Biggles Flys Again “Friends”

from Remember Saturday
[ released 3/30/13 ]
 

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Cobalt Cranes “Shake”

from Home Life
[ released 4/9/13 ]
 
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Jonas Reinhardt “Private Life of a Diamond”

from Mask of the Maker
[ released 4/2/13 ]
 
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Brøthers “Is This the End”

from the Is This the End single
[ released 3/8/13 ]
 
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Shark? “California Grrls”

from the California Grrls single
[ released 4/3/13 ]
 
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There is something undeniably powerful about delicacy in music. The affective quality of sounds issuing forth like whispers and songs imbued with ethereal intimacy is a potent force, however understated it may seem on the surface.

That’s lovely and all but sometimes what you really need is a big fucking moose of a song. “Born to Ruin,” the lead single from the new album by Toronto’s Wildlife, is that moose in full gear, stampeding toward you like a massive, majestic world of heft.

You can sense those big hooves coming at you right from the start. A wail of guitar feedback lathers itself up behind some big, reverberating drums, then the rest of the band shoves the song forward. Vocalist Dean Povinsky leads with, “Baby, we were born to ruin / With a stake and a storm through the heart,” and the weirdly poetic sentiment meshes perfectly with the track’s swaggering, anthemic feel. “Born to Ruin” calls to mind indie rock outfits who have elevated their sound to a craft–fine acts like The National or Young the Giant who can transform three and a half minutes into a searing, visceral statement about life.

“Born to Ruin” is the second track from On the Heart, the band’s new, excellent sophomore album. Povinsky has described Wildlife’s 2010 debut as “critically acclaimed (but) not so good selling.” Here’s hoping On the Heart intensifies their spotlight and changes the latter half of that equation.

Click here to listen to On the Heart on Spotify.

Dead Professional “Don’t Be Cruel”

from the Don’t Be Cruel single
[ released 4/2/13 ]
 
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Memoryy “Electric City”

from Electric City
[ to be released 6/14/13 ]
 
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Lower Plenty “Strange Beast”

from the Hard Rubbish
[ released 4/1/13 ]
 

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Majical Cloudz “Childhood’s End”

from Impersonator
[ to be released 5/21/13 ]
 
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Louville “I Still Think of You from Time to Time”

from Louville
[ released 4/3/13 ]
 
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Back in 1980, the supposed gulf separating new wave from prog rock was perceived to be only slightly less wide than the distance from the sun to Pluto. Proggers disdained the new wave’s ethos of DIY simplicity, while new wavers deplored prog’s pretensions to musical sophistication and general fuddy-duddiness. (The new wavers could sometimes develop a severe case of cognitive dissonance when it came to such things as “Vienna” by Ultravox, which ruminated on Olde Europa to the jaunty strains of a violin solo – tricks lifted straight from the prog playbook. But let’s not talk about that.)

So it was an act of purest heresy when Geoff Downes and Trevor Horn, the new wave duo The Buggles, replaced Rick Wakeman and Jon Anderson in Yes. Such things were simply not done at the dawn of the ’80s and the morally offended hosts of new wave shows on college radio stations quickly excised such songs as “Video Killed the Radio Star,” “Vermillion Sands,” and “I am a Camera” from their playlists. The Buggles had been one of us, but they’d gone over to the enemy.

A lot has changed in 32 years, and now the idea of blending new wave with prog is not particularly unusual. What is unusual is for someone to do it as explicitly and sort of weirdly as Athens, Georgia’s I Come to Shanghai do on “Nothing to Conceal.”

“Nothing to Conceal” starts out as straight-up synth-pop, sounding like an outtake from Depeche Mode’s Speak and Spell or The Human League’s Travelogue. The music proceeds as a fairly stark combo of synth-pulse and drum machines while vocalist Robert Ashley sings about a sleeping woman. During the bridge, what seems to be a guitar talk-box drops in and things start getting pretty florid in a hurry, as if the original line-up of King Crimson dropped into the studio for a visit. Things get even proggier at the song’s climax, when it sounds like I Come to Shanghai decided to mate Steve Hackett’s guitar solos from Genesis’ “The Musical Box” with Andy McKay’s demented oboe heroics from Roxy Music’s “Ladytron.”

The song is a synthesis of genres that at one time would have been unthinkable, and to I Come to Shanghai’s great credit, still feels pretty damn strange on “Nothing to Conceal.” Breeding prog with new wave may not be the unforgivable sin it was thirty years ago, but I Come to Shanghai manage to somehow still find a way to make it feel fresh and even slightly transgressive.

Click here to listen to Eternal Life Vol. 2 on Spotify.