"Hard Rain"
by Shout Out Louds
(Merge)

I admit it: There is every chance that length of exposure is the reason I like this song more than anything else on Our Ill Wills, this Swedish quintet's second album and first for an indie after their 2005 Capitol debut was released to essentially no response. Here's what I mean: Let's say you put a group's album on and think it doesn't sound all that special. But after a while, the band's sound has insinuated itself, or your defenses have broken down, to the degree that the later songs sound stronger than the earlier ones by default. So instead of "Tonight I Have to Leave It," Shout Out Louds' Cure-like single, my favorite track on the album is this seven-and-a-half-minute strum-and-drone, swell-and-retract, guitars-and-whispers workout, which I'm happy to report sounds just as good on its own as it does coming after 11 lesser examples of same.

"Lost"
by the Mary Onettes
(Labrador)

The Swedes do love their fake '80s new wave. Take this quartet, together for seven years but only recently releasing an album, on which they do pseudo–Echo & the Bunnymen with a scary degree of fidelity to the originals, so much so that for most of it you'd be right to wonder why they—or you—would bother. But "Lost" is so absurdly grand-sweeping-epic it transcends its mimicry, especially since singer Philip Ekström has almost none of Ian McCulloch's pomposity (score one for the Swedes vs. the English), so when he bellows, "I-I-I-I could dreeeeeaaaaam awaaaaayyyy," he doesn't sound nearly as much like a ponce as you might expect.

"Rolling Down the Hills (Spring Demo)"
by Glass Candy
(Italians Do It Better)

Concluding our minisurvey of worthwhile songs from unworthwhile albums is the time-honored Only Good Song from a Dance Compilation—in this case, After Dark, a collection of modern updates of early-'80s Italo-disco, meaning it's a dance compilation that exists to pay tribute to music that, for the most part, wasn't all that interesting to begin with. This opening cut sets the tone: faded, filtered, filmy rhythm guitar and an analogue synthesizer that wraps around itself like ribbon, setting up a lustrous, far-away horn chart, abetted by a huge bass bump every few bars. If vocalist Idano is a foggy, second-rate Nico, she doesn't get in the way of all the atmosphere—she enhances it, even. But not in the 13 songs that follow.