With its lilting accordion melody, “Underwater Savior” by San Diego’s Adams and Eves sounds like a tune playing at a Parisian café on a sunny spring day as Audrey Hepburn stares wistfully across the boulevard – at least until vocalist Adam Powell joins the proceedings, sounding for all the world like a well-intentioned spaniel who’s acquired the power of speech. His endearingly artless voice lifts the song out of its Gallic-pop trappings and drops it firmly in the American indie field – no actual Parisian would ever allow himself to record such a clearly un-suave performance.

Fortunately, the combination of smooth music with awkward vocals and impressionistic lyrics is a charming one. Adams and Eves consists of two very musically adept families – three Powells and two Lees (and one Mudd) – performing exquisitely crafted bedroom pop somewhere in the vicinity of The Boy Least Likely To, Belle and Sebastian, and The Ladybug Transistor, with lush instrumentation that feels simultaneously ornate yet intimate.

Powell’s lyrics speak of attempting to hold on to fleeting moments while life sweeps you forward in its path. “You and I, darling / are silver-spined starfish / who cling to the mountains / of monstrous creatures / that delve through the depths and beneath,” he sings, after an attempt to rescue the setting sun from the depths of the sea fails. It’s an appropriate topic for a band like Adams and Eves to dive into – their mix of refinement and guilelessness is as ephemeral as trying to grasp sunlight beneath the sea.

“Underwater Savior” comes to us from this year’s self-released Dear Professor LP.

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Craft Spells “Party Talk”

For the better part of a decade and a half, Gordon Zacharias has been releasing records as Fan Modine, packing his songs with melancholy sentiments and lovingly orchestrated indie-pop compositions. Zacharias had gone quiet for six years prior to the release of his new LP, Gratitude for the Shipper, but the time off seems to have served him quite well. Fan Modine’s melodies have never sounded as fully formed and enchanting as they do on the latest record, with the album’s fourth song, “Through the Valley,” serving as a prime example.

“Through the Valley” begins with a half-minute prelude awash with found sounds and lingering guitar and piano notes. It is a spectral mood, all hazy and ghostly, interrupted suddenly by the elastic groove of the song proper. If the shift is unexpected it is also effective, serving as a springboard for bouncy piano chords and the clever string melodies which gild the choruses. The production here comes courtesy of Chris Stamey (of The dB’s fame) and is crisp and bright.

As it continues on, “Through the Valley” keeps snowballing, accelerating forward on its own momentum until its gentle denouement. It is an elegant composition in the vein of tunes by The Chamber Strings or Alex Chilton, but it also has the backbone of acts like Spoon or ELO.

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Vanish Valley “Races”

Sarah Jaffe “Better Than Nothing”

Jonquil “Get Up”

Philadelphia’s War on Drugs are the damnedest folk-rock band one is likely to hear in this day and age. While the roots of their sound are very definitely sunken very deep in Dylan and The Byrds, they take that sound to some out-of-the-way places. The War on Drugs sneak up on the tambourine man, drag him onto their own magic swirlin’ ship, and on the jingle-jangle mornin’ leave him staggering through the foggy ruins of time.

Take “Baby Missiles,” a track from the band’s second full-length album, Slave Ambient. At heart, it’s a sprightly folk tune not far removed from Dylan’s “Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts.” However, The War on Drugs smother the song with droning, swirling psychedelic keyboards that ebb and flow atop each other, creating the feeling of being chased by a pack of hellhounds down an alley where the paving stones refuse to sit still.

Andy Granduciel’s vocals are a mix of Dylan, The Waterboys’ Mike Scott and Wovenhand’s David Eugene Edwards as he spits out his lyrics in order to stay ahead of the song’s frantic gallop – one gets the impression that if paused for a breath the rest of the band would trample him in the dust. “Baby Missiles” doesn’t really fit in the genre generally referred to as psych-folk, typified by bands like Mazzy Star – it’s a little too psycho to be psych-folk.

(Previously spotlighted artist) Kurt Vile, one of the founding members of The War on Drugs, moved on to a well-regarded solo career before Slave Ambient was recorded. Vile is an immensely talented individual, but on “Baby Missiles” his old band doesn’t seem to miss him much. Granduciel and his cronies have more than enough ideas of their own to make The War on Drugs a fascinating band.

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September & October 2011 MP3 Rewind

Teenage Fanclub “Baby Lee”

Devendra Banhart “Baby”

In one of those alternate universes so beloved by science fiction writers (perhaps the one in which the Enterprise was evil and Spock had a beard), a strange thing happened back in the 1960s. A shy young Brazilian named Astrud Weinert met and married not the bossa nova musician João Gilberto, but instead the budding minimalist composer Philip Glass. Much like Gilberto did in our own reality, in this alternate universe Glass prodded and persuaded his reluctant young bride to lend vocals to one of his projects, with unexpectedly pleasing results.

At least that’s the scenario conjured up in my head when I listen to “Too Beautiful to Work,” the title track from the new album by Montreal’s The Luyas. The song sounds like a genetic mix of Glass’ “Music in Contrary Motion” and the Gilbertos’ “The Girl from Ipanema.” It mixes manic repetition with a tuneful, vaguely tropical vibe and is topped with Jessie Stein’s wispy, breathless vocal that has more than a touch of Astrud Gilberto in the delivery. Then as if realizing the truth of its title, “Too Beautiful to Work” ends in a discordant clamor as the disparate elements that had no business existing in such harmony for most of its running time finally fly off in opposing directions.

As is the Canadian custom, The Luyas are something of a collective – the band is made up of members, former members or relatives of members of such bands as Arcade Fire, Bell Orchestre, Miracle Fortress, and By Divine Right. “Too Beautiful to Work” reflects the many differing approaches the members bring to the band. It speaks the vocabulary of minimalists like Glass and Steve Reich, but it speaks that vocabulary with the accent of Canadian pop collectives like Broken Social Scene. It rushes by at a frantic pace, but Stein’s vocal grounds it in a wistful calm. It truly does seem to emanate from another dimension, where matter and anti-matter co-exist in harmony and rather than cancel each other out create something new.

Check out “Too Beautiful to Work” on the album of the same name, released this past February on Dead Oceans.

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The War on Drugs “Baby Missiles”