After many repeated listens, it all boils down to this: the problem with Devon Williams‘ “Your Sympathy” is that when ends after three and a half minutes, you’re just going to want to listen to it again. However, further spins only amplify the issue, making you more inclined to want to hear it once more. It’s a powerful feedback loop–this song is a mesmerizing enchantress.

“Your Sympathy” was first released as the A-side of a single back in late June but finds its proper home as the second track on Williams’ new sophomore LP, Euphoria. Although his sound is an excellent fit for the Slumberland label (home to previously featured acts including Veronica Falls, Girls Names, Spectrals, Gold-Bears, and others), Williams doesn’t especially sound like any of his peers in particular. Instead, his music favors the jangle of formative 1980s indie-pop acts like Felt, Let’s Active, and even Aztec Camera, with their broad, warm melodies.

When Williams anchors the line “Ooh, I can’t get your sympathy” as the track’s focal point, he does so expertly, allowing a world of ever-increasing musical layers to swirl around that chorus’ gravitational pull. What begins as an accompaniment characterized by a single, stellar electric guitar riff soon gives way to the song’s final twinkling cosmos, dappled with lilting strings and new ideas from multi-tracked guitars, their notes bursting into life like so many little stars.

This is part of the reason “Your Sympathy” stands so tall during each subsequent listen: there is always a new shimmer to be seen dancing across its surface. Of course, all of that texture would be for naught if it weren’t for Williams’ sublime sense of melody, which is (as it should be) its main source of Euphoria.

Click here to listen to Euphoria on Spotify.

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

Tim Williams “I Hit Another Wall”

Friday Mile “Lives of Strangers”

Jens Lekman “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love”

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”

The first few seconds of “Party Talk” place Stockton, California duo Craft Spells en ce moment. The wavy, retro melody could easily begin the latest single by Tennis or Summer Camp. After no more than a breath of 1960s pop, however, Justin Vallesteros and Frankie Soto move swiftly into a gentle, post-modern lullaby.

Vallesteros and Soto create an explicit groove, as intimate as it is incessant. Hypnotic backing vocals pair with a looping melodic structure that creates the perfect foil for Vallesteros’ vocals. He swallows his words as he sings them, which gives the listener the sensation of being enveloped along with every syllable. As he repeats the phrase, “falling for you,” he draws the listener down like Alice, in a free-fall through the rabbit’s hole. “This better not be party talk,” sings Vallesteros. He needn’t worry. The song’s tone is more “pillow talk” than “party talk.”

Mike Sniper, Captured Tracks‘ head honcho and the man behind Blank Dogs has an ear for fuzzed-out, melodic simplicity. He was an early backer of Dum Dum Girls (and collaborated with Dee Dee on the excellent Mayfair Set 12”)) before releasing an array of promising new acts including Beach Fossils, and MINKS. With Captured Tracks’ release of Craft Spells’ debut full-length, Idle Labor, yesterday, Sniper added another must-own release to his catalog.

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

MINKS “Cemetery Rain”

Mariage Blanc “Whatever You Say I Am”

March 2011 MP3 Rewind

Regular One Track Mind readers are already well acquainted with Johan Angergård and his work under the Club 8 banner. On March 22nd, Angergård will break a five year silence with his most enduring musical project, the ironically named Acid House Kings, when they release Music Sounds Better With You, their first new set of tunes since 2005′s Sing Along With Acid House Kings.

If lead single “Are We Lovers or Are We Friends” is any indication, the intervening years haven’t shifted the band’s musical focus all that much. The song stays true to the band’s hallmark twee-pop sound, a breezy conglomeration of handclap-friendly vocal harmonies, upbeat guitars, and synthesized strings. There is a sprinkle of the unexpected, too; every song on the upcoming LP features castanets in the percussive mix (perhaps a holdover from Angergård’s recent polyrhythmic experimentation) and this single boasts an unlikely yet effective dose of what sounds like an oboe.

Lyrically, “Are We Lovers or Are We Friends” explores its titular gray area, that strange passage most every romance passes through with sweaty palms and uncertain minds. There is a sense of urgency in Angergård’s words, maybe even a blush of desperation (as when he worries that “tomorrow might not even come,” or notes he has “hopes so high, I almost forget were gonna die.”)

Of course, racked up alongside those sprightly melodies The Acid House Kings make us believe that love comes easily, if not quickly, which is a big part of why the band has remained so appealing for nearly two decades. The Acid House Kings write songs for romantics–simple, bittersweet tunes which are as charming as they are catchy.

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

Club 8 “Western Hospitality”

Kings of Convenience “Mrs. Cold”

Amanda Mair “House”