Today in songs that don’t sample My Chemical Romance…

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Jer Fairall: MGMT wannabes discover their inner Scissor Sisters via a near-rewrite of Jermaine Stewart’s “We Don’t Have To Take Our Clothes Off.” There may be some hope for these guys yet.
[7]

Alfred Soto: Opulent electronic whizzes and thrums, chipmunk vocals apparently inspired by Adam Levine, chunky guitar riff, and ludicrous lyrics. What’s to hate, folks? So devoted to secondhand inspiration and squeezing every dollar from their record contract that they’ll scroll through every iTunes playlist for melodies to pilfer. Let’s can the discussion of the influence of Animal Collective on everyone from MGMT to Owl City and call a truce.
[6]

Jonathan Bradley: It’s the lack of personality that gets me. Well may they have their analog keyboards and Styrofoam melodies, but who are these goons? Why should I care about whatever it is that has them warbling away? This isn’t an indie rock problem — you mightn’t like Ben Gibbard or Stephen Malkmus’s personalities, but you can be sure they exist — this is a straightforward bad music problem. It’s lucky they affirm the presence of people in the band’s name, because I sure can’t hear any trace of them in the song.
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Katherine St Asaph: At least Sleigh Bells was trying to sound distorted and wonky. They also hired a vocalist.
[3]

Brad Shoup: Oh, so this is why they used a vocal filter. I’m sorry to admit I heard this on the radio and didn’t take anything away from it other than the prepubescent vocals; while “Pumped Up Kicks” is constructed around a throughline, “Helena Beat” makes room for meandering. But there are some great details here: the trebly guitar blinking out funk in one channel, the underplayed handclaps, the remarkable sonics of the breakdown. There’s no chance they’ll duplicate the astounding chart success of their debut single, but they’ve got a shot at the career path MGMT abandoned: well-recorded, woozy Never-Neverland pop.
[8]

Jonathan Bogart: By an odd quirk, this was the first song I heard by F. the P., and I still like it better than “Pumped Up Kicks.” Maybe because it sounds less like Every Indie Anthem Of The Oughts and more like, I don’t know, a song.
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