Our Triumphant Return, or: From Girlpants, with Love

I was never a big fan of Acid House Kings. Actu­ally, I’m still not a big fan of Acid House Kings. They make that kind of cutesy, innocuous, soundtracked-pop that makes me think of a teeny kitten get­ting smoth­ered by a soft, marsh­mallow pillow (a familiar night­mare for all, I imagine). I con­fuse them with just about every other Swede combo/trio/quartet (well, maybe not ABBA); I hit “skip” every time one of their songs ruins a sweet run of blissed-out glo-fi (rare); I think I made a mean face at Nina Persson when I thought I saw The Cardi­gans out­side a Jiffy-Lube last week (doubtful). Yet need­less to say, I still listen to the Acid House Kings, and now find myself putting “This Heart is a Stone” on a crummy love-mix for cranky hip­ster people. And this is a song about cranky hip­ster love, about hearts cal­ci­fied into small pockets of coal. On the opening bounce, Julia Lan­ner­heim begins “They say your middle name is ‘Trouble’ / but I know it’s Car­o­line” and “They say that you only bring heartache / but I know you brought a bottle of wine,” that self-knowing delivery sug­gesting the type of tongue-in-cheek play­ful­ness that is so tongue-in-cheek it’s like there’s a smaller tongue inside a smaller cheek tucked away inside. Cou­pled with that long pause right before the insta-classic chorus (“This heart is a stone / no one will ever break it / this heart is a stone / just for you it breaks easily”) and you’ve got mix­tape fodder for years of catty Car­o­lines who are lookin’ for the right guy to cleave that heart-shaped car­bonate rock. (Joel)

This song puts me in a corny but gen­uine mood. I want to believe there is a bit of Emmylou influ­ence in the singing style of the Swedish sis­ters that make up First Aid Kit, and lis­tening to the crys­talline melody and har­mony makes a state­ment even as brash as this one pretty easy to back up. But though most of the other songs lack the nec­es­sary melan­choly, “Hard Believer” delivers and that’s the reason to pick this song off their debut, The Big Black and the Blue. “And it’s one life / and it’s this life / and it’s beau­tiful” – these are not com­plex lyrics, but set in the frame­work of this melody, they’re words that you want to wail when you’re drunk. And love, like the best Amer­i­cana, should be spoken plainly and timed as tight as a rope walk. (Niina)

From the Shondes’ upcoming album My Dear One, which is one album I’m highly antic­i­pating. The gor­geous blend of riot grrl and clas­sical instru­men­ta­tion is what makes their sound, and this song, so fucking irre­sistible that I can’t even make a halfway decent metaphor to describe it. The Shondes have a spe­cial magic with melodic break­downs, and this song is no excep­tion, with its self-conscious lyrics about struc­ture. Singer Louisa’s voice makes the instruc­tion “let’s make it beau­tiful” seem more like a com­mand than a coax, and I’m totally along for the ride. (Niina)

Awe­somely named band frontman Yoni Wolf is some­thing of a spe­cialist in heart­break and longing. Having made an entire album’s worth of songs about those two sub­jects in Ele­phant Eye­lash (also: family, drugs, sui­cide, and death in gen­eral), he turned around and made another, even better, album about the exact same stuff with Alopecia. Like most of my favorite lyri­cists, Yoni has the rare ability to employ seem­ingly non­sen­sical, or at least impres­sion­istic and scat­ter­shot, verse to sneakily dev­as­tating effect. “Good Friday” is about many things, in that it covers a pretty stun­ning array of scenes and moments for a song that runs just under four minutes–but at its base, this song is about the process of assim­i­lating the loss of love. A litany of the ways the nar­rator tries to forget, the lyrics are at the same time inter­mixed with admis­sions of pain and con­fu­sion as well as fonder rem­i­nisces, leading to a con­clu­sion in which he gives the girl the best sendoff he can muster. In a round­about way, it covers the entire breadth and depth of a rela­tion­ship in the space of a pop song. (And hey… the music is awe­some, too.) (Ben)

Then again, in the vagueries of romance, there is very little solid. As we dart through the shades of delirious love-lorn innu­endo like gup­pies through a minia­ture ceramic diver mask, all the while we secretly long for some­thing obvious. Luckily there’s choco­late, which we can use to mash into our eat-faces when we don’t get that phone call we deserve. And even more luckily, Jamie Stewart’s new Xiu Xiu iter­a­tion drops this month, and it con­tains this dark and dance­able tidbit con­cerning choco­late. It may also con­cern depres­sion. It may also want to make you recon­sider being happy. But that’s not my issue, that. (Niina)