Lower Dens – Escape From Evil

When Escape From Evil was posted on NPR's First Listen a week ahead of its release, I couldn't get into it at all. I love Lower Dens' previous albums Twin Hand Movement (2010) and Nootropics (2012), so to find myself disappointed with this long-awaited third album was frustrating. My reaction was similar to when I first heard Wild Beasts' Present Tense – what the fuck is it with bands I love suddenly employing 80s synth sounds and production?! Thankfully there was a lot to enjoy about Present Tense once I got past my objection to the synths – and there's a lot to enjoy about Escape From Evil, too.

Now the album's out and I've had the chance to live with it for a week, the over-riding impression is that Lower Dens have learned how to successfully adapt their sound yet again (the change-up from Twin Hand Movement to Nootropics was, in itself, pretty striking). Following the departure of guitarist Will Adams and miserable sessions working on new songs, Jana Hunter sought a new direction that favoured immediacy, clarity and emotional directness. The best way to understand this evolution in sound is to compare the version of 'Non Grata' that appears here with the version that appeared on a split 7" with Horse Lords released back in 2013. The earlier version has a similarly icy aesthetic to Nootropics, betraying a clear debt to Kraftwerk; the new version on Escape From Evil introduces buoyant layers of instrumental counterpoint, edging it more towards the lurid synth-pop of the 80s. It's certainly the track on the album I found it hardest to warm to, despite the fact it's superficially catchy.

While Nootropics was stark and initially forbidding, these new songs are bright and muscular. This is partly thanks to production help from Chris Coady, Ariel Rechtshaid and John Congleton – which brings the synths to the fore and makes the rhythm section really pop – and partly down to some striking guitar work from both Hunter and new member Walker Teret (Arbouretum, Cass McCombs). At the heart of it all is Hunter's smoky voice, as alluring as ever, but intoning what are, for the most part, some pretty lacklustre lyrics, such as this clanger from 'Electric Current': "I only want to dance with you, all night, on the street". What rescues it all from becoming a shallow, neon nightmare is the conviction of the execution and Hunter's sharp songwriting instincts.

First single 'To Die In L.A.' is, inevitably, one of the peppier cuts, but the aforementioned 'Non Grata', the galloping 'Company', with features a seasick, serpentine guitar solo, and stunning closer 'Société Anonyme' are just as upbeat – the latter akin to The Smiths, with nimble guitar lines worthy of Johnny Marr. Gorgeous second single 'Ondine' is an early highlight, while 'Your Heart Still Beating' introduces some steamy breathing space into the middle of the set. The closest this album gets to the Lower Dens of old is probably the morose torch song 'I Am The Earth' and opener 'Sucker's Shangri-La', with its prominent, echoing guitars.

Ultimately, though, I feel ambivalent about this release. It's easy to be cynical about the band's new direction when you think of the recent success of fellow Baltimore bands Future Islands and Beach House. If this album wasn't by Lower Dens, would I spend as much time with it, testing my aversion to 80s production? I think what keeps me intrigued is Hunter's vision: a balance between the stark and the flushed; between distance and intimacy; between the affected and the guileless. I'm conflicted, which is part of what keeps me coming back for more.

Fred Thomas – All Are Saved

Even though Fred Thomas has released dozens of albums, whether solo or in his band Saturday Looks Good To Me (plus numerous other outfits), I'd not heard any of them before All Are Saved, his latest on Polyvinyl. If any of his previous albums are even half as good as this gorgeous, warped gem, I'll have a long and fruitful time digging back through his discography.

Listening to this album feels like rooting around under the sofa cushions for the remote control, only to find a photo of your beloved departed dog, an unopened bottle of beer, a dusty cassette compilation made by an old friend, a dog-eared journal, and a pack of gum. It's surprising, ridiculous, hilarious, infuriating, brilliant, silly, beautiful, profound, knowingly throwaway and deadly serious. All Are Saved is truly an unexpected delight.

It starts and ends with songs about dogs, littered with tape hiss, cymbal crashes and tape echo. The lyrics – some of the funniest and most heartbreaking I've heard in ages – either tumble out in torrents of half-remembered ideas and f-words, or are measured carefully in Slint-like cadences, half-spoken, half-sung. So all the words don't become too much, Thomas throws in juicy instrumental synth confections 'July' and 'Thesis (Lear)' to keep things spacious and radiant.

While offering up a few reference points helps me understand where this fits in my personal history of musical enthusiasm – 'When They Built The Schools' is Radiohead's 'There There' half-asleep on the couch; 'Cops Don't Care Pt. II' is a prime Tobin Sprout cut from a lost '90s Guided By Voices album; and 'Monster Movie' is Elliott Smith with a backbone – the baffling thing about this album is that the deeper I dig into what I love about it, the more elusive its appeal becomes. All I can do is put it on again, writhe around in its warm recesses and itch-scratching edges, and let Thomas's inspired outpourings work their dark magic.

