Beach House: Bloom (2012-Leak)

Leaked last night.

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Schoolboy Q - Habits and Contradictions (2012)

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Wow!

Grimes - Visions (2012)

Late last year, Simon Reynolds described electronic music's response to our digitized world as a new kind of maximalism: "a hell of a lot of inputs... in terms of influences and sources, and a hell of a lot of outputs." That's an apt description for the music that Grimes was making before, but Visions showcases a streamlined aesthetic, resulting in a statement that feels focused, cohesive, and assured. It's simple enough to leave room for Grimes to grow, but this thing is so compulsively listenable it's hard to come away from it wanting much more. Anchored to the digital imagination but unbridled from its skittish anxiety and concerns, Visions gestures skyward and beyond.

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Frankie Rose: Interstellar (2012)

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Frankie Rose spent a few years kicking around the Brooklyn jangle-pop scene before striking out on her own: As the most charismatic member of Vivian Girls, Crystal Stilts, and Dum Dum Girls, she was a reliable bolt of onstage electricity enlivening the often noncommittal presences around her. It was pretty clear, even then, that she was eventually destined for bigger things, but her first solo record, recorded under the name Frankie Rose and the Outs, still felt constrained by a reflexive sort of cool-kid slouch. Between that record and Interstellar, she has dropped the pretense of a backing band entirely, and is recording simply as "Frankie Rose." The implicit point is clear: This time around, she's going for it.

The first moments of "Interstellar" make this point immediately. The song opens on a cool-blue vista of synthesizers, a transportingly vast sound of the sort Frankie's never made before. When her voice enters the mix, cooing about interstellar highways and moon dust, it's piped from above, passed through a series of filters so until she slightly resembles the Laurie Anderson of "O Superman". A minute in, a massive, Valhalla-pound drum hit resounds, the synths explode sideways, and Frankie hurls us down a flume ride of descending vocal harmonies. It's the most colorful, thrilling music of her career, and as grand a pronouncement as one can make that we're not doing things the same way anymore.

Interstellar is a big, second-album leap of faith into deeper waters, a sparkling synth-pop record that wants very badly to mean something to dreamy, hyper-emotional twentysomethings. For her model, she's taken the impression of some of the dreamiest, most hyper-emotional records of her youth. The production on Interstellar is gorgeous, and clearly modeled on the Cure's big, panoramic pop records, like Disintegration: booming-canyon drums, acres of spannable horizon. The drum beat that opens up "Know Me" is virtually identical to that of "Close to Me", and the silvery guitar leads on "Gospel/Grace" are pretty much mimeographed from "Plainsong". But although Rose indulges pretty heavily in the Cure's primary colors, she paints something distinctly her own with them. The world of Interstellar is a vision of paradise as lifted from the front of a Trapper Keeper: air-brushed, pastel-hued, and gloriously vivid.

Interstellar is not a thematically rich experience-- it basically has one single invitation, and that is to swim with Frankie in the glorious bath of echoes she's drawn for herself. "All that I want is a pair of wings to fly/ Into the blue, a wide open sky/ Show me your scars, I'll show you mine/ Perched out of the city on a pair of power lines," she sings over and over on "Pair of Wings", and you can hear this yearning for escape echoed in the record's every upward-spiralling note. Her singing has always been breathy and modest, but on Interstellar, her voice seems to mist on contact, even when she's swirling herself into a prismatic mini-choir of Frankies. On her record, she's just another celestial body orbiting larger ones.

The resulting album isn't one you actively explore so much as bask in gratefully. The longer I spend immersed in it, the more I appreciate its details: the haunting, truncated piano chords that the melody of "Apples for the Sun" clumps around, or the way Frankie's voice melts into and becomes one with the bloom of synthesized strings in the last minute of "Gospel/Grace". Rose is tapping the same slightly shameless clear eyes/full hearts well of teen melodrama that sourced M83's Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, and she demonstrates the same kind of focus and vision in carrying it off. On Interstellar, she transports us further and takes us higher than she ever could have as the drummer of an indie pop revivalist band. Amen to breaking free of sonic restrictions when they outlive their usefulness.

