Curling up deeper into cosmic folk with José González's pre-fame band

Jose González, who came to renown for a muted cover of fellow Swedish act the Knife’s “Heartbeats,” has, like them, spent the years since reacting against that hit. After slipping off into bleakness and haunting textures of 2007′s sophomore solo outing In Our Nature, he returned to pre-fame band Junip for his next album, 2010′s Fields, which expertly spiked González’s airy acoustic melancholy with spacey synths and free-flowing drums.

The follow-up shakes off its own shackles by instead withdrawing even further into Junip’s comfortable cocoon. Throughout, Junip is unassumingly elegant, particularly on bleary-eyed dancefloor pick-me-up “Your Life Your Call,” jagged psych excursion “Villain” and tranquil epiphany “After All Is Said and Done.” Over African-style rhythms, “Baton” finds a way to make even whistling sound subtle. As suggested in the lyrics of patiently propulsive first single “Line of Fire,” sometimes it’s best to beat a graceful retreat. There’s more than one way to deconstruct the mechanisms of consumer culture.

What exactly makes the Rockies so beautiful, though, is hard to say. The source of Powers’s muse isn’t always apparent even to him, but on Wondrous Bughouse he has a way of channeling it into expansive, magnificently warped dream-pop that can be breathtaking. Chatting on Kurt Cobain’s birthday from Boise, where he’s relaxing before a tour that will take him as far a Brooklyn arena gig opening for the National, Powers discusses the subconscious, the ineffable and, inevitably, Nirvana.

How was it different writing this album knowing people would actually hear it?

As soon as The Year of Hibernation was done and it started getting a little bit of attention, it kind of psyched me out. But as time went on, I just went back to the mentality that I’ve always had ever since I started doing music, just doing it for myself. Once I got back into that mindset it was easy to zone out and create whatever I want to create. As long as I do that then I’m happy.

On the last album, you compared some of the songs to entries in a journal, but on Wondrous Bughouse the song titles have less obvious connection to everyday life. What were some of the inspirations this time around?

Especially lyrically, this record is a lot more across-the-board. It’s mainly idea-based. I oftentimes write in a stream-of-consciousness type of way to start off songs. So a lot of stuff was just coming out of my system. It would be common themes I didn’t know I was dwelling on that much and I’d just go back and shape them.

Mortality seems like one of these themes. But it goes from “you’ll never die” to “here’s to death, drink up.” Is there a thread running through?

It’s always the type of thing where certain songs just play out different ideas. You mentioned some lyrics from “Raspberry Cane.” That’s kind of about, I got obsessed with this idea of just picturing what it would be like to stumble on this being that was by water, and all these crowds, they want this thing to come back to life, but they don’t always know what it is. And it could be something that’s dangerous, it could be something that’s very kind, but just the idea of something dying all the sudden makes it bad. Like, “Oh, this thing shouldn’t have died.” But maybe it should have died, you know? Sometimes death — I don’t know how to phrase it.

Children come up at least a couple of times: “Couldn’t have babies” on “Attic Doctor,” and then on “Daisyphobia,” there’s something about “and children are…”

That’s what I was saying as far as the subconscious stuff. A lot of it I was just writing. With this record I was trying to approach it in a way that’s very free and not agenda-driven, not trying to be like, “OK, here’s an idea that I’m going to write a song about.” It was more like, “OK, let me start writing and see what’s inside of me that wants to come out.”

That’s something Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox has talked about doing. I know you’ve mentioned Deerhunter before. Has that been kind of an inspiration, or what were some of the inspirations musically for the album?

One of my biggest inspirations musically for this record was the band This Heat. Just how at times it’s very, very minimal — it’ll be certain things that just keep going and it’s hypnotizing — and then at times it would be really chaotic. And that sense of freedom in music to where it’s really just letting your — back to subconscious — letting your subconscious guide what you’re doing. Letting the song take you where it wants.

I’ve always been a fan of A.R. Kane and a lot of early, early dream-pop stuff. Just that similar mindset of taking you to a different place. You turn on a record and you’re instantly someplace that’s unfamiliar and at the same time there’s a certain sense of familiarity to it.

The album cover last time came out of a vacation with your family to Hawaii. This time it’s art by a teenage drug-abuse patient in West Germany in the ’70s named Marcia Blaessle. What about the art connected with what you were feeling with the record?

I can’t put my finger on it. I saw it as I was closing the writing process, and I stumbled on this stuff, and there was something about it that really connected to what I was trying to say. I don’t even know what it was. There was just this sort of mental connection where it just felt right. I almost got into panic mode because I tried to track her down, track down the publishing rights, all that kind of stuff. And for a while there was nothing. The publishing company that released the book way back in the day folded, and they passed on the rights to another company. And it got to the point where I was like, “This needs to be the art,” because it was so connected with what I was trying to say. But I don’t know exactly what it is. It kind of just was, you know?

You’re hitting on a theme that I’ve seen in your interviews, that I love and think is interesting to talk about, because it makes sense with your music: You’ve said before maybe you can’t explain too much about the songs. But can you explain a little bit about that, about why sometimes it’s hard for you to put in words too much about your songs, or about the connection between the art and your songs?

I think it’s just because music for me is almost like this bubble that I live in. When I’m writing, I’ll just close myself off. It’s almost like transportive, like taking you to that other place. And when you come back, like say I’m done writing a song and I come back to reality or whatever you want to call it, it’s just hard to explain your visit to that other place when you’re writing it. Do you know what I mean? It really does suck though from my vantage point because then you have people asking questions about your mindset. It just kind of is.

Today’s Kurt Cobain’s birthday. What did he mean to you, if anything?

