One track today: the debut solo single by Chris Taylor from Grizzly Bear, which comes out on his own new label, Terrible, under the name of Cant. I’ve begun to assemble my albums of the year lists for the mag over the past week, and my personal favourite is looking likely to be “Veckatimest”, sad indie cliché that such a choice may make me. But anyhow, the music coming out in the slipstream of “Veckatimest” is also pretty special, most recently the astounding version of “While You Wait For The Others” with the new lead vocal by Michael McDonald, and Cant’s “Ghosts” is just about as brilliant. Like Daniel Rossen’s Department Of Eagles album from last year, “Ghosts” makes it fairly obvious which band Taylor comes from. He has a good claim to be the specific director of this sound, however, since it was Taylor who actually produced both “Veckatimest” and “In Ear Park”. “Ghosts” has a lot of the elements that made those records so beguiling: stark tambourine and drumbeats that could’ve been lifted from a vintage girl group single, or at least a very early Mary Chain one; watery, engulfing harmonies; that crotchety, fractionally disruptive guitar that previously came to the fore in “I Live With You”. That song is possibly the closest thing to “Ghosts”, but this new Taylor song is more spare, a little distrait, unanchored; it actually makes me want to go back and listen to the very first Grizzly Bear album for the first time in years, because I suspect this might provide a link of sorts between where they began and where they’ve ended up. What initially seems fragile and dislocated, however, gradually coalesces into a simple, nagging and magnificent sigh of a chorus that has a similarly transporting and addictive effect as one of my very favourite singles, Plush’s “Found A Little Baby”. I’ve just played this five times in a row while writing the review and it gets better every time. Oh, and the seven-inch, which I don’t have, has an unreleased Arthur Russell song on the flip; wow.

A while ago, I wrote about Ducktails, one of the projects of Matthew Mondanile from New Jersey. Now, Woodsist is putting out the debut album by a band he plays guitar in, Real Estate, that might be if anything even better. “Real Estate” has a very similar dazed, heat-damaged atmosphere to Ducktails – a generally baked nostalgia for summer childhoods, reductively - and there’s a comparable grasp of melody which is gentle and ebbing, rather than forceful. But while Mondanile uses that to make fuzzy, pop/ambience, Real Estate cultivate the same vibes with a spare, jangly indie sound that has already, and understandably, won them comparisons – in the press release, at least - with New Jersey antecedents The Feelies and also The Clean. In that last Ducktails blog, I mentioned something about how Mondanile was at his least effective when he worked towards more orthodox songforms. But here, on the likes of “Pool Swimmers”, it’s clear that the songs are actually, in their own discreet way, rather strong. The comparison I made with Felt holds some water again, not least because Real Estate manage to make a very thin, fey guitar sound come across as somehow mysterious and alluring, rather than tinny and winsome. There’s also something about Martin Courtney’s voice, especially on “Beach Comber” and “Fake Blues”, the way it sits tentatively, unsteadily just behind the prickly mesh of guitars, that is reminiscent of very early Stone Roses, perhaps; when Ian Brown was defined more by stealth than by arrogance. I may start talking about how the Bluetones initially and fleetingly seemed like a good idea, so perhaps some hipper contemporary references might help sell this lovely little record. There are definite affinities with some of the other new lo-fi bands around, most notably the excellent Ganglians, and maybe also Kurt Vile, when Real Estate build up a certain skinny, reverberant momentum around “Suburban Beverage” (Yo La Tengo might be worth mentioning, too). As the album goes on, in fact, it seems to drift further out of focus and into some kind of blissful chugging reverie, with Mondanile and Courtney’s guitars amiably running rings round each other, in no evident hurry to get anywhere. The effect is charming and beatific, and, as mentioned, very like The Feelies. Finally, there’s a song called “Snow Days”. Among publicists, there’s been an understandable but often pretty random habit this year of comparing new acts to Fleet Foxes; the Balearic/prog/MOR record that came billed as such being a particular winner. I suspect Real Estate wouldn’t be hugely enamoured with the comparison, but “Snow Days” has a similar dewy calmness to it, a folksy, borderline preternatural calm that could easily come across as precious, but is actually rather beguiling. Have a listen at their Myspace.