Hally and Emmerichs have been making music since secondary school; they’re now both 24. I heard Oh Pep! first in Nashville playing the Americana Music Festival, which is a bit of an irony for an Australian band. But the band’s use of fiddle, mandolin and harmonies fit comfortably at this festival, while also standing out as refreshingly original.

Stadium Cake is Oh Pep!’s debut album, recorded in Nova Scotia. Each of the duo’s previous three EPs is a progression into ever more complex songwriting and intricate playing. They’re funny at times, and they can be thoughtful and thought-provoking, sometimes in the same song. Stadium Cake expands on Hally and Emmerichs’ talents, to the point where it surprised me how detailed and intricate they are as both players and listeners. On each listen, I’ve come to find new favorites, though “Doctor Doctor” and “The Race” were my first loves. Put this on repeat, and by the time you stop, phrases like, “I know what I want and it’s not what I need” may be part of your own personal soundtrack.

Copyright 2016 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Carla Morrison‘s music exists in a private emotional space where she can address joys, heartbreaks and secret desires. But her words also speak to larger pursuits in life: family, career, child-rearing, friendship, lifelong relationships. There are lessons in her delicate voice if you listen for the deeper meanings.

With each of Morrison’s albums, those lessons have come wrapped in sparse arrangements splashed with piano. Amor Supremo is the best expression yet of her immense talents, as it expands her sound by couching subtle strings in electronics.

It helps that Morrison has become one the major lyricists of her generation. If you don’t believe me, you should have been in Mexico’s legendary Auditorio Nacional recently, as 60,000 fans sang along to her songs, each bringing his or her own story to Morrison’s words.

For Amor Supremo, she gathered producers and musicians around her who also seem to hear something of themselves in her songs. The result is a sublime and captivating representation of Morrison’s lyrical gifts.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

The band is filling up its calendar before Kelly splits town. The trio played its penultimate gig on Oct. 23 in College Park, and Oct. 29 marks its goodbye show, at Songbyrd Record Cafe in Adams Morgan. Oh, and there’s the album Teen Mom just released — its first, and most likely its last.

“It was a long time comin’,” Kelly says of the record, a 10-song collection called Groovy (stream it below).

Groovy, written between 2013 and 2014 and recorded at Persona Non Grata in Arlington, Virginia, is an independent release. The band considered working with a label, then opted against it in the interest of time. Yet time is the key ingredient on Groovy: It’s what makes Teen Mom sound recognizably like itself — fuzzy, jangly, heartbroken — but a touch more experienced.

“[The album is] more rockin’ in many ways,” says drummer Sean Dalby. “I think it’s a little more polished — and a little more versatile [than our first two EPs], too.”

While the band has sharpened, though, one thing that’s remained constant is the slight controversy over its name.

“We’ve received some criticism [for the moniker], and I respect people with that opinion,” Dalby says. He says some listeners may have misidentified the name’s target. It takes aim at a popular MTV reality show, not young mothers themselves.

“We thought it was funny to name it after [MTV’s Teen Mom series],” Dalby says. “We were going after MTV.”

Criticism aside, the local scene has treated Teen Mom well, says bassist Tom MacWright.

“D.C.’s music scene is great. It’s super, super supportive, and you hear in other cities that it’s really competitive between bands and really hard to book shows, but here it’s extremely easy to book shows,” MacWright says. “All the bands just kind of get along. They all root for each other.”

As for Kelly, his decision to move sounds personal; not necessarily to find greener pastures in another music scene. “I just want to change my life and move to a new city,” he says.

So, yeah — Thursday’s show may involve tears.

“I’m gonna be crying the whole time,” Dalby says, jokingly. “I think it will be a little intense but I think it will mostly be fun. We hope we have a lot of friends and family and support out there.”

Will this be a clean break for Teen Mom? It’s uncertain.

“I don’t know [if it’s the end]. I always think that who knows where we’ll all end up at some point?” says Kelly. “I’d like to play with these guys again, and hopefully our paths will cross at some point.”

MacWright says no matter what, none of them is dropping music for good. “I think all of us will continue to do music in one way or another.”

Plus, there’s a fringe benefit to Kelly moving westward, the bassist says. “Everyone’s very much looking forward to Chris’ mountain home recording.”

Teen Mom plays a farewell show Oct. 29 at Songbyrd Record Cafe.

