Sleigh Bells, 'Treats' Review

On the surface, it is easy to dismiss this band as just the "band of the week", you know, the kind of act bloggers go crazy about during a few days, then forget about it. When you learn more about this band, the feeling of having seen this before becomes stronger: they are from Brooklyn, they make "noise pop" (whatever that means), they are a girl and a guy, obviously the girl sings and the guy does all the rest, etc.

But I really think there's something special about this one. And I'm not writing here because their songs are annoying and repetitive enough to prevent them from becoming Lady Gaga type famous, and thus uncool, or because Pitchfork and M.I.A love them. To be honest, their songs are at times too distorted to my ears, and most bands hyped by Pitchfork do, well, suck.

I'm writing here because, despite its flaws, Treats it the best album of the year so far, and because I've never been so impressed with a debut album since MGMT took over the indie world in 2008.

Treats is a weird album. One could describe it as part Crystal Castles, part Lady Gaga, part Animal Collective (does that make sense?), but the truth is: you never heard anything like it. There are a lot of bass sounds, laser sounds and distortions. It's loud and aggressive, deliberately trying to make you feel uncomfortable. But it's also fast and pop. Alexis's voice is ear candy.

The conflict between the loud instruments and the melodic voice is probably its strongest quality. In this sense, Sleigh Bells are this year's Crystal Castles but not really. If you want violence and distortion a la CC, it's there. Hear 'Straigh A's'.

But Sleigh Bells have the kind of pop potential to make them much more than a cult band (don't get me wrong, I love Crystal Castles, but let's face it, they are never going to be on the radio...). Rill Rill is the kind of track that might make them appeal beyond the indie crowds. Here the pace is slower (but not that slower...), and Alexis's beautiful voice wins over the loudness. It's the type of song that invites you to sing along to.

It's hard to pick the best song in an album this good. The first one to come to my attention was lead single Tell'Em. It pulsates with such confidence and energy that it is hard to believe that this is a new band that just released their first album.

Crown On The Ground is the song that made this band blog-famous last year and after hearing it, you can understand why. It could be a huge radio hit if it wasn't so distorted, but this actually makes it more enjoyable for hipsters.

Treats is not only a technical triumph, but also has true pop appeal and originality. In an era where most bands either sound like more of the same, or are simply too punishing to listen to, this is really a big deal.

Because this is such a good album, haters have to find something to criticize and much has been said about its supposed lack of staying power. "Nobody will remember it in three months", some say. I'd say, who cares? This week, it sounds like the best thing in the world.

Grade: 9.5

Sounds of 2010

Vampire Weekend's Contra is a good album. It has a couple of catchy singles (my favorite is definitely White Sky), but it's not an amazing album. I don't know. I just expected it to cause a bigger impact on me, but the truth is: I'm not really giving it so many listens. On the other hand, there is not a single track that I completely hate, and some songs like Holiday grew on me a little bit. So perhaps Contra will enjoy the same kind of staying power that Phoenix's Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix had last year. Only time will tell...

I was taking a look at the BBC's artists of 2010. I remember last year when I fell in love with Little Boots because of this list. This year, all the bets are on Ellie Goulding, and I think that she totally deserves it. She has a very melodic voice, it reminds me of Bjork in a good way. Also, her songs are electro, but they don't sound like copies of La Roux or just "more of the same".

Marina & The Diamonds is also pretty good. The aggressive style of her music reminds me of La Roux and that probably explains why I listened to her so much, but I don't know. It's just not that different from so many other acts.

Delphic sounds good, but overall pretty generic. Like copy of a copy, you know what I mean? I miss Klaxons... Friendly Fires? Meh!

The new Hot Chip album is pretty good. Most songs are pretty decent. I was never their biggest fan, but I'm willing to try to like them more. Plus, a band with such a stellar single like Ready For The Floor will always have my respect.

Jesus, almost 4am. I better go to bed. I'll see you soon (hopefully, before 2011, hehe)

Metal Gear Solid 4: Almost perfect except for the happy ending

In case you care, I bought a Playstation 3 last semester. It helped to fill what otherwise would have been a pretty lame winter break. It's an awesome machine that let's you do lots of cool stuff, like playing blu ray movies and streaming Netflix. Oh, yeah, the games, right?

