ceo - Halo (Beyoncé cover)

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 4, 2011
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Beyoncé's I Am... Sasha Fierce smash "Halo" has already lived a startling number of lives. Co-written by Ryan Tedder of Leona Lewis' "Bleeding Love" fame, this heavenly power ballad almost went to Lewis instead, as Tedder himself has acknowledged; Kelly Clarkson once complained Tedder gave her the same arrangement for her own "Already Gone". In addition to Mrs. Jay-Z's Grammy-winning original, Beyoncé has sung "Halo" as a Michael Jackson tribute and, with Coldplay's Chris Martin on piano, as a Haiti tribute. The cast of "Glee" blended "Halo" with Katrina and the Waves' "Walking on Sunshine", Florence and the Machine remade it as a soulful belter, and Major Lazer transformed it into a deliriously weird dancehall hybrid.

Still, no cover of "Halo" has been quite as inspired-- or as perversely logical-- as this wonderfully over-the-top take by ceo, aka Eric Berglund, aka one-half of Swedish agit-pop duo the Tough Alliance. Swapping Sasha Fierce's staid piano and trance-y synths for Spanish-flavored acoustic guitar, 1980s-TV-theme electric guitar, bumpy beats, strings, and even horns, Berglund builds on the original's all-encompassing surge, enunciating the lover-as-salvation lyrics with the same wide-eyed sincerity his former group brought to covers like "Lucky", "Mine Was Real", and "Velocity Boy". A heavily manipulated rapped outro reminiscent of Salem adds an appropriately swaggering conclusion: "We have never been cheap, we give it all."

Tanlines - Real Life

Track Review
Pitchfork
March 2, 2010
Link
8
 

In an interview a couple of years ago, Swedish electronic pop duo the Tough Alliance, asked what (if anything) they're looking for, answered simply, "Reality." Now, past TTA remixers Tanlines have named the first single from their forthcoming Settings EP "Real Life", though as far as I can tell that phrase appears nowhere in the song's lyrics. Not that the Brooklyn-based duo of ex-Don Cabellero/Storm and Stress man Eric Emm and former Professor Murder-er Jesse Cohen are being elusive here. As with Delorean or Cut Copy at their catchiest, "Real Life" is neon-synthed pop you could imagine going over equally well at a dance party or, seriously, a sporting event. Echoing in there amid all the sproingy bass lines and calypso-calibrated percussion, Emm's no-frills voice at first might seem like the weakest part, but it's also what sells the song's emotional vulnerability. "It was a past life thing," he repeats, on one of those swooning choruses you don't realize you love until you hear somebody else play them in a public forum. And then, with an air of sad finality: "It wasn't anything at all." TTA might claim to "know a place where diamonds never fade away," but Tanlines know nothing gold can stay. For real.
 

The Delta Mirror - He Was Worse Than the Needle He Gave You

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 25, 2010
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8

A certain strain of recent indie rock seems to be taking an unusual interest in illness and death. You could blame Arcade Fire, the sad loss of whose family members only happened to lead to one of the most universally acclaimed independent releases of the past decade. Last year, the Antlers' Hospice focused an entire album on the subject of a man with terminal bone cancer. Now L.A. trio the Delta Mirror's upcoming Lefse debut, Machines That Listen, sets each of its nine songs in a different room of the hospital.

This slow, layered ballad "He Was Worse Than the Needle He Gave You" stands out not for its pathos-ridden subject matter-- I'm still not sure I know exactly what it's about-- but rather its restrained emotional gutpunch, which it achieves with a simple but catchy tune and dramatically expansive production. Imagine the Big Pink's electro-shoegaze explosions sounding vulnerable. "I've got too much time on my hands," goes a gothy male vocal, and before long we find out the reason why-- and the guy responsible won't fucking be held responsible. The next time the Delta Mirror sing those words, at the end of the song, their meaning has changed. Damage done.
 

jj - let go

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 20, 2010
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4

"Summery," we said? Ha! The cold Swedish winter is right outside! As if to make good on Sincerely Yours' past promise of "no fantasy, no stupid escape," jj's latest leaves behind Balearic beaches for a desert of the real. The Swedish duo's still quasi-anonymous (What? Free health care and no TMZ?!) female singer mentions the change of season in her earnestly intoned lyrics to "Let Go", the first mp3 from the forthcoming follow-up to my favorite album of 2009, but she wouldn't have to. Suspiciously Nebraska-esque harmonica gets her point across immediately. Fragile guitars, icy keys, and Knife-like blots of percussion all second.

