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)”

It’s not just superheroes who require secret identities. Sometimes musicians stepping out from their day jobs feel the need to create a separate persona, just to underline the fact that they’re doing something a bit different from their usual work. For as much as music fans want their favorite artists to experiment a bit, they also want them to not stray too far afield – recall Neil Young’s “lost decade” back in the 1980s, when he decided he might like to sound like Kraftwerk or Merle Haggard for a change instead of Neil Young. Perhaps he might’ve saved himself a bit of grief at the time if he’d crafted an alias for himself.

Hugo Manuel, frontman of the (previously spotlighted) Oxford combo Jonquil, is nowhere near the household name that Neil Young is, of course, but it’s still understandable why he would feel the need to craft a separate persona when he steps away from his band and does solo work. Where Jonquil’s style might best be described as a slightly off-kilter mix of Killers-style alterna-pop mixed with Atlas Sound atmospherics, Chad Valley traffics in a British take on the chillwave sound.

“Fast Challenges” is awash (one might even say “Washed Out”) with swathes of smoothly percolating synthesizers and soaring, swooning vocals. Chillwave is a style that’s got contradictions built into its core – it’s a sound that’s highly danceable without giving the impression that it’s asking anyone to put themselves out too much by dancing, and “Fast Challenges” nails the vibe. It’s one of the most relaxing but very energetic songs one is likely to hear, conjuring up the feeling of sunrise after an all night rave or lounging in bed with a lover in the afterglow of sex. (Or for the more pure-minded, heavenly hosts of angels who are too hip for harps.)

Chad Valley may be Hugo Manuel’s nom de plume when he’s working away from his main band, but he performs at a high enough level to make the idea of him adopting it as his main identity very appealing.

Chad Valley’s seven-song Equatorial Ultravox EP was released on June 21st by Cascine.

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

Plant Plants “She’s No One”

Johan Agebjörn “Watch the World Go By (with Le Prix and Lake Heartbeat)”

Euro-style dramatics have always been a hard sell to American pop music audiences, at least since rock music took over the charts from the crooners for good back in the 1960s. Us Yanks will gobble up melodrama if it’s a working class anthem from Mellencamp or Springsteen, or if it’s a goofy horror movie theatrics like Alice Cooper or Kiss. But give us a dude with an Edith Piaf jones lamenting over strings and piano and we’re likely to run screaming for the hills.

We let Freddie Mercury get away with that opera crap, and my high school classmates were inexplicably fond of the hilariously pretentious Styx, but otherwise the closest any act bearing even the faintest whiff of European style cabaret theatricality (post 1965 or so) has come to mass American acceptance would probably be Tori Amos in her more dramatic moments – and she can better get away with it by virtue of xx chromosomes (we’re much more accepting of divas than divos in these parts).

So it’s safe to say that London’s The Irrepressibles will have an uphill battle if they have any hopes of catching on stateside – though one of their songs did somewhat improbably turn up on an episode of So You Think You Can Dance? last summer. On the other hand, though, in a world where one can buy Antony and the Johnson discs at Target (or at least one could when The Crying Light was a new release) anything would seem to be possible.

It’s Antony and the Johnsons that spring most immediately to mind when listening to “Forget the Past,” though Scott Walker, Englebert Humperdink, and Charles Aznavour (of “Yesterday When I was Young” fame) are also lurking in the gloomy, half-lit shadows that swaddle the song. Jamie McDermott’s dramatic crooning definitely recalls Antony’s as he reaches for operatic heights, goaded on by his 10-piece band. It’s undeniably over-the-top in its melodramatic ambition, but it’s well-done melodrama for sure.

Listening to “Forget the Past”, one imagines a beret-wearing McDermott seated in a dimly lit café in Paris or Vienna or some other impossibly romantic European capital, staring out at the grey drizzle through the sunglasses he wears indoors to hide the tears in his eyes as he recalls a lost love. If anyone ever gets around to making a movie out of one of Alan Furst’s excellently moody spy novels, they need to hire The Irrepressibles to handle the soundtrack – they capture that same ambience of a sensitive souls trapped in a dark, decadent Europe on the verge of blowing itself apart. “Forget the Past” is continental ennui rendered as a pop song.

The Irrepressibles released Mirror, Mirror, whence “Forget the Past” is culled, on August 8th of this year.

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

Thieves Like Us “Forget Me Not”

Sin Fang “Always Everything”

The Philistines Jr. “If I Did Nothing But Train For Two Years, I Bet I Could Be in the Olympics”

Grayson Sanders, leader of Brooklyn’s Snowmine, has a background in classical music and it shows. “Beast in Air, Beast in Water,” a track from Snowmine’s debut Laminate Pet Animal, betrays a classical musician’s ear for structure, orchestration, and drama.

The first movement of “Beast in Air, Beast in Water” begins with languid guitars over percussion before hushed vocals enter the picture. More voices enter in harmony when the song bursts into its bright chorus. More instruments are added to the mix until there are string and horn sections swirling around the main melody. The vocal harmonies get more complex until the song reaches its racing crescendo and string sections reminiscent of John Barry help it along to its conclusion.

In addition to his classical grasp of music, Sanders demonstrates a poet’s way with words. His lyrics are impressionistic but evocative. “Tell me that you long for me,” he sings at the song’s rousing climax. “That you share all of my troubles / You get all the voices in my head are yelling / And my friends can’t hear a thing / And I’m a far cry from the old me.” It’s an effective statement of the longing to understand and be understood by another human being.

Snowmine are still a relatively unknown band, but on the strength of “Beast in Air, Beast in Water” they shouldn’t stay that way for long. This is a band with a huge amount of ambition with the talent and ability to see their ambition through.

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

June 2011 MP3 Rewind