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”

In an overzealous moment, we’ve all made the mistake. You twist the cap off a new bottle of soda (or pop the cork off some bubbly), and you pour yourself a glass too quickly. The liquid isn’t the problem–it’s those tickling bubbles who climb their way upwards and ultimately cascade over all the edges. Long Island, New York act Twin Sister‘s “Bad Street” is just as effervescent a moment, providing all the enjoyment with no sticky cleanup.

A refreshing bit of pop (in the best sense of the term), “Bad Street” comes off as an after-hours counterpart to Midnite Vultures, with that album’s frenetic energy replaced with something more suave and sexy. For those who remember them, the closest touchstone is probably the first album by indie-pop act Call & Response, who were so on the nose about their sparkling nature they recorded a song called “Blowin’ Bubbles.”

However, there is more here than the track’s slinky pep. Twin Sister successfully assimilate a variety of influences into a song that manages to wind up feeling both unflappably cool and unapologetically dorky. The final verse, a spoken word breakdown that channels Lex or Debbie Harry, is misplaced in this era by a good quarter-century but completely works.

“Bad Street” comes to us from the band’s debut LP, In Heaven, which was released in late September by Domino Records and follows 2010′s Color Your Life EP.

Click here to listen to Twin Sister’s new debut In Heaven on Spotify.

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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.

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Unicycle Loves You “Mirror, Mirror”

Summer Cats “Hey You”

Magic Kids “Summer”

Alexandra Patsavas. The name may not be familiar to you but if you’ve followed music at all for the last decade, her tastes have likely had some bearing on what ends up on your iPod. Patsavas is the music supervisor behind such network tv shows as The O.C. and Grey’s Anatomy, and in that role she has probably been more responsible for bringing relatively obscure artists to mass audiences than any other person operating during the same time period. While many will likely roll their eyes at the thought of musical montages featuring ridiculously attractive doctors having emotional crises, there’s no denying that Patsavas shined a deserved spotlight on more than a few very worthwhile artists (in addition to countless legions of bland secretary rockers, the inevitable downside of her efforts.)

One such deserving artist to get a boost from featured placement on Grey’s Anatomy is Oxford, Mississippi’s Sanders Bohlke, whose tune “The Weight of Us” turned up on the show a few years back. An ethereal folk tune with echoes of Damien Rice and Nick Drake, “The Weight of Us” subsequently spread from Grey’s Anatomy to other shows in need of Bohlke’s somber gravitas to add the emotional heft the shows themselves were seemingly incapable of generating on their own, such as Smallville and The Vampire Diaries.

Any attention directed Bohlke’s way is a good thing, because as demonstrated by “Quiet Ye Voices,” he’s definitely worth the focus. Bohlke tips his hand with the title, showing that he’s more interested in the timeless and the slightly archaic than he is in being particularly contemporary. One gets the feeling that he wouldn’t be too upset if audiences were to assume that the song was an old ballad passed down for generations in remote Appalachian villages. However, he’s picked the perfect time to be timeless, as the swooping vocal harmonies he constructs to cushion his own voice put “Quiet Ye Voices” squarely in the same camp as the similarly out-of-time Fleet Foxes, and Bohlke proves himself to be just as fleet of foot as that combo.

So a round of thanks ought to be extended to Alexandra Patsavas. As the traditional outlets for musicians to get their work heard by the public began to wither over the last decade, she stepped up and opened a new door via prime time weepies. While a lot of the artists that burst through that door could have remained mired in obscurity with no detriment to the world at large, the occasional emergence of artists with the level of Sanders Bohlke ultimately makes Patsavas’ work worthwhile.

The Quiet Ye Voices 7″ was released in mid-August as a part of Communicating Vessels‘ limited edition vinyl singles series (which also includes an installment from previously featured act The Great Book of John).

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The Black Hollies “Gloomy Monday Morning”