Jenny and Johnny are just a couple of crazy kids: Jenny Lewis and her boyfriend Johnathan Rice. Their first single “Big Wave” is a sweeping swell of sing-along pop. Lewis’s voice melds with Rice’s creating gorgeous harmonies that sound as sweet as a candy apple. But listen closely as Lewis peels back the melodic exterior and reveals the rotten core. Whether she’s alluding to economic collapse or “sleepwalkin’ down to the lake / and wakin’ up in the water,” the words belie the music’s sun-drenched vibe. Lewis honed her talent for masking dark lyrical themes with beautiful melodies on tracks like Rilo Kiley’s “It’s a Hit” or Rabbit Fur Coat’s “You Are What You Love,” and “Big Wave” keeps that tradition alive.

And what about Rice? Only time will tell if he’s a better songwriter than Blake Sennett, but for now Rice appears to be more than just an adoring suitor; he’s also dedicated to Lewis, the performer. Rice has backed Lewis at every live performance of her solo career to date. Whether he’s a muse or a partner, on “Big Wave” Rice brings out the best in Lewis. I’m Having Fun Now, Jenny and Johnny’s debut full-length, will be released August 31st on Warner Bros.

Western musical styles have always held the drone at arm’s length. The musical traditions of other cultures–from India to the Middle East to Siberia to Australia–have historically embraced the inherent hypnotic tug of sustained tones, undertones, and overtones slipping and sliding against each other. However, aside from the Scots and their bagpipes, Europeans haven’t been too terribly keen on the drone. It’s generally been relegated to the avant-garde in Western culture, with The Beatles, The Velvet Underground and the shoegaze bands championing it in pop music (but those people have always been considered a bit weird anyway).

So it’s something of a surprise to hear a Brooklyn folkie like Sharon Van Etten building a song atop a drone that could have come straight off a vintage Tony Conrad album. Instead, it’s lifted from her confidently titled new record, Epic, due out October 5th on Ba Da Bing. “Love More” is a mesmerizing thing, a slow, steady, sturdy bedrock upon which other instruments come and go until Etten’s vocals arrive, followed by the guitars and percussion, bringing the elements more commonly associated with Brooklyn folkies.

It’s that unyielding drone in the background that gives the spare instrumentation of the rest of the song feel epic–the muted guitars, Etten’s multi-tracked vocals, and the deliberate drumbeats. As they swell together during the finale of the song, they sell the hard-won lessons of a failed relationship just as effectively with pure sound as the lyrics do with words.

It’s been twenty-two years since the Cowboy Junkies first turned heads by mixing roots music with The Velvets’ ambience. It’s good to hear someone like Sharon Van Etten demonstrate that the combination is still far from played out.

Even in light of a brutally unpleasant summer such as the current one, a good summer song can still make the season seem like the best thing a human being can experience, full of lazy days and lemonade and days at the beach rather than ominous indications of the hottest summer temperatures recorded since such things started being tracked. It doesn’t matter if the reality of a summer is old folks dropping dead like flies and that setting one foot outside an air-conditioned bunker is an exercise in lunacy–a well-executed summer song still makes a listener wish the season could last forever.

Chicago’s Unicycle Loves You has unleashed just such a summer song with “Mirror, Mirror.” Mining the same vein as recent albums by The Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls, on “Mirror, Mirror,” Unicycle Loves You combine a sixties girl-group vibe with lo-fi indie rock aesthetics. Bassist/vocalist Nicole Vitale purrs for the listener to “open up to new sensations, in the summertime” over a lazy backbeat while all sorts of extraneous noises and textures drop in and out of the mix. It’s in the same ballpark as the underappreciated dream-popsters Joy Zipper, mixing upbeat sentiments with an undercurrent of nostalgic dreaminess.

Unicycle Loves You coalesced in 2006 around the core of guitarist/vocalist Jim Carroll (not the person who died, just one bearing the same name) and Vitale. The two generally split vocal duties evenly, but “Mirror, Mirror” is definitely a showcase for Vitale. Her vocals hit just the right note to convey the feeling of a summer day, where the competing impulses to get out and do something or just relax and enjoy a perfect day duke it out.

“Mirror, Mirror” is the title track of Unicycle Loves You’s self-produced sophomore album, due to drop on September 7th courtesy of Highwheel Records.

Keytar slinging hotties don’t grow on trees, which likely explains the fairly broad swath Juliette Commagere has cut through pop music over the last few years. She fronted the glammish Hello Stranger, is a member of Tool frontman Maynard James Keenan’s sideband Puscifer, and has performed with The Bird and the Bee and Ry Cooder.

That’s a pretty eclectic range of performers to work with, and Commagere’s own music has been similarly hard to pin down. Hello Stranger’s music always leaned towards an upbeat new wave/glitter rock mix, while her solo debut Queens Die Proudly was of a more somber cast, leaning towards ambient experimentation during its second half.

If “Impact” is any indication, Commagere will be in a more bubbly, synth-pop mode on her upcoming second album, The Procession (slated for an October 26th release by Manimal Vinyl).

“Impact” percolates along quite agreeably on synthesized tropical vibe then introduces a new wavish keyboard riff on the chorus, while Commagere recounts what seems to be the tale of a panic attack brought on by a marriage proposal in what is probably the sweetest and sexiest vocal performance of her career so far. It’s charmer of a track that sounds somewhat like the Brazilian Girls if they were produced by Ric Ocasek. If it’s representative of the album as a whole, The Procession will be one to watch out for.