Hero, the new split cassette from Bloomington's !mindparade and New Jersey's Vows has a classic-feeling lifeblood coursing through its plastic tape veins. It is the sound of pop music setting out toward the borders, looking for new (or new-ish) ground, instead of digging an ever deeper hole right where it stands. Both are adequate and fully acceptable means of discovery, but the former feels more early-days and bright eyed, maybe merely because it's built on the pure act of setting out. The map is not yet the territory and no one's seen all of either one.

!mindparade take this the farthest with their fragmentary, journey-like songs. Kitchen sink textures crop up without warning: strings, synths, horns, keys, acoustic and electric guitar, ad infinitum. This is bedroom pop from that imaginary bedroom of the alternate history past, one stocked with every musical tool imaginable and with a door that stays locked as long as it needs to and not a second longer. Every little structural or musical flair or fancy is chased down before it can flee. The songs tumble down various unpredictable side streets. 

Take for example "Loose Light." It starts off easy enough psych pop, built up though it may be with ever-so-slightly off-kilter synth sounds and stacked vocals. But then, before its scant two minutes are up, it slips into full on string quartet mode, abandoning all but the germ of the idea from the first half of the track. "I Took A Walk" moves similarly if in a different direction, from bouncy and catchy to full on a-rhythmic guitar drone on the outro. 

The whole thing could easily end up sounding manic and overstuffed but it doesn't. Part of this comes from the performances sounding fully bedroom and multi-tracked, possessed with a certain no click track looseness. The vocals, however, are what seem to really glom it all together. They are not disinterested, just unsurprised at the flips and fits that the band finds itself undergoing. It's all totally normal to him, and normalized for us because he's not freaking out. It's the singing voice of the kid at the end of Magnolia as those frogs come down: "this is something that happens."  Maybe it's a bit of a stretch, but it seems like the title of their 2012 release Everything is Happening could've been an oblique reference to just this scene; listen to it via the player embedded below. 

Vows, at first, sound an awful lot like !mindparade--both groups are dreamy, standing on the other side of foggy glass, and singing catchy pop songs anyhow. A closer look, though, reveals that they come at it differently: VOWS are less bedroom and more garage. Opener "Fun" reveals this. The song rocks and drives in a way that !mindparade don't even really pursue. There's more of a pocket, a groove.

Which is not to say that VOWS are not as well constantly morphing, it's just to say that they're going at it differently, and that in their case it's all about texture. Take the track "Be You Again," for example, whose outro is primarily one looping phrase. The development arises out of the way the backing tracks and the layered vocals and processed drums pulse underneath.  The track "Better With Age" does this the most drastically, by swapping in and out significantly different timbres throughout the course of the relatively simple song structure.  

Closer "Let Your World Go" is the pinnacle. Across seven minutes, the track builds and builds, with each layer finding some way to keep on fitting in. It is not just an act of piling though, there's an ear for the way pieces ought to come together at work here, so when the constantly upward climb finally tapers off it feels like it's actually gone somewhere instead of just having gotten louder for a while.  

Hero will be available from Tree Machine tomorrow, October 31, and !mindparade are playing a release show tonight in Bloomington at the Vid. You can order the cassette, which is limited to 100 copies, right here. Be sure as well to check out !mindparade performance at MFT's December in-store at Indy CD & Vinyl on December 6, and keep an eye out for !mindparade's next full-length EP Dead Mystics slated for release on Tree Machine in spring 2015.