Shearwater - "Red Sea, Black Sea". With Shearwater's new album, Palo Santo, they feel for the first time like a real, real band: not an Okkervil River side-project, but something with its own fashion-sense, its own record collection, its own late-night habits. It helps that Jonathan Meiburg sings all the songs (there's no sign of Will Sheff's voice, dredging up black sheep memories), but it's more than that. Palo Santo sounds like a house with all the furniture taken out. They've taken as much time as they needed to take everything - the tables, the chairs, the curtains, - out onto the lawn. Everything out. And then Shearwater went in and looked around. They decided what they needed: an ash table. a vase with ferns. new gold doorknobs, screwed in. and white paint. Lots of white paint.

It's an album full of space. Even in its fiercer moments, there's no feeling of panic. Go ahead and open the cupboards: there are no glasses to throw. There aren't even any cupboards. If you're going to rage you'll have to do it in the wide white room, till your rage drifts slow in the air like dustmotes in the sunbeam. Shearwater, today, remind me most of Mark Hollis and late Talk Talk. They're not as phantom as that: they've not receded that far. But it's still a guitar with its strings cut; a man singing into its hollow body, summoning songs like ghosts.

Of course "Red Sea, Black Sea" doesn't sound anything like that. No, this is an eerie kind of rock song, shuddering synths and a disco-beat. It's Final Fantasy with a megaphone; the Arcade Fire stripped bare; a guy yelling in a room, stamping his feet, watching the band play a winter beach madrigal on the green grass outside.

(My thanks to Jonathan Meiburg for inviting StG to do this.)

[buy more Shearwater stuff here. Palo Santo is out on Misra on (probably) May 9. You can listen to the album's other uptempo song here.

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Gomez - "Charley Patton Songs". When I wrote about Gomez before, I didn't say how important Gomez were to my discovery of pop music, of indie music, or any of that. But they were. The things that most shaped my listening habits, heading off into the end of my teens, were:

1) Waking up before school one morning, standing in sock feet in the den, turning on MuchMusic and seeing the last third of the video for Sloan's "Everything You've Done Wrong".

2) Going to a party at Catherine's house where she put on this weird-looking red-and-black album by Belle & Sebastian.

3) Catching a ride home from a workshop one night with Avi. He was driving his older brother's car and put in one of his older brother's tapes. He said it was good. The cover looked unlike anything I had ever known - this wasn't a Beatles cover, an Aerosmith cover, the cover of a Mahler symphony. And then when he played it it didn't sound like anything I had known, either. Muddy, boozy, yearning, and full of ache. I bought it within the week.

But as I say in the post mentioned above, despite an early reverence for Gomez's Bring it On and Liquid Skin, since then they have done nothing but embarrass me. In Your Gun was bad but Split the Difference was a bloomin' travesty. The band had gone so very far from those smoky and compelling, "Tom Waits in a hot-tub" roots. Like The Bees, they were easing into this vapid jam-band existence - meandering songs about meandering feelings, the atmosphere light and easily brushed aside. I totally gave up on them.

So I'm really surprised at how much I'm enjoying this new record, How We Operate. It's not a return to that old stuff - if anything it's a progress into an even more lightweight, nimrod place. (On "Girl-Shaped Love Drug" they sing, over and over, that "The girl-shaped love-drug messes with my head".) But it's good pop. Gomez were always great at melodies - I'd happily hang my coat on the hook of "Rhythm & Blues Alibi", "Hangover" or "Whippin' Picadilly", - and now those melodic instincts are back, stripped of complicating factors, with songs as easy to enjoy as Coldplay's "In Your Place" or Maroon 5's "This Love".

Though this is no longer the band that made me fall in love with music, it's an easy listening album that glitters and spins, that gives me a little frisson when its hooks chime at once. "Charley Patton Songs" has absolutely nothing in common with the blues of Charley Patton - and yet who cares. Who cares when in the fourth minute it pulls out the chorus, pulls out the cello, window dripping with rain. And then that weird downward-falling bell-ringing break, the thing that runs all through the song - and the most "avant garde" (ha!) thing on the whole record.

[pre-order]

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A few more days left on the Matthew Barney/Bjork Drawing Restraint 9 Contest. The competition remains wide open - do enter.

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Tiny Showcase has started selling t-shirts. Pre-order Jesse LeDoux's debut T and get a free signed print.

Molars reflects on the recent Alden Penner/Adam gig in Philly. And he has lovely mp3s of the gig, too.

I was gonna link to Popsheep's wonderful "Hold On"/"On Hold" Tom Waits/Edith Frost/Neko Case post, but it's not working at the moment. Maybe it will be when you visit.

And Marcello Carlin looks at Broken Social Scene, writing in a new, scary, swooping way.