Free and legal MP3 from Faunts (sweet, glum, soaring neo-shoegaze from Edmonton)

"It Hurts Me All the Time" - Faunts
     Breezy and melancholy is a seductive musical combination, trickier to master than it may at first seem. The big problem when aiming for both pretty and glum at the same time is avoiding glib pastiche; in this day and age when knob-twiddlers rule the world, it's easy enough to combine disparate moods and sounds and harder than ever to make it sound a convincing whole.
     "It Hurts Me All the Time" blows right past any difficulties from the get-go: first comes that extended intro mixing sprightly synths and low-level dissonance, and then (eventually) the decisive opening lines: "You could never love me/The sky is black above me," sung with pitch-perfect doleful-sweetness by Tim Batke (one of three Batke brothers in this five-man band). Scored or sung the wrong way, lyrics like that might set off the twee alarm, but not only is Batke's voice burnished with a subtle throatiness one might not expect from a soaring pop tenor, get a load too of that clanging guitar noise going on as a backdrop to the bubbling synthesizers accompanying him--a visceral signal of the song's mixed message. And then there's also the smooth, repeated synthesizer theme that's more or less an instrumental hook for the song--a pretty line aired with an eerie, organic fragility; a line which, as well, carries with it a distinct echo of Joy Division's famously melancholy "Love Will Tear Us Apart," which further undermines the sweetness.
     "It Hurts Me All the Time" is a song from the CD Feel.Love.Thinking.Of., the Edmonton band's second album (not counting last year's remix album), to be released next week on Friendly Fire Recordings. MP3 via Friendly Fire.