Big, big deal if you’re wrong.

Jai Paul - In The Company of Wolves (you can’t buy yet)
This is likely to be one of the most important albums of 2013.  In keeping with years of enigmatic positioning, it was leaked for a day then hastily retrieved.  I managed to snag some of it, which I now share with you until the helicopters start circling.  Introducing the future of indie R&B: heavy, sexy lyrics, restless rhythms, deep synths, and virtuoso songwriting. So itense, so fresh.

NZCA/LINES - Okinawa Channels (buy)
Popcorn percussion, woven synths, and gentle vocals. A slim and clear song like colorful glass.

The Orwells - In My Bed (buy)
Lo-fi retro punky rock n’ roll that really nails the swagger.  If this doesn’t make you want to clutch a microphone and belt it out, you were never meant to be a rock star. (That’s okay, though.)

Shakey Graves - The Donor Blues (buy)
His new EP demonstrates some increased range and opens with this heartbreaking 4-track folk in the vein of super early Sebadoh and Beck.

Labyrinth Ear - White Gold (buy)
This band has all the sophistication and poise of Phantogram - tense, atmospheric electro fusion. They’re Phantogram’s hot, sinister younger sister.  Get these EPs.

Melody’s Echo Chamber - Crystallized (buy)
Double barrel of Stereolab and Broadcast that you haven’t heard this clearly since the 90’s.  The full album has wide range and nice experimental stretching.

Ela Orleans - Longing (buy)
Psychedelic collage of sqelch and beats and staticy organs with spooky, arty vocals like a shy owl.

The Silent League - Yours Truly, 2095 (Memory Tapes Version) (buy)
This is a post Mercury Rev project remixed by a post Hail Social guy, so there’s some awesome pedigree and explains the weird pop combined with sensibly composed, versatile electro.

Standard Fare - Darth Vader (buy)
Completely disarming with a strong sound and a meandering lyrical style, these songs are capable of surprising emotional aikido.  One of my favorite modern indie bands whose albums are completely worth your hours and dollars.

Mock & Toof - Farewell To Wendo (buy)
One foot in each of the US, English, and Japanese electronic music scenes, progressive beats and instrumentation, unforgettably brazen lyrics, simultaneously cold and emotional, human and alien.

BACK! Okay let’s start by putting SX’13 behind us, now that I’ve recovered from the various spring circumstances.  Here’s what I saw.  Bold means I especially enjoyed their set.

Alpine,  Octopus Project,  Murder By Death,  Surfer Blood,  Divine Fits,  Vacationer,  Beacon,  Hands,  Dog Bite,  Part Time,  Fear Of Men,   Alex Bleeker And The Freaks,  Young Dreams,  Mitzi,  Shogu Tokumaru,  IO Echo,  Widowspeak,  Torres,  Blue Hawaii,  Hundred Waters,  Diiv,  Azari & III,  Icona Pop,  Local Natives,  John Talabot,  Caveman,  Savages,  Delorean,  Sky Ferreira,  Suuns,  Kariim Oulette,  Diana,  Autre Ne Veut,  The Neighbourhood,  Charli XCX,  Sir Sly,  St. Lucia,  Flume,  CHVCHES, a really amazing new jazz trio whose name i never caught but who sounded like squarepusher,  Hanni El Khatib,  Lianne La Havas,  Chaos Chaos (formerly Smoosh),  Nova Rockafeller,  No Ceremony///,  Reverend & The Makers,  K. I. D. S.,  Doldrums,  SOHN,  Guards,  Billy Bragg,  Indians,  On An On,  Cy Dune,  Roadkill Ghost Choir,  Magical Clouds,  Pat Jordache,  Haerts,  Wavves,  Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs,  Young Galaxy,  Darwin Deez,  Lemuria,  Merchandise,  Octant,  Humans,  Brothertiger,  Mø,  !!!

—-

SOHN - Red Lines (buy)
I wound up at this show accidentally. Hot, crowded, red-lit room with excruciatingly beautiful R&B songs swirling through the swaying crowd. Pure SX magic.

Reverend and the Makers - No Wood Just Trees (buy)
Dance party on par with LCD Soundsystem or The Presets though sparsely attended, in some forgotten corner in the last slot of Thursday night. Tall, drunken Brit belting out blase lyrics over commanding dance bangers not quite like anything I’ve heard before.

