Baths, “Exit the Mine.” A few months after Damon Albarn recorded an entire album on the iPad, electronic wizkid Will Weisenfeld (a.k.a. Baths) steps up to the app-implementation plate and knocks one out of the veritable park with the lovely “Exit the Mine,” put together just last Saturday with the help of INTUA’s Beatmaker 2. The track is more restrained than the majority of the pulse-heavy arrangements from Baths’s Cerulean, and the overall change in form from skittish to sedative allows the listener to buy into the uncharacteristically love-focused vocals that, coincidentally, sound a hell of a lot like those on Blur’s “Sweet Song.” Even if “Exit the Mine” hadn’t been cut on an iPad, it would still be noteworthy for its delicate, piano-driven structure and attention to detail: A background echo makes the song sound like it was actually recorded inside a cave. Mike LeChevallier
Lana Del Rey, “Blue Jeans.” The B-side to Lana Del Rey’s single “Video Games” ups the ante for the should-be future Grammy darling. In what seems like one fleeting breath, the singer compares her beloved to both cancer and her favorite sweater during the first verse, which is followed by an even more swooning b-section. That alone is enough to dispel any suspicion that “Video Games” was some kind of brilliant fluke. But then comes the song’s bridge, which drops a 4/4 beat and finds the typically cool Del Rey in a relative frenzy when “they” take her beau away. Just one question lingers: How long before she turns up in a David Lynch film? Sal Cinquemani
Yuck, “Cousin Corona.” In somewhat of an attempt to entice those who may have not fully jumped in when Yuck’s self-titled debut was released back in February, Fat Possum is releasing a deluxe edition on October 11 that includes eight bonus tracks, including “Cousin Corona,” which is grungier and ultimately more rambunctious than anything on the original release. It’s a largely slow crawl of a song that follows the Pixies-pioneered/Nirvana-perfected quiet bridge/loud chorus formula with expert precision. Even with all those obvious influences, though, “Cousin Corona” stands on its own as a great, boozed-up party anthem: “I wanna go out on the weekend/I want to hang out with my best friend,” sings frontman Daniel Blumberg, with a woozy tone that borders on drunkenness (too much of the titular beverage, perhaps) while guitarist Max Bloom wails both vocally and on his strings. ML
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