On Netflix, I found the documentary on the making of Nevermind. I happened to just watch that a couple of days ago. And I was just so, so fascinated with it, because I’ve always loved Nirvana. People like Kurt have left such an impact. It’s funny because, back to the idea of mortality and stuff: Certain people die at a younger age, and for a lot of people it’s really sad, but at the same time he lived so much more than most people do if they grow to be 85 years old. He experienced so much stuff. It’s so beautiful if someone can leave that kind of footprint at such a young age.

Synth-wielding, psychedelic take on punky guitar pop successfully moves beyond lo-fi

Over the last half-decade, we’ve seen a handful of bands emerge that embraced cruddy recording fidelity as an aesthetic choice rather than a limitation. Red-lining distortion and sludgy tape hiss didn’t have to get in the way of the songs; rather, for those who’d absorbed the lessons of the Swell Maps, Flying Nun or early Pavement sides, imperfections could become like instruments — almost as integral as the chords or lyrics. In recent years, though, bands like Times New Viking and Psychedelic Horseshit have inched out of the murk. Eat Skull, another member of that lo-fi noise-rock class, have taken almost four years to follow 2009 sophomore set Wild and Inside, and the Portland-born band has used the time to make the biggest step sideways.

III is still garage pop, and no one will mistake Eat Skull for Phoenix anytime soon, but the album’s synth-wielding, psychedelic turn succeeds at moving beyond shoddy recording quality as end in itself. Taking on space-rock anthems and ramshackle dance-punk with equal aplomb, Eat Skull are still perverse enough to punctuate the grotesque “taxidermy eyes” imagery of “Dead Horses” with a swooning “Crimson and Clover”-style breakdown. A pair of campfire-psych tracks mid-album also pays unexpected dividends. It all coheres in the fuzzy drone of the closing track, which offers a choice — between burning bridges and buying “brand new ones” — that’s really no choice at all. Eat Skull came to a fork in the road, and they took it.

Soft-spoken daydreamers can pump their fists, too

That Lockett Pundt, he’ll sneak up on you. In Deerhunter, frontman Bradford Cox’s outsize personality makes him an easy lightning rod, but Pundt has played a hardly less electrifying role as the band’s guitarist. His first solo album as Lotus Plaza, 2009′s The Floodlight Collective, was woozy, winsome dream-pop that confirmed Pundt’s familiar gifts for ethereal sonic textures but only hinted at his growing strength as a songwriter. This follow-up is strikingly the work of the man who wrote “Desire Lines,” the rousing centerpiece of Deerhunter’s peak so far, 2010′s Halcyon Digest. Crystalline guitar arpeggios meet precise krautrock pulses, time-bending codas – and ear-catching ’60s pop melodies. Wistful stoners’ anthem “Monoliths” distills the album’s shoegaze-informed style most concisely, but equally essential non-album single “Come Back” best previews the mesmerizing yet propulsive live show. Proof soft-spoken daydreamers can pump their fists, too.

File under: Noise-scrawled indie rock with twee-pop vulnerability and beery propulsion

For fans of: Japandroids, Yuck, Youth Lagoon, Wavves, Los Campesinos!, Built To Spill, Dinosaur Jr.

From: Glasgow, Scotland

Personae: Phillip Taylor (vocals/guitar), Josh Swinney (drums), Matthew Scott (bass)

PAWS released an EP early last year that was mastered by Shellac’s Bob Weston, and their scrappily melodic, garage-rock approach wouldn’t have sounded out of place on a vintage episode of MTV’s 120 Minutes. But drummer Josh Swinney quickly rejects the idea the Scottish trio is part of any kind of ’90s revival. “It’s just music that young people are making that’s evolving,” he says. When you consider that similar comparisons have been leveled at some of the acts PAWS have opened for – No Age, Wavves and other bands who’ve been playing since the ’00s – it’s hard not to be receptive to Swinney’s position.

It doesn’t hurt that PAWS’ debut album, Cokefloat!, happens to be an expertly-crafted contribution to Glasgow’s rich indie-rock lineage. Detuned guitars and lacerating feedback might be decades old, but PAWS – like recent European tourmates Japandroids – express their present-day angst with such specific passion that will make even crankiest ’90s-indie-rock curmudgeon feel the urge to pump a PBR-clutching fist.

Before sitting down to a dinner of Thai green curry while on tour in the Netherlands, Swinney talked over the phone with eMusic’s Marc Hogan about unexpected meetings, rock-band skateboarding tricks and the band’s perhaps-surprisingly tangential relationship to ice-cream beverages.

On touring with the Japandroids:

It’s been brilliant. The first gig we played with them was in Switzerland, and it was an absolutely amazing place. And yeah, from then on it’s been really fun. We’ve done two other gigs without them in Europe so far, as well. One in Ghent, in Belgium at the start. And we did one in a gallery in Amsterdam on Saturday night, which was absolutely crazy. It was really good. Everyone was just like moshing – it was mental. It was chaos.

On the other bands they’ve opened for, and fortuitous body art:

We’ve been really lucky to play with loads of different bands that we really like, but I think that one of my favorite bands that we’ve played with was the Babies. The gig they played where I saw them was just amazing. And it was cool playing with Wavves, because I really, really, really loved them before, and then got to actually play with them. And then I found out that the drummer who played with Wavves when we played with them he used to be the drummer for a band called the Mae Shi, and I’ve got a Mae Shi tattoo on my arm. I was like, “Oh my god, you used to be in the Mae Shi!” So I lifted up my arm and showed him. And I had a [Mae Shi song] “Run to Your Grave” tattoo. And he was like, “Oh my god.” He couldn’t believe it. I got that tattoo when I was like 16.

On making the album in a floating recording studio:

We recorded it on a boat that’s mired on the Thames, called the Lightship95, and it’s a recording studio in London. The novelty of being in a studio and being in a boat combined was pretty fun. We had never recorded anything in a studio before so that was really exciting in itself. And then also being on a boat, it was pretty cool. There were times when I was playing the drums and the tide would come in on the Thames, and the boat would start rocking back and forth, so we would record drums while i was rocking.

