Alt-J

Alternative rock/indie art weirdos Alt-J joined up after meeting in University in England.  For your Mac nerd trivia moment of the day, they are named after the keyboard combination that will produce a delta symbol.  Their original album, An Awesome Wave, is damn good.  They fired up a few hits off of that album, including "Fitzpleasure" and "Breezeblocks," along with just a cool sound - rock sounds sprinkled with strange chanting, electronic clicks and bloops, and references to Where the Wild Things Are. Here is "Breezeblocks"

With 80 million spins on Spotify and 54 million on YouTube, its a pretty large hit.  Definitely a weird tune, and "Fitzpleasure" and "Tessellate" are also winners, but they all have a great sound that the rest of the album tracks well.  You know what a "breeze block" is?  I didn't, but it is apparently what the Brits call a cinder block.  So my desk in college was mainly breezeblocks.  Now you know.

Unfortunately, I think their new album is crap in comparison.  I know that it was well-received by critics and won a Grammy nod, but I think other than a few tunes, it just takes the weird aspects of Awesome Wave and amplifies them to the point of unpleasantness.  I get that music nerds like the fact that they sampled Miley Cyrus for "4x4," but beyond the grin of irony I got from first hearing that, so what?  I listened to the album several times on one drive from Austin to Dallas and back, and I just can't get on board.  "Every Other Freckle" sounds good, but I'd just need to grab a few of the songs off of here and ditch the rest of the album.  I'll give them props for the fun of "Left Hand Free," which is a weird but fun party tune:

With the line-up as it is, I'll hope that these guys are playing while I want to get set up for the Foo Fighters, and that way I won't have to worry about whether I should see them or not.  I'm not terribly excited about the prospect, but they'd likely be good.