It’s possible that over the past several weeks you’ve noticed the reviews slow to a trickle around these parts. We had our reasons! Cookies weren’t involved! Okay, maybe they were! All of us at Tripwire HQ are pleased to introduce to you today a new chapter in our “take” on music criticism—by handing over the keys. Starting this week and every Tuesday hereafter, we’ll be posting a full album to stream through our friends over at LaLa. What we’d like you to do is lend us your brainwaves and tweet us whatever crosses your mind while listening. Maybe there’s a riff you can’t get out of your head. A lyric? A moment? An image? If you’re feeling ambitious, spend your 124 characters reviewing the record as a whole. Just toss those tweets over to us at @thetripwire and by the end of the week, we’ll cobble together and share the beautiful mess of a madlib it creates. Or, if you’re a complete Luddite, you can just leave a review in the comments section. You’re the boss now. So without further adieu, we give you… Tweet Release.

This week’s album is Unmap, full-length debut from Volcano Choir, a gnarly new collaboration between Justin Vernon of Bon Iver and Collection of Colonies of Bees.

I got off the plane 34 hours ago. Beaches immersed in sunlight surrounded me. People drank from the moment they woke up, each body bathed in a golden hue. Sun would set late, maybe around 7:00 or 8:00 p.m. We’d all go to dinner before buying liters of wine to be entertained by whatever discotheque the night chose. It’s not the real world, sure, but I’ll be damned if we didn’t live those nights like it was.  Arriving back home, where daily concerns amount to more than say, unripe peaches at a fruit-stand, was expected and predictable. Sure, there’s sun back home. But it hides somewhere beneath a legion of dark clouds intent on bleakness. Yet I was unfazed. I got home finding myself strangely impervious to the gloom outside the window. Maybe it was partly due to the post-euphoric state that a tropical climate can induce, or maybe it was the Ayrton Senna E.P. by Barcelona electro-pop quartet Delorean.

The five-song E.P. begins with the insistent “Deli” and iterates a simple thesis: “I like the time I spend with you girl.” The beautiful simplicity of such a statement serves as the album’s manifesto, both thematically and sonically: find happiness in simple pleasures. It’s this dedication to positivity that allows Ayrton Senna to shimmer and glisten without being cloying, to push their tracks relentlessly forward without ever losing our attention.

A perfect summer record, indeed; as much to please an intimate group of friends on a camping trip as an amphetamine-charged dance floor. But awarding Delorean with only the title of an excellent summer record denigrates what is a multifaceted musical accomplishment. Ayrton Senna will please the Cut Copy and Tough Alliance fan alike, along with house DJ’s inclined to Delorean because of the involvement of Barcelona DJ John Talabot. But ultimately, where Delorean transcends particular niches is their innate charm that reaches out to audiences of all types. The most obvious example being the sun-soaked anthem “Seasun”, a track so immediately entrancing that its touchstone crescendo and release almost convinced me summer would never end. The formula is not necessarily surprising, it’s just remarkably effective: chattering synth noises, serene vocals swooning and mixing, electric hand-claps and percussion refusing to sit still until an almost-comprehensible vocal loop hits. I can decipher the word “sun” and that’s about it, but this reticence only opens the doors for personal interpretation further.

I’m utterly impressed. Delorean have clearly mastered their composition leaving us only wanting more. The Ayrton Senna E.P. is infectiously positive, affording your mind the chance to transport itself somewhere placid, and whether that may be home or on a beach, Delorean are happy to take you there.

—Michael Cranston

“The Rocky Road to Dublin” is an old Irish folk song about a man’s trip from his hometown of Tuam, Ireland to, you guessed it – Dublin. Along the way, he encounters dogs and lasses, has his belongings stolen, and eventually ditches the city of Dublin to hop ship to Liverpool, where he whacks some contentious Englishmen in the head with his shillelagh for taking the piss out of him.

Brian Kelly, another man out of Tuam, sings under the moniker of So Cow. He turns out songs that bristle with a charming, jittery angst – concise, yet twee at times. Not the check-out-my-cutesy-Belle & Sebastian-plush-dolls twee, but more of the check-out-my-Television Personalities-vinyl-and-the-cigarette-burn-in-my-cardigan ilk. Though if the “t-word” is deemed dirty in your vernacular, perhaps this record isn’t for you. This release collects 18 tracks that show Kelly is studied in both the classic British Invasion song structure as well as C81 and C86, both of which gave several nods to the past themselves. Most of the songs were recorded in Ireland and South Korea, a regional blur which could explain some of the lyrics’ tendencies towards that ever-so-fond feeling of being lost. I’m not sure whether it’s the words themselves or Kelly’s inflection, but tracks like “Halcyon Days” and “Shackleton” make me wince like I just saw the girl of my dreams walk out of the dance with that dick who drives a lifted Jeep Wrangler, as I’m left standing near the bleachers in the gym holding the mixtape I made for her like a hopeless romantic dunce. Because let’s be honest – love is never as pure as it is in adolescence, and Kelly captures that notion beautifully. The Irishman in love is a rocky road indeed.

—Joseph Tirabassi

If Justin Townes Earle’s sophomore effort, Midnight at the Movies, falls short in any way, mentioning his Old Man would only serve to exonerate another tiresome venture into music from a kid with a loaded last name. While most country-influenced twenty-somethings craft their lovesick songs inside a familiar bottle of wine, JTE bounces seamlessly from genre to genre, welding the Ink Spots to Hank Williams (“What I Mean to You”, “Poor Fool”), or Louis Jordan and Norman Blake (“Walk Out”, “Black Eyed Suzy”). With a voice that sounds like a farm-spliced Bing Crosby and Strangers Almanac-era Ryan Adams, nothing seems forced, his lyrical savvy therefore all the more accessible.

But what aids Midnight At The Movies in becoming not just a crammed collection of dog-eared influences from the last 80 years of modern music, but rather a complete album, are the songs that sound like, well, Justin Townes Earle. The two standout numbers (aside from the mandolin driven cover of “Can’t Hardly Wait”), the title track and “Mama’s Eyes”, sound so effortless, the immediate thought is that he must be a terrible athlete. Natural ability is specific: No matter how many late nights he tried, Kobe Bryant could not write a song like this. Earle picks the guitar like Richard Thompson on a jug of corn liquor, he has a voice like a Yosemite stream, and he kills a ‘Mats cover with a mandolin. I’m not asking him to play touch football. I’m just asking him to keep making records.

— Colin Thompson

Damn overachievers. Grizzly Bear are those kids whose parents never let them watch television or drink Coke, the ones who had their homework finished right as they got off the bus and still had time for their Suzuki violin lessons before dinner. The walls of their bedrooms are lined with blue ribbons, award certificates and any matter of plaques and medals, but no one would ever know it, because no one’s ever been invited over. They’re the quiet kids who stay to themselves, reveling in their reserved genius and leaving the rest of us to wonder just what exactly goes on inside those heads. Veckatimest is their latest A+, another flawless, carefully executed effort to hang on the fridge.

The bombast employed on this collection provides a heady compliment to the relative airiness of 2006’s Yellow House. The guitars have gotten fuzzier, the drums are a vivid cannon, and the vocals soar just close enough to the sun to allow the boys to stay adrift on their harmonies. The chunky bottom end of “Cheerleader” is brilliantly offset by the ethereal Brooklyn Youth Chorus, who appear on three of the album’s tracks. The Gershwin-aping “I Live With You” is cushioned by lush strings and horns, an honest-to-goodness rhapsody in Brooklyn. Ed Droste’s vocals are as pristine as ever, but Daniel Rossen gets to shine a bit on “Fine For Now” – you follow him down to every syllable of the raspy “we’re all fal-ter-ing.” And though the record slows here and there, the whole set feels complete and is easy to get lost in. It’ll take several listens to pick out every calculated detail, but since Veckatimest is an infinitely repeatable affair, it shouldn’t be that unpleasant a task.

—Joseph Tirabassi