On the source of the title Cokefloat!:

It’s basically because our friend Jessica [Penfold] did all the artwork for the album, and the comic strip that she drew [for the artwork] was already called Cokefloat!. It just seemed like quite a cool thing to have both these two aspects: music, and a comic strip to look at as well. It’s a nice, succinct, short name; rolls off the tongue…

On the source of the name PAWS:

What happened, basically, is that we were thinking we wanted our band name to do with some sort of creature of something. We were thinking a big Canadian creature, something scary. But then we just somehow stumbled on PAWS. I don’t know why, but it seems to have worked so far.

On cats, which appear often on the band’s Tumblr and on one of its T-shirts:

Philip really likes cats. And I really like cats. But we’re not weird about it or anything like that. I just think they’re cute.

On skateboarding, another theme of the band Tumblr:

Phillip skateboards, not me – I wish I did! The other day, on the first day of tour, he ollied over Brian [King] of Japandroids, who was lying on the ground. We got a video of that, so it should be pretty funny.

On the stories behind the lyrics, described by Phillip as “pretty much a documentation of the past two years”:

It’s just things that have affected him [Phillip], things that he had fun doing or things that made him sad over the course of a period of time, and he just vocalizes it. It’s a good way of expressing your feelings, I guess.

On PAWS’ other influences:

Lots of different things. Kind of a Death Cab [for Cutie] influence, I’d say. I find them to be quite influential. Nirvana, I like. I take a lot from that drumming style, for me personally, just hitting the drum as hard as you possibly can at all times. We all like loads of different stuff. I like old hardcore and stuff like that, and Matt likes lots of country.

Punchdrunk noise-pop shout-alongs with disarming vulnerability

“She wasn’t only just my mother,” Phillip Taylor slurs over rickety, distorted guitar in the opening seconds of PAWS’ Cokefloat!, continuing, “She was my friend, a good friend.” As an introduction to the Glasgow trio’s rowdily impressive debut album, it could hardly be more fitting, showing off both the band’s throwback slacker-rock style and Taylor’s blunt, decidedly un-macho lyrics. But on this 13-track, 42-minute set, what separates PAWS from so many other garage-bound pop-punks printing out Pavement and Sonic Youth guitar tabs is how expertly – and emotively – they assail a relatively wide range of song types. “Sore Tummy” and “Miss American Bookworm” put bubblegum melodies beneath heavily scuzzed noise-pop and throat-rending screams, like early Foo Fighters but more awkward and relatable. While “Get Bent” comes across as a post-Girls acoustic kiss-off to a distant father, the stylishly chiming “Pony” steps back to critique parent-funded underground scenesters. Best of all is mid-tempo anthem “Homecoming,” which begins as a bully-baiting comeuppance but morphs into a self-actualizing mission statement recalling recent European tour-mates Japandroids: “Thanks for the punches of encouragement/ I’ve turned my world into sing-alongs.” Shout-alongs, even – punchdrunk and easy to love.

Jens Lekman is not the man he used to be. After three albums of charming, sample-happy semi-pop, culminating in 2007′s brilliantly overstuffed Night Falls Over Kortedela, the Swedish singer-songwriter-producer decamped to Australia, where he proceeded to fall in love. On heartbroken 2010 mini-masterpiece Love and Its Opposite, former Marine Girls/Everything But the Girl singer Tracey Thorn addressed him directly, warning, “Oh Jens…love ends just as easy as it’s begun.”

Unbeknownst to Thorn, a harsh breakup was already teaching Lekman this lesson for himself. That’s the main theme of his richly expressive new album I Know What Love Isn’t, which turns Lekman’s keen storyteller’s eye and casual urbanity toward a more minimal instrumental arsenal, in a form of musical process of elimination. Chatting from his hometown of Gothenburg, after running around to pick up equipment for a backyard show with California electro-R&B singer Nite Jewel, Lekman remains as friendly, witty and observant as ever: a romantic still, hoping against hopelessness.

How long have you been back in Gothenburg, and what’s your view on what’s happening there musically these days? A few years ago there was you, the Knife, the Tough Alliance, Air France, the Embassy…

I’ve been back since New Year’s Eve 2010. It’s great. I just came back because I couldn’t really finish the record in Australia. Things just got really complicated with the visa issue. I left just to finish the record, basically. It’s nice here. I like being able to know that I don’t have to call my friends when I’m going out, I can just go to the local bar or café and they’ll be there.

I’m not sure about the music scene anymore. It doesn’t feel like there’s anything that exciting happening right now…I mean, I worry sometimes, is it just me getting older and nostalgic for what’s happened in the past? There’s a lot of young bands, but it feels like they’re playing in a tradition, rather than creating something of their own tradition.

They’re taking heroes instead of taking inspiration.

Exactly, yes! Which is not necessarily a bad thing. I think music scenes need to go up and down a little bit.

You mentioned getting older. Did you feel pressure being a few years older, and perhaps not being able to access the same “lens” that Tracey mentioned?

The transition was something that I didn’t notice myself, and it was something that created a bit of a problem. And that was interesting, too, with Tracey singing to me. It felt kind of weird at first, because I was going through those transitions at the time and she was singing to a past me, someone who I used to be. And I wasn’t really sure how to relate to that. I’m really glad I took five years to finish this album because otherwise — it just had to take five years, basically. I had to get a little bit older to be able to do the record.

Were there any follow-up records you looked to that other artists had done at similar points in their careers?

The two records that came to mind — they’re records that I’ve always loved — were, first, Behaviour by Pet Shop Boys, when they went from this very hit-based, fun pop music to a more serious thing. I’ve always loved how that record just feels like a real album. And also for some reason I was thinking about Simple Pleasure by Tindersticks. Just the way they went from this very lush, orchestral music to something that was more stripped down and more jazzy and soulful somehow.

How did you come up with the idea of changing to a more stripped-down instrumental palette?