My first one was (not surprisingly) rock Band 2. In the past years, but biggest regret about not having a console was not being able to play music games. I mean, 2 of my biggest passions together, it can't go wrong right? And it didn't. RB2 rejuvenated the way I listen to music. Now I pay more attention to specific sounds like what is bass and what is guitar. It may sound silly, but I never thought it was really important to separate sounds. But of course it's VERY important. Also, it was pretty cool to get a little idea of how a guitar works.

It was made me go back to bands that I had forgotten like Alanis Morissette, The Cranberries and The Offspring.

For some time, I could hardly play anything else. RB2 was THE game. But then I suddenly got tired of it. I guess it demands too much exercise and I usually play at late nights when I'm tired after a long day. Of course since there is so much to this game, I'll certainly go back to it, I just don't know when.

My Playstation came with 2 games: LittleBigPlanet and Rachet and Clank's Future: A Crack In Time. The first one is considered one of the best games of this generation, so obviously I was very curious about it. It's a platform game that let's you create your own levels. The idea is pretty cool and you can many interesting things if you let your imagination run.

The creation of levels in LittleBigPlanet (LBP) lets you effectively be a programmer, creating your own fun, which has a particular appeal to me, since I'm really curious about these things. And yet I didn't play it much! I don't know. I guess I just didn't have the time (and energy) to dedicate that attention that a title like LBP deserves. But maybe I'll go back to it in the future. well, even if I don't, it makes me proud to have such a smart game in my library, specially when there is so much crap around (hello, Nintendo Wii).

Rachet and Clank is a game that surprised me. Being kind of a platform game with animals, I was expecting a cheap copy of Mario or Crash, but it's not not like that. It's almost a shooter. With many weird weapons. Also, there are levels with very smart puzzles. It's so much more than Mario.... Another good point is the humor. It has some very funny moments. It putted a smile in my face a lot of times. Oh, yes, and the graphics are phenomenal!

However R&C is not really memorable. Yes, there are many very good things about it, but nothing is memorable or legendary. I didn't finish the game yet and I don't know if I ever will...

Valkyria Chronicles is my favorite PS3 game. The fact that it looks like a dream might make you think that it is a superficial game but it nothing like that. It has a very original battle system (seriously, you never played anything like it...), a heartwarming story with excellent character development, and a great replay value. Maybe I will write about it later (this post is supposed to be about Metal Gear...), but for now let me say that this was the game that truly made me remember how much I loved video games in my teenage years. That made me feel the same way (more or less) that I felt about games like Final Fantasy VII and Resident Evil during the 90s... To cut the story short, VC is a masterpiece in its genre. If you ever liked RPGs and you have a PS3, you're committing a crime against yourself by not playing this game (no, Sega is not paying me to do the ads). I'd say more, only VC is worth a PS3. That's just how much I love it.

But today I'm talking about a much more popular game: Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. If you're reading this, you probably know a lot about the game, so I won't bother explaining it to you. Instead, i'll just give my personal experience with it.

I had a hard time "getting" Metal Gear Solid 4 because of the very very long movies, but now I love it. It's extremely well done entertainment with a lot of references to the first Metal Gear Solid, one of my favourite games of all time.

SPOILER ALERT: If you didn't play Metal Gear Solid 4 yet, and you might play in the future, the next paragraphs may ruin your experience!

But obviously MGS4 is much more than that. The graphics are just "wow". It's almost unbelievable how good HD games look, and MGS4 is one of the best in that department. The gameplay has a bunch of cool new features, but it's in essence the same one from 12 years ago. And this is definitely not bad. I mean, the first Metal Gear Solid is, after Final Fantasy VII, my favorite game of all times! You can confront enemies if you want, but the real fun is in advancing without being noticed. It can be really hard this time because the enemies aren't completely stupid like the ones from other games..

The story is complex and pretty much everyone from the series appears in this final chapter. There is a very real effort from the creators to put all pieces together, but the final result is a little bit overwhelming: too much information. As a result, even after beating the game, I still don't know exactly what the hell was going on. But I love it!

There are so many emotional moments. Detailed references to previous games that only fans would notice. While playing I said more than once: "wow, this is so cool".

The cut scenes are LONG. But they are very interesting once you get into the story. And the story is nothing short of fascinating. It makes me feel a little bit like Lost with so many problems and so little concrete answers, but I just can't get enough of it. It took me almost 19 hours of "gameplay", about half of it was spent watching movies. This makes MSG4 a very long interactive movie.