Alpine - Tough Skin (buy)
My first SX’13 show and one of the best.  Alpine has an incredibly precise, clear sound that works surprisingly even better on stage with cerebral power and sexy energy.

Hanni El Khatib - Family (buy)
Dry, serrated guitars and wailing drums with some greasy style and burnt sunshine that make Hanni El Khatib stand out against piles of similar SoCal retro surf bands.

Chaos Chaos - Antibiotics (buy)
Their recordings can’t capture the unrestrained enthusiasm, telepathic chemistry, and prodigious talent of these two young sisters.  One of my favorite shows to attend.

Merchandise - Anxiety’s Door (buy)
Dark 80’s pop like The Church and Echo & The Bunnymen, but they hit it with an edgy punk energy.

Indians - Cakelayers (buy)
I only barely remember their show, but I can get lost in this patient and expansive alt folk song.

Fear Of Men - Doldrums (buy)
An Adrian Tomine comic sprung to life, with obvious inspiration from some of the best 90’s indie girl pop - Heavenly, Go Sailor, Cub, Velocity Girl, etc..

Sky Ferreria - Lost in My Bedroom (buy)
It’s probably hard to rock a stage as a 21 year old pop diva in the making, but she held her own and every photo I took of her looked like a magazine cover.

Autre Ne Veut - Counting (buy)
He won a lot of hearts with his unrestrained, full bore R&B vocals and forcefully emotional songs.

Young Galaxy - Blown Minded (buy)
Inclusive but serious, cosmic plodding synths and somber verses.  Translated better live than most synth pop bands can.

Divine Fits - My Love Is Real (buy)
I love Dan from Wolf Parade, and I’m bored by Brit from Spoon, so this show was an unusual flip flop depending on who was singing.  The “Handsome Furs with a bit more Tom Petty” formula is a powerful one, though.

Savages - Husbands (buy)
Yelpy (post)-punk a la Slits, Crass, Bikini Kill, etc..  Super ferocious and capable on stage, beautiful and frightening.

Doldrums - Egypt (buy)
Post-hippie, art-punk, noise-pop, electro-psyche.  Reminded me of the band Mahjong in a highly favorable way.  Stage energy on par with a jam band of teenagers.

Torres - Waterfall (buy)
Captivating songwriting in the 90’s indie chanteuse vein (PJ Harvey, Tori Amos, Throwing Muses), worthy live show that only promises to improve.

Vacationer - Dreamlike (buy)
Turns out Vacationer is fronted by a short, pretty dude formerly from Philly pop-punk band The Starting Line.  The trajectory makes sense, and the pedigree only helped their performance. 

BELOW HERE are a handful of the best SX-related songs previously posted, those that truly deserve a second chance in case you didn’t dwell on them enough.

Read More

This post was written during the thick of SX and has like thirty or more SoundCloud widgets, so it’s SUPER SLOW.  Unless you’re totally devoted, I would just read one of the other SXSW ‘13 posts instead (the best stuff appears in those).

Read More

Okay, this is part two of “the musicians I recognized when I read the line up”.  Again listed roughly in order of how excited I am to see them. Stay tuned in the near future for a whole post of “new to me bands”.

At the bottom you should also check out other showcases you may want to see that I’m not posting songs of for various reasons.

Haim - Don’t Save Me (another song here)
Trio of sisters from LA with a very consistent pop thing reminiscent of early 80’s lady rock.

Humans - De Ciel (another song here)
Gruff and chanty evolved male techno rock, stylish and strong.

Charli XCX - You’re The One (another song here)
An indie pop diva with real heart and a genuine creative aesthetic; she collaborates broadly, releases her own weird mix tapes, and has a pretty wide range of electro/goth/girly pop song styles.

Thee Oh Sees - Lupine Dominus  (another song here)
With their sharp, yelpy, almost improv-sounding jam punk thing, I assumed they’d be fantastic live, but I recently received confirmation that they are even better than that.  Listen to this, imagine the show is super awesome, and feel excited!

MS MR - Hurricane
I love this stormy, dark cloud of female vocal rolling across some powerful rock landscape.  Faint hints of Concrete Blonde and a little gospel.