jj n° 2 stood on a lofty precipice between naïveté and cyncism, sensitivity and machismo, Saint Etienne and Flo Rida. "Let Go" breaks on through to the other side. A little bit more New Age now: As my colleague Eric Harvey alerted me, the melody to the synth-glistening chorus bears a more than incidental resemblance to Sting's "Fields of Gold", which maybe shouldn't be surprising-- have you ever tried listening to "Fields of Gold" in jj's usual state of mind when it's perpetually dark and freezing outside? "All I have is my soul," the new song begins; a drug reference, a Boss reference, and a reference to label bosses the Tough Alliance later, we're told to free ourselves, let the jealous sun burn our skin anyway. Huh. I was ready for other people to be puzzled by jj. I just wasn't ready for it to happen to me.
 

Ceremony - Someday

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 15, 2010
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7

Before Stephin Merritt decided orchestral folk-pop songs for Eric Cartman's next tea party constituted Realism, he cranked up his copy of Darklands and titled the Magnetic Fields' 2008 album Distortion. For these former members of Virginia-based Skywave, a band that also spawned A Place to Bury Strangers, that album title could've summed up an entire career. Instead, Paul Baker and John Fedowitz chose to call their post-Skywave duo Ceremony, a moniker that hearkens back to a certain New Order song title (also, probably less relevantly, a short-lived band fronted by Chastity Bono). Aside from vocals recalling Merritt's tired monotone, "Someday" doesn't sound like anything you might not be able to imagine from those reference points-- thunderously romantic Factory Records guitar/bass interplay, lo-fi drum machines-- but as far as what it sets out to do, it succeeds. And did I mention that it's really fucking loud?
 

Rogue Wave - Good Morning (The Future)

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 14, 2010
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3

If Rogue Wave sound underwhelmed by the way the Great Recession has downgraded our collective prospects, consider the couple of years these Bay Area rockers have had. Two days before Christmas 2007, then-bassist Evan Farrell died in an apartment fire. Guitarist Gram LeBron lost his father. Drummer Pat Spurgeon survived a years-long quest for a new kidney, as documented in a recent PBS documentary, D Tour. And frontman Zach Rogue spent much of last year bed-ridden and partially paralyzed. Rogue Wave would've been forgiven for throwing in the towel.

Instead, they're bringing happy back. "Good Morning (The Future)", the first mp3 from the quartet's fourth album (second for Brushfire), marks a dramatic shift from the melodically tricky folk-pop that once made these guys such natural Shins labelmates. "The future isn't what it used to be/ I'm not surprised," their new song blithely begins, but its "future" unfortunately sounds like a more irritating version of the recent past. It's got the sensitive-guy choruses and peppy synth programming the Postal Service delivered to Owl City and lockstep post-punk guitars the Killers might've used to crash a Bloc Party. And, on the bridge, the sort of warped alien voices that haunted the Flaming Lips' Yoshimi. Bland political pronouncements ("Do you think that we like to take our orders from fools?") don't make this awkward electro-pop embrace any less clumsy. "Love machine"? Really?
 

Fiveng - Jonah

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 12, 2010
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8

Less Jonah and the whale, more David and Goliath. Nicholas Ng has the kind of story that became increasingly common in 2009, when the most intriguing new psychedelic bands often weren't bands at all. A couple of months ago, Ng started sending out mp3s of his Fiveng bedroom pop project, in hopes that maybe somebody out there would hear something they liked and post them. A few local Bay Area blogs did. From there, Ng's aquatic lo-fi productions somehow found their way to Switzerland-based blog Delicious Scopitone, and then to Dallas-based Weekly Tape Deck. Now you're reading these words. And deservedly so.

Amid so many lame attempts to jump the recent "chillwave"/"glo-fi" phenomenon with summer-themed songs and "mysterious" secret identities, it's thrilling to know there are still undiscovered talents like Ng out there, tapping that zeitgeist of wooziness in their own refreshing ways. The fact that "Jonah" uses nature samples, exotica percussion, heavily reverbed guitars, streaky synths, and Panda Bear-style harmonies shouldn't come as much of a shock. That the arrangement is so accomplished, though-- the song so melodic and well-constructed-- makes Fiveng one of those rare pleasant surprises. "Jonah was a boy who didn't give a damn," Ng sings, over strummy chords that cry out for a mashup with the Exploding Hearts' "Throwaway Style"; "All he ever wanted was a bowl in his hand." As much Here We Go Magic as Washed Out, Ng just wants to see you underwater.
 