To truly appreciate this "movie", you have to understand the creator's idea: to change people's perceptions of games and movies, and to surprise! Yes, there are a bunch of WTF moments here. At some point you just start playing MGS1. Not a MGS1 with HD graphics, but truly a scene of the Playstation game. It brought back memories from 1998. But the best part was that I wasn't really sure about what was going on. I thought it was probably a dream (I mean, Snake's dream and not my dream, hehe) but then I screwed up and died, and I had a 'continue' just like in the first MGS! In the end it was just a prank, but you gotta admit, a genius one. Try to find something like that in Super Mario!

In another scene, I was warned that I had to insert disc 2, with Otacon immediately remembering that since they were on PS3 and had blu rays, there was no need to multiple discs, a clear mocking of Sony rivals' Xbox360 and Nintendo Wii.

In a boss fight against an enemy with physical abilities, I was reminded that I couldn't use the MGS1's trick of plugging the controller on port 2. Ok, that wasn't really a WTF moment, but I was surprised by how rapidly I remembered the epic fight against Psycho Mantis 12 years ago.

MGS4 is divided in 5 acts. The first 3 are more gameplay-intensive and the last 2 are really an interactive movie, which could be kind of frustrating because the gameplay in the first three is really diverse and fun. Except that it's not. THe best boss fights of the game are in the last two acts.

But the real deal is the story. These last two acts are better than most movies that I saw last year! Very big moments and great twists create an atmosphere of chaos and depression. The characters are having such a hard time. Naomi, the friend-then enemy-then friend-then enemy again..., finally dies (kind of a shame because she was super hot, but I guess she kind of deserved it...). Raiden not only lost his girlfriend, but his two arms in a noble effort to save Snake. He pretty much believes that he has nothing to lose. Solid Snake, the once ultra cool super soldier, is very old. He will be a walking machine in a couple of months (I won't even try to explain why, go to wikipedia) and dead a little after that. This is definitely his last mission.

All keeps building up for a very tense atmosphere. I was playing a game to see characters that I learned to care about being defeated and then the climatic end to one of the most epic videogame sagas of all time comes. I was expecting not only Snake to die (I mean he was old, this was his final mission) but another big character to pass away. But it didn't happen! The ending was too happy for me!

I mean, I never asked to love a game that was about depression and dark themes, but after all that happened, how come everything was magically solved in the end? Snake didn't die. In fact, he looked healthy like a horse in the end. Raiden got the girl and his arms back (ok, his arms, I can understand, Konami needs to make money in the future and Raiden is arguably the future of the series), but common'! Seriously, I hated the ending. I hated specially because the story was getting me depressed after the end of act 4. I was totally immersed in an amazing experience and then they just had a normal happy ending.

That's my main complain. I wanted a sad ending. Seriously, Kojima (if you're reading this up until now, you know who that is, right?), that's cheating. The entire journey is depressing and in the ends things magically work out. But perhaps that was his objective, to surprise people, to piss people off.

Come to think of it, MGS4 was partly about showing the middle finger to the players. You thought the other Metal Gear had too many movies? Make them even longer now. You didn't want to play with a war veteran, an "old" man (a girl reportedly said this in a letter to Hideo Kojima years ago). Make Solid Snake really old. And so on.

Which brings me to my last point: MGS4 is not perfect and is not for everyone. Your 4-years old cousin will give it up after 5 minutes. The typical Xbox360 Halo player that just wants to kill everyone (in a game, obviously) will hate it. No, MGS4 tries to do one thing and it does that thing extremely well. I play most games because of their story and I love a complicated plot. MGS4 is definitely for me. Sure, it's not perfect (that damn happy ending!), but it gets close...

Best 10 songs of 2009

Ok, let's go to the songs now. A bigger female presence here. I like female vocals a lot!

10. The Cure, Tegan and Sara:
Confused and slightly disturbing, this honest rip-off of The Cure's Lovesong is irresistible to me. 'All I said to you, all I did for you, seems so silly to me now'. This speaks directly to my soul!

9. Songs Remind Me Of You, Annie:
And here am I, talking about this singer again. Seriously, she might be the best pop singer around these days, and this is the best track of her new album.

8. Dominos, The Big Pink:
A big song with a catchy chorus about guys who cheat and write great songs about it. 'These girls fall like dominos, dominos...'

7. Resistance, Muse:
Matt Bellamy might be a little crazy (ok, not just a little...) and an extraordinary songwriter, but he's also a normal human being who is in love, and who fights for his love besides all the problems and shortcomings of a relationship...wow, am I really talking about the Muse leadsinger here?