Kill the One You Love

With floaty songs like “Pegasus” and “Never Age,” University of Virginia grads Lindsay Pitts and Cliff Usher tapped into a sound sweeping cool music blogs at the time: teary electronic pop indebted to British record label 4AD.

It was a somewhat engineered choice, as Usher told Washington City Paper in 2013. Pitts and Usher had been getting nowhere with their previous band, indie-folk act Birdlips. Reinventing themselves as GEMS, with a sleeker style and trendier sound, nearly guaranteed the musicians a bigger audience.

Now GEMS seems closer to the break it’s always wanted, with a publicity firm, a record deal and a formal debut — Kill the One You Love — expected out Oct. 30. The pair has already released two songs from the LP: “Living As A Ghost,” premiered in August by NPR, and “Tangled Memories,” a single the band dropped today.

But while Kill the One You Love will come out on D.C. imprint Carpark Records, GEMS is no longer a D.C.-area band: Pitts and Usher recently relocated to Los Angeles, the city that seems to have displaced New York as the No. 1 destination for D.C.’s aspiring music stars.

For local fans of GEMS, the duo’s departure may feel like a betrayal — but the same couldn’t be said of their new music. It’s as morose and pristine as ever.

GEMS plays U Street Music Hall Oct. 23 with Autre Ne Veut.

Aspiring to a ’70s ideal that rolls up sugarcoated bubblegum glam, soul balladry, Francophone pop and echoes of the Brill Building, Fleming finds the right notes of sincerity under all that artifice. “Spring Breathes” inhales the dark perfume of Pet Sounds and exhales something akin to truthful camp, as the track bounces between his breaking falsetto and acoustic strum, and between choral bursts of fuzz guitar and chunky bass. “Soon To Be, Won’t To Be” continues those clever juxtapositions, coming across like a millennial Saint Etienne with its mutable, Leslie-speaker vocal vibrato and rainy-day stabs of funk organ. The rhythm section anchors the album from stem to stern, its low end acting as a buffer against studio-tested fills, brassy bravado and canny intros that make these 11 songs feel all the more familiar.

At the center of all this is Fleming, who mines a double-edged conceit: tailoring the intensely borrowed elements of Everybody’s A Good Dog to fit his own aims, and bringing his stage and screen training along to bolster them. He’s mugging as hard as he can, while also adding dimension and character to the collection. His cooing high notes are matched by a predilection for blue-eyed soul, with a range that accommodates jumps into the clouds and throaty, from-the-gut proclamations. “Duet,” a fittingly named collaboration with vocalist Felicia Douglass, recalls the weathered 45 sides that built up R&B radio in the early ’70s; the song jams a bedroom-funk wah-wah break into a confident take-me-back ballad, underlining the influences while also having fun with them. Fleming will never let you forget where his music comes from, but on Everybody’s A Good Dog, he works hard to keep his own identity in there, as well.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

On the third single from the band’s forthcoming EP, songwriter Jay Nemeyer nods to bands like Phantogram and Sohn, who texturize their electronic music with organic sounds.

Thematically, “Rain” (listen below) flows with the rest of the EP, depicting a last-ditch attempt to save a drowning relationship. At the heart of the track is a relentless, alarmlike vocal drone that triggers a wave of intensity, like the downpour in which the narrator seems caught — and Nemeyer throws in a few layers of sound to build a foggy atmosphere.

Combined, those elements add up to the band’s heaviest single to date, which seems to be the point.

“It’s about the compounding effect loss in one area of your life can have on the rest,” Nemeyer says.

Color Palette plays Aug. 15 at Ghost Office in College Park, Maryland.

While Owen Ashworth had been writing and recording music under the name Casiotone For The Painfully Alone since the late ’90s, his melancholic, handmade synth-pop gained a bit more notice in the early ’00s before Ashworth brought that project to a close in 2010. He now continues on as Advance Base, named for “the Antarctic meteorological station and psychedelic death trap that nearly killed Admiral Richard E. Byrd during the winter of 1934,” as his Bandcamp page puts it. There’s a bit more brightness to Advance Base than CFTPA; the flat and sullen tone Ashworth deployed in his previous incarnation finds a bit more nuance on Nephew In The Wild, his second album under this new name.