Elliott Smith - Cecilia/Amanda

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 7, 2010
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7

After three discs of posthumous songs, most musicians don't have a whole lot of gold left in the vault. Elliott Smith's spiritual brother in intimate, depressive folk-pop, Nick Drake, made it to one rarities collection before lapsing into mediocrity. John Lennon got one half of a studio album and a couple of barrel-scratching Anthology tracks. Jimi Hendrix, for whatever it's worth, was releasing unreleased songs to some critical acclaim well into the second decade after his death (though I gotta admit I haven't heard many of them). So there's no reason Smith-- who recorded songs constantly, and, judging by some of his latter-career creative choices, wasn't necessarily the best judge of his own talent, anyway-- might not still have a couple of worthwhile recordings that haven't yet found a home.

"Cecilia/Amanda" is one, though it's not exactly greatest-hits material. With bleak but rich imagery that evokes the deadly "party dress" of Elvis Costello's "Alison" almost the way XO's "Baby Britain" turned over Revolver, Smith sings of a damaged female duo and "a place where lonely men pay to make their opposites match." It's still unclear who exactly belongs to whom, but a baby is definitely involved. Remastering by Tape Op editor Larry Crane nicely cleans up the keyboards and acoustic strums from the muddled version that has been floating around for a few years. Given that the tune dates back to Smith's high school band-- he recorded this take with Crane in 1997-- it's a good bet Smith didn't consider it one of his best. You won't need him to tell you that, but you'll be happy to hear another reliably well-constructed folk-pop song from the late singer/songwriter just the same. Even if part of his romantic charm was that he always strived for something more.
 

Kurt Vile - I Wanted Everything

Track Review
Pitchfork
January 6, 2010
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8

This Philly home-taping head got his biggest break with the 1970s FM-rock dreams of Matador debut Childish Prodigy last fall. But delve deeper into Kurt Vile's work, and you hear a folk troubadour off in his own Another Green World. "I Wanted Everything", from a 7" titled Meet the Philly Elite (tongue, no doubt, halfway in cheek), is Vile in downcast acoustic-totin' slacker mode. The outer-space production flourishes of his best album so far, God Is Saying This to You, must've gone back to their home planet, but Vile's earthy moan and rusty guitar arpeggios pass through lo-fi reverb that should please devotees of Atlas Sound, Ariel Pink, and, hell, early My Morning Jacket. One minute, Vile is dusting off American clichés to promise eternal love. The next, he's bumping up against deeply contemporary quandaries involving work-life balance-- and impending mortality. You can't always get what you want.
 

Class Actress - Journal of Ardency

Track Review
Pitchfork
December 8, 2009
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8

Before Elizabeth Harper was frontwoman for slinky Brooklyn electro-pop trio Class Actress, she was another eponymous singer-songwriter. And yeah, before she gained some local media renown as a singer-songwriter, Harper was a college drama major. Those acting classes would appear to have paid off handsomely on the title track from Class Actress' debut EP, Journal of Ardency. For me, a big part of this coolly seductive song's spell lies in the way it gracefully finesses the gulf between someone's glamorous image of big-city nightlife and the narrator's lonely, wounded reality.

"You think I'm livin' it, livin' it, livin' it, livin' it up," Harper repeats behind frosty snare thwacks, adding, "It's a lie, lie." The galloping Italo-disco bass line and luxurious rubber-band synths evoke a night of cosmopolitan-clutching revelry at pricey Manhattan clubs, but the ponderously Depeche Mode-ish song title, unshowy melody, and earnest, expressive vocals tacitly acknowledge our narrator will no doubt be going home as she probably went out: alone. So while the track's moodily retro aesthetic suggests the nocturnal shadows of Glass Candy or Chromatics, its warm heart and bright hooks bring it closer to the communicative synth-pop of Annie, Little Boots, or stated influence Madonna. Confessions on a dance floor, for real.