NO CEREMONY/// - HOLDONME (another song here)
Dark and ethereal, twisted, plodding electro with dramatic inhuman vocals.

Kisses - People Can Do The Most Amazing Things (Dominique Leone Edit)
Gloriously lo-fi instrumental pop.

Alt-J - Tessellate (another song here)
Severe and arty, still manages to be accessible, kind of like a less floaty, more ornate Radiohead maybe.  They are kind of a big deal right now.

ON AN ON - Ghosts
I hope everyone gets at least this far, because oh boy this is such a good song.  Elements of Death Cab with that new LA pop vibe and a breezy strong male voice.

Dan Croll - Home (another song here)
He’s got this one amazing indie pop song, then this acoustic thing, and I think that’s it so it’ll be interesting to see how his SX thing goes off.

Solid Gold - Who You Gonna Run To
Dreamy and intense, drifting and golden electro pop with a male singer.

Goldroom - Fifteen (ft Chela)
Sweet, slow, and pretty disco/house influenced pop.

Jaill - The Stroller (another song here)
Some confrontational, swaggery, and unique modern rock, which, considering they also did the Television / Stones / Who song, is pretty impressive.

Poolside - Only Everything (another song here)
Mellow but soulful dance band, the one that covered Neil Young’s Harvest Moon.

Flight Facilities - Foreign Language (ft. Jess)
House disco pop!  So peppy!

Body Language - Huffy Ten Speed
A bit too careful to be a indie electro punk band, exactly, but definitely musically interesting.

Skream - Reflections (another song here)
Robotic and angular techno.

Wavves - So Bored
Massively overblown loud and distorted reinvented surf pop hyperactive kid from the LA area.

Torres - Mother Earth, Father God
Angsty and dramatic indie lady in the general vein of Tori Amos or whatever, and so nicely written.

Yelawolf - Pop The Trunk
This is a guilty pleasure, and I stand by it.  I find hip-hop shows generally questionable at SX, but maybe let’s try it.

The Virgins - Flashbacks, Memories and Dreams
If you’re all “wtf this disco Tom Petty thing!?” well, that’s just The Virgins.

Deep Time - Clouds
Austin band formerly known as Yellow Fever who draws heavily from thoughtful mellow post-punk like The Raincoats.

Guards - Long Time
One of those retro pop outfits like Cults or Fergus and Geronimo, these guys seem to have some nice substance.

The Hood Internet - Wasted Love (Gucci Mane vs. Lindstrom & Christabelle)
They picked up where Girl Talk left off and make for a reliable SXSW dance party assuming you’ve still got the energy.

Diamond Rings - Something Else
Very sing-along-able gay showboating indie casio beats and guitar, great live show.

Unknown Mortal Orchestra - Jello and Juggernauts  (another song here)
Sassy guitars, crispy beats, and crunchy 60’s reel-to-reel production.  I think these guys NPR’ed / blew up.

St. Lucia - Closer Than This
Sounds like it was cooked in a lab to stir the adolescent friendship emotions, but there’s still something at least halfway worthwhile here.

Shakey Graves - Roll The Bones  (another song here)
Austin’s own vagabond trash folk / twang / bluegrass drifter.

Fol Chen - The Holograms (Hard Mix Remix)
I actually don’t know anything about this band, including whether they sound like this or not.

Small Black - Despicable Dogs
One of the early and heavily celebrated chillwave bands of a few years back, about to release a new album.

Sharon Jones and The Dap Kings - Pick It Up, Lay It In The Cut
I think she’s the Vice Lordess of modern funk and certainly doesn’t need my promotional support, but if I can see her in a venue with less than 5000 people in it, that would be rad.

