Lace Curtains - "Bedroom Honesty"

If Harlem warmed our hearts with love songs—classic and simplistic pop constructions colored with touches of crackle and rust—Michael Coomers' solo side-project Lace Curtains centers around the sexual side of human nature with an articulate and cooly confident lyrical precision. "High Fantasy"—to date, our very favorite song of 2012—is part homage to and part conversation with Candy Darling, the Warhol regular and transexual subject of The Velvet Underground's "Candy Says." Coomers' tempo-changing chorus—accompanied by that killer racing bass riff—is thoughtful, nuanced, and just about as close to poetry as rock 'n' roll gets:

You sit in judgement / Analyze my skin / Point out all of my imperfections / You romanticize the saints and fetishize familiar / Oh what a Judas you've become.

"Bedroom Honesty," the second track released from what's being called The Garden of Joy and The Well of Loneliness, is nearly as impressive, as Coomers invites the listener into the bedroom for an argument about the "same old screw": "I'm trying to sleep / Why don't you leave me alone? / You can call me a freak if you want to / We can smell our own." There's a real loose swaying rhythm and warm groove to the track as the narrator drops gems of insightful yet entirely brutal "Bedroom Honesty"—"A person you could fall in love with / If they weren't already in your bed." Lace Curtains takes a few stylistic cues from Lou Reed and company (who doesn't?), but the personal and idiosyncratic lens Coomers writes from is entirely his own. If the rest of the forthcoming full-length maintains a similar quality, then we might just have to agree with our pal Rollo & Grady: this is an album of the year contender.

Lace Curtains - "Bedroom Honesty"
Lace Curtains - "High Fantasy"