Instant Playlist - April 12 2012

Frankie Rose

Beck
Looking for a Sign (Iliad)
Oh, we see Beck’s feeling mopey again, à la Sea Change. The thing is, the guy does heartbroken so convincingly that we’re actually starting to worry about the dude’s marriage.

Olaroks
Gridlock (Independent)
Having God turn out the lights has never sounded so bright and jangly, even when singer Ola Roks starts things off with "One day a vein popped in my brain/I dropped dead there in the street."

Gossip
Perfect World (Columbia)
Beth Ditto and company’s dedication to slick dance-pop is slowly eroding our precious memories of watching them, as a scrappy garage-rawk band, rip shit up at the Pic so long ago. But this is still a decent track.

Meshuggah
Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion (Nuclear Blast)
Holy doomsday, Mulletman. Sweden’s finest punch in with a seven-minute epic that starts off with ghostly apocalyptic-wasteland guitar and then works a grind-groove that will melt your eyeballs.

Opossom
Getaway Tonight (Independent)
Over a clattering, drum ’n’ bass–indebted beat, New Zealand’s Opossom drops a little ditty that sounds like what might happen if the Venusians assigned a couple of robots to re-create what earthlings listened to in the Summer of Love.

Lucero
It May Be Too Late (ATO)
A Marlboro-scented, marinated-in-sour-mash roots-rocker for anyone who’s ever found themselves at the lonely end of the bar on a Saturday night, waiting for a date who never shows.

Primal Rock Rebellion
White Sheet Robes (Universal)
Still buzzing over that Darkness show at the Commodore a few weeks ago? Climb back on the retro-metal crazy train with this squealing-and-pealing ode to the dangers of coke. (Or maybe it’s a warning about using too much Javex.)

Brother Twang
Running Through to You (Independent)
Falls somewhere between whisky-blazed Celtic punktry and acoustic-tinted Sunday-morning folk-pop, which is to say a billion times more original than, say, the Creed.

Raghav
So Much (Cordova Bay)
Think bringing-sexy-back riffing on Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and strawberry confections over an elastic, star-spangled house beat at a circa-’97 London superclub. Break out the ecstasy!

Municipal Waste
Jesus Freaks (Nuclear Waste)
It’s a toss-up as to what’s going to happen first in this antireligious scorcher from Virginia’s long-running cross-over kings: is the guitar player’s pick going to melt or is the drummer going to drop dead from over-exertion? We’ve got even money on both.

Frankie Rose
Pair of Wings (Slumberland)
"All I want is a pair of wings to fly/Into the blue wide open sky", Frankie Rose sings breathily over church-service organ. If this is what heaven sounds like, we’ll take a pair as well.