Shout Out Louds - Walls

Track Review
Pitchfork
December 4, 2009
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7

Mr. Ek, nice job putting up this wall. Construction is a sturdy enough metaphor for "Walls", the lead mp3 from Shout Out Louds' second Merge album (third overall), appropriately titled Work. When we last heard this Swedish five-piece, on 2007's Our Ill Wills, Peter Bjorn and John's Björn Yttling was producing; he gave the band's melodic, emotive rockers that innocent "Young Folks" splendor. As great as singles "Tonight I Have to Leave It" and "Impossible" were, the risk for Shout Out Louds is to get too heart-tugging-- you may have noticed "Very Loud", from their 2003 debut, Howl Howl Gaff Gaff, in the trailer for Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist last year-- so it's good to have producer Phil Ek (the Shins, Modest Mouse, Band of Horses, Fleet Foxes) as foreman this time around. "Walls" pounds out a rigid foundation, then lets chunky guitars and hummable piano rise above like spires. Horns are there for hue, not for hooks; those are provided courtesy of throwaway phrases like "ahhh ahhh" and "run, run, run", so you'd almost never notice the fraught lyrical content. "I took too many pills and wrote my will just to get to ya," Adam Olenius sings, sounding tense but restrained. From Sweden's emo Strokes to Sweden's emo Spoon: Look what Shout Out Louds have wrought.
 

Citay - Careful With That Hat

Track Review
Pitchfork
December 1, 2009
Link
7

2010 could turn out to be the year the indie kids stopped worrying and learned to love 1970s classic rock. As a devoted hand-wringer, I'm of more than a few minds about this potential development. It's not as if bands from the Hold Steady to Belle and Sebastian haven't already spread the gospel of Thin Lizzy. And yeah, My Morning Jacket and Band of Horses have almost definitely spent time bro-ing down in the wide open country-fried spaces of classic Neil Young LPs. Do I have to tell anybody at this point about Animal Collective's jones for Grateful Dead? But with Free Energy's barbecue-friendly power-pop choogling and Surfer Blood's more than Boston-sized feelings already among next year's most promising releases, I'm already starting to wax nostalgic for, like, post-punk. Or post-anything.

From the sound of it, Citay were never worried at all. Except possibly about their headwear. Led by Ezra Feinberg-- previously of Piano Magic-- Citay shredded happily, hippily, all over 2007's Little Kingdom, the San Francisco band's first album picked up by Dead Oceans (following a stint on Important). "Careful With That Hat", the rambling opening track from upcoming follow-up Dream Get Together, is no more apologetic about Allman Brothers-style dueling guitar heroics, sprightly acoustic strums, and summer-festival organ-- these guys could share a stage with similarly 70s-minded Swedish folk-rockers the Amazing. "It's an homage, not a mockery, I swear," asserts a boy-girl-girl vocal, the only thing tentative here. As synths and all kinds of percussion pile up on the closing jam, it's clear Citay are of more than a few minds, too-- I count seven band members in the press release-- but also, instruments. Which they can play, too, almost as good as Dickey Betts, whose musical rep should need no rehabilitating. Peach.

Mountain Man - Animal Tracks

Track Review
Pitchfork
November 23, 2009

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7

Yeah, a group of three girls called Mountain Man. They sound as old as the hills and as current as some micro-genre that doesn't have a stupid name yet. With woodsy acoustic guitars and lilting, reverbed harmonies, the Bennington, Vt.-based trio of Molly Erin Sarle, Alexandra Sauser-Monnig, and Amelia Randall Meath set up camp between the old-timey lilt of Alela Diane or Fleet Foxes and the laid-back lo-fi vibes of Underwater Peoples pals like Real Estate or Julian Lynch. All that said, nothing about Mountain Man's nostalgic underneath-the-stars simplicity really grabbed me until I heard a cover of "Animal Tracks" by Alex Bleeker and the Freaks. Where Bleeker's version rides in on enough Crazy Horse-type guitar to inspire another three Kurt Vile albums, Mountain Man's unadorned original foregrounds earnest vocals, concrete sensory details, and an equally sturdy melody; "The sweat will roll down our backs," the Mountain women sing. When you get far enough from civilization, hygiene isn't important.

Mount Kimbie - Maybes

Track Review
Pitchfork
November 19, 2009

Link
8

"People... act like nobody before has used samples in an ambient way or cut up a song and layered it with electronic elements." That's Deerhunter/Atlas Sound main man Bradford Cox talking to our own Joe Colly in a recent interview. Much of the sample-based, ambient-leaning music under discussion these days falls beneath the nebulous umbrella of chillwave, glo-fi, or hypnagogic pop. Washed Out and other artists that Cox endearingly dubs "the chill-glos" tend to approach ambient sample-weaving from more of an indie rock context. Dominic Maker and Kai Campos, the London duo who record as Mount Kimbie, represent a rising cadre of artists coming at ambient textures from something of an opposite direction: dubstep.

