The Impossible Shapes - "Our Love Lives"

From Bloomington, Indiana, the Impossible Shapes tread incredibly diverse musical terrain, nodding to a wide range of influences along the way, while still doing something coherent and their own. Deep bowed strings, concrete pastiches with superimposed bass melodies, back-porch picked banjo, Love-like sweeping folk-pop melodies, Microphones-like use of sound-space in production (voices coming in from all directions, sometimes right in your ear, sometimes from way over your shoulder; sometimes bass drums hit you in the gut, sometimes snares are warning from a distance).

?Our Love Lives? is one of the most straight-ahead songs on the limited vinyl-only release, Tum. Heavy acoustics are strummed with electric guitar and piano weaving in and out of the mix almost unnoticeably. The voice, like a brass instrument, cuts through the melee and engages in melodic interplay with the round playful bass. At 2:33 the song begins to slip away, moving into unexpected minor chords. When it gathers itself back up and the driving guitars kick back in, the two voices peel away, one in each channel, humming and singing. For the remaining few seconds the instruments and voices take turns falling apart and regaining control.

The ambiguity of this song?s title is cleared up in its first line, ?Our love lives inside the sea.? Actually, writing the line out doesn?t really clear up its ambiguity, so listen and find out for yourself. [Info]

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The Invisible Cities - "Synaptic Gap"

On ?Synaptic Gap? The Invisible Cities sound like Yo La Tengo: delayed guitar feedback, deep tremolo, cymbal wash and crisp tom drums. An ethereal female voice floats above.

From their self-released cd, Watertown. [Info]