Tennis: Young and Old (2012)

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But if Cape Dory was the honeymoon, Young & Old is the daily grind of marriage. Gone are the carefree themes of sailing the open seas and bird-watching with your lover—Young & Old finds itself considered with some heavier themes and makes it clear that the couple has matured and tucked-in its shirt since Cape Dory.

The album opens with “It All Feels The Same,” which starts out with a surf-pop guitar hook but quickly dispels the idea that the band might still be out at sea. In fact, Tennis now even sounds a bit like a hapless couple attempting to rekindle the fire of yesteryear: “When I say your name I look for a change/But everywhere I go it all feels the same.” Even right from the get-go, frontwoman Alaina Moore expresses these landlocked emotions—but Young & Old isn’t just looking into the past with mixed emotions.

Cloud Nothings: Attack on Memory (2012)

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Post-hardcore....rockers all grown up. "Stay Useless" could be an epic anthem if the music industry wasnt so lame and commercialized. For now it will simply remain an undiscovered gem, a really, really, really good rock song. Catchy lyrics, repeating bridge, and power chords.

Check it.

A Place To Bury Strangers: Onwards To the Wall (2012)

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Third release from one of my favorite bands. So good, so loud....visit them on tour near you soon.

Real Estate: Days (2011)

For a mix of songs made at different times, Real Estate's self-titled 2009 debut was impressively consistent. Given how well the New Jersey band fused disparate moments, you had to figure they could reach even greater heights were they to craft their next set all at once. They did just that last winter, and the result is indeed a step forward. Cleaner, sharper, and just plain stronger, Days is like a single idea divided into simple statements-- a suite of subtle variations on a theme.

Its coherence sounds remarkably effortless, as if stringing together catchy gems is as easy as, in the words of one song, "floating on an inner tube in the sun." Interestingly, Real Estate actually acknowledge this sense of ease. The opener is bluntly titled "Easy", and references to carefree simplicity abound. As singer/guitarist Martin Courtney puts it, "If it takes all summer long/ Just to write one simple song/ There's too much to focus on/ Clearly there is something wrong." But the band's celebration of the uncomplicated is less about how Days was written than about the beauty of life seen in retrospect, especially young life in small towns.

Like the stirring scenes of suburban Texas in Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life, these songs find meaning in daily mundanities-- in houses and gardens, phone lines and street lights, names carved in trees and leaves pressed by footsteps. "All those wasted miles/ All those aimless drives through green aisles," sings Courtney wistfully. "Our careless lifestyle, it was not so unwise." That sentiment was evident on the band's debut, but here they've honed it to its essence.

The music bears a simplicity to match. These aren't minimal songs by any means, but the layers of cycling guitar, rolling rhythm, and gentle echo are always understated, more about conveying feeling than showing off the band's considerable chops. There's also a smooth efficiency in these rich tunes. No note feels wasted, and nothing happens at the wrong time or in the wrong place. Much of this precision comes from guitarist Matt Mondanile, whose nimble playing adds color to each song's shape. It's most noticeable in the insistent "It's Real", but I'm even more taken with his sonic smoke rings in "Out of Tune", and how his shimmering guitar evokes sunrays mingling through branches and sparkling off pools.

That idyllic tone permeates Days, and in lesser hands could deprive it of tension or variety. But Real Estate have such a knack for classic-sounding melody that every song quickly engages on a musical gut level. It's a quality their music shares with the jangly hooks of early R.E.M., the breeziness of later Pavement, and the garage twang of the Fresh & Onlys. But their closest kin are New Jersey forefathers the Feelies. That group's undying ability to mine repeated chords and Zen phrases is matched best by the album's closer, "All the Same", a looping study of how night and day are merely sides of the same coin. Lasting over seven minutes, it might be Real Estate's first epic. But it's as subtle and unassuming as anything on Days-- more evidence from this band that great music doesn't have to sound hard to make, even if it is.

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The Flashbulb: Opus at the End of Everything (2012)

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