Summer in Abaddon

Flowing art pop -- with a somewhat dark cast. Highly stylized with polyrhythms and layered melodic voices. Owes a lot to New Zealand and Australian pop (The Church, The Clean, Jean Paul Sartre Experience, et al), as well as to XTC. Male harmony vocals with plenty of piano, guitar, drum machine, spiced with some interesting electronics. Pretty & gentle yet energetic. Very musical, albeit radio-ready, arrangements. Third LP (and the first in 3 years) from San Diego duo Zach Smith and Rob Crow. Home-recorded. All mid-tempo unless noted. No FCCs. Start with 2, 5, 10.

1. Starts with percussive, staccato guitar. Nice, swaying rhythm. Ends with some quiet guitar interplay.
==> 2. Starts with quiet keyboards. Introspective ballad. Dreamy voice during verses sounds a lot like Elliott Smith. Slow fade.
3. Starts with sparse, solo guitar chords. Wispy vocals. Gets percussive. Nice high & low vocal trade-offs. Interesting, minimal arrangement alternates between quiet & loud, slow & fast. Fades.
4. Mid-slow. Begins with keyboards. 7/4 time, with 3/4 chorus. Dreamy. Solo guitar fade.
==> 5. Starts with a simple guitar arpeggio. Drum machine. Very simple and very pretty. Develops from start to end with more layers & instruments. Slows and then quick fade.
6. Starts with drums and then repetitive guitar figure. Fairly repetitive throughout but to nice effect. Electronics sound a bit like Band On The Run (from Wings). Quick fade.
7. Fades up to full volume over 10 seconds. Jazzy. Pretty harmonies. Brief spoken samples. Ends with several seconds of silence.
8. Starts with drum & guitar arpeggio. Piano-based bridge.
9. Syncopated piano & drums to start. Lots of glissando synth. Blends into next song (but you could play alone).
==> 10. Blends from previous song (but you could play alone). Quiet vocal sample and then solo drums fade up. Drum-heavy. Some telephone-like samples. Yelled & sung vocals. Minimal... mostly guitar & drums. Drums stop and song ends with voice and then just a guitar fade.