He might never quite scan as a singer, but Ashworth’s deadpan delivery finds new wrinkles and emotions on Nephew In The Wild, at times evoking comparison to the droll likes of Randy Newman and Stephin Merritt. There’s even a newfound country twang in his voice here that brings to mind J Mascis‘ cracked drawl. That Ashworth contributed electric piano and co-writing to Sun Kil Moon‘s critically revered and painfully precise (or is that precisely pained?) Benji makes sense, as Ashworth’s remarkable eye for minutiae and mundane detail remains intact.

The lonesomeness of the Midwest in bleak winter figures often here, even if the ice is melting in “The Only Other Girl From Back Home.” There are rusted Chevy Novas and pickup trucks idling. Specificity of place reigns, be it the gentle chimes of “Christmas In Dearborn” or the electric-organ-led “Christmas In Milwaukee.” An accordion busker gets punched in “Summon Satan,” a baby daughter swallows a goldfish, two friends fall in love and fall out over a hesher dishwasher, and an ex-girlfriend up and disappears without picking up her last paycheck in “Trisha Please Come Home.” Think of Nephew In The Wild as Benji‘s slightly less morose next-door neighbor.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

SET LIST

• “Do Si Do”

Hear Peter Bjorn And John’s full World Cafe: Sense Of Place session here.

Copyright 2015 WXPN-FM. To see more, visit http://www.xpn.org/.

Released on Year of the Manatee, the quartet’s forthcoming full-length tape on Babe City Records, “Go Bi” (listen below) finds singer/guitarist Dave Lesser rethinking his sexuality, prompted by complex circumstances — specifically, two difficult relationships. One of his previous girlfriends moved back to the Midwest. Another died of cancer.

“I was thinking… this is really hard,” says Lesser, 30, in a phone interview. “Wait a minute: there’s a whole segment of the population [men] I haven’t even considered. What would it be like if I were to write this character and sing a song about this character?”

So “Go Bi” finds its narrator considering his options. If women aren’t working out, what about men?

“Relationships with women always seem to end in disaster/Some run home to Ohio, others, they die of cancer,” Lesser sings. “I do not know which is worse, but my friends have found an answer/Master my fears of the other gender and put in for a transfer.”

Lesser says that while all of his lyrics originate from some personal truth, his characters can take on a life of their own. That is to say, he didn’t actually fall in love with a guy as the song imagines. But he did explore the idea.

Written in 2011, “Go Bi” was originally supposed to appear on BRNDA’s first album, but it didn’t make the cut. It also had different music at first, according to the band’s bass player, John Gardner.

“It’s the second incarnation of the song,” says Gardner, 35. “[Year of the Manatee] is also a transitional album because it has older songs written by Dave but also newer songs that were written more collaboratively and organically.”

As for the lyrics, Gardner says he knows a lot of bi people who feel a bit disconnected from the straight community as well as lesbian and gay communities. He’d like to think of “Go Bi” as a sort of “bi anthem.” (Though, not all band members agree the song could be called an anthem for bisexuality or anything else.)

But Lesser’s thoughts about the lyrics are still evolving. He says he probably wouldn’t write the same song today; he’d be more nuanced and careful about his implications. It wasn’t until a recent conversation with Gardner — who identifies as queer — that he gave the tune more thought.

“One thing that never occurred to me was that I could be subtly implying that it is a choice to ‘go bi,’ and that was never my intention at all,” Lesser says. “I would actually feel very bad if it was assumed that someone could just choose to date men or women. But at the same time I was writing it I was thinking, ‘Hey, this was a hard time in my life. What if I tried something different?’”

BRNDA plays an album release show July 30 at Black Cat.

This post has been updated to add that not all members of BRNDA agree that “Go Bi” could be called a “bi anthem.”

In 2013, Lew debuted her solo project Cold Beat with Worms/Year 5772, and followed up last year with the full-length Over Me. Both packed the harmonies, snappy drums and pop sensibilities of a Grass Widow release, but sounded vignetted — even a little goth. (A writer at Wondering Sound compared Cold Beat to “Aislers Set at a seance.”) Lew has said she’s used the band to express some of her thoughts about death, particularly the passing of her father in 2009.

Before Lew and her bandmates played Comet Ping Pong in D.C. a few weeks back, we invited them to our studio to tape a couple of songs. We got two we hadn’t heard before — and fantastic performances of them, too. Above, hear Cold Beat play “Broken Lines,” and check out “Am I Dust,” below.

Subscribe to Bandwidth’s channel on YouTube, and don’t miss our awesome playlist of every Bandwidth session to date.

Photos by Rhiannon Newman for WAMU