Singles Mixer

You can spin the wheel on the Bridge’s fifth record, National Bohemian, and get some pretty different, though uniformly super-produced (by Los Lobos’ Steve Berlin), things: swamp-boogie blues, grandly orchestrated roots-rock, and some of the more usual (however adept) dorm-room G-Love funk meh. But, here, the Bridge gets a little bit country, delivering the record’s underdog standout, as lonesome on the album as it is just a lonesome-sounding ballad: mostly winsome singing, slide guitar, and dusty lightly twanged vocals without much flourish—which is kinda weird on a record so full of flourish and embellishment. An odd and welcome inclusion.

For more information visit thebridgemusic.com.

Adventure—Benny Boeldt to the government—released a debut LP in the summer of 2008 that thrust him out onto the grand stage of indieland hype armed with little more than a backpack half full of 8-bit melodies. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t too terribly exciting either. Mainly, they sounded thin and underdeveloped, like notebook sketches. “Relax the Mind,” released now as the lead track on a Boeldt-compiled mixtape and set for release on his long-gestating follow-up record Lesser Known, is a whole new species, a dynamic, vibey cut of slow-motion synth ricochets and droney undulation. It’s the sort of hypno techno that makes as much sense in a mix with Ceephax Acid Crew as it does with Emeralds.

For more information visit facebook.com/adventuresound.

A 4/4, tightly-sequenced dance cut that reads like an LCD Soundsystem take on the Castlevania soundtrack. You could do much worse, and “Moon Child,” currently available only on the Raindeer Bandcamp page (raindeer.bandcamp.com), is the sort of track that feels refreshingly displaced in time, something you’d like to have cued up in the interests of doing something sweaty and shallow. There’s a wave of self-seriousness in indie-leaning dance music these days for some reason, but, as the werewolf howl that closes the song attests, you won’t find it here.

> Email Michael Byrne