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 was 82 degrees where I live on the day I wrote this, but the forecast is for highs in the 40s by the end of this week. Summer of 2011 is definitely a thing of the past in the northern hemisphere – the trees are shedding their leaves and the temperatures are preparing to embark on their inevitable march downwards. Snow flurries are just around the corner, at a distance now measured in weeks rather than months.

So perhaps we come to “Summer Jam” by New York City’s Cookies a little late in the year to know quite how it would have played in its titular season. Instead, now it simply conjures nostalgia for a season recently ended, whose sunny days and warm nights are now merely memories to recall as colder weather moves in on the northern half of the globe.

However, it’s entirely likely that mood of melancholy nostalgia is the same mood “Summer Jam” would’ve evoked even hearing it in July. It doesn’t seem to aim to be the soundtrack of any current summer, but instead is stitched together from pieces of summers past – a little early 1970s Philly soul, some early ‘80s hip-hop beats, and some mid-’90s Beck-style sonic collage. “Summer Jam” doesn’t feel so much like the summer of 2011 as it does every summer in the unreachable past.

The vocals on “Summer Jam” are courtesy of former Mobius Band member Ben Sterling and Melissa Metrick, and their harmonies on lines like “You’re the most beautiful thing / That I’ve ever seen” speak to the heady emotions of summer love, while the retro-’70s instrumental touches ground the whole thing in a vintage past, like looking at snapshots from the beach. Like those snapshots, “Summer Jam” reminds us that while summer is a fleeting moment each year, even as the leaves begin to fall it will still be there in memory.

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

Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

Summer Cats “Hey You”

Magic Kids “Summer”

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.

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

Pictureplane “Goth Star”

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

CREEP “Days (Azari & III remix)”

Listening to “Hologram” by the band Founds is to hear the sound of young Scandinavia crossed with the English countryside. The track sounds like a mix between Sigur Ros and The Sundays and Shelleyan Orphan, all moody Icelandic art-rock leavened with a dash of pastoral British alterna-folk. It’s a sound that seems to embody the upper latitudes of the northern hemisphere.

So it’s a bit jarring to discover the band actually hails from Brisbane, Australia – a city with a sub-tropical climate perched at the edge of the Coral Sea about midway between Sunshine Coast and Surfer’s Paradise. The image “Holograms” conjures up is of wintry fjords or rainy meadows, not of a large urban/beach resort area just up the coast a bit from where gold-bikinied meter maids are making sure the surfers never get parking tickets.

Chalk it up to some people just being displaced on the globe, because no matter where they’re physically located Founds have the north Atlantic in their souls. The vocals (by either Kirstie or Elle-Louise – I’ve not found a source that identifies the members in any way beyond their first names) have a definite but unidentifiable lilt to them, sounding alternately like the Icelandic Bjork, the Irish Dolores O’Riordan, or the English Harriet Wheeler. Musically, the band explores the swirling dream-pop of Sigur Ros with a bit more forward momentum than the Icelanders usually care to exhibit but with the same upward thrust. Founds are not afraid to rock while they dream and the way that “Holograms” builds to its soaring climax is a thing of beauty.

It’s difficult to think of a location that would seem less suited to produce first-rate Scandinavian pop than a beach community in the southern hemisphere, but Founds have managed to do it. Like the hologram of its title, the Aussie combo has managed to conjure up a more than lifelike image of something where logically it ought not to exist. Founds have managed to relocate the edge of the Arctic Circle to the Pacific tropics.

Founds released a digital single of “Holograms” as a free download on their Bandcamp page this past June.

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

I Break Horses “Winter Beats”

Trentemøller “Sycamore Feeling”