Now this is music #44: Young Ejecta, Oh Wonder, Aurora, salute feat. Vanessa Elisha, Electric Wire Hustle

Life is a curiously complex thing.

Euphorically up one moment, desperately down the next, and a confused hot mess in-between, it is never less than utterly unpredictable even when it feels like it’s stuck in some sort of bland sameness.

These five artists, who hail from quite divergent parts of the globe seem to understand this innately, pouring emotions that are real and make sense into their songs in ways that make their lyrical impact every bit as powerful as their musical effect.

These are songs to please the ears but nourish the soul from people who know life covers a whole gamut of feelings and sensations and isn’t an easy beast to tame, assuming you ever can.

Possibly best just to sit back and experience it, much as you will these beautiful, heart stirring songs.

“Your Planet” by Young Ejecta

Once known as just plain old Ejecta until for some legal reasons they morphed into Young Ejecta, the American synthpop-loving duo of musician Leanne Macomber (Neon Indian) and producer Joel Ford (Ford & Lapotin) known their way around exquisitely-beautiful, free-flowing dreamy electronic music.

The title track of sorts from their forthcoming The Planet EP is a thing of rare loveliness, pulsing with insistent beats that seem to pulse with a peculiar melancholic intensity at regular intervals, diving and darting through the ethereal, emotionally-evocative wonder of Macomber’s voice and a buoyant melody that is as much enchantingly upbeat as it is not.

For all its beauty though there is an aching sadness running the course of this song and that is for a good reason as Sasha Geffen of Pitchfork explains:

“‘Your Planet’ is an ode to Macomber’s close friend who died at 20. To mourn him, she imagined him in his own, new world, looking fondly down at Earth like a lost Little Prince laughing among the stars. “You were the only one who ever loved me,” she intones on the track, while Ford transitions from celestial organ to an outer space dance party bass line. In mourning there’s also celebration, and “Your Planet” gently wraps its tendrils around both.”

It is a mix, as Geffen notes, of the celebratory and the mournful and it works as an ode to someone once and always loved, and as a reminder that Young Ejecta know their way around music that is darkly synthetic and yet fully human too.

“All We Do” by Oh Wonder

Frankly if all London-based duo Oh Wonder did was name themselves before sitting back and watching us say their moniker with its inescapable sound of amazement-inducing euphoria – it sounds like the sort of phrase Anne of Green Gables or Pollyanna might utter in one of their frequently gushing moments – then life would be a very happy place indeed.

Thankfully the twosome once known as Wonder Wonder (and also as Anthony and Josephine), which isn’t quite as emphatically wondrous let’s be honest, also make some damn fine music too, and on a regular basis with a bold plan to release a track a month regular as clockwork.

Their fourth track, December 2014’s “All We Do” comes with their trademark intertwining harmonies, their rich vocal tapestry overlaid with the warmth of a feather-filled quilt on a bed in mid winter onto a piano so singularly alone and resonant that it recalls a quiet bar as 3am slowly emptying of its diehard patrons.

This is a song meant for hushed intimacy, of gathering with friends and loved ones over shared life experiences, of realising that what we go through every day can seem futile, too safe and limiting but it’s all we’ve got and it’s all we do.

The thing is, brutally real and honest though the lyrics are, they and the music that bears them with beauty and quiet grace are a thing of comfort, a reassurance that we’re not alone in this seemingly pyrrhic march through the valleys and mountains of life.

Quite simply Oh Wonder, apart from possessing a name I want to say over and over, are good for the soul and the ears, and in life that’s pretty much all I, sorry we, need.

*Check out this interview with Oh Wonder on Pigeons and Planes.

“Under Stars” by Aurora

Aurora Aksnes is an 18 year old from Norway who not only has shampoo-commercial worthy hair but a gift for melding all sorts of different sounds into a cohesive musical whole anchored by her striking vocals which possess a presence many artists would kill for.

Her voice dips and soars, coasting along the depths and rising to the heavens with effortless goosebump-inducing ease, emotions pouring forth in a cascade that overwhelms in the most glorious of ways.

