Pitchfork

The Never are a young North Carolina band who, on their recent album Antarctica, worked the same grandiose indie rock seam as Death Cab for Cutie and the Decemberists. Musically, there's not a lot to this unreleased Antarctica­­ track, recorded live for Daytrotter. It's a stately jangle with popping percussion that opens up into an electrified, hand-holding chorus, swaying drunkenly in the Catfish Haven style of white boy soul. As is always the case with such bare-bones indie rock, the song's success hangs on how much melodic lucidity and emotional oomph the Tunnell brothers can pack into their bell-clear harmonies; it's on this score that "When You're Gone" succeeds. It's also an interesting counterpoint to the relentlessly idealistic Antarctica-- with lines like, "My apartment's just your parking lot/ You leave me when you're done," the Never begin to probe the fissures in their romantic idyll, and one gets a poignant sense of a youthful bubble on the verge of its inevitable explosion.