I had a conversation with Joel [Karlsson] from Air France, some time ago. We had both worked with so many different sounds, and at some point we started thinking, “Are we supposed to make a pan flute album now? Is that the next thing?” Because in the first 10 years of the new millennium, all these old instruments started coming back. There was ukulele, and then there was the thumb piano, double drummer, and it just kept going like that. It felt like a pattern after a while. We looked at each other and we were just going, “No, we don’t want to make a pan flute album. We’ll find another way.” For me the most natural way to evolve was to subtract rather than to add, and just to work with what I had, basically. But less.

The whole world is in a phase of cutting back in the past few years. Is that something you had in mind, or was it just more personal?

It was just more personal, but I’m sure the whole world was feeling a hangover from the massive flood of different sounds and instruments that those first 10 years spat out. A reason why the music was so colorful and full of so many sounds back then was because all of the sudden everyone had access to the whole music history at the same time, and everyone just went bananas. The Avalanches’ record Since I Left You was what started it, basically.

I should talk to you about some of the songs a little bit, too. One that I really like is “The World Moves On.” In a weird way, it reminds me of Kortedala‘s “Your Arms Around Me,” with these funny little details, but instead of an avocado there are frozen peas — and then it goes off in a whole different direction.

Well, that’s a good example of the way I wrote the songs for the new record. That song started as an attempt to move away from the breakup story and to write in a new way. And I just felt, “Write down the first image that comes to mind.” And the first image was me, lying on the floor, hugging a bag of frozen peas. And I thought, “That’s a great image. Why am I hugging a bag of frozen peas?” That was because it was during the heatwave in February 2009 when it was like 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit]. And then that image led to me the Black Saturday bushfires, and my birthday happening at the same time, and all these images just started flooding in. And I was writing like Joan Didion said, just to write to find out what I’m thinking about, and eventually it started leading me back to the breakup. And that’s how basically every song on the record happened.

So let’s talk about the records you picked from the eMusic archives. You gave us four…

The Twerps, Twerps

I must have seen like a hundred shows with the Twerps. They just grew to be one of those bands that really was the soundtrack for the time I lived in Melbourne.

Peter Gordon & the Love of Life Orchestra, The Love of Life Orchestra

I just got that the other week from someone. He played with Arthur Russell. It has that disco feeling, but it’s still kind of abstract and jazzy in a way.

Ace of Base, Happy Nation

I remember being in fourth grade and someone had that record on tape, and we played it in class while we were working on some project. It was a girl who played it, and I remember all the guys went, “Ugh, why do we have to listen to this? Why can’t we put on some hip-hop or some heavy metal?” And I remember my best friend turning to me and going, “Actually, isn’t this the most beautiful thing you’ve ever heard? Her voice, isn’t that the most beautiful voice ever?” And I was like, “Yeah, yeah, it is, but don’t tell anyone.”

Marine Girls, Lazy Ways/Beach Party

I love the Marine Girls. The one thing that was funniest with Tracey Thorn singing that song for me was that she sang to me as if, you know, me being a young foolish romantic. And I got that from her! I got that from listening to Marine Girls back when I was a teenager. So I just thought I’d pick that as a little link to my teenage years, I guess.

I love Tracey’s recent solo albums, especially the one that she mentions you on. The sound of it reminded me of your new album, too.

I feel like we almost made the same record. This didn’t hit me until I finished the record, but it feels like we did the same record but from different points in life. Even the title is very similar [Love and Its Opposite vs. I Know What Love Isn't]. I didn’t think of that either, but It’s kind of fascinating. I’m hoping that we get to continue this correspondence through songs. I don’t think she will reply to me on her next album.

But they’re both really depressing albums, Jens. How are you doing? Are you doing OK?

Yeah, I’m doing great.

OK, good. I listen to these and I just go — is it “The World Moves On,” where she’s saying you’re a friend, and you’re like, how could you say you’re a friend, “…but I never said any of that”? And it’s just, like, ugh. Every time, it’s just crushing. I’ve got a little baby now, so I’ll be playing it, and I’ll be like, “Should I really expose my child to this kind of melancholy? Is this going to be a bad influence on him?”

Not yet, not yet. When the kid gets older, maybe.

Rich and emotionally bleak

On I Know What Love Isn’t, the Swedish singer-songwriter-producer pares back his musical template to suit a muted and downcast reflection on a breakup. Taking as influences such masterpieces of restraint as Pet Shop Boys’ subtly breathtaking Behaviour and Tindersticks’ soulfully stripped-down Simple Pleasure, Lekman retreats from the Avalanches-style excess of 2007′s brilliant Night Falls Over Kortedela and achieves something still richer, if also more emotionally bleak.

Past fans will find the easiest connection with the bouncy, string-flourishing piano-pop of election reminiscence “The End of the World Is Bigger Than Love” or the sham-marriage-proposing title track. But Lekman’s endearing wittiness shades toward hard-earned wisdom here, from the jazzy, Sinatra-referencing “Erica America” and exquisitely drip-dropping sax ballad “She Just Don’t Want to Be With You Anymore” to the two album book-ending tracks both titled “Every Little Hair Knows Your Name.” If there’s a unifying conceit, it’s what Lekman sings on tenderly poignant standout “The World Moves On”: “You don’t get over a broken heart/ You just learn to carry it gracefully.” No silver linings, just magnificent purple clouds.

