It’s a Hit

by Ne-Yo (MP3)

There are a lot of officially unreleased Ne-Yo songs floating around
online, many of them outtakes from 2008’s Year of the Gentleman,
but this is the first that’s gotten under my skin. The track doesn’t do
anything especially new, just like everything else the guy does. And
it’s impeccable—from the modestly glossy keyboard hook, to the
bobbing and weaving drum programming, to a sparkling vocal arrangement
that buoys a lyric that finds the cracks in an old-standby scenario
(“You ain’t out in the club all night/You want to be the quiet part of
my life”)—also just like everything else the guy does.

by Vibes (Not Not Fun)

From a limited edition 7-inch by members of Pocahaunted, Robedoor,
Magic Lantern, and Fantastic Ego, and easily findable via any number of
MP3 blogs, this short track is weirdly funky and addictively unnerving.
It sounds like it was recorded under a blanket in a subbasement, and
the bass resembles mud, but the deranged wah-wah guitar could cut
through a brick and so could the vocal, which sounds, in the impeccable
phrase of the Boomkat catalog, “like Yeah Yeah Yeahs undergoing a
psychotic episode.”

by Metric (Metric Music International)

“If I stumble/They’re gonna eat me alive”—Emily Haines sounds
like she’s stuck inside of a very dull video game. “My heart keeps
beating like a hammer,” she sings, but alas, nothing nearly so exciting
goes on anywhere else in the song.

by Heartland Permian)

A country quintet from Atlanta rewrites both Joe Jackson’s new-wave
sneer “Is She Really Going Out with Him?” (“I can understand a
goatee/Or even a Fu Manchu/But he’s got a mustache/Has she lost her
mind?/He’s got a mustache/Straight out of 1979″) and Rick Springfield’s
jealousy anthem “Jessie’s Girl,” whose bridge is recycled here, only
Springfield didn’t get off the funniest “Un-frickin’-believable” in
recorded history, and Heartland’s vocalist Craig Anderson does. His
barely suppressed giggle on the closing “He’s actually got a mustache”
is for the ages, too. Jerky as all hell, but then, most truly funny
things are.

by the Champagne Socialists (Slumberland)

Winningly scruffy guitar combo, just like everyone else on
Slumberland, only this one is from L.A. and features an actual
Glaswegian, Wallace Meek of Bricolage, for that extra dab of indie-pop
authenticity. The A-side has a quick-stepping tambourine beat, the B is
a more downcast march, and both barely hold together—charmingly,
of course.