ALSO APPEARING AT SXSW 2013, with links if I’ve posted them before:
Airborne Toxic Event, Austra, Baths, Beach Fossils, Black Angels, Bonde Do Role, Braids, Caitlin Rose, Camera Obscura, Caveman, Cold War Kids, Computer Magic, Dawes, Death Set, Deer Tick, Delicate Steve, Delorean, Devendra Banhart, Dirty Ghosts, Dosh, Drop The Lime, Experimental Aircraft, Flaming Lips, Fort Lean, Generationals, Heartless Bastards, Hurray For The Riff Raff, Iron and Wine, Japanther, Lianne La Havas, The Little Ones, Local Natives, Machinedrum, Major Lazer, Marnie Stern, Natural Child, Octant, Pharcyde, Phosphorescent, Pink Nasty, A Place To Bury Strangers, Ra Ra Riot, Rhye, Shout Out Out Out Out, Surfer Blood, Tegan And Sarah, Thao & The Get Down Stay Down, Toro Y Moi, Vampire Weekend, Wild Belle, Yeah Yeah Yeahs

Strap yourself in; things are going to get fast paced as we prep for SXSW.  What follows is JUST the bands I’m stoked about after ONLY reviewing the lineup for artists I ALREADY know – ie – no actual research yet.  And in a hopeless effort to avoid massively exceeding attention spans, I’ve broken it into two halves and this is part one.  Wtf.  Second half coming very soon, so cram for the test.

Listed in order of how excited I am to see the bands, but all of this is crazy awesome and worth a listen:

The Neighbourhood – Sweater Weather
Sexy edgy poppy rock.  My current favorite song.

Sky Ferreira – One  (another song here)
My current favorite indie pop diva (but I still love you Charli XCX!).

Chaos Chaos – My Hands
Duo of sisters formerly known as Smoosh with an uncanny ability to write sophisticated, dangerous, sexy music, which is less creepy now than when they debuted at ages 12 and 14 five years ago.

CHVRCHES – Recover  (another song here)
The friendlier, poppier Purity Ring.

Autre Ne Veut – Tell Me  (another song here)
One of the first artists to do the “new Prince-esque R&B” thing, although his approach to it is very avant.

Alpine – Too Safe  (another song here)
Calculated and clean, angular and pretty, excellently composed female pop.

Young Galaxy – Cover Your Tracks (another song here)
Emotionally cosmic indie synth rock.

Vacationer – Great Love (another song here)
I mentioned these guys have a lot of range, and here’s a song that’s more like emotionally building alt rock but still has that strong, warm, confident male energy.

Brothertiger – You’re Afraid  (another song here)
My favorite chillwave band, Beach Boys sweet with a sound like furry electricity.

Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs – Garden
Not a sloppy goofy punk band as the name suggests, actually a very smart and tight dance / techno thing.

Darwin Deez – No Love  (another song here)
An awkwardly straightforward musical glimpse into the mind and soul of a weirdo poet with a guitar, atypical compositions that sound like black and white sketches.

Pat Jordache – Phantom Limb  (another song here)
Mumbling and insistent, clouds of rhythmic guitar sounds, surprisingly captivating.

Lusine – Another Tomorrow
A former IDM musician whose electronica has always been far and refreshingly off formula.

Everything Everything – Kemosabe
That new Gotye / Phil Collins –esque vibe with lots of clean but agitated LA style indie pop smeared in.

HAERTS – Wings
A kind of late 80’s / early 90’s alternative radio lady thing, like Throwing Muses or Divinyls.  Poppy and satisfying.

Merchandise – Time
Definitely a lost track from the Donnie Darko soundtrack, in the best possible way.

Sir Sly – Ghost
A less obviously pretentiously arty version of Alt-J.

Reverend And The Makers – MDMAZING (ft. Howard Marks)
Super awesomely trashy first pumping dance techno with nasty vocals pop.

Widowspeak – Gun Shy
90’s college rock / Mazzy Star / Giant Sand.

DIIV – Doused
Verby gothy guitars and fast, powerful rhythm section, like a hipster Joy Division.

Youth Lagoon – Afternoon (another song here)
Echoey halls of sentimental light singing and tangible guitars that build in intensity, like little canoes or a collection of one way signs that all point in the same direction.

My Gold Mask – Your Coo Ka Choo  (another song here)
She drew the connection to Kim Carnes herself when she covered Bette Davis Eyes, but her music is way more raw and dangerous.  It’ll give you rug burn.

Doldrums – She Is The Wave  (another song here)
Super noisy electronic thumping singing squelching yelling power.

SUUNS – Optimist  (another song here)
Excellent completely angsty and tense avant rock, like a younger, maler Blonde Redhead.

Houses – This Is War  (another song here)
Powerful heartbeats of rock instruments into a dark reverb chamber.

