I can’t talk about who the Horrors are today without talking about who the Horrors used to be. When they made their debut in 2007 I took one look at them and thought they were a band of Peter Murphy’s disaffected nephews. They weren’t bad, but their freak-beat punk was easily over-shadowed by their vampire style. It was shocking then, in 2009, when they released Primary Colours, a psychedelic departure that drew from bands like the Velvet Underground and Spacemen 3. Skying sees the band continuing to mutate, but also establishes them as British pop preservationists.
     Skying is a sunny record. It lifts the band, as the title might suggest, into the upper atmospheres of pop. The album’s first song, “Changing The Rain”, starts with a cavernous electronic beat that wouldn’t feel out of place on a Fever Ray song, but soon blossoms into synth-pop heaven.

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Listen to For Emma, Forever Ago, Justin Vernon’s breakthrough début as Bon Iver, before you listen to this, his self-titled second album. Those already familiar with For Emma and Vernon’s wounded falsetto, sung over sparse acoustic guitar, might be perplexed to learn Bon Iver takes a different approach. And yet, the two albums are not as drastically different as they seem. For Emma is so successful because of how it totally envelops its listener in Vernon’s sense of loneliness, experienced (as the legend goes) recording his songs in a secluded cabin, during the winter, while sick and getting over a breakup. Bon Iver communicates its feelings just as well, but things are more hopeful, here, like the thaw spring brings after winter. A rising drum-roll boldly proclaims itself on the Bon Iver’s opening track, “Perth”, making it immediately clear Vernon is venturing into new musical territory. The drums are soon fleshed out by horns and electric guitar, and create a rousing climax.

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Some people are surprised when they learn Wes Eisold — the creative force behind the blackened synth-pop group Cold Cave — was once the vocal-cord thrasher of hardcore bands like Give Up The Ghost and Some Girls. But, for Eisold, who spent a childhood constantly moving from city to city, change is as defining a characteristic as his cryptically dark lyrics are. Eisold just released Cherish The Light Years, his second full-length as Cold Cave, and it’s a marked departure from the lo-fi bedroom production on which the band first made a name. In fact, it’s a fully-blown electronic pop record, one so committed to its mode that comparisons with decade-specific new wave is an unavoidable knee-jerk reaction. But, to consider Cherish The Light Years only in this context would be, for Eisold, completely missing the point. Currently on a European tour, Eisold spoke with us about his artistic evolution, album aesthetics, and, among other things, how he decided to completely commit to his music.

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The best way to listen to Peer Amid, the latest album from Swedish noise-makers the Skull Defekts, is to simultaneously stare at the album cover. The image is a road map for a record that begins with a sustained mystic Eastern chant, awakening a lumbering bass line that explodes into a chorus of Steve-Albini-esque guitar noise. The rest of Peer Amid follows a similar pattern, creating a dense song cycle of industrial destruction with former Lungfish singer Daniel Higgs at the center. Higgs’ presence on Peer Amid, his first collaboration with the Defekts, will likely draw many new listeners, but aside from a few shared sections of a Venn diagram, don’t expect many similarities between this album and anything produced by Higgs’ former band.
     Each song is built around a propulsive and repeating rhythm that seamlessly morphs between songs for an effect that’s less punk and more hypnotically psychedelic. Jarring guitars and multi-layered tribal drumming are built on top of prominent bass-lines, with suites of distortion buttressing all the rhythmic chaos.

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Original twee-pop from the ’90s seems like a cursed genre — with good bands damned to obscurity and, perhaps, better known for their influence than their actual musical output. (We can argue about this later.) Nirvana put the entire genre on the map by covering a bunch of Vaselines songs. Kurt Cobain got the logo of Calvin Jonson’s (of Beat Happening) record label, K Records, tattooed on his arm, and now we’ve got a bunch of bands sounding just like Black Tambourine and Tiger Trap. All those are really great, but so are many of the ones they’ve influenced.
     An all-girl trio from San Francisco, Grass Widow play a bouncy and meticulously interwoven kind of post-punk, as frenetic guitar-picking and bass-plucking create a tumultuous backdrop for their sweet harmonized vocals. And though there isn’t much variety among the songs on the 26-minute Past Time, Grass Widow’s ability to write complex arrangements with such addictive melodies is the missing link between discord and melodious twee pop.

