Stop

The first time my coworker heard me put in Twin Sister, he said, "Is this Feist?" Noooo, definitely not. Long Island's dream pop quintet Twin Sister makes music that's meant to feel comfy and lived-in, with a good amount of subtlety. Their first EP, Vampires with Dreaming Kids, was self-released that year. After their first live show out of town, at SXSW, they toured with tUnE-YarDs and Xiu Xiu before putting the final touches on their second EP, Color Your Life, which followed in 2010. In 2011, Twin Sister signed to Domino Records and released their first full-length, In Heaven, that September.

Twin Sister keep the songwriting focus small and detailed. More interested in documenting life's minor moments than the big, transformative ones, they sing about things like recommending movies to friends or having an awkward crush go unspoken. Little stuff, but meaningful in its way. Take "Stop", for example, a track breathily sung by guitarist Eric Cardona and featuring a sultry R&B thump. It reads heavy romance on first listen, but that's actually not the case. "I keep telling myself to stop, to feel if I like it," Cardona sings, describing a new relationship he's trying to be responsible about. It seems he doesn't want to rush into sleeping with this person-- someone's feelings could get hurt that way.

Get dreamy with me and take a listen to Stop here.


Buy a copy of Twin Sister's In Heaven here.

Lazy Bones

San Francisco's Wooden Shjips play a minimal, droning brand of garage-styled psychedelia with a noticeable '60s Krautrock influence. Immediately I think of local bands The Priests or the Veins. The band's vocals slip beneath waves of throbbing minimal rhythms, while fuzztone guitar and shrieking organs jump to the foreground. When bandleader Ripley Johnson assembled the group in 2003, he wasn't interested in playing gigs or becoming famous; rather, his original intention was to find a group of non-musicians for the purposes of creating innovative music. On their Thrill Jockey debut, engineer Phil Manley (who handled the recording and mixing chores for Johnson's side project Moon Duo's latest album Mazes) was brought in, making this the first WS record to be cut in a proper studio. Mastering was farmed out to Sonic Boom and Heba Kadry. The end result is the most expansive Wooden Shjips album yet,full of the fuzzed-out, murky, and distorted excesses that are the band's trademarks. The San Francisco psychedelia that Johnson claims as his biggest influence takes a back seat to both the MC5 and Loop.

Wooden Shjips are very much sticking to their signature sound on West. Even with its increased focus on classic-rock virtues, the album isn't really a collection of riffs and wails and choruses; it's more a muscular sort of vibe-out-- badass ambient music, if you will. As hard as the band can rock, expansive nod-out music is still its focus, and the album works best when you give yourself over entirely to its pounding grandeur. Frontman Ripley Johnson sings in a narcoleptic mutter that never displays the slightest bit of feeling, and his numbed monotone never disturbs the mood by leaping out of the mix to grab you.

If you're as much a vinyl fetishist as I am, you'll be interested in getting a copy, as LPs straight from Thrill Jockey are a beautiful aqua hue!

Lend your ears to "Lazy Bones" here.


Buy your copy of Wooden Shjips' West here.

Cruel

Before she began composing and performing her own quirky, intricate pop songs, Annie Clark proved her musical prowess as part of Glenn Branca's 100 Guitar Orchestra, as guitarist and background vocalist for the Polyphonic Spree (on their third album, Fragile Army), and as a member of Sufjan Stevens' touring band. Contrast has always been a major part of her music, and Strange Mercy's juxtapositions of harshness, softness, truth, lies, cruelty, and kindness feel especially pointed and potent. Most apparent is her use of opposing sounds; working with producer John Congleton, she focuses on luxurious strings and woodwinds that float above wobbly keyboards and ugly, distorted guitars that emphasize that these songs are under pressure. Less obvious are the emotional shifts many of these songs undergo, and how they blur the album’s contrasts.

On the title track, Clark goes from vulnerable to protective to violent as she sings “I’ll tell you good news that I don’t believe/If it will help you sleep,” and on “Champagne Year,” she confesses and deceives at the same time. “Cruel” is Strange Mercy's definitive track, putting inspired lyrics like “They could take or leave you/So they took you then they left you” atop strings and woodwinds straight from a vintage musical and a messed-up, fuzzed-out guitar solo. The song gets increasingly anxious as it closes, a pattern Clark repeats throughout the album; indeed, while these songs are some of her most fragmented, each song on Strange Mercy is tied to another.

Strange Mercy is St. Vincent's most reflective and most audacious album to date, and Clark remains as delicately uncompromising an artist as ever.

Take a listen to "Cruel" here.


Buy your copy of St. Vincent's Strange Mercy here (get it while it's hot!).

How Deep is Your Love?

It's kind of hard to believe that New York's Rapture have been around since 1998. Once hailed by some writers as the second coming of Gang of Four, the Rapture were the flagship band of the post-punk revival that swept through the indie underground during the early 2000s. They debuted on Sub-Pop with an EP, added keyboards, were produced by DFA, and blew up with "The House of Jealous Lovers", an infectious punky dance anthem of 2003. The album Pieces of the People We Love followed, which had a couple of top 40 singles in the U.K.Pieces of the People We Love, was released three years later by Mercury and involved production input from Ewan Pearson, Danger Mouse, and Paul Epworth. Tapes, a stylistically broad mix album, came out through !K7 in 2008. Safer left the following year and it would be two more years before the band would release another studio album.

In the Grace of Your Love is a more mature Rapture than we have seen before. The opening track, "Sail Away" makes me think of "Come Sail Away" by STYX, a concern initially. However, it features singer Luke Jenner straining to hit the high notes, completely unlike STYX. Yet I kind of like that aspect of that song. Nearly a decade after "Jealous Lovers", they're a patient, skilled rock band unafraid to look uncool.

Listen to How Deep is Your Love? and get sucked into their piano-driven tour de force here.


Buy your copy of the Rapture's In the Grace of Your Love here.