6. Bulletproof, La Roux:
Possibly the only true catchy chorus in La Roux's album, here we get a break from her weird vocals. Which is not necessarily a good thing, but works great in this track.

5. 1901, Phoenix:
I saw Phoenix live this year (and I'm going to see them again in December...) and they closed with this, their biggest hit. The place almost felt apart, with everybody singing the words and jumping a lot. Nice moment.

4. Zero, Yeah Yeah Yeahs:
This starts slow, and builds up and up until it explodes. Then the last 2 minutes are pure nirvana. 'You're a zeroooo...' Epic!

3. Stillness is the move, Dirty Projectors:
Dirty Projectors are truly blog darlings and their exceptional album is going to be in 9 of 10 'best of' lists this year. I certainly believe that they deserve the hype, but overall their album is just too hard for me, with too many experimentations. Once you start to like a song, something too weird shows up and you're turned off. Thank god this doesn't happen with the entire record. When the Dirty Projectors's weird pop works, it works extremely well...

2. Sleepyhead, Passion Pit:
Since the beginning of their hype last year, Passion Pit released many memorable songs and that consistency is ultimately what makes them one of the best acts of 2009, but they never improved over their first (and best) hit.

1. Heads Will Roll, Yeah Yeah Yeahs:
'Of with their heads, dance till you're dead. Heads will roll, heads will roll, heads will roll...on the floor'. The Yeah Yeah Yeahs aimed very high with It's Blitz!. They really wanted people to dance. Sure it was a risky bet. But they totally won. I never really believed that they could go beyond the glory of 'Cheated Hearts' and 'Maps'. But they did it. The best song of their career and one of the greatest moments of this decade.

My 10 favorite 2009 albums!

Usually I wait until the year is over but since I don't expect much action in the next two months, and I really need to remember why life is worth living for, I decided to do my 'best of' lists tonight. In some sense, this is good because this way I do my list before magazines like NME and so I am a little bit less biased.
I'm more of a song's person than an album's person. That said, even thought 2009 was musically amazing, it was hard to make this list. Big hits like 'Poker Face' and 'Stillness is the move' were very important to me, but there was no way I could include them here, simply because the respective albums are not as good as a whole.
Anyway, below is my list. Hopefully it tells you something about my personality and, more importantly, it gives you a new act to listen to.

10. Cobra Starship, Hot Mess:
THe kind of plastic record that doesn't say anything and stills says it all. I used to hate these emo bastards but this time, by leaving the complaints and embracing the dancefloor, they really did it! This is probably the album that rivers Cuomo had in mind (but never accomplished) for Weezer's Raditude: just plain fun, without taking itself too seriously.

Highlights: Nice Guys Finish Last, Hot Mess, Good Girls Go Bad

9. Lily Allen, It's Not Me, It's You:
Oh god, I love british accent. I once went out with a british girl just because of her accent. Oh yeah, and the songs are amazing too...

Highlights: The Fear, Back To The Start

8. The Big Pink, A Brief History Of Love:
This feels like a long, dense and complicated trip, occasionally made more pleasant by things like the stellar 'Dominos', but still... I was not going to put this album here, but I was in love for the entire year, and I don't know. I just connect with this album, even thought it's far from perfect.

Highlights: Dominos, Velvet, Love In Vain

7. Muse, The Resistance:
My once favorite band came back in 2009, 3 years after the memorable Black Holes And Revelations. The Resistance may not match BH&R's glory, but still it's hard to not be touched by lyrics that speak so closely to my heart such as in 'Undisclosed Desires', or to the brilliant chorus of 'Resistance'.

Highlights: Resistance, Undisclosed Desires

6. Annie, Don't Stop:
Annie's music is exactly the kind of pop that I love the most. Plastic, with no big message, but still with weird touches. In "I don't like your band', when she sings (sarcastically) about feeling bad for not liking the guy's music, it reminds me of the best moments that Lily Allen might never had. 'Songs Remind Me of you' uses a simple (and ordinary) feeling and transforms it in one of the best chorus of the year. I could go all day... In terms of singles, this is possibly the album of the year!

Highlights: Don't Stop, Songs Remind Me Of You, Bad Times

5. Franz Ferdinand, Tonight:
Cold and calculated, yes, but Franz Ferdinand was always like that. You wouldn't necessarily want to be their close friend but still cannot resist the big party anthems. People talked a lot about the role of synthesizers in this record but at least in one of the tracks it yields a very interesting result: 'Lucid Dreams', an 8-minutes club epic, is beyond fascinating.

