NO GENRE

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Thankfully, Houses are not a fluke.  When “Endless Spring” dropped back in May, the band had only had a Myspace page for about a fortnight, and the song almost immediately got picked up by Pitchfork.  My fear that the band would clam up before they had the chance to show us much more was entirely unfounded.  On October 19th, the band will be releasing their first full length, All Night, on Lefse Records (because Lefse is having an incredible year and why the hell not).  In advance of the album, we get the late-night jam “Soak It Up.”  Whereas “Endless Spring” felt like the dawning sun peaking over the treeline, “Soak It Up” sounds like a quiet cab ride home in the middle of the night along desolate streets.  And while one great song is lucky, two great songs is a promise.

As much as I enjoy geeking out by building best-of album lists, song lists are infinity more interesting.  A song is a high-wire act: one slip, one faulty step and you’ve got a mess on your hands.  Albums, almost by their very nature, are more forgiving: great albums still have awful, awful songs.  So a list of the best songs of a period tend to be more inclusive of different types of talent.  Quite a few of these bands here don’t have enough of it to sustain an album (yet?), but they have enough to absolutely crush one.  So, culled together with scraps of time over the past week and crafted with a fair amount of thought and consideration, I humbly submit 40 songs that have it pretty well locked down this year.  Comments, omissions, counter-arguments all certainly welcome.

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Like Happy Family’s excellent “Youtube,” “Endless Spring” by Chicago’s Houses is a modest affair.  The song does not make any undue demands on the listener.  It’s upbeat without being cloying, contented without being arrogant.  And unlike a lot of the music that gets shackled with the sunny/beach/chill adjectival derivations, Houses’ “Endless Spring” sounds thoughtfully contemporary.  There is no false sense of nostalgia here: only the stuttering strum of looped guitar progression and the warm embrace of an electric piano.  While only having created a myspace page 16 days ago (!), Houses evidently has an EP coming out the first week in June. [via]

mp3:  Endless Spring