20 OF MONTREAL
HISSING FAUNA, ARE YOU
THE DESTRO YER?

Kevin Barnes combines joy and misery into such pleasing confusion that it’s hard to know whether he’s going to shake his ass or collapse in a heap after each song. The bristling, buzzy “Heimdalsgate Like a Promethean Curse,” blends new-wave bounce with lyrics detailing his battle with depression—he begs his mind not to fail him by serenading it with chipper chirps and hip-swiveling slink. Psychological complexity and libertine flamboyance rarely complement each other so well in the either-or world of pop music. J.M.

19 ARCTIC MONKEYS
FAVOURITE WORST
NIGHTMARE

Proof that youth is not, in fact, always wasted on the young: Arctic Monkeys’ fantastically agitated sophomore album ups the velocity, craftsmanship, and fuck-it-all Britishness of their acclaimed debut. Frontman Alex Turner, still within spitting distance of his teens, wrangles caustic barbs from both his guitar and his lyrics, the two coming together particularly well on “Brianstorm” and “Fluorescent Adolescent” (the latter rhymes “fishnets” and “nightdress” with sneering glee). Snot-nosed punk—and we mean that as the highest compliment. J.M.

18 FEIST
THE REMINDER

The cool older sister in the sprawling Toronto indie-rock family, Leslie Feist beat a path out of the underground in 2007, selling hundreds of thousands of copies of her third solo album to folks whose idea of a broken social scene is a bar without bottle service. But this was far beyond music to brunch by—The Reminder boasts more than its share of arty eccentricities, such as the field-recording rustle in “The Water” or the now-omnipresent Broadway-chorus vocals in “1234.” Slyly subversive, challenging even as it soothes. M.W.

17 THE NATIONAL
BOXER

Matt Berninger is blessed with the type of beaten-down baritone that can’t help but evoke melancholy—when he sings the line “Half-awake in a fake empire,” you’re inclined to believe him. But this Brooklyn-based quintet’s gift lies in their ability to maximize the drama inside that space, transforming songs about staying indoors (“Apartment Story”) into darkly romantic epics as sonically soaring as their lyrics are agoraåphobic. The margin between shout-from-the-rooftops hope and head-on-the-bar despair is a narrow one in the National’s purview, but, hey—in ours, too. S.K.

CASS BIRD

16

PHOTOCREDIT

LILY ALLEN ALRIGHT, STILL… In a pop world filled with airbrushed, pitch-corrected fembots, Lily Allen comes across like a flesh-and-blood human—one who drinks too much, dates dopey dudes, and overshares on MySpace about her personal life. Her debut album of reggae-dusted, rap-influenced sing-alongs feels like a weekend romp through London with a mouthy young chavette as your guide. Though the melodies are breezy and her voice a cool, limpid tool, the songs are full of acidic opinions about cheating boyfriends (“Smile”), crappy shags (“Not Big”), and cocaine-hoovering frenemies (“Friend of Mine”). Shit-talk rarely sounds so sweet. M.E.