Highlights: Lucid Dreams, Turn It On, What She Came for

4. Passion Pit, Manners:
Seriously, can someone resist the the super catchy melodrama of songs like Sleepyhead and Little Secrets? Passion Pit is this year's MGMT and more than deserves all the love it got in 2009.

Highlights: Sleepyhead, The Reeling

3. Phoenix, Wolfgang Amadeus Phoenix:
While the Strokes are too busy delivering average solo projects that they can't be a band again, these french guys gave the world a reason not to miss them. With pop gems like '1901', who needs The Strokes anyway?

Highlights: 1901, Lasso, Liztomania

2. La Roux, La Roux:
At first, I dismissed this as just an overhyped effort of an ugly girl with an annoying voice. But with time the annoying voice became less annoying and more powerful, and her beauty...well, she's still the same but who cares? Like Annie's album, this is electropop at its best. Party tunes directed to the dancefloor, the kind of Britney spears that it's cool to like. But, unlike Annie's Don't Stop, the message here is dark and angry. Eleanor Jackson is not happy but she knows that the fun can never stop...

Highlights: Colourless Colour, Bulletproof, In for The kill

1. Yeah Yeah Yeahs, It's Blitz!:
'Shake it like a ladder to the sun', the first words of the YYYs third album, could be considered an understatement of what this album does. It has the big party energy of FF's Tonight but without losing the emotional stuff that made this band epic in the past. Don't get me wrong, I love all the albums in this list, but It's Blitz! is 2009's best by a mile. Reviewing this record, Spin Magazine wrote: "The result is the alternative pop album of the decade-one that imbues The Killers's Hot Fuss and MGMT's Oracular Spectacular with a remarkable depth and finesse". I couldn't agree more.

Highlights: Heads Will Roll, Hysteric, Zero

Album review, Muse, The Resistance

Few bands, if any, had such a big impact in my life as Muse. Back in the second semester of 2006, songs as 'Time is running out' and 'Butterflies and Hurricanes' were big anthems for me, songs that had effect in pretty much every aspect of my life. I loved, loved 'Black Holes and Revelations'. I lost count of how many times I danced like crazy to the beat of 'Supermassive Black Hole'. And what about 'Starlight'? Well, let's just say it was the the song that represented an important love...
For a lot of reasons, like 'Muscle Museum', 'Stockholm Syndrome', 'Knights of Cydonia' Muse was, for a long time my favorite band. But then time passed and I became more eletronic (and less crazy...) and simply got tired of songs that I heard hundreds of times. Sure, I always came back to hits as 'Hysteria' but it was never again like before.
That's why this year I had high expectations about a lot of albums and bands, but wasn't terribly excited about Muse. Plus when ' United States Of Eurasia' with its ridiculous Queen-inspired part came out, I was really, really disappointed. After this I didn't expect much of Muse. But then came first single 'Uprising' and, while wasn't the biggest song of their career, it had some interesting elements and it was, in the end, a very nice track.
Because of the reasons above, my expectations about 'The Resistance' were mixed. "Is it going to be like 'United States' or more like 'Uprising'?", I thought. Now that the album is out, the answer is: none of the above. There is more than one Muse here.
One is the 'pop' band of Starlight, that delivers an irresistible chorus in the title track. 'It could be wrong, it could be wrong, but it should've been right...' is certainly one of the catchiest lines of the year. Another good example of this more accesible Muse is 'Undisclosed Desires', which could be described as this year's 'Supermassive Black Hole'. Except that the lyrics are much better than in the latter. I think I would say these are the best lyrics of their career. It fits perfectly in the moment that I'm living right now.
But this would not be a Muse album without the difficult and weird sound that was always in many of their songs. And believe-me: there is plenty of weirdness here. 'Unnatural Selection' is a completely paranoid track but one that makes total sense once you remember who wrote it. Isn't it suspicious that human DNA makes us so smiliar to computers? Mathew Bellamy smells something like a conspiracy. And keeps going on and on using 100 different riffs during 6:55 minutes. It can't be more Muse than this.
However, while it's nice to keep the roots of the band and preserve the craziness, there are many times in this album where it just feels too much. Sure in 'MK Ultra', you hear, like 2 or 3 very nice sounds, but in the end, you get tired and just want slow things down a little bit. Plus, while I recognize there is classical beauty in the 'Exogenesis' part, it feels like too much pretension for a rock band. And, yes, it's beautiful, but I really don't care much about the last three songs.
To sum up, there is plenty to love in this album. 'Resistance' and 'Undisclosed Desires' are two pop gems that I'm playing like crazy these days. 'Unnatural Selection' reminds me of the good old 'New born' times and that's a pretty good thing. The drawback is that this band doesn't seem to know where to stop with the experimentations and often embarasses itself with things like 'United States Of Eurasia'.
This happens probably because these three guys take themselves too seriously and think that there is nothing that they can't do. Perhaps they are right. How many mainstream bands have albums influenced both by Timbaland and Chopin? Plus, I wonder where they would be if they hadn't believed in themselves in the beginning of their careers when everybody was labeling them Radiohead copycats.
Probably not selling out Wembley and being superstars in Europe. So while this album is not as good as 'Black Holes...', it definitely deserves a lot of praise for all the risks it takes and for mantaining the band's identity. Long live, Muse. We love you!

