Fifteen years ago, Fountains of Wayne released their eponymous debut LP, a near-perfect set of twelve power-pop songs supercharged with clever lyrics about life on both sides of the bridges and tunnels which connect New York and New Jersey. The second single from that record, “Sink to the Bottom,” managed to turn the line “I just wanna…” into a powerful B chorus.

Even this many years later, it’s impossible to hear Jersey quartet Big Troubles turn that same phrase into the hook of “Misery” without thinking of their musical forebears. It isn’t just the repetition of the lyric–it has as much to do with the fact that Big Troubles tap into the mid-1990s musical zeitgeist, that post-grunge, slacker rock era when there was no shortage of excellent bands getting signed to major labels, a Superdrag for every Superchunk.

“Misery,” the second song on the band’s debut, Romantic Comedy, has an earnestness and a strain of melancholy absent from the FoW catalog, but the core promise to the listener is essentially the same: memorable melodies flanked by smart guitar parts. Although Big Troubles play it subdued, there is clearly an affinity here for the classic power-pop sensibility admired by fellow tri-staters Free Energy. Where those two sounds come together–at the intersection of 120 Minutes and Big Star–is where you’ll find Big Troubles.

Click here to listen to Romantic Comedy on Spotify.

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It’s A King Thing “Old Hobbies”

Yo La Tengo “Periodically Double or Triple”

Spiral Stairs “Maltese Terrier”

It was 82 degrees where I live on the day I wrote this, but the forecast is for highs in the 40s by the end of this week. Summer of 2011 is definitely a thing of the past in the northern hemisphere – the trees are shedding their leaves and the temperatures are preparing to embark on their inevitable march downwards. Snow flurries are just around the corner, at a distance now measured in weeks rather than months.

So perhaps we come to “Summer Jam” by New York City’s Cookies a little late in the year to know quite how it would have played in its titular season. Instead, now it simply conjures nostalgia for a season recently ended, whose sunny days and warm nights are now merely memories to recall as colder weather moves in on the northern half of the globe.

However, it’s entirely likely that mood of melancholy nostalgia is the same mood “Summer Jam” would’ve evoked even hearing it in July. It doesn’t seem to aim to be the soundtrack of any current summer, but instead is stitched together from pieces of summers past – a little early 1970s Philly soul, some early ‘80s hip-hop beats, and some mid-’90s Beck-style sonic collage. “Summer Jam” doesn’t feel so much like the summer of 2011 as it does every summer in the unreachable past.

The vocals on “Summer Jam” are courtesy of former Mobius Band member Ben Sterling and Melissa Metrick, and their harmonies on lines like “You’re the most beautiful thing / That I’ve ever seen” speak to the heady emotions of summer love, while the retro-’70s instrumental touches ground the whole thing in a vintage past, like looking at snapshots from the beach. Like those snapshots, “Summer Jam” reminds us that while summer is a fleeting moment each year, even as the leaves begin to fall it will still be there in memory.

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

Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

Summer Cats “Hey You”

Magic Kids “Summer”

Goth and synth-pop weren’t always so different as they might seem these days. Both genres started out in the early 1980s as fairly glum offshoots of English post-punk but eventually progressed into their own more cartoonish personas – Goth became the musical equivalent of Tim Burton movies, all cinematic darkness angd black nail polish and teenage girls pining for Edward Cullen, while synth-pop became the soundtrack for day-futurism and shiny happy mall culture. But in the beginning, there was not a world of difference between The Cure and OMD.

Brooklyn’s Selebrities are making a good effort at reuniting the genres. On “Can’t Make Up My Mind,” they mix Dare-era The Human League synth-pop with a Joy Division/Cure-style guitar hook, all topped off with Maria Usbeck’s Siouxsie-lite vocals. The result is a fairly delightful track that has just enough of a dark edge to it to keep it from being cloying. While Selebrities dress the song up in goth surfaces and atmosphere, at heart “Can’t Make Up My Mind” is pure new wave pop, with more in common with Erasure and Freezepop than the Banshees or Danielle Dax.

On their Facebook page, Selebrities describe their sound as “voguish summertime goth,” and that’s a pretty accurate description of “Can’t Make Up My Mind.” It’s the sound of goth that gets out of the basement once in a while and goes out and plays with its musical siblings. It’s as if Anthony Michael Hall’s bullying character from Edward Scissorhands remembered that he was being played by Farmer Ted from Sixteen Candles and decided to lighten up a bit.

“Can’t Make Up My Mind” is the fourth of ten tracks on Selebrities’ debut LP, Delusions, released this past May by Cascine.

Click here to listen to Delusions on Spotify.

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

Pictureplane “Goth Star”

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

CREEP “Days (Azari & III remix)”

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)”