Monday 08.01.11: Monday Night Residency: ACTIVE CHILD / THERAPIES SON / LETTING UP DESPITE GREAT FAULTS / CASSETTES WON’T LISTEN @ Echo

8:30 / Free / 21+

Active Child || Listen||Watch||MP3
Pat Grossi’s a harpist, an ex-choirboy, an Active Child; precious, no? Nah, not really. Grossi’s gauzy, twinkly Active Child songs feel at once rather humble and astronomically huge. Bits of Animal Collective’s stacked harmonies, Dazzle Ships’ askew shimmer, and M83′s post-New Order epic pulse coalesce in Grossi’s tidy yet titanic sound, stretched out over six songs and 30 minutes on the Curtis Lane EP. Precious? More like prodigious.

Tracks here comes in a couple of varieties: there’s the hazier, sultrier, slower numbers, and the ones you can dance to. Grossi’s smart to keep the two sides in balance, but while the thumpier numbers have their charms, they seem a bit timid next to the others’ sky-streaking grandeur. “I’m in Your Church at Night” seems to stretch on forever, matching Grossi’s heaven-sent falsetto to a lush rumble not unlike a screwed’n'chopped “In the Air Tonight”. His compositional skill is really something, moving beats and harp plinks and negative space in and out without disrupting the majestic scope of the tunes. His falsetto, a touch meek on its own, has a dreamy incandescence when piled on top of itself. The harp’s far from the focus here, but coupled with his voice, it provides a organic counterpoint to the synthetic sounds constantly shuffling underneath him.

Grossi’s hand as a dance producer isn’t quite as steady; deft as he is at matching sounds, there’s a reason you don’t hear much harp in house music, and the throb he throws under half the tunes here never quite seems to knock hard enough to actually enter the realm of the danceable. Perhaps that’s not the point, but the reedy “Take Shelter” doesn’t have quite as much vitality as the stretchier stuff, sounding at times like any number of bedroom Bernard Sumner. A stuttery sample of Grossi’s voice makes head-nodder “When Your Love Is Safe” the best of the dancier bunch, but “Weight of the World” is bogged down by too much thump and a sharp vocal downshift; his falsetto’s lovely, his tenor not so much. It’s not that Grossi oughta give up trying to get people to move, but his dance music’s just a smudge too cerebral, and besides, the more extravagant numbers are moving enough as is.

Grossi’s limited means seem to have pushed the cosmic, stately side of these tracks to the forefront; these tunes might be huge in effect, but they’re fairly modest in execution, and one hopes Grossi can maintain that homespun feel should bigger and better things befall him. And they oughta; lord knows if I were charged to soundtrack the big smooch in a teen movie I’d snatch up the rights to “Wilderness” or “I’m in Your Church at Night” post-haste. These songs just feel climactic, durable, far greater than the sum of their parts. If this guy can almost get you to dance to harp songs, just imagine what he might be capable of creating.Pitchfork

Therapies Son || Listen||Watch
Alex Jacob is a wunderkind whose warped, synthy Americana nods to the Beach Boys and the Flaming Lips. And we love it

The background: Here’s another PC (post-chill) laptop-pop boy – and he is a boy, just – to file alongside the likes of the much raved about (around these parts anyway) Idiot Glee, Perfume Genius and Porcelain Raft. As opening sells go, that doesn’t quite do 19-year-old Alex Jacob justice. Because the five songs we’ve heard by him really are staggeringly good. Our sincere apologies for liking – really liking – three new artists this week. We promise to find someone we hate soon.

Not today, though. Jacob apparently only began this pop-writing lark in November (what, the one just gone? Jeez) after he had his heart broken by a girl, he put the results on MySpace and within days his “little songs for friends” were all over the blogs. Soon, he was being offered a deal by Transparent, the label we keep mentioning so often people are going to start suspecting we’re on the payroll.

We can see what Transparent saw in him. Like Perfume et al, this is fragile and DIY, but there’s a bona fide talent here – we won’t say “waiting to come out” because we dig the budget nature of it all as it is, just as we appreciate Jacob’s Wayne Coyne via Tiny Tim vocals. Destiny presents our favourite new wunderkind as Brian Wilson and Van Dyke Parks in one person, his warped, synthy Americana nodding to the Beach Boys and Flaming Lips.

This music suggests all manner of suppressed fantasies and sublimated desires. Therapies Son? We’re reminded of the story, possibly apocryphal, that they used to play the Beach Boys’ Smiley Smile in psychiatric wards to calm patients. Jacob sounds as though he may be able to verify that one. On Rose Red Rose he sounds frail and a little damaged, but the music couldn’t be more vital, the sort of showtunes-goes-psych, Broadway on Venus shtick the Lips do so well.

And that’s not even the best track. No, the gold rosette goes to Yellow Mama, which represents conceivably the finest cluster of cosmic carnival calliope we’ve heard since Zaireeka. After that, the Spector-Wilson mambo pop of Golden Girl is merely terrific. We were thinking, last night, that from now on we were only going to get really excited – properly shamelessly hyped-up and giddy – over new bands who delivered music as timeless and true as Him by Rupert Holmes or Didn’t We by Frank Sinatra, or as heart-stoppingly poignant as the bit at the end of the film Never Been Kissed where Don’t Worry Baby comes in. In which case: done, and done.The Guardian UK

Letting Up Despite Great Faults || Listen||Watch
To say that it never rains in Southern California might be an overstatement, but it’s still an unexpected pleasure to hear something so unmistakably autumnal from the season-challenged state. Letting Up Despite Great Faults, a Los Angeles-based band, effectively capture an overcast mood with “In Steps”, the opening track from their forthcoming self-titled album. Layering lush synth and a shimmering New Order guitar tone, “Steps” prettily evokes the tipping point from full bloom to slow decay, as the warm summer days give way to a wet, windy fall. While the shoegaze-y indie pop of M83 probably represents the closest contemporary reference point, Letting Up’s melodic sensibility is distinguished by careful and decisive plotting– save for the muted, billowing vocals. Overall, “Steps”‘ subtle shading suggests maybe there really is no such thing as an endless summer, even in Southern California.Pitchfork

Cassettes Won’t Listen || Listen||Watch
Bedroom music has been around since the ’60s when Brian Wilson wrote a song about it. In recent years chillwave artists from America’s west coast added their names to the tableau thick and fast: Washed Out and Wild Nothing to name but two. Cassettes Won’t Listen have/has been doing this since 2003 to little fanfare.

Jason Drake is Cassettes Won’t Listen and ‘Stuck’ is a paean to isolation. ‘I keep to myself in conversations,’ he sings over a background of music that would make The Postal Service think twice before mounting a comeback. Things are kept under control by Drake though, who has two full-length albums under his belt plus plenty of remixes, which can be found on his blog (Daft Punk’s ‘Derezzed’ sounds great).The Point of Everything