Incan Abraham - Beige

Beige starts with pure potential energy - enough that you can feel the musical chemicals mixing as the drumming starts to amp the song up. It's like it doesn't have an intro or verses or an end, but is more like a gradual blending of a musical procession. It goes from minimal instrument into a build up of sound waves, vocals adding in not to overlap the music but to be an additional instrument to drop into the tide of music peaking and receding.

Glitter Pox rating: 75% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

The Jungle Giants - No One Needs to Know

Favorite lyrics: while everybody's sleeping we're just quietly creeping out of our empty beds

The Jungle Giants are wild and sunshine-fueled energetic in this song. Music that sounds genuinely fun is what a summer soundtrack should be all about, and No One Needs to Know fits right into the middle of a perfect humid night's street-party playlist. It's full of drumming that makes you stomp your naked feet, guitar riffs that scream adventure, and vocals that hold the promise of a good time.

Glitter Pox rating: 68% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Daughter - Home

Favorite lyrics: Burned out flames should never re-ignite/ But I thought you might.../ Take me, Take me, home.

This song's entire tone begs to be among something familiar, a want to become part of a certain part of your life again. It's a song that lives in the past, but it has a small resistance to it, too, so it comes across as both desperate for and disastrously against the same desire. The vocalist plays around with her own voice as if she were trying new things with an old, well-used instrument; kind of like The Cranberries' quirky melody in 'Zombie', 'Home' has a unique vocal playground. Sometimes adding a lot of different style into a song is distracting from the passion in the lyrics, so a lot of singer/songwriters do better with acoustic, but Daughter has just the right mix of music and raw emotion, with a drum beat that sounds like a repetitive door-knock and moments of silence that fit well into the song. Daughter is just a really stand-out artist and entirely emotionally addicting; it'll be hard not to come back to Home's play button.

Glitter Pox rating: 89% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

The Lighthouse and the Whaler - White Days

The Lighthouse and the Whaler is from Cleveland, OH - where we live - but we've only recently discovered them. They have a great solidity of mellow melodies, bright xylophone, and happy hand-claps that make it a song that easily wins windows-down approval. It's a song that's really laid back, like something you'd listen to while reading outside by mason jar candles,but the lyrics are so personal, even though they're sung about someone else, that it connects as a harder hitting song than the music implies. There's something so validating about a singer observing the most intimate parts about someone that makes it almost more transcendentally emotional than if it were about the person actually singing it.

Glitter Pox rating: 70% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Young Man - Fate

We saw Young Man when they opened for Oberhofer, and they are just as flawless live as they are in this studio version. 'Fate' is a song that stuck out to us that night; it has enough movement with its climbing vocals to keep your attention, but it also has a sleepy tranquility to it. Toward the end of it, right when you expect it to be over, there's this great break down that completely changes the whole tone. Most of Young Man's songs on their newly released album, Vol 1, are lengthy, but there's enough change and refreshment in their music to make each of them unique and continuously interesting.

Glitter Pox rating: 77% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

White Arrows

White Arrows just released 'I Can Go,' a song that'll be on their new CD 'Dry Land is Not a Myth," released June 19th. This band blends its sound into a beat that's strong enough to survive as instrumental, but they also add vocals that manage to be both indifferently calming and restlessly dissident, similar in sound to one of our favorite bands, 123. 'I Can Go' definitely has that mix, with pan flute in the background of the chorus making it seem like a summer daze, followed by echoing vocals that you would probably hear whispering right before having a mental breakdown. Our favorite track of theirs is 'Get Gone,' with percussion and guitar riffs that pace the song like a sugar rush. Comparing the two, their CD will obviously have range, but it'll probably hit all of its targets dead center.

Glitter Pox rating: 83% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox

Animal Kingdom - Strange Attractor

This song manages both elegance and eccentricity, beginning like an echo and going into a soft falsetto followed by the deepness of a good bass drum. The contrast creates a song that has the quirky attractiveness the chorus is all about. It's not too sentimental, because the music adds depth to it, but the singer has the kind of soprano voice that generally only lives in pretty, mellow songs; the additions in the music, though, modernize it into something that catches your attention and keeps it.

Glitter Pox rating: 81% contagious

Hope you catch it,

the Glitter Pox

Tobias Fröberg - When We Go to War

Favorite lyrics: When we go to war I'll keep a picture of you in my heart

The string instruments hidden beneath the synth pop voice in this song are equal parts genius and enchanting. It's like an audio version of the movie Pleasantville, falling into a world that lacks color and slowly gaining it back as the overlay of ominous orchestral symphony fills in the silence of the most hollow parts of the song, like a mix of standstill and struggle. It doesn't have much musical resemblance, but there's something about the songwriting in When We Go to War that is comparable to Sufjan Stevens, the same style of lyrics that completely encompass some kind of common emotion in a rare way. You can put yourself on either side of this song and have it supply an instant reaction.

Glitter Pox rating: 92% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox