Harlem Shakes "Sickos" [MP3]

With a garage-rock shimmy and power-pop twinkle, these New York kids craft a sweet cacophony on the cheap, marveling at how scary humans are.

"After a whirlwind of label interest and blog frenzy over the past few years, Harlem Shakes have reformed, reevaluated and rediscovered themselves. They have now decided to self-release their debut EP, Burning Birthdays, this February 6, 2007. Produced by Chris Zane (Asobi Seksu, Human Television, Les Savy Fav), the 5-song EP evokes all of Harlem Shakes' character and high-octane melodies, maintaining the hooks you've come to expect — while adding the energy and depth they've been evoking live for the past few years.

Burning Birthdays is full of classic-yet-creepy pop songs stuffed with some of the most diabolical, yet touchingly hopeful, lyrics to date. There is still plenty of vintage Harlem Shakes catchiness, though, with intelligent pop melodies you can hum along to — think Housemartins meet the Shins with the Beach Boys harmonies and a dash of Eno-style weirdness.

With Burning Birthdays, Harlem Shakes have opened up their hearts, minds, and melodies, and rewritten the archetypal pop song... all while delivering what will be the freshest and smartest sound of 2007." [MP3 here] [MySpace here].

LCD Soundsystem "Sound of Silver" (2007)

Two years after LCD Soundsystem's eponymous full-length debut sent indie scenesters rushing to the dancefloor, the outfit headed by dance-rock producer James Murphy serves up another stiff cocktail of punk, dance, and funk with Sound of Silver. Analog synths, chugging basslines, chunky guitars, and Murphy's wild falsetto excursions are once again the foundation to which is added the new and strange, such as the heavily chorused voices that suggest backward-masking in the opener "Get Innocuous" and the captivating harmonics keyboardist Nancy Whang bounces off of Murphy's vocals on "Someone Great." If this album has its own version of "Daft Punk Is Playing at My House," it has to be "North American Scum," an infectious stormer that breezily dismisses Europe as a place where "the buildings are old and you might have lots of mimes." Such lines are good evidence that LCD's music would rather ridicule itself than fall into the kind of pretense and nostalgia it constantly lampoons. The album's title track reflects that hankering after one's teenage years is often interrupted when "you remember the feelings of a real live emotional teenager--then you think again," while the power ballad "New York I Love You But You're Bringing Me Down" wearily serenades the Big Apple as "still the one pool where I'd happily drown." True, LCD's music is not for everyone, which may have something to do with why their fans love them as they do. If you fall into the latter category, however, Silver is gold. [MySpace here].

The second album from New York uberproducer James Murphy's LCD Soundsystem project is every bit as smart, funky, and literate as its predecessor. Party-starting dance music indebted to the driving percussion of early-'80s New York acts like Liquid Liquid and ESG, the pneumatic thud of house music, and the arch, modernist pop of Brian Eno or David Bowie circa Heroes. If you don't know the reference points, it really doesn't matter: "Someone Great" is the sort of delightful, dazed disco to rank amongst Ladytron or Goldfrapp's best, surfing a six-minute wave of woozy keyboards, acid blips and tapped xylophone, while "Us Vs Them" is a combative punk-dance march built from aggressive cowbells and splinters of funk guitar. But the clued-in will get an additional kick, both from James Murphy's hipster humour ("Take me off your mailing list," he wheezes, on the weary "New York I Love You") and the myriad reference points wired into the machinery of each song: see the tongue-in-cheek 'North American Scum', the sound of Fatboy Slim's 'The Rockefeller Skank' rewired by industrial terrorists Throbbing Gristle. Making music 'intelligent' so often kills its rump-shaking appeal, but Sound Of Silver does its thinking on the dancefloor.