The recent collapse of the Borders Books & Music chain became much more understandable to me when I visited the half dozen or so locations in my area during their last week in business. In each store, I discovered around a dozen compact discs by The Dutchess and the Duke remaining on the picked-over music shelves.

It was puzzling, to say the least. In what reality were the music buyers for Borders living, that they would stock their shelves so deeply with The Dutchess and The Duke? Not ours, unfortunately. If their handling of this particular band was indicative of their general mindset, the people in charge of acquiring music for Borders let their own apparently impeccable taste in music cloud their judgment of America’s taste as a whole and paid the price for that overly charitable assessment.

Speaking for myself, I’d love to live in a reality where Borders’ faith in the American musical preference was justified and where overloading the CD racks with The Dutchess and The Duke’s brand of bluesy psych-folk was a sound commercial decision. But alas, we don’t, and discovering dozens of discs by the band in the emptying shelves of a dying retail chain was a wtf? moment of the highest order. On top of that, not only did Borders go the way of the dinosaur, but The Dutchess and The Duke had actually preceded them into oblivion, packing it in a year before the company that apparently had tremendous faith in their commercial potential did.

If we lived in the reality the Borders music buyers believed we inhabited, it would be headline news that the Duke – Jesse Lortz – is back with a new solo project called Case Studies. The people of America would be hanging on every word Lortz sings on “The Eagle, or the Serpent.” We would all be thrilling to the contrast between Lortz’s vocals, which recall Dylan’s weird Nashville Skyline voice, and the sweet female voices arrayed behind him like a madrigal chorus. Across the nation, Americans would marvel at the skillful arrangement, the way additional instruments are subtly introduced behind the strummed acoustic guitar until there’s a full band playing by the end of the song. “The Eagle, or the Serpent” would be in the mainstream, not a song by a cult project by the survivor of another cult project.

Sadly, the reality in which Jesse Lortz is a major star is not the one we live in, as Borders discovered too late. But mistaking major talent for major commercial potential is at least a noble blunder and the music buyers for Borders should be applauded for that. In a better world, those Dutchess and The Duke CDs should have flown off the shelves and not still been sitting there forlornly as the stores prepared to shutter for good. The advance buzz for Lortz’s work as Case Studies would have been deafening.

It’s not that world, though. But at least we still have Lortz recording songs like “The Eagle, or the Serpent” to dull the edge of that harsh reality.

You can find “The Eagle, or the Serpent” and ten other tracks on Case Studies’ debut LP, The World Is Just A Shape to Fill the Night, out now on Sacred Bones.

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

Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

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”

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:

In his day job as a political writer (for the libertarian publication Reason), Virginia’s Meredith Bragg sees the unpleasantness of the current state of American affairs up close. That perspective seems to color “Birds of North America,” the lovely but troubling first single from Bragg’s third album, Nest.

On “Birds of North America,” Bragg paints a portrait of a nation where to be a public figure is to be viewed as a target like a duck in duck season. Whether you’re someone running for president or a teenaged starlet who simply wants to behave like every other teenager in the country (i.e. appallingly), there’s someone else who has you in their sights and is just itching to blow you out of the sky. The strong ones will survive, the rest will end up roasted and served up for consumption on TMZ.

Bragg seems especially aware that it’s his own profession driving the hunting frenzy. Lines like “Take a shot and aim for center / Take a shot with ink-stained fingers” underline the media’s complicity in making sure that no ambition – be it for fame or public service or whatever – will go unpunished in the America of today.

What saves the song from being an absolute downer of a civics lesson is the fact that it’s a pretty gorgeous piece of work. It begins with acoustic guitar plucking out a nice little melodic figure, which is then overlaid with cello sawing out the same pattern. Bragg’s vocals are laid-back, with a subtle female harmony lending him support until the song climaxes with a humming drone laid over the top of the entire thing.

It’s a pleasantly mesmerizing four minutes of music that reports a nasty reality, yet still seems to maintain a hopeful outlook. Which only makes sense – if Meredith Bragg is able to make a topic like the blood sport which passes for discourse in America these days into a song like “Birds of North America,” there’s got to be some hope for the rest of us.

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

September & October 2011 MP3 Rewind

Jogger “In America”