An alluring stroll along the blurry line between hooks and incantations

Kristina “Teeny” Lieberson used to play keyboard for Brooklyn indie rockers Here We Go Magic, and while her own dreamy electro-psych sister act relies on slightly different ingredients, the results can be similarly spellbinding. TEEN’s 2011 digital-only EP Little Doods leaned toward narcotic lo-fi jangle that recalled Mazzy Star. Mixed and produced by Spacemen 3′s Sonic Boom, and engineered by Here We Go Magic’s Jen Turner, full-length debut In Limbo is a brainy, immersive and often-intriguing blend of pulsing krautrock drone and bouncy Phil Spector harmonies. The 11-track set has its share of reverby retro-pop gems, whether confidently thrumming “Better,” lovesick space-prom waltz “Charlie” or insistent, surf-flecked “Electric.” Elsewhere, on tracks like free-flowing synth workout “Unable” or crunching, Beta Band-skewed “Why Why Why,” TEEN sprawls out to suit the youth-appropriate album title. Either way, In Limbo is an alluring, sometimes-enchanting stroll along the blurry line between hooks and incantations.

A delightfully perverse DIY synth-pop compilation that reaches the heights of his previous LPs

The idea of a John Maus obscurities compilation is deliciously absurd on multiple levels: As a former Ariel Pink and Panda Bear sideman whose biggest release to date was named after an arcane philosophical precept, the Minnesota-born synth-pop auteur is plenty obscure by most standards. And after a controversial interview last year where Maus blasted the commodification of culture and expressed discomfort with even selling his own merch, this compilation’s blatantly literal title is at once self-evidently true and ridiculously droll. The 16-track, 45-minute set itself is no less perverse, but at its best it’s as rewarding as any of Maus’s previous full-lengths.

Although the material unearthed here spans from 1999-2010, the remixed and remastered results are remarkable in part for their cohesiveness. Whether Maus is booming that he loves “those fucking eyes” on 2007′s stalker-ish “Bennington” or Jan Hammer-riffing his way through a Drive-like urban night on 2008′s “No Title (Molly),” the initial highlights here are true to Maus’s homemade goth-pop form. A couple of oddities, such as 2003′s guitar-stabbed “Lost,” are for true completists only. But as with his previous album’s “Believer,” Maus saves the best for last, closing on a gorgeously emotive, Flashdance-gone-Balearic ballad — titled “I Don’t Eat Human Beings.” Of course.

A triumphant post-punk debut with scrappy muscles and brittle bones

On their self-titled debut album, the brooding Swedish hooligans spray-tag late-’70s post-punk turf that’s unavoidably near the bloodied stage-diving grounds of similarly astounding Danish brutes Iceage. As previewed, though, by lead single “ABC City,” a ferocious rebel yell from a drab Stockholm housing project, Holograms has the worn-out synth wobble, scrappy gang-vocal hooks and brusquely sloganeering youth-without-youth perspective to set it apart — both from summer-of-’78 retro pastiche and the group’s contemporaries over in Copenhagen. It’s a triumphant record with scrappy muscles and brittle bones.

Within this rickety garage-punk milieu, each of the set’s 12 tracks is impressively distinct. Vocal duties on the album are split between the bark of bassist Andreas Lagerström and the higher-pitched shouts of guitarist Anton Spetze, which helps keeps the listener on their toes. Slow-building opener “Monoliths” borrows a bit of Joy Division’s gloom to set the album’s seductively menacing tone, but that’s followed by the itchy indie-dance of “Chasing My Mind,” which evokes Los Campesinos! and Love Is All. Angst-ridden “Fever” breaks into a towering early-Weezer coda. The art-punk squall “Memories of Sweat” interrupts its chorus with percussive bursts. Soaring last stand “You Are Ancient (Sweden’s Pride)” is a sly, “Born in the USA”-like anti-fascist anthem. With all these tricks in their arsenal and an infectious sense of enthusiasm to animate them, Holograms is anything but one-dimensional.

File under: Dub-inflected psychedelic pop with beatific vocals and intricate, expansive grooves

For fans of: Air, High Places, Sun Araw, Ducktails, Studio, Lindstr_m, Lee "Scratch" Perry, Can

From: Los Angeles

Personae: Indra Dunis (synths, piano, bass lines, vocals) and Aaron Coyes (synths, guitar, bass, drum programming, noises)

Indra Dunis and Aaron Coyes, the married duo behind Peaking Lights, say they plan to get “2011 tattoos.” 2011 was the year they moved from Wisconsin, where she grew up, back to California, where he did, and where, up the coast in the San Francisco Bay Area, the two originally met. It’s also the year Dunis and Coyes released Peaking Lights’ breakout album, 936, welcomed their son, Mikko, into the world, and started recording their nocturnally-themed follow-up, Lucifer.

Though the title’s devilish connotations might seem out of character for a couple of new parents, Dunis and Coyes explain that the word’s original Latin meaning refers to Venus: literally, “the Morning Star.” Appropriately, Lucifer maintains the mesmerizing pull and finely tuned sonic detail of Peaking Lights’ earlier work. The recording quality, however — with engineering by Al Carlson (Light Asylum, Oneohtrix Point Never, Lady Gaga) — is their most sparkling yet, and the lyrics, written by both group members, embrace the types of new beginnings that have characterized their lives together the past dozen or so months.

eMusic’s Marc Hogan, himself a proud recent father, caught up with Dunis and Coyes via Skype a few days into their European tour, just minutes after they had arrived at a friend’s house in London. Occasionally finishing each others’ thoughts in that way longtime couples often do, Peaking Lights discussed Mikko’s musical tastes, how parenthood affected Lucifer, and the importance of a good vibe.

On what it’s like taking an infant on tour:

Indra Dunis: We’ve actually gotten really lucky in that so far, two of the three shows have been in places that have playgrounds. InParis, the festival was in a big park, so there was this incredible kids’ playground there. And then yesterday inGhent [Belgium] it was an outdoor theater and they had a playground next door, so it was a lot of fun for him. Our tours end up being half tour of parks and half playing shows at night.

On their son’s musical tastes:

Aaron Coyes: He’s really into [disco-funk artist Hamilton] Bohannon. We just made a mixtape of his stuff. He really liked Bohannon.

Dunis: He likes New Order. He likes stuff with a good beat and a good bass line. But sort of a specific kind of beat, more of a disco, techno kind of beat.

