After many repeated listens, it all boils down to this: the problem with Devon Williams‘ “Your Sympathy” is that when ends after three and a half minutes, you’re just going to want to listen to it again. However, further spins only amplify the issue, making you more inclined to want to hear it once more. It’s a powerful feedback loop–this song is a mesmerizing enchantress.

“Your Sympathy” was first released as the A-side of a single back in late June but finds its proper home as the second track on Williams’ new sophomore LP, Euphoria. Although his sound is an excellent fit for the Slumberland label (home to previously featured acts including Veronica Falls, Girls Names, Spectrals, Gold-Bears, and others), Williams doesn’t especially sound like any of his peers in particular. Instead, his music favors the jangle of formative 1980s indie-pop acts like Felt, Let’s Active, and even Aztec Camera, with their broad, warm melodies.

When Williams anchors the line “Ooh, I can’t get your sympathy” as the track’s focal point, he does so expertly, allowing a world of ever-increasing musical layers to swirl around that chorus’ gravitational pull. What begins as an accompaniment characterized by a single, stellar electric guitar riff soon gives way to the song’s final twinkling cosmos, dappled with lilting strings and new ideas from multi-tracked guitars, their notes bursting into life like so many little stars.

This is part of the reason “Your Sympathy” stands so tall during each subsequent listen: there is always a new shimmer to be seen dancing across its surface. Of course, all of that texture would be for naught if it weren’t for Williams’ sublime sense of melody, which is (as it should be) its main source of Euphoria.

Click here to listen to Euphoria on Spotify.

If you liked this song, you should also check out:

Tim Williams “I Hit Another Wall”

Friday Mile “Lives of Strangers”

Jens Lekman “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love”

With its lilting accordion melody, “Underwater Savior” by San Diego’s Adams and Eves sounds like a tune playing at a Parisian café on a sunny spring day as Audrey Hepburn stares wistfully across the boulevard – at least until vocalist Adam Powell joins the proceedings, sounding for all the world like a well-intentioned spaniel who’s acquired the power of speech. His endearingly artless voice lifts the song out of its Gallic-pop trappings and drops it firmly in the American indie field – no actual Parisian would ever allow himself to record such a clearly un-suave performance.

Fortunately, the combination of smooth music with awkward vocals and impressionistic lyrics is a charming one. Adams and Eves consists of two very musically adept families – three Powells and two Lees (and one Mudd) – performing exquisitely crafted bedroom pop somewhere in the vicinity of The Boy Least Likely To, Belle and Sebastian, and The Ladybug Transistor, with lush instrumentation that feels simultaneously ornate yet intimate.

Powell’s lyrics speak of attempting to hold on to fleeting moments while life sweeps you forward in its path. “You and I, darling / are silver-spined starfish / who cling to the mountains / of monstrous creatures / that delve through the depths and beneath,” he sings, after an attempt to rescue the setting sun from the depths of the sea fails. It’s an appropriate topic for a band like Adams and Eves to dive into – their mix of refinement and guilelessness is as ephemeral as trying to grasp sunlight beneath the sea.

“Underwater Savior” comes to us from this year’s self-released Dear Professor LP.

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Craft Spells “Party Talk”

In an overzealous moment, we’ve all made the mistake. You twist the cap off a new bottle of soda (or pop the cork off some bubbly), and you pour yourself a glass too quickly. The liquid isn’t the problem–it’s those tickling bubbles who climb their way upwards and ultimately cascade over all the edges. Long Island, New York act Twin Sister‘s “Bad Street” is just as effervescent a moment, providing all the enjoyment with no sticky cleanup.

A refreshing bit of pop (in the best sense of the term), “Bad Street” comes off as an after-hours counterpart to Midnite Vultures, with that album’s frenetic energy replaced with something more suave and sexy. For those who remember them, the closest touchstone is probably the first album by indie-pop act Call & Response, who were so on the nose about their sparkling nature they recorded a song called “Blowin’ Bubbles.”

However, there is more here than the track’s slinky pep. Twin Sister successfully assimilate a variety of influences into a song that manages to wind up feeling both unflappably cool and unapologetically dorky. The final verse, a spoken word breakdown that channels Lex or Debbie Harry, is misplaced in this era by a good quarter-century but completely works.

“Bad Street” comes to us from the band’s debut LP, In Heaven, which was released in late September by Domino Records and follows 2010′s Color Your Life EP.

Click here to listen to Twin Sister’s new debut In Heaven on Spotify.

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Shoegazing started out as a guitar-based genre, seeming to require layer atop opaque layer of gauzy guitar feedback in order to achieve its swoon-inducing combination of pop hooks and sonic disorientation. Then M83 came along early in the last decade and showed that the same vertiginous effect could be achieved with glistening sheets of keyboards as with shrieking guitars, and the shoegazing/dream-pop genre got a fresh second wind as a result.

Stockholm’s Maria Lindén definitely attended the M83 school of dream-pop, and her band I Break Horses (name courtesy of a Smog song) puts what she learned to good use. “Winter Beats” begins with a shimmering synthesizer pattern, then Lindén slowly piles layers of droning synths, guitars and her own vocals atop it until the entire song breaks into a climactic gallop during which the original synthesizer pattern seems to morph into a broken funhouse mirror version of itself.

Lyrically, Lindén warns of emotional shutdown as a relationship begins to cool. “Don’t let that cold blood freeze” she sings, invoking the winter beats of the title – that time when the warmth of affection dies out, leaving behind only “frozen love.” The music she builds around her words has a sort of sad, glacial majesty that ultimately turns frenzied, as her struggle against the winter beats becomes more passionate. Lindén isn’t going to let love turn cold without a fight in this song.

While the icy keyboards of “Winter Beats” seem to operate with a detached cool, Lindén reveals a warm heart at the song’s core. The wave of keyboard based shoegazing bands kicked off by M83 may at times feel a little less organic than the older wave of guitar-based ‘gazers, but I Break Horses proves that they can be every bit as human.

You can check out “Winter Beats” and eight other tracks on I Break Horses’ just-released LP, Hearts.

Click here to listen to Hearts on Spotify.

If you liked this song, you should also check out:

Bell Horses “Dust of Us”

The City and Horses “A Thousand Lashes”

CREEP “Days (Azari & III remix)”