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Future Islands, On the Water

2011 | Label: Thrill Jockey

Future Islands make break-up records, but not the kind you associate with curling up in bed and crying in your beer. The times you just want nothing else than to howl at the moon? On the Water has got your back there. On their second LP, the Baltimore-based Wham City vets up the drama, softening — but not shedding — their rep as synth-toting live berserkers. Sam Herring’s vocals are still an acquired taste, inflating and braying like a bagpipe, but dispersed through On The Water are quietly resonant anthems… more »

Mates of State, Mountaintops

2011 | Label: Barsuk Records

Husband-and-wife indie-pop outfit Mates of State have come far from the barebones organ-and-drums duo they started as in the late ’90s. Where Kori Gardner and Jason Hammel’s vocals used to be urgent and detached, they’re now smoother and more relaxed; they’ve also expanded their records’ instrumentation with strings, horns and a wider variety of electronics and keyboards, and dropped the signature electric organ that drove their first few releases. It’s been a natural progression — 2008′s Re-arrange Us was a collection of sugary pop songs that found the pair at… more »

Deastro, Keeper’s

Label: eMusic Selects

The 22-year-old Randolph Chabot is Deastro, a one-man machine synthesizing Death Cab for Cutie, M83, LCD Soundsystem and other future-rock practitioners into a glitzy world overflowing with regret. Keeper's 'ten songs are culled from demos and home recordings Chabot pieced together in his parents 'basement, a land decidedly far from the dance floors and neon-lit city streets of his music, a place where his bald yearning and incredible talents find no boundaries, a place where he still lives. Like any dreamer, Chabot's imagined world is infinitely better than the… more »

Closer Musik, After Love

2002 | Label: Kompakt

The duo of Germany's Dirk Leyers and Chile's Matias Aguayo, Closer Musik only lasted for two singles and one album, but the latter is rightly regarded as one of Kompakt's shining moments. There's never been anything else quite like it on the label, or anywhere else for that matter: spindly synthesizer melodies twine like plastic ivy around economical drum-machine rhythms that are as dry-as-a-bone as they are bare-boned. Equally informed by early electro-funk and vintage Detroit techno, the album feels like the only vestige of an alternate future that never… more »