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.

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Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

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”

If Pink Floyd hadn’t insisted on applying the phrase “the delicate sound of thunder” to their own music when they came up with it, they could have loaned it out to Los Angeles sextet RACES. On “Big Broom,” RACES more than live up to the description by mixing rafter-shaking atmospheric rumbling with ethereal wispiness like a thunderstorm raging in Fairyland.

The song kicks off with a brooding bass line and sketchy guitar part that for the first section of “Big Broom” places it in the dark psychedelic territory of bands like The Black Angels and The Warlocks. Then pianist Breanna Wood drops in to add a soaring harmony to Wade Ryff’s lead vocals and it’s like a ray of sunlight suddenly cutting through the dark clouds. The ominous roar of the song continues on its way, but Wood’s voice slowly moves more and more to the fore until by the end she’s on equal footing with Ryff and “Big Broom” concludes with the feeling that the clouds have parted for good.

Crafting a song that simultaneously stomps and tiptoes requires a band with a sure sense of dynamics, and Races rise to that challenge with “Big Broom.” They sacrifice neither roar nor soar, but strike a perfect balance between the two. “Big Broom” is like a storm that batters everyone below it with hailstones, then paints the sky with a rainbow to make up for it.

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Vanish Valley “Races”

Color of Clouds “Brother”

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.

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