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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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.

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Bell Horses “Dust of Us”

The City and Horses “A Thousand Lashes”

CREEP “Days (Azari & III remix)”

Goth and synth-pop weren’t always so different as they might seem these days. Both genres started out in the early 1980s as fairly glum offshoots of English post-punk but eventually progressed into their own more cartoonish personas – Goth became the musical equivalent of Tim Burton movies, all cinematic darkness angd black nail polish and teenage girls pining for Edward Cullen, while synth-pop became the soundtrack for day-futurism and shiny happy mall culture. But in the beginning, there was not a world of difference between The Cure and OMD.

Brooklyn’s Selebrities are making a good effort at reuniting the genres. On “Can’t Make Up My Mind,” they mix Dare-era The Human League synth-pop with a Joy Division/Cure-style guitar hook, all topped off with Maria Usbeck’s Siouxsie-lite vocals. The result is a fairly delightful track that has just enough of a dark edge to it to keep it from being cloying. While Selebrities dress the song up in goth surfaces and atmosphere, at heart “Can’t Make Up My Mind” is pure new wave pop, with more in common with Erasure and Freezepop than the Banshees or Danielle Dax.

On their Facebook page, Selebrities describe their sound as “voguish summertime goth,” and that’s a pretty accurate description of “Can’t Make Up My Mind.” It’s the sound of goth that gets out of the basement once in a while and goes out and plays with its musical siblings. It’s as if Anthony Michael Hall’s bullying character from Edward Scissorhands remembered that he was being played by Farmer Ted from Sixteen Candles and decided to lighten up a bit.

“Can’t Make Up My Mind” is the fourth of ten tracks on Selebrities’ debut LP, Delusions, released this past May by Cascine.

Click here to listen to Delusions on Spotify.

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Pictureplane “Goth Star”

Shit Robot “Take ‘Em Up (featuring Nancy Whang)”

CREEP “Days (Azari & III remix)”

One of the most time-honored words that rock music has given the English language is the adjective “Beatlesque” – a word that surprisingly still triggers spell-check. One would think that the word would be in official dictionaries now. It’s a very useful term that contains its own definition right there in it. It denotes something – generally a song, but sometimes just a sound or general artistic aesthetic – that resembles The Beatles.

“Love Or Death,” by Lawrence, Kansas’ Hospital Ships, is sneakily Beatlesque. It doesn’t include any of the Technicolor ’60s-style psychedelia that the word normally conjures, likely because a one-man band can only do so much. Listen to the melody of “Love Or Death,” though, and the first bell it’s likely to ring is that of late-period Fab Four songs by John Lennon along the lines of “Lucy In the Sky with Diamonds,” “Across the Universe,” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” It shares the same stately pace and Lennon’s touch for crafting a serpentine melody that manages to twist and turn around on itself during any given verse, a trick that hides its complexity in plain sight by making it so damn catchy.

The second bell it rings is The Flaming Lips, perhaps the most Beatlesque band to rarely ever be referred to as Beatlesque. Sole Hospital Ships member Jordan Geiger (formerly of Shearwater, The Appleseed Cast, and The Minus Story) shares Wayne Coyne’s Dust Bowl-states yelp and the Lips’ affection for layering pure-pop melodies with oddball sonic textures. The way Geiger piles competing layers of feedback and distortion atop his melody without ever coming close to concealing it is a move the Lips mastered at least as far back as Hit to Death in the Future Head, and it’s one that most of their imitators have a hard time replicating, but Geiger manages it with ease on “Love Or Death.”

Like the best Beatlesque bands, Hospital Ships are able to mine inspiration without stooping to imitation. Listening to “Love Or Death,” it’s easy to imagine either The Beatles or The Flaming Lips recording the song, but it’s impossible to say which of either of those bands’ albums it could’ve appeared on. Geiger may resemble Lennon or Coyne, but he has his own vision of where to take that resemblance.

Catch “Love or Death” on Hospital Ships’ recently released sophomore LP, Lonely Twin, available courtesy of Graveface Records.

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