Cold Cave: Love Comes Close (Heartworm Press)
Over the last year, Cold Cave — led by Philly-based poet Wesley Eisold — have been quietly releasing 7″ and 12″ singles that take early goth aethetics, New Order and the Jesus & Mary Chain and throw them into a dirty synth pop blender. These have been weird, dark records that somehow manage to make electronically-produced “pop” with the sinister aura of the most dastardly garage rocks. In the process, they’ve stumbled onto a style that’s pretty unique, making music that pops and fizzes almost like shoegaze, but with Eisold’s dark lyrics hiding inside. Love Comes Close takes the baby steps of those singles and puts the Cold Cave ethos where you’d least suspect it to work — in the album format. But work it does, and the group’s debut hangs together like Yaz’s Upstairs At Eric’s or even, dare we say, the first few Depeche Mode albums, rewritten for a crashed-out world almost no one has dreamed of since.

Brown Recluse: Sings The Soft Skin EP (Slumberland)
The forthcoming four-songer by Philly’s Brown Recluse — it’s our belief that they’re dropping the “Sings” from their name — is already getting love all over the place, and it’s with good reason: At just four songs, it’s a pretty succinct statement of what the band is trying to do. What are they trying to do? Best we can tell, they’re trying to make twee/indie-pop grow up in the same way that Camera Obscura (and, on a grander scale, Belle & Sebastian) have tried (and succeeded) at doing. Does it work? Yeah, and better than you’d think. Containing “Night Train,” one of their best tunes to date, Sings The Soft Skin closes out with “Contour And Context,” which also shows the band growing straight across its Glasgow influences, from B&S to Teenage Fanclub (who, okay, yes, still have a lot in common with one another). But the EP does what great EPs are intended to do: signal growth, whet the whistle, and prepare, as much as it can, the band’s breakout moment.

A Sunny Day In Glasgow: Ashes Grammar (Misojos Discos)
When we last checked in with Ben Daniels of A Sunny Day In Glasgow, he was knee deep in transforming what began as a bedroom project into real, live band. Ashes Grammar is the result of that, and it doesn’t skimp on either; the record has the feel of actual people playing actual music together, but is in no way Daniels taking his tunes and adapting them for a guitar-based band. Far from it, in fact: On Ashes Grammar, Daniels uses his bandmates to grow in ever-more-esoteric directions. The press line here is that ASDIG is wandering into the Animal Collective tent, but in reality, thick clouds of shoegaze still permeate everything the band does — and here, that’s a complement, especially when you’re copping a Pale Saints vibe over, say, a Panda Bear stylecheck. Ashes Grammar sometimes plays like an almost academic ambient record, but it’s got a soul filled with teen angst that makes both sides far more attractive.

Download “Ashes Grammar/Ashes Maths” here.

This entry was posted on Thursday, August 6th, 2009 at 3:55 pm.