Pictureplane – Future Step
Refreshingly unique electronic musician, he rips music into strips and builds paper mache new songs out of them.

Givers – Meantime (RAC remix) (another song here)
The Remix Artist Collective (RAC) can make seemingly any song into something poppy and danceable, like it was always meant to be that way.  This will be one of the best dance parties at SXSW 2013.

Love Inks – Skeleton Key  (another song here)
Indie pop rock girls, a little light, a little dark.

XXYYXX – Love Isn’t Made (ft. Steffaloo) (another song here)
Clicks and whirls and clean synth chords of sweet, cerebral, and heavy electronica.

Shout Out Louds – Fall Hard
Sweetheart indie rock, like the Cure on antidepressants. 

Young Dreams – Fog Of War
Vocal driven with indie rock instruments rushing to support it.

In your eyes I see the eyes of somebody I knew before.

Slow Club - Two Cousins (buy)
Opens as big and frantic as most songs climax, clawing its way out of a desperate trench, big simple sounds, clambering drums, indie rock’s intimacy multiplied by classic rock’s longing and loss.

Dan Croll - From Nowhere (buy)
A little Miike Snow, a little Gotye, a 2012 blog hit, a reminder that it’s time to commence the SXSW research.

Weekend - Hazel (buy)
I haven’t even listened to the new My Bloody Valentine yet but here’s some super classic-sounding 90’s college shoegazer I’ve grown to love.

Vague-à-bonde - Something (buy)
Right after that first track ended, the girl pop ghostsoul of Slow Club put down its guitars and ran over to Grimes’s keyboards and now it’s performing this emotionally fraught, building and cresting indie synth pop for you.

Wye Oak - Spiral (buy)
Rush era prog rock, super bleak and aching swirls of thin guitar and circulating sounds trapping you inside your drained and collapsing head.

Jaill - Perfect Ten (buy)
Television songs as sung by adolescent Roger Daltrey who woke up in Mick Jagger’s body.

Acid Glasses - My Pale Garden (buy)
Submersible touring a whole underwater kingdom of crazy with your smiling robot pilot.

No Ceremony - HURTLOVE (buy)
I love the way this song mixes an inarguable, eternal anthematic chord progression with twisted chillwave static and enormous bursts of verbal noise, like being worriedly and crazily in love or maybe near death and talking to ghosts.

No, my first name ain’t baby.

Phèdre - In Decay (buy)
Unselfconsciously awkward noise pop to make you feel weird or avant party rock to make you feel beautiful about being weird. Their album is like an upsetting scrapbook of construction paper, crayon, and magazine cutouts.

Tourist - Your Girl (buy)
There’s a bit of Jai Paul to this - smartly tightened and focused reenvisioning of elements of R&B and electro with a certain distance or inhumanity.

Giovanni James – Shining (buy)
I see no reason this poppy soul wouldn’t work splendidly with the NPR crowd (the Reader’s Digest of new music), but <unfinished thought>

Holy Family - Meathooks (buy)
They came from Sweden to Montreal with dangerously sharp voices, synths, drums, and ideas.  This is about as close as you can come to The Knife in spirit while being totally different in sound.

Hermetic - Portlandish (Jay Arner Remix) (buy)
Hermetic is a great but very rock band, kinda 90’s post hardcore indie or something.  This remix preserves lots of that uplifting corporal humanity, encasing it in the amber of its plodding electronic recomposition.

Electric Guest - American Daydream (buy)
Like a super pop and slick Black Keys, all cool style and extra production and publicity photos on sunny LA streets and a whiff of weed in the studio.

John Talabot - Destiny (buy)
It’s fascinating how he breathes humanity and light into this shifty, intellectual rhythmic insistence by using his mechanically dry voice.

Madi Diaz - Trust Fall (Jensen Sportag Remix) (buy)
That airy Miami Vice production, sassy sexy 1986 guitar stabs, a sweet Sheila E / Janet Jackson singer, this is a smart, soulful update and tribute in so many ways.

Kids Without Instruments - Stardust (buy)
Okay these really are super young college kids without instruments but it’s best not to look into that too deeply.  Think of them as the friendlier Sleigh Bells or Crystal Castles and just enjoy the hyper, structured, edgy, very modern pop for what it is.  It almost Tweets itself.

