Joywave - Tongues (feat. KOPPS)

The beginning of Tongues has the uppity jazz of Kimbra, a skipped-vocals intro matched with male vocals that don't seem like they would fit together initially. But they fit in tone with the xylophone so that the high notes and low notes of the music and vocals give this mix-matched vibe that's perfect. It's kind of a great song to speed on the highway to.

Glitter Pox rating: 85% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Night Beds - Lost Springs

The guitar at the beginning of Lost Springs is slow and seems reminiscent behind the vocals. There's something utterly comfortable about those vocals, too; they aren't demanding but affirming. There's also this sad Sufjan Stevens feel to the song, with the music alluding to the hearing version of a comfort cry.

Glitter Pox rating: 70% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Sara Jackson-Holman - Cellophane

The heart-breaker lyrics and vintage sound of Sara Jackson-Holman's vocals sound like they belong in a smoky bar. It's part of a genre of bad-ass chicks with feelings, like Lily Allen, Kate Nash, and Lindi Ortega. The piano adds this focal melody that classes up the song into a mix of sultry and sassy.

Glitter Pox rating: 75% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

The Moxies Interview

The Moxies have only been a band since 2011, but they play like they've been working on music together for years. We sat down with the two members that make up The Moxies, Marco Ciofani and Kevin Werfield, and talked with them about their music.

Right now, they say they're working on new stuff "all the time," trying to get a sound together for their first album.

"To put out an album," Marco says, "especially your first album, you want it to be just, like, a brick. For example, you guys are familiar with Jet? "Get Born" was awesome, you had "Cold Hard Bitch," you had "Are You Gonna Be My Girl" - those two songs alone are just great. People just fell for that album, right? Once you get a good first album then people will be like "well, first album was great, let's get their second stuff" then you can kind of experiment and do different things."

"The first five years of your music career is to make a perfect album. You can't get recognized off of a good sixth album, you know?" says Kevin.

They definitely have this southern, bluesy, ice cream parlor kind of feel to their music, a mix of genres, and you can hear that they've listened to a lot as inspiration.

Marco says they listen to "motown, punk, blues, electric blues, chess records in chicago in the 50s. Classic rock when we were younger was like the greatest thing ever, but once you get older you start finding your niche. Soul, like James Brown, Otis Redding, Ray Charles. As far as country goes, it's just Johnny Cash." He says this while pointing to a huge Johnny Cash poster in their living room.

While on the subject of inspirations, they started talking about their "biggest inspiration," Jack White, who they saw at Third Man Records when they were recently in Nashville, where they played a show at 12th and Porter.

"We just turned our heads and he was three feet away," they said. They'd gone to visit Third Man Records, Jack White's label, not expecting him to actually be there.

Their own studio experience was recorded at The Jungle near Cleveland. "Playing a live show is one thing, and studio is completely different," says Marco.

"Yeah, it's about precision," adds Kevin.

Since they've recorded what they wrote there, though, they've been working on new stuff. "We'll just go down, and don't really even say anything to each other, we just start playing something until it forms," says Kevin about writing music.

"A great way to get inspired or start writing a song is to just jam and mess around until you find something that sounds good," adds Marco. "Once we get to that point we drop it and I just play it through my head, I'll just be nodding during work."

"Yeah," says Kevin, "We've worked on songs for like three months at a time, or we can start from scratch and have a song done by the end of the day."

If you want to hear some of what they've recorded and worked on, they have shows coming up over the next few months. You can find out dates and info on their Facebook.

Born Ruffians - Needle

Needle has a Fleet Foxes or Bastille vibe with the uppity-ness of Walk the Moon and the lyricist genius of Radiohead's Creep. It starts out calm and turns into yells of dance vibes, like the vocalist is happy about being sad. The background vocals repeat in echoes like crowd shouts, so you get the satisfaction of screaming lyrics back at a live band without actually being at a show.

Glitter Pox rating: 88% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Stealing Sheep - I Am the Rain

I Am the Rain has a really old sound, almost like an incantation or a biblical verse, but with this ancient rust to it. The guitar at one point sounds like old backwater blues but is overlaid with other guitar work. It has a lot of layers of harmony and instrumentation for how short the song is, and it sounds damn pretty.

Glitter Pox rating: 77% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Magic Man - Paris

The vocals of Paris have this euphoric flow to them, a weirdly calming frenetic vibe, while the music feels short and stuttered like a film in rewind. But the overall feel of the song is movement, from the piano in the beginning to the reverse-intro of the last notes. The song just fades out in this loudly anticlimactic ending, but it ends so unexpectedly different that it makes you want to hit play again.

Glitter Pox rating: 89% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Wild Belle - Backslider

This song sounds like the whole band was thrown underwater, with distorted instrumentation and drowning background vocals. And after hearing the casual suggestion of graves in the pretty singsong of the lead vocalist, I wouldn't doubt she did. Her raspy voice has this sassy-ass soul to it that speaks of scorn; it sounds like crossing this gal would be a bad idea.

Glitter Pox rating: 85% contagious

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The Glitter Pox

Sir Sly - Gold

Sir Sly is part of this whole indie r&b thing that's been created for your ears so much in 2013. Gold sounds like The Neighbourhood, with really rhythm-based vocals and repetitive pulses of keyboard effects. It's a laid-back song, but it's sweeping, always flawlessly transitioning and always consistent.

Glitter Pox rating: 69% contagious

Hope you catch it,
The Glitter Pox