Even though David Kilgour will get you puzzled looks from most people in America, even those well versed in “indie” and “alternative” rock, he is the legendary singer and guitarist of New Zealand’s The Clean.  

Time: “The Fantastic Reality”
Dirty Laboratory, 2008

Time, the frontman of .Calm, veritably has words flowing out of his head at light speed.  Fortunately, the light of his inspiration doesn’t serve to spotlight hip-hop egomania. Rather, it is dynamic poetry that gives shape to and highlights what it means to be a creative, intelligent person in a world that doesn’t often reward true artistry.

Someone was bound to take old Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass records and find the beauty in them. And then bring that ineffable sound into their own music and make it not only cool but use it to enhance what they already do well.

Gabe Saucedo has been writing ambitious and heartbreakingly sincere music for years at this point. On this record, his songs, and those of longtime collaborator, Tony Prudhome, prove that not only can pop music be richly layered but also still has the ability to say interesting things about our lives without peddling in tired, saccharine clichés.

Electronic music: it’s the unoriginal soundtrack of raves, the pulsing heartbeat of those hedonistic brain-cell annihilation-fests, the stuff of naive candy kids strung out on ecstasy, right?  

Well, in all honesty, yes, it sometimes is. But don’t all music genres have to put up with a few cheesy, embarrassing members the way pop music does with, say, Britney Spears?  Most believe that a typical “techno” song consists of a variation of an “unts-unts” bass beat over the top of a Sarah McLaughlin remix, something that took about as much thought and creativity to produce as the “tracks” my hamster, Chuckles, “laid down” when she escaped her cage and walked across the piano keyboard.  

Mannequin Makeout

Too much of the recent keyboard, danceable post-punk has been merely the indie set’s equivalent of party music with little more to recommend it.

Mannequin Makeout, however, aims to be something more interesting.

The jaggedly jittery guitar riffing you’d expect is there, but it’s used more creatively by alternating between those kinds of sounds and wiry leads. The rhythm section is often hectic, insistent and angular but in a way that doesn’t induce an instinct to move to the music. Rather, the rhythm fits into the larger framework of the band’s sound.