Mount Kimbie release their music on a dubstep label, but it's not dubstep, exactly. Their two EPs this year for Scuba's Hotflush imprint, Maybes and Sketch on Glass, cover a lot of stylistic territory, using pitch-shifted vocals along with electronic and organic tones to create beat-oriented headphone music with the elegaic grandeur of post-rock. The second EP makes the bigger outreach to electronic DJs, but Mount Kimbie's most arresting track so far remains the title track from their first EP. "Maybes" is built around a glacially stretched electric guitar chord sample, indistinct but emotive vocals, and percussion that shifts between bassy rumbles and glass-like plink-plonks. The effect is to create a sonic space somewhere between Stars of the Lid and Burial. So Mount Kimbie aren't reinventing the wheel, but they're boldly going where Primitive Radio Gods and LEN, at least-- to name but two acts mentioned by Cox-- have never gone before.

The Tough Alliance - A New Chance (The Juan MacLean Remix)

Track Review
Pitchfork
November 16, 2009
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8 ("Best New Music")

"It's not a question of understanding it, man. If you feel it, you feel it, stupid." That's a male voice talking on the title track from the Tough Alliance's second proper album, 2007's A New Chance. And, at the risk of thinking when we should be feeling, I'm pretty sure those words get right to heart of what makes this Swedish duo's recordings so enduring. As with that quote, TTA's music is simple and emphatic-- a kid could "understand" it, as if that were the point-- but at the same time, there's something aggressive about that clarity, the shiny electropop hooks and the innocently cynical (or is that cynically innocent?) Top 40 emotion. You could follow the trail of references here back to John Cassavetes (the source of the sample), but you'd be missing the point. "If you feel it, you feel it."

TTA aren't the kind of band that makes portentous-sounding eight-minute epics. "A New Chance", at 4:34, is the longest track on the album of the same name, alongside eight other short, melodic, should-be worldwide hits. So it's a good thing Six Finger Satellite guitarist John MacLean, better known as DFA electronic artist the Juan MacLean, remixed "A New Chance" for a 2008 digital-only EP that's only now seeing the light of Klicktrack. You can hear the Cassavetes quote a little more clearly, but what this house-y remix really does best is put the original song up on a gleaming, hi-fidelity pedestal of piano and percussion and synth arpeggios, to be admired as well as felt. "I know a place where diamonds never fade away," TTA sing, and we're there, and MacLean gives it all a museum-worthy, disco-worthy frame. If you felt like you never understood these guys before, any day's a new chance. Don't fight it, stupid, feel it.
 

Arctic Monkeys - Cornerstone

Track Review
Pitchfork
November 13, 2009
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8

Everything reminds Alex Turner of her. Who exactly she might be, however, is anyone's guess. Where much of the Arctic Monkeys' Josh Homme-produced third album, Humbug, lumbers along with ill-fitting machismo, "Cornerstone" stands tall from first listen, an impeccable case for songcraft and subtlety. Turner packs his usual vivid lyrical observations into this lovelorn tale, but he's learning that withholding them can be just as effective.

When the narrator on "Cornerstone" sees someone who looks to him like his lost love, if only ever so slightly, he starts kissing her. This usually seems to work out better than you'd think. At least until he asks if he can call the new girls the old one's name. As Turner rattles off real or imagined watering holes, his backing's organ-swaying nostalgia recalls another record named after a meeting place: Richard Hawley's Coles Corner (which coincidentally lost the 2006 Mercury Prize to the first Arctics LP). Turner's rich wordplay brings his fancifully poignant subject matter to life, but it's far from clear how seriously to take all this. No less so after watching the Richard Ayoade-directed video, which adds Morrissey-like gesticulations to the recording's resonantly Mozzy phrasing, but does little to resolve the song's central ambiguities. "I'm beginning to think I've imagined you all along," Turner sings about halfway through. A hint? Possibly. Or else one step in the grieving process en route to the ever-popular "making out with your ex's sister" phase.

A Sunny Day in Glasgow - Close Chorus

Track Reviews
Pitchfork
November 6, 2009
Link
8 ["best new music"]

If you hadn't noticed this was the standout on A Sunny Day in Glasgow's triumphant-despite-adversity sophomore album, Ashes Grammar, you're forgiven. When it's working, the Philadelphia band's diaphanous dream-pop washes over you like an "ambient slipstream," to borrow a nicely evocative phrase from the BBC. With 22 tracks flowing by in a little more than an hour, Ashes Grammar makes picking favorites even more difficult. Some tracks pass in a matter of seconds, mere interludes; others glide toward an infinite horizon.