There are times, many times, when “Under Stars” feels like an onrushing vocal and melodic flood, sweeping all before it, with the listener willingly submitting to the subsuming sensations that accompany it.

The song is powerful, delicate, fragile and robust all at once, anchored in what Aurora calls “dark pop”, a peculiarly-Scandinavian ability to balance the happy and sad, the light and the dark in one trembling but meaningful whole.

And there is real thematic substance threaded through the song as Aurora explains in a quote from a piece on paste magazine:

“It’s about us. About the people we’ve lost through time, and how we handle that loss. The guilt of still being alive when they are not, and the hope that they might only be sleeping, maybe still dreaming, under the star.”

In other words, it’s about life in all its infinite richness and loss, and so talented is this emerging artist that it sounds as if she has managed to fit it all into one profoundly-moving track.

“Real Cool” by salute (feat. Vanessa Elisha)

Salute, an up-and-coming UK producer who has become known for his memorably-rousing remixes but is about to release an EP of his won Silver Tides, is man who understands that less is quite often for.

Cliched though this observation might be, it’s true that much more nuance of feeling and expression can be achieved by dialling it back as Pigeons and Planes notes:

“With Vanessa Elisha on vocals, salute keeps his synth wizardry fairly restrained, proving he can make a seductive pop song as well as he can make a party starting club song.”

There is pleasing sparseness to the throbbing synths that percolate throughout, allowing Vanessa Elisha’s shimmeringly-rich voice to glide across the mesmerising melody as she sings of her delight in how different she and would-be amour are but how well they go together, something she thinks is “real cool”.

“Real Cool” is a chilled track that holds back, and yet manages to convey the full intensity of two people coming together in the most unexpected but pleasing of ways, a further sign if we needed that salute is one artist capable of moving up and down the spectrum of human experience and musical sounds with consummate ease.

“Bottom Line” by Electric Wire Hustle

Mara TK and David “Taay Ninh” Wright, collectively known as Electric Wire Hustle (surely one of the more inventive names out there in what is a crowded field) hail from New Zealand, a country that has given us some pretty impressive musical acts in the past and which continues to contribute to the musical richness of the world far out of proportion to its small population.

Their sound, Pigeons and Planes admiringly notes, is made of “dark, skittering percussion and out-front vocals” which finds possibly its most emotionally-arresting distillation in the stripped back beauty and heartfelt emotion of “Bottom Line”, a song which makes effective use of Mara’s highly emotive voice.

It’s a song that also subscribes to the less is more philosophy, keenly aware that there is something deeply immersive about letting voices do their thing over music that takes a backseat.

It’s hard not to be moved by this most beautiful and transcendent of tracks, probably the best calling card possible for their uniformly-excellent album Love Can Prevail which released in September last year.

*It’s also worth checking out the video for “Bottom Line” on Pigeons and Planes.

NOW THIS IS MUSIC EXTRA EXTRA!

There is something truly arresting about the perfect marriage of song and visuals in a music video, a sense that you have moved beyond just listening to the song and are immersed in its three-minutes-long world.

Such is the case with the video for “Drown”, the latest song released by Dive into My Midnight Heart aka Angelica Allen (a member of the disco-revival outfit Escort) whose director Jake Nelson has called his evocatively-crafted extension of the song “a watery dreamworld that reflects Angelica’s subconscious thoughts and fears.”

According to EW, Nelson used a “hand-drawn animation, live action, and visual effects (including computer animation and the 3D imaging of still photographs)” to achieve this stunningly gorgeous dive into the subconscious of a very talented artist whose two-song EP Drown released this week.

“Twenty-five songs in total appear on a leaked version that surfaced overnight, as opposed to the 19 currently displayed on the iTunes pre-order for Rebel Heart. Now back in the mix appear to be “Beautiful Scars,” “Borrowed Time,” “Graffiti Heart” and “Addicted” — songs that first sprung up in demo form in December. Additionally, “Queen” and “Autotune Baby” are on the tracklist for the leaked version.”