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)”

The United States like to think of itself as the nation that invented rock ‘n’ roll, but anyone who has paid attention to music over the last sixty years or so knows that musical innovation has largely been an import in North America. Of course, in the most simplistic sens, rock music is all really just a manipulation of the blues–another American innovation–but it took foreign intervention to transform those sturdy roots into the expansive boughs of the musical family tree we enjoy today.

For some reason, it seems that the British in particular are always slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to growing that tree a little bit taller. When listening to “She’s No One” by London duo Plant Plants, one is taken by the notion that, yes–this is what music should sound like in 2011. The third track from their recently released comes off as a hybrid of Ratatat’s instrumental synth jams or Battles’ electronic tomfoolery and The Boo Radleys’ pop-gone-noise expeditions. Both of those aren’t especially cutting edge touchstones, but the way Plant Plants unifies those sensibilities is relatively novel.

This track in particular exudes an effortless sense of cool, with its airy prelude giving way to the satisfying moment the drum machine and distorted guitars kick in. In keeping with the feel of the backing track, the vocals on “She’s No One” are unstrained and warm; like the layer of fuzzy static working behind them, the words here are vaporous. Taken as a whole, it makes for a listen that is engaging but dreamy enough to allow the listener’s focus to shift elsewhere.

An excellent recent mixtape Plant Plants released features tracks by previously featured acts like HEALTH, Chad Valley, Toro Y Moi, Wild Nothing, Twin Shadow, and tUnE-YaRDs. That coterie of peers should provide a solid sense of where the group situates their sound. Needless to say, it’s wonderful company.

Click here to listen to the Plant Plants EP on Spotify.

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

Thieves Like Us “Forget Me Not”

Edmonton’s Doug Hoyer first came to attention in his native Canada back in 2004 as a cast member on the CBC reality show Rock Camp – a spin on School of Rock that followed musically inclined teenagers in their efforts to form bands at the titular camp. Since then, he’s been releasing a steady stream of product that usually somehow manages to bring a synth-pop spin to the odd wave of ukulele music that’s been all the rage of late.

Hoyer left the ukulele in its case for “Northern Lights,” a track from his new album Walks With the Tender and Growing Night. Instead, Hoyer unspools a straight up dance track that sounds like a lot like the sorts of bands that popped up in the mid-1980s who desperately wanted to be New Wave whether or not New Wave wanted them – bands like Animotion, the Eurogliders and Re-Flex. It’s a perky piece of ear candy with a synthesizer hook so indelible that resistance is futile no matter how much the listener might try to fight it.

“Northern Lights” most resembles what The Magnetic Fields might have sounded like if Stephin Merritt had ever chosen to take the synth-pop tendencies of his early work into full-on dance territory. It’s not hard to imagine Merritt penning a chorus like “You can dig for silver and gold / But you can’t mine the northern lights / And you can chase the sun all day / But the moon still brings the night,” especially when Hoyer delivers them in a baritone that might fool Merritt’s own mother into thinking it’s her boy singing them.

I have no idea how Rock Camp played out and if Hoyer’s combo ended up winning any sort of competition it might have included (heck, for all I know he may have been a counselor and not a camper). Based on “Northern Lights,” though, it’s safe to say he was paying attention when they were teaching how to write and record catchy pop songs.

Click here to listen to Walks With the Tender and Growing Night on Spotify.

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

Cookies “Summer Jam”

Chromeo “Night by Night”

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

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”