This is almost a summer song slush fund.  Despite hailing from Chicago, Ghost House molts more in a single song than most rappers do in a career. Spank Rock, OutKast, and codeine sippers of world all scramble on the angles of this electro-infused monument to being a “bad ass mutha fuckah”. Granted, that’s hardly new territory in the genre ego built, but the Ghost House crew have some humility in their hubris, which makes the self-inflation part of the song’s sky high energy and not just bragadacio baggage. 

The opening keyboard riff, wiry and alien, sounds like a totally warped and reinvented take of the keyboard wash in Justin Timberlake’s “My Love”. I’m no Timberlake fan, but I’ll take every version of that space age stutter that I can get. The verbal flow gets skipped like a stone and shifted into frenzied knots just before drifting into the slow-mo sludge hook. “Samuel L. Jackson” unpretentiously swarms you with switched up rhythms, sexy come on’s and a sound grafted from the best of the cutting edges.

What happens when a four-piece girl group discovers Rainer Maria and ‘50s Motown vocal harmonies? They form a group called Vancougar, featuring members of Cinch and Pink Mountaintops. These Canadian belles have honed their own brand of power pop that will gladly fit among the other Canadian imports into the U.S. scene over the past several years.

“Obvious” is their most direct statement off their sophomore release on Mint Records, Canadian Tuxedo; it kicks off with a driving fuzz bass line, but don’t be fooled. As soon as the vocals kick in it becomes a simple melodic chant based around the lyric “It’s so obvious to me / We were meant to be in love.” Sound cheesy? Well, it kind of is. Cheesy in the way your grandpa tells a story about the five feet of snow he had to walk to school in—might be false, but it still sounds awesome.

You gotta hand it to LA-based songwriter AM, he chose his unfortunate stage name before the internet was a major concern and has stuck to it even though it has rendered him all but invisible to Google.  Here are some of the places you’d have been more likely to end up if it hadn’t been for us:

• Texas A&M University: home of the Aggies
• Amplitude Modulation: talk radio’s best friend
• A and M Records: a subsidiary of Universal Music Group
• The American Meteorological Society: lying bastards
• I-Am-Bored.com: at least they’re not pretending to be useful
• A.M. Best Company: statistical analyses for insurance purposes
• AM Statistical Software: relationship to above still undetermined

You’re welcome.

Look, I’m not going to pretend to have the ethnomusicology background necessary to really decode this on its own terms and accurately explain it to you people.  That’s kind of the point, though—quite unexpectedly, Burkina Electric is decidedly outside my comfort zone.

New York percussionist Lukas Ligeti is the son of noted Austrian composer and perennial Kubrick fave György Ligeti.  In 2000, he began working with Maï Lingani, a popular singer from Burkina Faso, by producing her debut album.  A few years later, the pair decided to call it a collaborative project and pad it out into a quartet; the first album with the new format came out in 2006

At first, Rêem Tekré came across as the sort of alien folk tradition that just served to remind me how little I know about music in the grand scheme of things.  Everyone needs a little worldly education every now and again, but eventually I found Ligeti’s incorporation of Western drums and electronics really unsettling.  I’m generally pretty comfortable with both, but here they are entirely inconvenient because they make it impossible to just file the songs under a catch-all term like “World Music” and think myself more educated for the listening.  As it turns out, there are people using those same tools in the parts of the world we generally don’t bother with.  Oops.

I’ll let you define your own philosophical ramifications for this one.  Personally, I just come back to it periodically to see if I’m comfortable yet; no luck so far, but I’m still glad to hear sequenced drums that aren’t accompanied by a filter sweep.

As you probably already know, Sigur Rós has built a career out of selling nonsense—vocalist Jón Birgisson sings in “Hopelandic,” a made-up language that occasionally blends together bits of Icelandic and English, but mostly it just departs for the moon while you’re not paying attention because you’re still trying to figure out what the the last sentence was about.

In doing so, they raise an interesting question about the role of language in mainstream rock music.  Can it be communicative without being semantic?  Or alternatively, if the semantic value is imposed by the listener, is it still useful?  If so, maybe that’s the reason bands with obtuse Nirvana-esque lyrics still manage to connect with audiences who learn to sing along with every word even when none of the make sense.  Treating the human voice as an instrument is not a new approach, but treating human language as such is still largely unexplored territory for most of us.

Since his was the first band to totally base their gimmick around the idea that a properly-delivered hard plosive can smack you up just as readily as a kick drum, Birgisson is usually the focal point, but at times the other members are the ones that keep things ticking.  Sometimes the supposed gibberish starts to seem a little too conveniently tied to the English phonetic equivalents (the part of their site with all the free music is labeled “dánlód”), at which point Hopelandic threatens to collapse into the same sort of caricature as teenage txt msgs and l33t h4x0r sp33k.  Some of the tracks on () were guilty of that, but at the end drummer Orri Páll Dýrason came to the rescue.

It’s been six long years since the snowstorm during which I trudged around for days listening to (), but since Takk was such a heinous misstep aside from “Gong,” I still consider the album’s closing number, “Untitled #8,” the band’s crowning achievement thus far.  Since () was so verbally abstract—there were no titles at all, not even Hopelandic ones, and it came with blank liner notes in which listeners could write their own interpretations of the “lyrics”—fans desperate for a tangible handle have since taken to applying unofficial secondary names. This one is “Popplagið,” but since we’re still in Hopelandic territory there, the alleged translation would be “The Pop Song.”

You’d think that’d be a harder sell—the notion that a band which insists on singing in gibberish syllables which sound like scat on shrooms could have a pop hit, I mean—but if there’s a more universally beloved Sigur Rós tune, I certainly haven’t met it yet.  Maybe the “pop” here means “popular in terms of raw numbers” instead of the more obvious “musical genre diametrically opposed to inaccessible art-rock.”

OK, that’s probably enough.  There’s not a shred of semantic coherence in the subject matter, but my word count on this post keeps rising.  Oh, the irony.