Feather Beds – The Skeletal System

I'd like to think I'm an omnivorous listener, open to many genres and styles, but really, who am I kidding? I'm inexorably tied to the music of the mid to late '90s, when I was in my late teens and early 20s: Yo La Tengo's I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One, The Flaming Lips' Clouds Taste Metallic, Sparklehorse's Vivadixiesubmarinetransmissionplot. I rarely listen to those particular albums any more because they're so familiar, but their enduring appeal lies in the balance between songcraft and soundscaping – there's always a tune to hitch your ear to, plus plenty of interesting stuff going on within and around the songs to explore on repeat listens.

Michael Orange mines the same rich seam, and his debut album as Feather Beds, The Skeletal System, is a short, sweet distillation of this aesthetic. Nothing is played absolutely straight, but nothing is showily odd. The video for 'Animal Fat' visualises this effect nicely:

 

I know it's a kaleidoscope; you know it's a kaleidoscope. But can you look away? No. It's hypnotic. Understanding something doesn't necessarily make it less alluring. I hear what Orange is doing and it all sounds just right to me. I appreciate the craftsmanship that gently eases the album from more focused, melodic passages into ambient washes of sound. There's a lightness of touch, a gentle flexing of arrangements to make reflections glint off surfaces. A blurring. The pleasure of parallax as you stare out of a train window. Although I could happily zone out to tracks like 'Airbrushed' if they were two or three times as long, the restraint demonstrated on this lovely album keeps me coming back.

The Skeletal System is available as a limited edition CD on Happenin Records and for streaming on Spotify.

Lazy Salon – 'Halo Hand' / 'DAM'

Sometimes a promo email grabs me immediately with a short description. In the case of Lazy Salon, all it took was "the stonier side of Yo La Tengo" to reel me in. And dammit, this new two-track, eighteen-minute release by Sean Byrne (ex-Twin Atlas, Mazarin, Azusa Plane, Photon Band, Lenola, BC Camplight) sounds exactly like the stonier side of YLT. Maybe a bit more layered and reverb-drenched, but definitely in the YLT lounge room, kicking back. (He's called himself Lazy Salon, just to drive the point home.) This is a very good thing. Oh wait, there's more from Sean: "new directions in layered hypnotic pop jammers". Dammit, this guy is good. Not only does he create awesome music, he can succinctly describe it in order to really draw people in. (Well, me at least.)

'Halo Hand' starts off as though you've just walked in on Ira, Georgia and James rehearsing 'I Heard You Looking'. It sounds like one of those staircase melody illusion things, as if the music is constantly ascending, spiralling upwards into the clouds. 'DAM' pulls off the same trick, but with a sleight-of-hand down-tempo intro before we're into prime YLT territory again, percussive details flitting around as distorted guitar leads shoot off like fireworks. Real head-out-the-car-window-while-summer-driving stuff. Beatific.

In addition to these two fantastic new songs, there are three more on the Lazy Salon website from last year, just sitting there for free download. (Hint: download them too, they're great.) Sometimes this music-via-the-internet thing is just too easy: someone living in New Jersey cranks out superb instrumental jams and uploads them to the internet; someone living in Melbourne hears about said instrumental jams via email, downloads them and blisses out. You know what to do.

The Caribbean – Moon Sickness

When I shared The Caribbean's last album Discontinued Perfume with my best friend and bandmate Jono, his initial response was similar to mine – the music's too busy, there are too many words, frontman Michael Kentoff has a nasal vocal tone akin to Yo La Tengo's Ira Kaplan on a caffeine buzz. It's hard to find a way in. Jono persisted, thanks in part to the appearance of the wonderful 'Mr Let's Find Out' on a mix CD I gave him, plus my continued insistence on the band's idiosyncratic brilliance. Given time, he had to admit The Caribbean have a certain something, a unique magic that I attempted to put my finger on in a write-up about my favourite albums of 2011.

On their new album, The Caribbean are more immediately persuasive. Although their attention to detail makes repeat listens a necessity, both to appreciate the smooth songwriting and to luxuriate in the wonderful production, Moon Sickness feels more vivid than Discontinued Perfume. Most notably, first single and album standout 'Imitation Air' juxtaposes guitar parts so sonically differentiated that the effect is deeply psychedelic – a warbling, chewed-tape guitar in the left channel, a clean phased guitar in the right – especially when the vocals, bass and drums sit soberly between them, carrying the song forward with a crisp clip. It's my favourite Caribbean song to date, perhaps for the band too – after all, that's a snippet of the song's lyrics on the album's front cover.



Second single 'Jobsworth', premiered late last year on rollingstone.com no less, is almost as appealing, with its chiming guitar refrain, shuffling drums, and some of Kentoff's most resonant lyrics to date:

American Jobsworth
Sends us out to scan the city
We've got nearly zero asshole factor here
No real shouters
In fact, everyone speaks quietly
And smiles your soul to sleep.

'Electric Bass' has a propulsive groove and the cheeky line "Cue electric bass!" prompts that goosebumpy feeling when a song's bassline kicks in and the energy level jumps. Except it's a feint. Nothing changes for a few bars – very funny, fellas – then some delicious instrumental colours begin to expand the song's horizons, tingling the extremeties. The guitar licks on this one are hot shit, too. Similarly tasty fretwork crops up later on 'Echopraxia', the song title potentially pointing to another sly Caribbean "joke". Are those guitar licks aping the earlier song? Or another band? Or both? Whichever way you cut it, it's smooth without being smarmy. A suburban Steely Dan.

Given Kentoff's fondness for chatty, literate lyrics, with his vocals pretty much guaranteed to start up as soon as the song gets going, the feel of The Caribbean's verses can get a bit samey, but just as you start to wonder whether you should skip a trick, something changes – beautiful instrumental details will pop up or drop out, a fresh chord sequence will evolve. They judge exactly when to make things interesting again to persuade the listener from tuning out, whether between songs or within songs, maximising the impact of each twist and turn. And on the title track, the band muster a rare extended instrumental coda for some much-needed breathing space. Smart songwriting.

I love how succinct The Caribbean are, and how much they cram into these 35 minutes. I love how I feel when I listen to their smart, deftly executed songs. Moon Sickness is a beauty, and probably their best album yet. If you need further convincing, producer Chad Clark's overview at the Hometapes website should do the trick.