Hot As Sun - Come Come (Tokyo Police Club Remix) (buy)
I could see no relation between the original and this dark, heavy, somber collage of sounds leaping around the central voice like naked dancers around a bonfire, but that’s just another reason to love Tokyo Police Club.  Ed: Just figured out it was a different song, but I don’t want to talk about it.

Caribou - The Dauphin (buy)
If you’re like me and Caribou is basically your favorite band, then trust me, you’ve got nothing better to do with your time right now than click that “buy” link (kind of a misnomer) and stream the entire Tour CD 2010.

Nothing can account for reasons why I’d be so mean.

Sky Ferreira – Everything Is Embarrassing (buy)
An update of those big, simple Salt N Peppa beats with Debbie Gibson’s sugary singing, only when did she get so sad, spiraling down into some sexy heartbroken abyss… oh, because Blood Orange wrote this track for her, and he’s a fucking champ and a half.

Whitey – Brief and Bright (buy)
Holy cow, Hot Chip had a baby with Django Django.  Love those polyrhythms and manly tenor harmonies, and maybe the end result is a touch cellophane, but whatever, it’s still brilliant.

Two Door Cinema Club – What You Know (buy)
If you drew a line all the way from Death Cab to Bloc Party, it’d cross through these guys, who have a gentle cerebral thing despite their consistent crafting of timeless, punchy rock the remixers can’t stop remixing.  I’ve listened to this track dozens of times and it still works.

Fredo Viola – Vache Qui Rit (buy)
Like doing a crossword puzzle in a foreign language in which you don’t even know the characters. His site has awesome art.

Xenia Rubinos – Hair Receding (buy)
Cannon blasts of serrated slabs of keyboard noise and a more dangerously balanced yell than PJ Harvey’s.

Ackeejuice Rockers – Wade In The Water (Moombahsoul Mix) (buy)
Straight up gospel meets straight up downtempo club.  There’s an afterhours dance party out there perfectly stamped with this vibe.

Ariel Pink’s Haunted Grafitti – Baby (buy)
I’m not normally into the particular 60’s pop sound they reconstruct, but this cover of a late 70’s blue-eyed-soul song I can get into.  It’s sexy, dreamy, and strong.

Vacationer – Trip (buy)
I like every track on the satisfying and listenable album, Gone, too varied to represent with one song, a thorough amalgam of disparate elements from let’s say Vampire Weekend, yacht rock, Sublime (!!?!? I dunno!), maybe Arcade Fire, and even stuff like Broadcast’s floral sample patches as heard on this track.

Neonfaith – Escape (buy)
Concrete Blonde meets Phantogram.  Dark and velvety powerful female vocals over an electrorock track that’s alternately heavy and bouncy.

ODESZA – How Did I Get Here (buy)
Delicate girl vocals scrambled and crushed by weighty dub bass and plunky percussion, like a pink rose that’s been beautifully run over by a bike.

Chrome Sparks – Show You My Way (buy)
They are famous courtesy a song about marijuana, but I love their contrast between primitive electronica sounds and twisted snippets of human soul that unfold on artful compositions which gradually build in grandiosity.  No one else has quite this aesthetic.

Will you marry for the money, take a lover in the afternoon?

Superhuman Happiness - GMYL
That awkward era of 80’s alternative before alternative got popular enough to be cool, updated for the 90’s.

Humans - Possession
Dudes shouting with casual ferocity, reserved synths, and gradually building, stylish island rhythms.  I feel a little guilty posting this when I haven’t pushed any of the great album Tanlines released last year.

School of Seven Bells - The Night
A lot of the album is thick, bookish, and contemplative, but this upbeat track introduces some welcome breathing room to their balance of intellect and emotion.  Summons the ghost of Belly, Tanya Donelly’s 90’s alt girl radio band, although people tend to ask “Cocteau Twins?” when they hear it.

Corin Tucker Band - Groundhog Day
The other third of Sleater-Kinney has returned to tell us what’s what or at least what should be so in riot grrrl today.

Ghoul - Swimming Pool
A fantastic mutation of art rock and cold sounds somewhere in the spacetime vicinity of Alt-J and Radiohead.  This came out in 2008 and they keep claiming there will be an album.

