barely understood thing.

Smith Westerns :: "3am Spiritual"

2013-05-28T05:00:00.000-04:00

A shimmering and delicate slice of the late stages of a summer night, Smith Westerns latest single, "3am Spiritual" possesses only a few moments of bombast. The chiming synth and guitar progression that follow the band's carefree group vocal, "whoa ... yeah", exactly the kind of non-answer that the second-half of a parabolic evening demands. Better yet, the second movement, a keyboard interlude lifted right from Win Butler's "We Used To Wait", seemingly doubles the layers of the refrain, a last languid look down a nostalgic hallway. The band sings, "You don't look like you used to be," a type of easy sadness so uniform, it can't possibly be original or surprising. And yet, pitching themselves as the last heirs to a fragile and nearly deceased world, Smith Westerns have one of the better songs of the year, an invented moment in the last iterations before dawn, the unremembered guitars of the 1970s slow-dancing with the anachronistic, gauzy synthesizers that never seemed to exist until now.

TV Girl :: "She Smokes In Bed"

2013-05-27T05:00:00.000-04:00

Self-destruction is as dangerous as it is attractive. It's a trope: the poisonous girl with the laissez-faire attitude, a person unbound by the constraints of risk-adverse modern society. She's uninsurable; she's a walking liability; she's fascinating. Or, rephrased and writ-large as a visual simile, "She smokes in bed", the title lyric of latest TV Girl single. With a bass line that very nearly has a voice booming along at the bottom of the arrangement, TV Girl craft "She Smokes In Bed" as a breezy take on the sample-heavy, industrial-pop of a band like the Big Pink. The band refuses to answer the essential problem - with all the rhetorical niceties stripped away, "She's a nightmare" - instead descending into a series of weightless "ba's", maybe the only response for someone who cares so little and still manages to be the fecund and imploding star around which so much interest orbits.

HAERTS :: "All The Days

2013-05-23T18:18:00.001-04:00

A rapid-fire combination pops from the tams as HAERTS' singer Nini Fabi scoops her way up - and the height is considerable as the arrangement is in full-bloom - to the top of the refrain on latest single, "All The Days". Possessing the ambient power of all great pop music, it describes a place that is no place, a time that is no time, quite literally "All The Days". Cribbing the charming, now Taco Bell-approved sonics of St. Lucia (who also acts as co-writer and producer here), the creepy vocal loops of Kate Bush and the synth dessert of Men At Work's globalized drum-fills, HAERTS cuts across genre lines with their pan-location pop. "All The Days", like "Wings" before it, won't necessarily be the song that breaks the band into the mainstream, but the next one, the first single from their full-length due later this year, will almost certainly transition this band from one that sounds like it could be anywhere, to one that is, in fact, everywhere.

Le Fever :: "White Hearts"

2013-05-22T05:00:00.000-04:00

A glittering ode to the sound of the Shout Out Louds, Le Fever, a Stockholm outfit, disburse a meticulous and somber bit of pop on latest single, "White Hearts". Featuring down-tempo lyrics like, "Monday morning, what a joke" and the final, admittedly-adolescent crusher, "that you love him and you never loved me", the band courts the sort of fragile, heartsick Northern European pop that has found such an audience on the other side of the ocean. The melody runs downward, each stanza of the verses beginning at eye-level before heading relentlessly to the floor. Even the warm synthesizers, Cure-guitars and sharp snare drum do nothing to regain uplift, another in a long history of happy-sounding songs that instead encounter the inviolable depths of human relations.

Pure Bathing Culture :: "Pendulum"

2013-05-21T05:00:00.000-04:00

It's a bit of form meeting function, vocals rising and falling in a swaying downbeat, as Pure Bathing Culture arrive at the chorus of lead track, "Pendulum" from forthcoming debut Partisan Records LP, Moon Tides. Like some lost 1980s revivalists who awoke in a universe of swimming pastels and Beach House songs set down 10 BPMs, Pure Bathing Culture prove expert at providing a type of modern moral-victory slow dance. "Pendulum" is a sweeping arrangement, an aperture opened wide, a melody focused on the natural rise and fall, the rhythmic cycles that so fascinate the band. The human experience filtered through this lens becomes an exercise in repetition, release and return. This, too, shall pass, only to emerge again, like Teen Dream washing up, over and over, on a foreign shore.

Let's Be Loveless :: "Video Song"

2013-05-20T05:00:00.000-04:00

Brooklyn's Let's Be Loveless draw portions of their name from the second My Bloody Valentine LP and their sound from across the dream-pop and shoegaze landscape. On debut single, "Video Song", vocalist Abby Camaya channels one the band's stated and most pleasing influences: The Sundays. Though "Video Song" is darker by far, a bass line that rumbles with a vague if unyielding menace, the breezy vocal, even on lines like "Give me some time to work this out" is every bit Harriet Wheeler. With an album release show at Muchmore's on July 10th, it will be something like you and them in the summer time, as Camaya calls wilting from beyond the leading guitars.

