After many repeated listens, it all boils down to this: the problem with Devon Williams‘ “Your Sympathy” is that when ends after three and a half minutes, you’re just going to want to listen to it again. However, further spins only amplify the issue, making you more inclined to want to hear it once more. It’s a powerful feedback loop–this song is a mesmerizing enchantress.

“Your Sympathy” was first released as the A-side of a single back in late June but finds its proper home as the second track on Williams’ new sophomore LP, Euphoria. Although his sound is an excellent fit for the Slumberland label (home to previously featured acts including Veronica Falls, Girls Names, Spectrals, Gold-Bears, and others), Williams doesn’t especially sound like any of his peers in particular. Instead, his music favors the jangle of formative 1980s indie-pop acts like Felt, Let’s Active, and even Aztec Camera, with their broad, warm melodies.

When Williams anchors the line “Ooh, I can’t get your sympathy” as the track’s focal point, he does so expertly, allowing a world of ever-increasing musical layers to swirl around that chorus’ gravitational pull. What begins as an accompaniment characterized by a single, stellar electric guitar riff soon gives way to the song’s final twinkling cosmos, dappled with lilting strings and new ideas from multi-tracked guitars, their notes bursting into life like so many little stars.

This is part of the reason “Your Sympathy” stands so tall during each subsequent listen: there is always a new shimmer to be seen dancing across its surface. Of course, all of that texture would be for naught if it weren’t for Williams’ sublime sense of melody, which is (as it should be) its main source of Euphoria.

Click here to listen to Euphoria on Spotify.

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

Tim Williams “I Hit Another Wall”

Friday Mile “Lives of Strangers”

Jens Lekman “The End of the World is Bigger Than Love”

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.

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

Vanish Valley “Races”

Color of Clouds “Brother”

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”

Euro-style dramatics have always been a hard sell to American pop music audiences, at least since rock music took over the charts from the crooners for good back in the 1960s. Us Yanks will gobble up melodrama if it’s a working class anthem from Mellencamp or Springsteen, or if it’s a goofy horror movie theatrics like Alice Cooper or Kiss. But give us a dude with an Edith Piaf jones lamenting over strings and piano and we’re likely to run screaming for the hills.

We let Freddie Mercury get away with that opera crap, and my high school classmates were inexplicably fond of the hilariously pretentious Styx, but otherwise the closest any act bearing even the faintest whiff of European style cabaret theatricality (post 1965 or so) has come to mass American acceptance would probably be Tori Amos in her more dramatic moments – and she can better get away with it by virtue of xx chromosomes (we’re much more accepting of divas than divos in these parts).

So it’s safe to say that London’s The Irrepressibles will have an uphill battle if they have any hopes of catching on stateside – though one of their songs did somewhat improbably turn up on an episode of So You Think You Can Dance? last summer. On the other hand, though, in a world where one can buy Antony and the Johnson discs at Target (or at least one could when The Crying Light was a new release) anything would seem to be possible.

It’s Antony and the Johnsons that spring most immediately to mind when listening to “Forget the Past,” though Scott Walker, Englebert Humperdink, and Charles Aznavour (of “Yesterday When I was Young” fame) are also lurking in the gloomy, half-lit shadows that swaddle the song. Jamie McDermott’s dramatic crooning definitely recalls Antony’s as he reaches for operatic heights, goaded on by his 10-piece band. It’s undeniably over-the-top in its melodramatic ambition, but it’s well-done melodrama for sure.

Listening to “Forget the Past”, one imagines a beret-wearing McDermott seated in a dimly lit café in Paris or Vienna or some other impossibly romantic European capital, staring out at the grey drizzle through the sunglasses he wears indoors to hide the tears in his eyes as he recalls a lost love. If anyone ever gets around to making a movie out of one of Alan Furst’s excellently moody spy novels, they need to hire The Irrepressibles to handle the soundtrack – they capture that same ambience of a sensitive souls trapped in a dark, decadent Europe on the verge of blowing itself apart. “Forget the Past” is continental ennui rendered as a pop song.

The Irrepressibles released Mirror, Mirror, whence “Forget the Past” is culled, on August 8th of this year.

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

Thieves Like Us “Forget Me Not”

Sin Fang “Always Everything”

The Philistines Jr. “If I Did Nothing But Train For Two Years, I Bet I Could Be in the Olympics”