The Eastern Sea/News on the March, “The Sea”/”The March (If You Had Gone Away)”

Talk about a tailor-made release… Seeing as — obviously — the world naturally spins around yours truly, I’m halfway tempted to think these two bands, The Eastern Sea and News on the March, both of whom happen to be among my tip-top favorite things to listen to of the past year or so, heard I liked ’em both and decided to collaborate pretty much solely to make my day. And hey, if their joint efforts make other people’s days, as well, then the more the merrier. Right?

Totally kidding, of course (my ego’s not that big, thankfully), but damn, just seeing those two bands on the same piece of vinyl makes my heart do weird things and a manic grin creep across my face. I feel like the guy who puts a buck into the snack machine, presses the button for the oh-so-enticing bag of peanuts, and on the way down from its coiled-wire perch, the bag of peanuts catches on a chocolate bar and drags it down, too. Both are great on their own, but together they’re out-and-out wonderful.

And not just theoretically, mind you. The Eastern Sea’s half of the deal, “The Sea,” is a surprisingly murky, dark piece of indie-pop experimentation, seemingly almost an ode to the ocean’s power to wipe manmade structures off the face of the planet. Songwriter/frontman Matthew Hines hits the perfect note with one line, in particular: “We picked the wrong pig to put together our house / The one with the straw that always gets blown down.”

The song starts off busy and apprehensive, quickly building to what sounds like it’ll be a clashing crescendo, but abruptly shifts downwards to a delicate, somberly repetitive guitar figure, inexorable as the song’s namesake and lending a weird heaviness to the proceedings. Fans of the band’s self-titled EP may be thrown a bit off-balance by the track, honestly, since it eschews the pastoral, bright-and-shiny the band seems to use most of the time in favor of a corkscrewing, ever-falling melodic structure that brings to mind Radiohead’s OK Computer more than anything else. Trust me, though — it works, like Hines and company have been doing it forever.

As does the News on the March side of the EP, “The March (If You Had Gone Away),” which sees the band doing a beautifully organ-heavy, deliberate-sounding waltz ’round the room. It’s a melancholy/pretty tune, swinging and slow and gorgeous, incorporating those awesome, awesome harmonies the band does so well (like nobody I’ve heard but maybe Fleet Foxes, really) to great effect and two dancers who used to be in love but aren’t anymore twirl and step in perfect time.

There’s a resigned bitterness to it all, the kind that comes at the end of a relationship, after the harsh words and slammed doors are done. The lyrics give it away, with the narrator giving an audible shrug as bassist/vocalist Brent Randel flatly sings, “It wouldn’t matter / if you had gone away,” all over a delightfully woozy melody that’s like a ride spinning on its own in an empty, lonesome carnival. I doubt they planned it that way, but the two bands have managed to somehow meet in the middle, thematically — while The Eastern Sea sings about how it feels to witness the death of a place, News on the March sing about how it feels to witness the death of a feeling.