Haim - Forever
Expertly composed, cheerfully bombastic pop with a flavor of not-quite-dark substance and light gravity reminiscent of Laura Branigan and Belinda Carlile.

Dirty Ghosts - Pretty Face
Aesop Rock gets credits for the beats, but I’ve seen a drummer live, but anyway the point is a smoking hot guitar goddess throws gutter rock riffs and blistering solos and it’s pretty danceable too and I’m still baffled why this isn’t the most popular thing in Merca.

Saskatchewan - Venom
Menacing slow rock a la Corey Hart or Don Henley bred with some sexy chillwave R&B, which is a pretty fucking tight formula when you say it like that.

ice cream shout - tattooed tears
Clean and jaunty DIY casio track under a mopey, tortured singer, heartfelt songwriting stirring a nice pot of sentiment.  Remember White Town?  Less fun / disposable.

Hoodie Allen - No Interruption
As white party rappers go, he’s pretty damn pizza. I’m given to understand he bust the Billboard top 10, but it’s too late to remove from this track now, plus it’s really good.

Inc. - Swear
Still more of that new Prince-style R&B stuff which I still can’t get enough of but also seem to have a limited vocabulary for describing.

Chris Malinchak - So Good To Me
Comes out of the gate like the kind of house techno that’s been pouring ravey sunshine into our ears since ‘94, but it earns special recognition with artfully layered rhythms, chipper and blissy synths, and an overall composition that punches through the cynicism to remind us why some of this stuff was actually super great in the first place.

Pompeya - Untitled
A near-mythical Moscow band that recorded but didn’t really release my favorite album of 2011, some perfect blend of modern disco, breezy 80’s pop, and 10’s chillwave.

Why don’t you turn your radio up?

TOPS – Diamond Look
If the Shangri-Las had releases in 1990 they might sound like this, sweet tooth pop that’s (in their own words) fierce in the heart.  Montreal indie band with a solid and worthwhile album.

Emil & Friends – Royal Oats (Radial Remix)
He’s got quite the magic for coaxing the blasé and everyday into perfect pop gems.  A song that envisions a video of canted camera angles of balcony parties, smiling faces, road trips, string lights, and endless cuts of a bunch of stuff you love about your life without having explicitly noticed yet.

Panama – Magic
A lost 1982 radio hit.  Think Cut Copy meets Big Country opening for Toto.

Wild Belle – It’s Too Late (Snakehips Remix)
Should be required to make a formal declaration to M.I.A. and Santigold about her claim on their territory.  Her first song was catchy but a bit too vacant; this one seems better genomed for nourishment.

Teen Mom – I Want To Go Out
An off-balance, downhill slide of careening fuzz guitar punctured by bass stabs, shattering cymbals, and understated crooning, a shrine to restlessness, a reminder never to settle down.

Apollo Cobra – Feel Like It
Party down, good times, overhead clapping, secular-Gospel-for-Williamsburg-loft-parties style indie dance floor packer.

The Cyclist – Visions
Opens like a rusty and complex piece of cutlery and only betrays its clean techno foundations dimly through the patina.

Mickey feat. Billie - Weekend
I think Sweden might sport its own musical ecosystem where the shimmering descendents of Abba still pack the charts.

Baby Monster – Fresh Biscuits
That dorm room shared by the sweet nerdy hipster boys whose Friday night performances in the Commons you had to admit were actually really good.  They had a mini blog hit, City of Lovers, on this same 2011 album.

Rhye – Open
Honey voice like Feist, artful melancholy arrangements, a gentle plea for love not to die.

BEAK> - Mono
Dry, shifty, jumpy, and insistent, would fit right in at Dischord alongside Antelope.

Chvrches – The Mother We Share
The less witchy, more radio-ready good twin to Purity Ring’s evil twin.  Not that it makes them better, but is hard to deny the appeal of this almost Arcade Fire caliber anthem and wish them well as they rocket to fame.

Connan Mockasin – Forever Dolphin Love (Erol Alkin rework)
I imagine Connan Mockasin as an isolated, angrily disgruntled, gay, skinny art school genius pitching these disorienting avant pop songs when music isn’t even his primary form, he’s really a painter or something, and here remixed into a deep space star expedition or a gorgeous cyborgial blend.