New Music: Ana Caravelle – “Where Have You Been?”
Ana Caravelle’s music reminds me of White Hinterland’s Phylactery Factory — well, actually, it reminds me of a brief, tumultuous couple of weeks in 2007 when she was going by the name Anahita Navab and I was hooking up with her roommate. (Small world. I was, of course, terrifically young and confused and sad that year, which is probably enough biography.) But Caravelle’s music does remind me of White Hinterland’s dark whimsy and, due to the harp being her chosen instrument, Joanna Newsom. On “Where Have You Been,” she sings, “The coyotes have gone wild again” with a Newsom-like affect, but the song soon revels in harmonies and darker vocal tones more akin to Mia Doi Todd’s wondrous alto. The arrangements are another effort entirely, horns and strings diving in and out with the shadowy elusiveness of ships in the night. It’s a magnetic first effort; Caravelle’s debut album, Basic Climb, marks her ascent into singer-songwriter importance on Sept. 28. She plays the Bootleg Theater on Oct. 10.
Ana Caravelle – “Where Have You Been?”: mp3
(Basic Climb is due Sept. 28 on Non Projects; photo by Spencer Lowell)
ARMS’ sophomore album — the debut of the current lineup and frontman Todd Goldstein’s first effort since the dissolution of Harlem Shakes, but it is technically No. 2 — has a name: Summer Skills. Leave it to the band to plan on recording it in October (so probably a 2011 release date, yeah?). And they’re going on tour but not coming anywhere near the West Coast, God forbid. Hey Todd, you know who has summer skills? People who live in California and would like to see you play live (again) before the Mayan apocalypse. Please come.
Caucus are a Japanese band that, coincidentally, sound a lot like Japandroids. On “Sing,” they play immensely cathartic guitar rock shaded with shoegaze, Sonic Youth and propelled by buried English-language vocals. Per their MySpace, they’re looking for a U.S. label (which their SXSW trip earlier this year didn’t help with, apparently) — Sub Pop? Polyvinyl? Somebody do the blogosphere a favor.
Twin Sister and its Color Your Life EP hail from Lawwwng Island — not Brooklyn, astoundingly, which is probably why it sounds so good. (Also, I bet the band’s been eating at my aunt’s favorite deli.) Like Beach House or St. Vincent, the group offers emotive, severe vocals over medium-budget electronics-tinted soundscapes, with song structure a consideration but not necessarily a priority. The EP’s six tracks range from weirdly Fleetwood Mac-y easy listening (“Lady Daydream,” the set’s best song) to the murky almost-motorik of “All Around and Away We Go,” which sounds like a Broadcast song from one of the early circles of Hell. The band’s song-to-song detours are consistently surprising — looking forward to hearing which lines they color outside of next.
I know and love Darren Hanlon best for the 2002 classic “Hiccups,” a pop song of such flawless complexion it could pose without makeup on the cover of Vogue. Some eight years later, “All These Things” finds the Australian singer-songwriter no less charming, turning to a ukelele and call-and-response vocals for a song about all that you can’t leave behind. (How he fails to mention Bono’s sunglasses is beyond me.) Hanlon, like fellow quick-tongued songwriters such as Sondre Lerche or Swede-turned-Aussie Jens Lekman, is hard not to like — give “All These Things” a bone and let it slobber lovingly at your feet for a while.
Meet the new boss — you know the rest. Though The Radio Dept. tends to devote its energies toward romance (in all its failed, painful forms), the band doesn’t shy away from politics. “The New Improved Hypocrisy,” a surprise digital single, takes aim at Sweden’s general election this weekend. Somebody should tell the guys about 
