When The Sun Shines In Between The Blinds

My second Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site. This week’s column includes a Gene Serene & John Downfall song that will be familiar to regular readers of this site, and very good songs by The Coup and Bishop Allen that have never been featured here.

Irving @ The Knitting Factory 5/10/2006
Situation / I Want To Love You In My Room / She’s Not Shy / If You Say Jump, I Will Say No / I Can’t Fall In Love / Care, I Don’t Care / Jen, Nothing Matters To Me / Did I Ever Tell You I’m In Love With Your Girlfriend? / L-O-V-E / The Curious Thing About Leather

Irving “I Want To Love You In My Room” – I don’t know why I was even a little bit surprised to have so much fun at this show. Though Irving will not be winning any awards for pureness and originality of vision any time soon, they are a remarkably gifted indie pop band with a knack for stealing the best bits from classic (and not so classic) acts of the mid-60s, late 80s, and early 90s and filtering out the annoying or obvious tics that tend to be emulated most often by lesser bands. I knew all of that coming into the show, and yet they still impressed me, playing an extremely well planned and utterly dud-free setlist with an energy and charm that I hadn’t been anticipating. Strangely, I had not realized that there were actually three lead singers in the band until seeing them perform in person. This united front only makes me appreciate their commitment to writing lyrics that come off like episodes of a tongue-in-cheek indie soap opera that much more. (Click here to buy it from Insound.)

Bardo Pond “Moonshine” – Bardo Pond love the jams, and indeed, the jams run free once again on their forthcoming Ticket Crystals. Though the band had fallen into a textural rut on previous releases, this album is a revelation with its mix of shroomy psychedelic jammery and acoustic tunefulness. The album’s twin highlights are a woozy but gorgeous cover of The Beatles’ “Cry Baby Cry” and “Moonshine,” a pastoral epic with overdubbed layers of vocals from Isobel Sollenberger that fall out of phase for a lovely effect, and eventually disappear into a backmasked haze. (Click here to pre-order it from Ear Rational.)