Coyes: Kind of, but he also likes throbby bass dub stuff. And he likes some doo wop, or really sweet soul songs. But he’s not really a fan of more like horn, funk — I don’t know how to describe it.

Dunis: It’s funny. He’s really specific. He doesn’t seem to like indie rock all that much. He likes dance-oriented stuff mostly. I think he likes the Beach Boys — well, I don’t know if he likes the Beach Boys anymore. He liked them when he was really little.

Coyes: He used to sleep to Pet Sounds.

On how having a baby influenced Lucifer:

Coyes: We started writing it when he was still in utero, and we recorded it when he was 6 months old.

Dunis: He’s been with us the whole time, so he’s always been a big part of the process. Definitely a big inspiration for us. Having a child, as you know now, totally changes your life and just really opens your mind to some bigger things.

On recording Lucifer in New York:

Coyes: I thinkNew York is more hectic when you don’t live there or something. When we were living there we got into our routine pretty quick.

Dunis: It felt like an inspiring place to create. We had a good setup. We subletted an apartment in Greenpoint. We could walk to the studio every day, and we brought a nanny with us, so we had Mikko and she took care of him during the day. There was a lounge in the studio so they would hang out there a lot and we were able to see Mikko throughout the day. So it worked out really well. We wrote a lot of the album in the studio because it was an opportunity for us to try to spend time together and be creative. At home, as you know, it was a little more difficult, with a baby!

On making the leap to Mexican Summer (home to Best Coast, Washed Out, Real Estate, Marissa Nadler, the Tallest Man on Earth):

Coyes: After we wrote 936 and people started saying, “Hey, what’s your guys’ deal?” we just took our time, you know? We took our time meeting people and we liked them. A lot of it for us is about vibe, you know, and how we get on with people. Their vibe was awesome.

Dunis: We really liked them. That was the main reason. Their label is cool, too, so we felt like it would be a good match. But we definitely went by vibe.

Coyes: I would say it was like 98 percent vibe.

More defiantly and brilliantly California than its predecessor

They can’t all be California Gurls, but Bethany Cosentino has embodied the role as proudly as anyone this side of Katy Perry. Following a stint in New York, the Los Angeles native’s debut album with multi-instrumentalist Bobb Bruno as Best Coast, 2010′s Crazy for You, poured reverb on the Byrds’ guitar jangle, the early Beach Boys’ lovesickness, and ’90s-indie-rock’s frankness, resulting in dispensary-grade West Coast pop. The duo’s equally brilliant follow-up, The Only Place, lies back on the same beach blanket, but moves to vastly more inclusive shores.

Quintessential L.A. musician-about-town Jon Brion imbues Best Coast’s former fuzz with Fleetwood Mac’s crystalline sheen, though the celebrated film composer’s touch is lighter here than on his productions for Fiona Apple and Kanye West. The album is very nearly bookended by Southern California odes, from the boppy, babes/waves title track, which convincingly buys its own La La Land postcard, to penultimate charmer “Let’s Go Home,” which alludes to not one but two Beach Boys oldies. Even a seeming outlier like crunching waltz-time working-musician lament “Last Year,” with its barroom la-de-da outro, makes sense when you remember Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” was an L.A. song, too.

Brion’s clean production allows Cosentino’s blunt, forceful voice to shine, and it’s increasingly becoming an instrument that recalls Neko Case or newcomer Lydia Loveless. The Internet’s most notorious cat lady advances her anxieties, too, but can’t shake them, and she masterfully links her Urban Outfitters-people problems to more relatable romantic angst (“Why I Cry,” “How They Want Me to Be”). A “Valley Girl Patsy Cline,” in one outlet’s enviably perfect words, Cosentino can be old-fashioned about her heartache (“No One Like You”), but she rarely describes boys in terms she wouldn’t also use for her hometown. Fittingly, then, the album’s peak, the Phil Spector-lavish finale “Up All Night,” is about two people divided by geography. If Cosentino ever moves back east again, Best Coast’s next album could be one hell of a break-up record.

Like a Lord of the Flies where all the kids are bespectacled vegans

“This is a declaration of independence,” Duncan Barrett whoops, with audible glee, near the start of this U.K. guitar-pop group’s superbly crafted debut album. It’s a mission statement for Isle of Dogs, which plays like a Lord of the Flies where all the kids are bespectacled vegans and therefore nobody wants to kill the pig. Though one of them is getting into leather, so naturally everything turns into a big, colorful, nervous-energy dance party. Like early Los Campesinos! records, Tigercats’ songs foreground their warts and awkwardness as a way of conquering them, if only for a Saturday night.

The five-piece’s devoted music fandom spills over into its song titles, from one-hit-wonders ode “Vapours” to Pavement-rangey “Kim & Thurston.” But the most immediate tracks here bypass clever references for bouncy Orange Juice-style dance-pop, with boy-girl vocals, bustling percussion and an endearing sense of wonder. “We’re gonna get bigger than the national debt,” Barrett yelps, like fellow Hefner fanatics Art Brut vowing to “write a song as universal as happy birthday,” on second-to-last track “Banned at the Troxy.” They won’t, of course — that refusal to compromise is part of their appeal — but keyboardist Laura’s lead vocal turn on finale “Jonny” is a fittingly sweet consolation. Along with recent tourmates Allo Darlin’, Tigercats are continuing to find a place for heart-on-sleeve indie pop that defies shifting fashions.

A week before Blondes left Brooklyn for a new European club tour, eMusic gave Haar and Steinman $50 credit to spend in our store. Here, they talk with Marc Hogan about what they bought.

Marcel Dettmann, Conducted

Zach Steinman: The first one that we bought was a Marcel Dettmann compilation called Conducted, which had a few tracks we already knew, and we were feeling the vibe of the tracks.

Sam Haar: It’s pretty deep and atmospheric techno. Some of this stuff we did on a FACT mix recently. This guy VRIL, we’ve been really feeling recently.