[All Are Saved will be released on vinyl, cassette, CD and digital by Polyvinyl on 7th April.]

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.

The White Birch – The Weight of Spring

The White Birch is time slowed down, moments drawn out, emotional burdens given their space to be felt. In the ten years since Come Up For Air, Ola Flottum has lost his mother, fathered two children, and bought a house in Oslo, where he's set up a basement studio. You can feel it. Despite the air and light in the arrangements of these slow, sad songs, there's the weight of earth around them, the slow transformation of leaves into soil, the movement of feelings from felt sensations into memories.

The Weight of Spring is so uniform in its mood, so consistently poised, it's almost ambient music, tinting the room with melancholy. It glows and thrums with an internal rhythm that allows it to unfold naturally without the desperate need to grab your attention. If you're not moved by this music, you're not listening, not really – you're waiting to be impressed. Key to this is Flottum's voice, a strange, wavering, deflated instrument, and once you acclimatise to its timbre, it has its own unique beauty.

Most of these anti-gravity ballads are sparse and beatless, traced out lovingly on piano and strings. Whenever rhythms are introduced (such as on 'New York' 'Lamentation', 'Lantern' and 'Spring') it feels like the clouds parting, like feeling your heartbeat again after being slumped listless on the couch. It gets the blood flowing, lifts the mood, breaks the daze. The album also employs striking textural shifts to break the narcoleptic fog, such as the second half of 'Lantern' and 'Mother'. These moments need the context of their neighbouring songs to create their dramatic effect, which lends the album a wonderfully unified atmosphere.

I still feel like I'm coming to terms with the subtle shifts this album stirs within me. It needs more time to absorb. It needs more space to breathe it all in. It's truly beautiful.

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.

Sam Atkin – Gently, Quietly

I like music that is simultaneously big and small. Both vast and intimate. Large enough to lose yourself in but human-sized, too. Sam Atkin's Gently, Quietly is such music.

It's skewed in such a way that my ears discern some sense of perspective, a feeling of momentum, without being able to predict where it's going to end up. I'm ushered along by streaming synths, vague rhythms like heartbeats, droning half-melodies and twinkling piano lines that break my heart. I follow where it leads because it's strange and beautiful.

I approach this music feeling immediately at home, though I don't know if I've heard anything exactly like it. Too uneasy and melancholy for 'New Age', too clean and radiant to be 'lo-fi', too lovingly mapped out and oddly accessible to be 'experimental'.

The best way to put it is that I can hear Atkin making the music while it's playing, right there within the music, responding to what's just happened, fiddling with filters or cooing into a pitchshifter. During the second half of 'Grove/Grown' he decides to pick up an acoustic guitar and strum a few open-ended chords and it sounds new, for fuck's sake. When was the last time anyone did that with an acoustic guitar? He even manages to use field recordings of flowing water and birdsong without upsetting the applecart. It all feels just right to me, without being predictable or cheesy.

Music this understated yet so deeply affecting is a rare thing. Go and listen and download over at Bandcamp.

Lower Dens – 'To Die in L.A.'

If I didn't know Beach House producer Chris Coady had a hand in Lower Dens' forthcoming third album Escape From Evil, I probably could've guessed from listening to their new single 'To Die in L.A.' It sounds so much like Beach House it's almost a parody. As gorgeous as Beach House's music may be, it's never really grabbed me. I mean, I can appreciate the husky desolation in Legrand's voice, the artisan's touch in the arrangement of their dreamy music, but I rarely go back for more. Lower Dens, on the other hand – I can't count the number of times I've played Twin Hand Movement and Nootropics.

On 'To Die in L.A.', the move into Beach House territory is, I'm hoping, just to tease out the highlights in Lower Dens' sound. This is the poppiest song off the new album, surely? It's a single – it's supposed to grab people. Vocals front and centre! Bright keyboard arpeggio! Chiming Strat! Brisk tempo! I can already picture sensitive twenty-somethings in cardigans grooving self-consciously around an indie disco... As usual, though, when I start paying attention to what Jana Hunter is singing, the song takes on a slightly different hue: "I wish I could count on you to be mine / But here I'm not crying / I'm just glad to be alive".

For now, I'm cynical about their new direction on the basis of this single. Hopefully the musical momentum of Lower Dens 3.0 translates into something irresistible over the course of Escape From Evil, which comes out on Ribbon Music on 30th March – just in time for my 38th birthday. Thanks, Lower Dens.