Challenger :: "Back to Bellevue"

2013-05-17T05:00:00.000-04:00

John Ross of Challenger is a synthesizer genius. Latest single, the first from a coming yet-to-be-titled LP, "Back to Bellevue" shares the stomping and halcyon Reading Rainbow-electrics of his 2012 offering, "I Am Switches". Similarly, "Bellevue" also features a stunning second movement, vocals spun in reverse and a leading keyboard line. It stands that the Challenger LP that comes with "Bellevue" will be an enormous and wantonly nostalgic slice of synth-pop, set wide-screen for impact.

For New Yorkers, the band plays Arlene's Grocery at midnight on Saturday, May 18.

Swimming Lessons :: "Double"

2013-05-14T05:00:00.000-04:00

An effervescent slice of electronic pop, Swimming Lessons meanders pleasantly through debut single, "Double". The percussion resonates as carbonated, an ever-rising loop of chiming sounds and loops - a snare sound for organizational purposes only - mixed with Ben Lewis charming, echoing vocal. The Leeds outfit gives hints of the Clock Opera empire that never was, and windows to the better sides of Ernest Greene's work in Washed Out. None of it necessarily aims for the ceiling. "Double" gives little hint of unchecked ambitions, rather a frictionless slow-drive through electro-pop tropes that sound as familiar as they are pleasing.

Magic Man :: "Nova Scotia"

2013-05-13T05:00:00.000-04:00

The great hope of Providence, RI, Magic Man recently hooked their cart to the Neon Gold imprint of Columbia Records, meaning you might be reading this in early 2014 when one of their songs ends up in a Taco Bell commercial and your Shazam-ing turned Googling leads you here. Their mercurial rise will be completely earned and entirely righteous. After all, it isn't cheating when the game has already been fixed. You aren't skipping steps when you've always written hooks this sticky. Having heard some of the unreleased cuts live a few months back, Magic Man are an easy prediction for an intensely relevant band in the summer of 2013, portending an absolute heater of a next calendar year.

Frugal Father :: "Red Headed Hipster"

2013-05-08T06:00:00.000-04:00

Lost somewhere between the confessional barritone of Matt Berninger's work with the National and the glittering sonics of an LCD Soundsystem record, comes LA-by-way-of-Boulder, Colarado band Frugal Father. Essentially, the one-man work of Mac Welch, a young guy who has been cutting his teeth as a roadie for other bands, Frugal Father will soon be making its own way through the independent rock wilderness on the back of bulletproof first single, "Red Headed Hipster" and its charming mixture of lyrical hedonism and nihilism, one of the lines of 2013, "We don't have to be best friends/but I like your cardigan/let's dance." The arrangement grows in expansiveness from an initially limited perimeter, channeling a weird mixture of "Dance Yrself Clean" and "Bloodbuzz Ohio" in the opening measures before unleashing a somber glitch-pop anthem in the final movement. With just two songs to his name, Welch and Frugal Father have nothing but green lights ahead with this titanic mixture of indie rock.

Bend :: "Short Crush"

2013-05-07T05:00:00.000-04:00

Like a wedge finding the weakness in a small fissure, the keyboard pop coming out of the minds of the current crop of adolescents and post-adolescents is both tiny and potentially huge. Built in the ashes of a post-Postal Service world, the bedroom jams of burgeoning LA two-some - currently at USC and Vassar College respectively - Bend represent the smallest of impulses on the appropriately titled, "Short Crush". Soft 8-bit breakdowns lay beside a snapping loop and pretty boy-girl duet, all accented with the type of lyrics that make most intimate sense to 19-year-olds who wrote them. But if "Short Crush" lacks a certain universalism, it still manages to strike a deep sonic chord with anyone who ever loved Give Up, a new generation of painful bedroom pop for the kinds of thoughts and minor terrors that, understandably, never left the bedroom in the first place.

There Is Danger :: "Passport"

2013-05-06T05:00:00.000-04:00

The charming last movement of There Is Danger's latest single, "Passport" offers singer Illya Riske riding down the back of a cascading melody and a mantra, "All I wanted was adventure." It sounds vaguely apologetic, the final iteration of a song that has Riske admitting, "I keep my passport in pocket" and "I fall in love in every city", a love song to wanderlust and all her terrible drivers. The sounds are dreamy and spirited, lo-fi and ambitious, a little prop plane rock song that buzzes low over the trees. Appropriately, Riske ends not with an apology but a demand, "Just give me adventure." Both he and his listeners won't be disappointed by what the next movement brings, a national tour and unfolding recognition, one of the best independent bands in this vein since Throw Me The Statue and Youth Lagoon.