Steinman: It’s got a [track] from Sandwell District, Silent Servant.

Haar: It’s a good mix, you know? A good DJ mix.

Steinman: I was listening to it today. It wasn’t everything that I hoped for, but there were a few other good tracks that I didn’t know.

Casrten Jost, A Certain Kind

Steinman: Because we like Carsten Jost?

Haar: Yeah, we do like Carsten Jost! We like Dial Records and wanted to check that one out.

Steinman: We’ve been feeling some of his other tracks a lot recently and really like his record label.

Haar: Deep house.

Kassem Mosse, Enoha

Haar: He recently came out with these 12″s on Workshop – one this year and one a few years ago, that we’ve been listening to a lot.

Steinman: Yeah, basically we were just really feeling his Workshop stuff and never heard this release. I think that’ll be our running theme!

John Talabot, Fin

Haar: Hadn’t actually heard it yet. We’ve worked with him before, we did a remix of his, and wanted to get this record.

How did you guys get synced up with John Talabot in the first place?

Steinman: Our friend Dean sent him our first EP, I think, and then John contacted us about a remix.

Haar: [We have a] similar Balearic sort of sensibility.

Mario Diaz De Leon, Hypnos

Haar: A friend of ours just put it out on this record label called Shinkoyo. It’s really cool. It’s pretty wacky. It’s like kind of emotional, metal-inspired electronic music. It’s very – it’s called Hypnos so as you might think it’s pretty hypnotic. There’s all these synth arpeggios going into deep space but it’s kind of got this slow, metal sensibility.

Basic Soul Unit, Tuff Love EP

Steinman: [After reading the title] He bought this one!

Haar: He makes cool house music. I have one track of his that I’ve been DJing, and I just wanted to buy some more.

Theo Parrish, Parallel Dimensions

Haar: I’ve heard tracks from the album, but I hadn’t actually got it, or anything. It’s one of the few full albums that you can actually find. He doesn’t have many full albums.

So when you guys DJ, is it vinyl, or do you do mp3s and stuff, too?

Steinman: Digital.

Haar: I mean, vinyl would be cool, I guess, but we’re not DJs first and foremost.

Steinman: Actually when we’re DJing we’re so happy to not be lugging our gear around. So I don’t know if I would actually want to be lugging around vinyl.

Isao Tomita, Tomita’s Greatest Hits

Haar: He’s a Japanese sort of new age-y synthesizer composer that we hadn’t heard before.

Steinman: We were doing an interview with Lindstrøm, and he was talking about the Rene Hell remix of our track “Amber,” and he was like, “I think you guys should really get into Isao Tomita – check it out.”

Haar: And that was right when this feature was happening, so we were like, “Let’s buy one!”

Steinman: So we bought it!

Haar: There’s a cover of the main theme from Star Wars. What’s that called? I don’t exactly know what that track is called. [Hums theme]

What are your thoughts on new age? There’s that blurry line between some of the more ambient, psychedelic electronic music and then new age.

Haar: I love new age. I even like that it’s called new age. It really depends on the music. I think the majority of new age is probably pretty terrible, like any genre, but people can do good things with it.

Steinman: There are definitely pioneers of the form.

Haar: There’s also a lot of cheesy crap. There’s definitely a lot of crap. But there’s definitely people who consider themselves new age who make good stuff.

Steinman: But then it also goes to like, spa music.

Haar: Speaking of ambient, sort of weird sounds, not new age really music though…

Chris Watson and BJ Nilsen, Storm

Haar: It’s on Touch Records. It’s all field recordings of animals spliced together into a sort of listening art.

Steinman: Manic white noise.

Haar: I really like that label.

How did you get into Touch? I know you studied electro-acoustic music in college – was that where you got into them?

Haar: Well, I definitely listened to Touch in school. But I actually saw Chris Watson at this really cool place in San Francisco called the Recombinant Media Labs. It was this weird, super fun place, they had all these surround sound speakers, you could just go and sit and lay there for two hours. That’s where I really got into him. He had some older records that I really enjoy, too, like this album called Outside the Circle of Fire – it’s a really weird record. He’d hide in bushes and record animals from like a mile away so they didn’t know he was there. He got, like, cheetahs sleeping. It was pretty weird. But it actually just sounds like crazy electronic music.

Vladislav Delay, vantaa

Steinman: Longtime fans! First-time listeners. Wanted to check it out.

Haar: Hadn’t heard this one yet.

Do you remember when you first started listening to Vladislav Delay?

Haar: A few years ago. What was that album? It was really good. When I got into Vladislav Delay first, it was Whistleblower. It came out in 2007. He’s really prolific, though, he comes out with all this music.

Unfathomable personal darkness purged through industrial blight

White-knuckled brooding, it turns out, is a many-splendored thing, as the Twilight Sad fortuitously discovers on its triumphantly depressive third album. The gloomy Glasgownoise-rockers’ 2007 debut, Fourteen Autumns and Fifteen Winters, introduced a cathartic, tempestuous band in the tradition of other downcast Scottish racket-makers like Mogwai or Arab Strap. 2009 sophomore outing Forget the Night Ahead, meanwhile, did away with the arena-ready choruses and dialed up the churning My Bloody Valentine, Sonic Youth guitar tempests, intensifying the guilt-wracked emotional purge but doing away with easy entry points. From there, it wouldn’t have been unreasonable to predict a career of diminishing returns. Or else implosion.

