The college trip abroad is a time-honored method for broadening one’s perspectives on the world and awakening creative impulses. College students are at best curious – and at worst, insufferable – in their desire to challenge all the assumptions they’d been raised with, and immersing oneself in the culture of a distant land is a nearly foolproof way for a student to jumpstart their adult persona. In the best cases, they gain insight into what’s really meaningful to them in the world and it starts them on their path to pursuing their life’s dream. (In the worst cases, they leave as a jerk and return as a bigger jerk, albeit with a tan.)

Fortunately, Ann Arbor’s Madison Velding-VanDam falls into the best-case category. Traveling to Santiago, Chile to finish his Bachelor of Philosophy degree (because really, what other major would someone named Madison Velding-VanDam pursue?), Velding-VanDam was exhilarated by the sense of dislocation and isolation he experienced as a North American college student immersed in a South American culture. He drew on those feelings to record his debut album, Postmodern Whirled, under the name De la Montaña.

On “Golden Soul,” the second track from Postmodern Whirled, Velding-VanDam seems to directly address the scales-falling-from-the-eyes moment when one realizes there’s more to the world than the typical college experience. “These are the smartest ones I know,” he observes, paying his peers a compliment before yanking the rug from beneath them, “passing out in the back of the discotheque.” He goes on to check off bad decisions, empty dreams, and meaningless hook-ups before arriving at the realization that none of it has accomplished much of anything as he sings “there’s nothing that I’ve won.”

Velding-VanDam makes these observations over a gently percolating synth-pop track that mixes new-wave with chillwave, full of swooning keyboards and a gently insistent rhythm track and jangly tracks. It’s a song that seems to embody hard-won maturity by being catchy enough to make its point but restrained enough to not get in anyone’s face about it. The ability to make one’s point in a cogent and rational way is a quality to be treasured, and “Golden Soul” is the best argument one could make for shipping as many American college students overseas as our international friends can bear. The good ones generally tend to come back even better.

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

For the better part of a decade and a half, Gordon Zacharias has been releasing records as Fan Modine, packing his songs with melancholy sentiments and lovingly orchestrated indie-pop compositions. Zacharias had gone quiet for six years prior to the release of his new LP, Gratitude for the Shipper, but the time off seems to have served him quite well. Fan Modine’s melodies have never sounded as fully formed and enchanting as they do on the latest record, with the album’s fourth song, “Through the Valley,” serving as a prime example.

“Through the Valley” begins with a half-minute prelude awash with found sounds and lingering guitar and piano notes. It is a spectral mood, all hazy and ghostly, interrupted suddenly by the elastic groove of the song proper. If the shift is unexpected it is also effective, serving as a springboard for bouncy piano chords and the clever string melodies which gild the choruses. The production here comes courtesy of Chris Stamey (of The dB’s fame) and is crisp and bright.

As it continues on, “Through the Valley” keeps snowballing, accelerating forward on its own momentum until its gentle denouement. It is an elegant composition in the vein of tunes by The Chamber Strings or Alex Chilton, but it also has the backbone of acts like Spoon or ELO.

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

Vanish Valley “Races”

Sarah Jaffe “Better Than Nothing”

Jonquil “Get Up”

When The Dogs‘ bassist Matt Bachmann emailed me a few months back with little more than a link to songs from their new album, Camping, he did so with the phrase “Delicious music” in the subject line. Indeed, “A Decent Warning,” the record’s second track, is about as tasty as they come.

It’s an electrified bit of guitar-pop with the same sort of simple-yet-divine hooks that have made The Drums, Cults, and The Rosebuds such hot commodities over the past year. That isn’t to say that The Dogs necessarily sound like either of those acts per se, just that they embrace a similar ethos in their songwriting.

The production on Camping, however, is a far more homespun affair: the band logged a total of four hours in a proper studio during its creation, which explains the excellent lo-fi sheen throughout. Drums sound a little more cavernous, guitars become a bit more gruff, and so forth, but there are still nicely placed flourishes throughout (like the distant twinkle of–is it a xylophone?–during the verses).

Those verses are an elegant foil to the choruses, which grind and howl in a manner not alluded to by their more subdued surroundings. Listening to those two sections bridge together with the help of some ascendant vocal harmonies is a glorious thing and it only gets better when you know to expect it.

You would never guess that the members of The Dogs are strewn across the globe–Minnesota, Washington, Massachusetts, even Norway–because that physical distance is belied by a sonic closeness, the sound of four musicians who are all on the same page, making delicious music together.

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

Summer Cats “Hey You”

Dum Dum Girls “Jail La La”

Seapony “Dreaming”

I don’t smoke, but after listening to “Yer Spring” I feel like I need a cigarette.

The opening track from Newfoundland, Canada six-piece Hey Rosetta!‘s new LP, Seeds, is the kind of song that takes a lot out of a listener, an epic in miniature whose intensity escalates to greater and greater levels like a fireworks display ramping up to the finale. Bandleader Tim Baker has said “this is a song about that looking for a spring, in every sense of the word: a rebirth, a propulsion, a source of power and nourishment,” and as hyperbolic an artistic statement as that may sound, it pretty much hits the mark.

Bubbling forth from a gentle spring of atmospheric guitars and bass, “Yer Spring” is set in motion by an insistent kick drum and Baker’s soft vocals (which have something of Chris Martin around the edges of their high notes). Things build quickly from there, reaching loftier new plateaus before charging forth to the next elevation. Eventually, around the 3:18 mark, this leads to one of the sweetest payoffs in recent memory, a satisfying, climactic surge that finds Hey Rosetta! rocketing upward on their own momentum.

Although Hey Rosetta! have enjoyed some acclaim in their native Canada, they have yet to significantly break through to audiences in other countries. They clearly have the talent to do so, however, and here is hoping that tracks like “Yer Spring” will be just the thing to make it happen.

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

Andy Clockwise “Stealing Cars (Second Wind)”

Oh No Ono “Internet Warrior”

Hot Club de Paris “Free the Pterodactyl 3″