I hadn't noticed "Close Chorus" was my most-played track from Ashes Grammar (well, tied with the 11-second intro) until my fellow staffers started saying how great it was. After the psychedelic clang of the Panda Bear-like "Failure", "Close Chorus" is only the album's second track that even resembles a conventional song. Make that songs: By around three minutes in, the bass line's quasi-techno bounce could almost be coming from a different piece altogether from the Cocteau Twins-haunted female vocals, effects-drenched guitar strums, and indeterminately warped hum. "Close Chorus" undergoes plenty of other metamorphoses, too-- drum machines trading off with live rock drumming, a few snippets of lyrics comprehensible here and there ("it's hard to believe..." "I just want to be happy")-- until, before you know it, shoegaze guitars start dropping like dying seagulls. You definitely won't notice that Ben Daniels recorded the song without founding singer Lauren Daniels (grad school) and mostly without bass player Brice Hickey (broken leg) and sibling singer Robin (looking after Brice).

I'm probably the only one who'll notice how one of the melodies vaguely recalls the chorus from the Offspring's "Gone Away", but why not listen again?

Wild Nothing - Confirmation

Track Review
Pitchfork
October 30, 2009
Link
7

Art needs something to push against. With Bush-Cheney now in the rearview mirror (Jesus, drive faster!), and the technological possibilities for creating and distributing new music almost too vast to think about, bedroom track-makers are finding their constraints in the mediums of the past. From lo-fi to glo-fi to, um, Sleigh Bells, rising artists are experimenting with recording effects-- analogue hiss, cassette warping, red-line distortion-- that highlight their own recorded-ness, their own fakeness, the fact you're hearing anything but a flesh-and-blood live band standing across the room. In doing so, they're occasionally breaking free of the bounds of actual 1960s garage-rock, actual 80s synth-pop. We may look back at all this stuff and laugh someday. Right now, these feel like pretty heady times.

Which brings us to Wild Nothing. Blacksburg, Virginia-based Jack Tatum records under a couple of different guises-- Abe Vigoda-y tropical-punk band Facepaint, ramshackle singer/songwriter project Jack and the Whale-- but his (maybe surprisingly) impressive cover of Kate Bush's "Cloudbusting" made clear this one was something different. While the ghost of the Cure's synth-pop hits haunts the trebly guitar riff and frail vocals of Wild Nothing original "Confirmation", Tatum's heartache is shrouded in neon haze. A voice way up in Passion Pit range will deter some, especially because it's often off-key. But don't let such flaws kill it for you. Comics critic Sean T. Collins has described "a way of doing things that is not intended to look or sound effortless, that draws attention to its own construction, but which--with every pixelization and artifact, with every crayolafied visual and left-in glitch, with every burbly synth and sky-bright color--pushes against that construction and springs out into something wild and wonderful." Isn't that something?
 

Shrag - Rabbit Kids

Track Review
Pitchfork
October 28, 2009
Link
7

Brighton, UK-based quintet Shrag, like many of their 1970s indie-punk forebears, are one of those bands whose tunes and natural charisma could easily endear them to a wider audience, but whom the vagaries of record release dates, hype cycles, and airline prices have so far conspired to keep a well-loved secret. The shouty, synth-charged group's "Punk Grammar", from a compilation for a local club night, first appeared on our own Matthew Perpetua's Fluxblog way back in 2004. Two years later, breakup ballad "Hopelessly Wasted" made its way onto a couple of Pitchfork contributors' year-end lists. Shrag's 2009 self-titled debut LP, drawing mostly from prior 7" and mp3 releases, proved they had in them a whole album's worth of songs at nearly that high level.

New single "Rabbit Kids", due in December, is another fine chance to get acquainted with the band's charms. The oblique title and muffled production-- or is that just my mp3?-- again suggest the early English DIY movement. The surging boy-girl chorus and exposed nerves could almost entice you to visit MySpace again. We don't hear the full story, but the scene is one of painful departure: "Why don't you just stay?/ It's hard to see you fall apart that way." Little details-- "The hand in palm/ The coral dawn"-- help what sounds like personal heartache resonate for a wider world. It doesn't hurt that the song is bright, scrappy, and exuberantly melodic enough to rank alongside tracks by Love Is All, the Long Blondes, or early Los Campesinos!. A few more like this, and Shrag might break through yet, though you get the sense they're happy just playing in a band with their friends.