The Easy Gramophone ft The Twilight Sad

1. Parts and Labor - Fractured Skies
Parts and Labor have made a track that's strangely seminal, strangely stand-alone, not quite like anything else in the indie-rock landscape. There's some of Arcade Fire or Wolf Parade, yearning and brash, but the mix is noisier, fiercer, dosed with glitch and the spirit of Fugazi. This combination is less mongrel than you would think, and more beautiful. Not beautiful like rainbows: beautiful like the demolition of a ruined Brooklyn tenement.
Download at: http://www.jagjaguwar.com/mp3.php

2. Elvis Perkins - All The Night Without Love
Elvis Perkins is more Costello than Presley: on this song he shows an urban, modern melancholy, ruminating on insole packaging and GotMilk.com. It's not funny, or bitter, quite; just resigned, weirdly proud in its sadness, especially when the klezmer fiddle sidles in, like a guest from the room down the hall.
Download at: http://www.elvisperkins.net/site/music.shtml

3. The Twilight Sad - That Summer, At Home I Had Become The Invisible Boy
A Glasgow band that skipped Scottish buzz and went straight for North American broo-haha, although with a song like this it's hard to be resentful. Cut from straight indie cloth and yet strangely affecting; the noisy bits are genuinely noisy, the angsty bits are suitably raging, and the lyrics are the kind that are really, really fun to yell in a throng of like-minded people. Repeat after me: "THE KIDS ARE ON FIRE IN THE BEDROOM."
Download at: http://www.insound.com/mp3/mp3s.php?searchby=twilight

4. The National - Fake Empire
May means summertime and so I don't know why all my picks this month are vaguely-or-explicitly melancholy. It's not heartbreak or homesickness; maybe it's reverse-psychology. I think The National's Matthew Berninger would be okay with this: You Do What You Have To Do, he'd intone in his red-wine baritone. And his band would play on, sluggish piano and confused narrator, trumpets rising splendid for all sides.
Download at: http://www.beggarsgroupusa.com/mp3/thenational_fakeempire.mp3

5. Ornament - Weeds
Lochside folktronica, lulling and green, made with guitar-strings, static and half-murmurs. Just right for those long afternoons on the grass, bicycles spinning past, butterflies flitting through the sunshine.
Download at: http://www.myspace.com/ornamentronica