Secret Place

Ponies in the Surf “Slow Down Sugar” – “Slow Down Sugar” is a wonderfully appropriate name for this song, but an even more accurate title would have been “Slowed Down, Sugared.” Camille McGregor’s voice is almost cartoonishly sweet and angelic, but it’s never so gorgeous as when it’s extended into an ethereal drone that merges with a lightly humming organ. Following a brief, gently clanging middle section, the song drifts to a halt for over a minute. It seems even slower than it actually is, but it’s absolutely mesmerizing and almost seems to set the entire world in slow motion. (Click here to buy it from Asaurus.)

These Are Powers “The South Angel” – The opening of the track sounds like a stream of clipped inanities set to a backdrop of motionless, muddied but still shrill noise, as though you’re somehow being forced to listen to a loop of a few seconds of an overheard conversation outside a rock club. However, the tension escalates and the tone takes a turn toward outright panic, and it seems to retroactively transform the opening bit into something that now sounds more like pleading and less like a girl excitedly trying to tell her friend about some new whatever. (Click here for the These Are Powers MySpace page.)