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For David Andrew Sitek, a member of the unique and eclectic TV on The Radio and a producer, who has helped shape the sound of bands like the Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Liars, it’s easy to get typecast. Sitek was key in the creation of the “New Brooklyn” scene that first emerged ten years ago, but since then has been working hard to defy the expectations of his pedigree.
     Sitek’s self-proclaimed production style is a wrench in the system, and is determined to destroy all he deems boring in music. It’s an ethos Sitek has carried over to his new pop project, Maximum Balloon. The album marks a somewhat drastic shift into unapologetically fun dance music, a genre Sitek likes because it’s “more about the ability to get inside the song, not worry about other stuff, and not be self conscious”.
     Fortunately, Sitek didn’t have to explore this new territory alone. For Maximum Balloon, he enlisted the help of a different vocalist for each track, a structure that came about totally by accident. “I was kind of dicking around, which is how I started the song “Tiger”. I was just messing around, wrote lyrics, and I tried to sing it, which just sounded terrible. Then Aku [Orraca-Tetteh, from indie rock band Dragons of Zynth] came over, he sang it, it sounded incredible, and then I knew I couldn’t sing on any of the other songs,” says Sitek.

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Interpol’s 2002 debut, Turn on the Bright Lights, was a damning success. The band arrived too fully formed, setting expectations unattainably high for their subsequent follow-ups. Unattainable, though, because critics and fans are conditioned to expect a band to evolve, topping their previous achievements. Interpol do not evolve. They work instead to hone a singular sound, refining a melancholy mixture of post-punk and professional indie rock, and delving deeper into its exploration.
     Interpol has two key sounds: atmospheric and driving. On their last album, Our Love to Admire, the band dabbled in shoegaze, emphasizing its music at its most ethereal, but Interpol is leaner and more driving. The guitars and drums on “Lights” (see video, after the jump) are the hardest they’ve been since “Slow Hands” from the sophomore album, Antics.

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It seems like Nathan Williams has emerged from his smoke-filled van and got his head into some real nice vitamin D. On King of the Beach, the Wavves’ leader ditches the under-produced garage-punk of his first two records for a cleaner and far more pop-oriented collection of songs, majorly influenced by Southern California. The entire album, like the best punk rock, is imbued with a casual, but never tossed-off, air of fun. The songs feature addictive ’80s hardcore-like vocal melodies and crisply produced guitars. It only took two or three plays before I had the epic riff of “Super Soaker”, and its sentimental foil, “Take on the World”, stuck in my head. For King, Williams indoctrinated a new rhythm section — drummer Billy Hayes and bass player Stephen Pope — who cut their teeth (and who knows what else) for the late Jay Reatard.

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Last summer, like the scattered showers that unpredictably color a July afternoon, Bethany Cosentino and Bobb Bruno, better known as Best Coast, drizzled a handful of noisy love songs upon the Internet — each one adding a few minutes to the season’s soundtrack. The songs were lo-fi and reverbed to the point of distortion but, with Cosentino’s disarmingly sweet voice, proved to be an essential summer combination. Nevertheless, with every addictive melody chugging along at a similar mid-tempo, repeat plays made overdose inevitable.
     The songwriting on Crazy for You, Best Coast’s full-length debut, is more diverse and assertive than on the band’s early singles, making those songs sound like rough demos of half-baked ideas. The noise here has been turned down, morphed into a vibrant haze that surrounds and buoys Cosentino’s voice in a real ’60s-girl-group style. Songs wobble between the Jesus-and-Mary-Chain drum-n-fuzz of “Honey” to the up-tempo indie-pop of “The End” — and though there’s still plenty of reverb, it sounds like Cosentino’s the one controlling it, not the other way around. Even when she’s saying nothing at all, just oohing along with the music, it’s still great to hear her sing.

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After months flying through space, the bad press meteor that is M.I.A. finally crashed on Earth as /\/\/\Y/\ (Maya), her first new album since 2007’s Kala, came out this week. But, instead of making a mind-blowing follow-up, and proving she has some substance beyond her frustrating public image, M.I.A. released a mess — an atonal collection of unpolished half-ideas that do little to push her forward artistically.
     M.I.A. has always been kind of controversial. She’s outspoken about her relatively radical (and sometimes misinformed) political views, feelings about other, more mainstream, artists, and her own musical abilities. So yeah, she’s annoying. With a new record, though, M.I.A. has a platform, the only one that really matters, to show the world what she’s all about. And what does she do? Releases a song called “Teqkilla”, a messy party jam with the chorus, “I got sticky sticky icky icky weed/I got a shot of tequila in me.”

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