Grade: 8 out of 10

Best Songs Of 2009-Partial

Since I have nothing better to do (well, actually I do, but I don't want to...), I had the pretty original idea of taking a look of what 2009 in music offered us so far. It has been an above average year, and the simple fact that Little Boots in not on my list (have you hearsd about her? what? less than 10 times today?) gives one the idea of how competitive this year has been.
So far I'm still waiting for a song as remarkable as last year's Kids. Sure Yeah Yeah Yeahs tried but they just didn't get there yet. Perhaps MGMT's second album will do the job. Or perhaps Muse will blown my mind away and become once again my favorite band. Who knows? We'll have to wait for the second semester...

My partial 'best of' list goes like this:

10. Lisztomania, Phoenix:

When I decided to listen to Phoenix, I was expecting something along the lines of Animal Collective and Grizzly Bear (i.e, boring...), because all these bands have been music blogs darlings for some time . Such a pleasant surprise...

9. Headdress, Amazing Baby:

Two months from now, they will be all over the place, but I've been a fan of these guys since last year when I saw them at Mercury Lounge. Chances are high that you will see people comparing them to MGMT, but that is really not fair. MGMT is more like a big dance band, but these guys have a more, say, hypnotic sound. You don't know what that means? You weren't supposed to anyway. Just give Amazing Baby a chance.

8. Walking On A Dream, Empire Of The Sun:

At best, Empire Of The Sun is to MGMT what Kaiser Chiefs is to Franz Ferdinand. Good, but still much inferior to the band that inspired it. That doesn't mean that they cannot have their 'I Predict A Riot'.

7. Know Your Enemy, Green Day:

Repetitive, annoying at sometimes, just like everything Green Day has ever done. The lyrics don't say much but in some sense it's nice to have a break from lyrics with a 'deep' meaning and a lot of pretension, like most of the stuff on American Idiot.

6. Poker Face, Lady Gaga:

Cool people would have a problem admiting that they like this. Since I am not cool, I can safely say that I love this tune!

5. What She Came For, Franz Ferdinand:

The number one song on my last.fm, for a while I thought this would be the song of the year. Everything is pretty good about the song but the explosive guitar solo in the end is fantastic. One of the best things that my favorite band has ever done...

4. Zero, Yeah Yeah Yeahs:

This song got 2 billion remixes so far, but no one has did better than the original. It's such a hard task. This is the kind of song that it's impossible not to dance to. And the last two minutes will go down in history as some of the most memorable moments of this year.

3. Sleepyhead, Passion Pit:

The closest thing, at least in spirit, to 'Kids', this is such an addictive track. The best thing about Passion Pit is that there is a lot of feelings in their songs. Lead singer Michael Angelakos thinks like a girl and he is not gay! If I actually had any music talent, I would write songs like Passion Pit.

2. Help, I'm Alive, Metric:

"I tremble, they're gonna eat me alive..." I don't even remember a better song to identify myself with. This pretty much translates how was this semester for me, and because of this I freaking love it. After releasing their best album yet, it's pretty clear that Metric doesn't need any help but yes, they are very very alive, and making people like me much happier.

1. Heads Will Roll, Yeah Yeah Yeahs:

Before recording 'It's Blitz!', Karen O must have told guitarrist Nick Zinner: "We are going to drop the guitar on this. If it sucks, we will be back to basics next time. If it is good, I'll be in charge from now on". Poor Zinner...

This is like the perfect pop song. It's fast paced, it got a great chorus, amazing lyrics, cool synths, powerful guitars. Sure die hard fans complain a lot about the band dropping guitars, becoming too comercial, but screw them, this is unbelievably awesome!