The latter, in a sense, is what happens on No One Can Ever Know, and it’s a brutally gripping thing to behold. Working with famed U.K. producer-remixer Andy Weatherall, who’s credited as having “anti-produced” the album, lead moaner James Graham and the lads delve deeper into the recesses of their own unfathomable personal darkness, and emerge with a compelling new sound salvaged from the scrap metal of a previous recession’s industrial blight. Mechanical beats and icy synths spar with stormy guitar and Graham’s ever-richer Scottish burr in a jagged, lonesome space that updates the band’s forebears in foreboding. See the Radiohead-haunted guitar of advance single “Sick,” the Depeche Mode bass line of “Another Bed,” or the hammering Krautrock throb of “Dead City.” Setting it all apart are Graham’s obliquely harrowing vocals, which end the album almost a cappella, the scent of blood in the air.

London dream-poppers evoke a mood that's miles away from their name

Brooding dream-pop goes through an East London fog on Trailer Trash Tracys’ full-length debut. Equally indebted to the fuzzy girl-group romance of Jesus & Mary Chain and the narcotic sexuality of David Lynch, Ester sounds like a lot of the gothy guitar-pop coming out of California these days, though it’s less direct than Dum Dum Girls, less tempestuous than Tamaryn, and less earthy than Warpaint. Debut 7″ sides “Candy Girl” and “You Wish You Were Red,” presented here in punchier form, are still the most immediate showcases for Trailer Trash Tracys’ fractured guitars, rattling bass lines and tinny drumbeats, all set beneath Suzanne Astoria’s distant vocals. Other tracks are more expansive. The stately electro-minimalism of “Dies in 55″ helps explain why the group once toured with the xx. On two songs, finger-tapped guitar bridges the gulf between Eddie Van Halen and Bradford Cox (someone should tell Marnie Stern a collaboration is in order). Not a mobile home in sight.

Style-conscious Brooklyn psych-pop trio makes good on its early promise

This is where Keepaway prove they’re not playing. Over the course of a couple EPs and a Das Racist collaboration or two, the Brooklyn trio established themselves as one of the more endearing of the many psych-tinged electronic-pop bands floating somewhere between Animal Collective’s tropical squawks and MGMT’s aggressive fluorescence. This 10-song, 37-minute debut doesn’t quite have the sharply-honed songwriting to improve on those influences, but it does make good on the promise of 2010 standout “Yellow Wings,” adding a few new textures as it sets up Keepaway as worthy of sharing a bill with Passion Pit, Yeasayer or Hooray for Earth. Or, to an extent, even L.A. beatmakers like Flying Lotus and Matthewdavid.

The official video for first track “Cake” shows Keepaway in three-part split-screen, goofing around in front of a tree. Sounds about right. Avoiding a single focal point, Mike Burakoff (samplers), Frank Lyon (drums) and Nick Nauman (guitar) all share vocal duties, and while there’s definitely a sylvan quality to Black Flutes‘ hollow beats and campfire harmonies, these are no stone-faced shamans. “Hologram” ventures into grinding-ready dubstep bass wobble; synthy, Afropop-nodding reverie “Bomb Track” ends with what appears to be assurance that women can’t measure men’s size as well as they think; and the chorus that’s most like one from Passion Pit’s Manners, on the otherwise FlyLo-warped “Vital,” includes the wildly apropos line, “I forget my manners.”

Released on Das Racist wise guy Himanshu Suri’s own Greedhead label, Black Flute is serious fun, and a big step up from a band clearly immersed in recent underground sounds — which, let’s face it, aren’t so far off anymore from going flat-out pop. Artsy collegiate slackers need their party music, too.

Always an old soul, Marling now belongs to the ages

Four years ago, Laura Marling sang on the brutally twee debut album by London folk-pop outfit Noah and the Whale, but she left before they got popular. Smart move. On her own, the English singer-songwriter won a Brit Award and scored two nods for the prestigious Mercury Music Prize, all before age 21. Her third album is more guarded than its predecessors, but also more mature, and all the better for it. The ingenuous directness of songs like early track “New Romantic” is missed, but Marling makes up for it with brambly wisdom. Backed by a broader instrumental palette, Marling inhabits her folk-rock influences (Blue-era Joni Mitchell, early Leonard Cohen, acoustic Led Zeppelin) so fully she could be their contemporary. On “My Friends,” which distinctly resembles José González’s sinuous 2006 cover of the Knife’s “Heartbeats,” she actually sort of is. Always an old soul, Marling now belongs to the ages.

Updating gothic '80s synth-pop for an alternate universe

If Ariel Pink was the godfather of chillwave, his CalArts pal John Maus must be its eccentric uncle. Only instead of, say, scratch-building model trains, this scholarly small-town Minnesotan updates gothic ’80s synth-pop for an alternate universe where Ultravox outsold Michael Jackson. With booming vocals, exaggeratedly artificial shimmer, and medieval melodic touches, Maus’s first widely distributed album packs enough deranged karaoke fodder to render its world hyper-real. His cold-blooded delivery (“Quantum Leap,” “Cop Killer”) makes it hard to tell whether this should be terrifying or hilarious. On gorgeously uplifting finale “Believer,” it’s simply inspiring.

Painting with a brand-new set of Crayolas

In the video for “Altos Lugares,” the spellbinding capper to High Places’ brave and bewitching third album, these eMusic Selects alums look like they’re fading away into the landscape. Which, if intentional, is a fantastic preview of Original Colors. The Los Angeles-via-Brooklyn duo of Michigan-reared bassoonist Mary Pearson and former Philly hardcore kid Rob Barber threw expectations out the window with 2010′s High Places vs. Mankind, which veered from the homespun found-sound patchworks, wispy schoolyard melodies and positive global vibes of their early records toward a moodier, more guitar-driven style. With Original Colors, they use that newfound freedom to dissolve their old selves even further. The result is an enigmatic but beguiling electronic swirl that floats Pearson’s lilting nature imagery amid Barker’s clubbiest home-studio beats yet. As aspects of High Places’ initial sound have bubbled up in the winsome indie-pop collages of Cults, the bold uke-nanny intimacy of tUnE-yArDs and the warped, disorienting wobble of Purity Ring, the O.G.s are painting with a brand-new set of Crayolas.