Our first date with Seatraffic came last August when the A-side from their “Crimes” 7″ was included in a Sunday Sampler. Since then, the San Francisco duo has been working on refining their dreamy synth-pop in advance of a new series of new singles and it’s clear they deserve the benefit of the full spotlight here.

“Superficial Heart” is set amid a firmament of flickering synthesizer notes and a simple drum pattern which create a transfixing, dreamy groove. Vocalist Mark Zannad stretches out each mid-range note until they nearly become part of the song’s ethereal drone. His style is a superb match for the song’s central lyrical concern, an introspective chorus that wonders, “What do you want, superficial heart?”

The production on “Superficial Heart” never feels too dense–there is always sunlight peeking through, shimmering on the surface–part of which can surely be credited to producer Nic Pope who has previously highlighted that same sensibility in the work of Twin Shadow and The Morning Benders. That sense of balance between lightness and substance is what makes this track stand up so well to repeated listens and makes us excited for the other singles and (hopefully) debut LP ahead.

Click here to listen to the Superficial Heart single on Spotify.

PS – Seatraffic released the second single in this series, “Tempo of Regret,” earlier this week.

Back in 2002, Danish duo The Raveonettes recorded “Attack of the Ghost Riders,” a deceptively brilliant storm cloud of a tune that was equal measures cacophony and melody.

While the main debt of this premiere single was owed to The Jesus and Mary Chain, the tunefulness evidenced went far beyond the haze of distortion such a comparison might suggest. There was something almost pulpy about the song and its evocative title, sure, but there were also bloodlines there which ran back past JAMC’s ’80s roots and stretched back to the meticulously crafted vocal harmonies of the 1950s and ’60s.

A decade on, it turns out the latter tradition, the one preoccupied with deliberately constructed melodies, won out. Sune Rose Wagner and Sharin Foo’s music has never sounded as thoughtful or–let’s just go ahead and say it–pretty as it does on “Observations,” the first single from their upcoming sixth LP, Observator (coming September 11th on Vice). It remains possessed by the minor key mood which has haunted all of their recordings but occupies a much more spacious habitat than early recordings. Instead of being fueled by thick guitar parts, “Observations” is anchored by lilting piano chords and brushed drums.

People often speak of bands’ sounds “maturing” over the course of a career, but here is a case where such talk is fully warranted. “Observations” is “Attack of the Ghost Rider” all grown up. Sune and Sharin have ditched their Jim and William Reid costumes, slipped into something more comfortable, and discovered that it was a better fit all along.

Click here to listen to Observations on Spotify.

Listening to “Night Is Dark,” one is instantly transported back to the good old days of late ’80s/early ‘90s British pop. The guitars jangle and chime like those of Johnny Marr of The Smiths or Ride’s Andy Bell and Mark Gardener, the vocals have the swooning, whispery quality of Slowdive’s Neil Halsted or Chapterhouse’s Andrew Sheriff, and the melody is as indelible as the best work of any of those bands.

Exactly how it got recorded by a 20-year old native of the Dominican Republic named Andrés Pichardo is anyone’s guess. Didn’t anyone tell Pichardo that the citizens of his neck of the woods were supposed to be playing reggae or calypso or some other brand of sunny Caribbean music, and not wistful pop reminiscent of the English music scene of the year he was born?

Yet shoegazing pop is exactly what Pichardo ended up recording under the name Grand Resort after departing the sunny tropics in favor of the northerly latitudes of Boston, eventually settling in Brooklyn. Once he traded endless summer and ocean breezes for concrete jungles and bleak winters, he got down to the business of crafting exquisite dream-pop alone in the bedroom of his apartment and somehow making it sound like a full band in a high tech studio.

Yet, despite its gloomy title, “Night Is Dark” shows that while you can take the boy out of the Caribbean, you can’t completely take the Caribbean out of the boy. The song has a sunny, joyous vibe more akin to the average calypso track than to the autumnal moodiness of most of the shoegazers it draws its inspiration from. It’s the sound of a genre raising its eyes from its feet and noticing that the sun is warm and the breeze is cool and, as the old Slowdive song noted, it’s blue skied an’ cleared overhead.

When one mentions Athens, Georgia, chances are that the cultural associations conjured up for that undying musical hotspot will either be the classic, kudzu-coated college rock sounds of the 1980s that centered around R.E.M., Love Tractor, and Dreams So Real, or the kitchen sink psychedelia of Elephant 6 Collective bands like Olivia Tremor Control and Neutral Milk Hotel. When a city has a storied musical history with such well-known signature sounds to live up to, it can be daunting for a young band. Should they attempt to sound like an “Athens band” or should they forge their own path?

Easter Island, the project of brothers Ethan and Asher Payne, appear to be following the latter path. There’s little about the sound of “Frightened” that screams Athens – perhaps the guitars could be said to jangle a bit, maybe there are hints of psychedelia creeping in around the edges, but that would be a stretch. The Payne brothers seem to understand that the best way to honor all the legendary bands that put their town on the map is to do their best to ignore them completely and just be themselves.

“Frightened” comes across more as a splicing of Austin and Reykjavik than any sort of update of the Athens sound. It’s a soaring, expansive track that mixes the massive post-rock Americana of Explosions in the Sky with the sweeping dreaminess of Sigur Ros to create an epic sprawl. Like the natives of their namesake, Easter Island feel like they’re trying to evoke something huge to capture the attention of the gigantic sky overhead. The Payne brothers craft a sound so majestic that it would draw people to it even if it was an isolated rock in the middle of the vast ocean.

Easter Island (the geographic location) has tugged on mankind’s imagination for centuries now, as a place of mystery and imagination. Athens, Georgia, has done likewise for the imagination of music fans for decades. With Easter Island (the band), Ethan and Asher Payne do honor to both places.

Easter Island was previously featured on a Sunday Sampler in March of 2011. Click here to view that post or visit Easter Island’s Bandcamp page to name your own price for the album.

Click here to listen to Frightened on Spotify.