Who needs vocals? Lots of people, actually. How many times have you shown someone that band with the amazing guitarist, ridiculous drum beats or funkiest bassist you’ve ever heard, only to be on the receiving end of the twisted face of disgust as the music is thrown back at you because they didn’t like the singer?

When it comes to screaming, lo-fi vocals or just plain unintelligible singing, the situation only gets worse with arguments flung around by those who like to hear the lyrics not necessarily loud, but clear:

“Screaming is for those with no talent who can’t sing.”

“They only use lo-fi to hide their inadequacies.”

“I’d probably like it if I could tell what they were saying.”

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Librarians – Present Passed
Postfact Records (3/9/10)
Indie rock / Pop / Psychedelic

Like some benevolent pop overlord, Animal Collective dominated 2009 with a synth-drenched fist of genius, so it’s unsurprising that their sound has begun to seep into the diets and DNA of those who you might consider downwind of them in the musical food chain.

Merriweather Post Pavilion is Librarians’ biggest problem with their latest release, Present Passed. The considerable influence and sway that hangs over every moment clouds whatever the band are trying to create here and you’re just left thinking you’re listening to a collection of Animal Collective demos and cuts with the occasional brief foray into a mundane indie-rock vein.

The vocal and synth sounds feel like a running sprint to catch up to the flatbed psychedelic pop bandwagon of 2009 as it speeds by and, just when you think the band may have stumbled upon pastures new, they revert to their Merriweather aping in an attempt to forge a build-up, chorus or climax.

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Close Your Eyes – We Will Overcome
Victory Records (2/16/10)
Pop-punk / Hardcore

The debut album by Close Your Eyes has been tagged under the sound-alike banners of Rise Against, New Found Glory and A Day to Remember, and you can hear why from the offset.

Although touted as the big hardcore release of 2010 so far, stay away if you’re expecting something gritty, edgy and, well… hard. This is “hardcore” in the current trend of beat-down, stuffed, riff-infused, heavied-up pop-punk; polished to perfection and sprinkled with chart-friendly melodies and anthemic sing-a-longs.

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KiNDERGARTEN – Small
Self-released (2/10: available on iTunes)
Rock / Funk / Punk

So, apparently, KiNDERGARTEN are the “new” sound of New York, made up of equal parts Talking Heads, Television, Elvis Costello, David Bowie and Lou Reed, with a touch of Prince.

Besides Bowie and Prince, I’m not so sure. The idea that this is the “new” sound of New York when there are bands such as Yeasayer and Vampire Weekend around is just nonsense.

If I were to write this band an ingredient list it would go as follows: Tay Zonday and his “Chocolate Rain”, Jeff Wayne’s Musical Version of The War of the Worlds, the standard distorted chug of a guitar swaggering through a pop song, the vocal yaps and yelps of Ziggy Stardust and the glammed-up, fabulously operatic tendencies of Queen.

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So this week I finally upgraded to an iPod Touch. It’s really a nifty piece of technology, though I find the lack of continuous video playback to be a bit stifling. That said, it’s not as frustrating as having to decide what music was going to be taken off of my 4GB iPod Mini whenever I purchased something new.

I should be raving about how awesome it is to be living in the year 2007. But instead I’m lamenting one of the other purchases I made on Wednesday—Joanna Newsom’s Have One on Me.

I don’t know why I picked it up.

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Today I had my mind blown.

I was hanging out with my friend as he went to pick up his kids from school. Now since his kids are in preschool and elementary school, there’s really nothing on the radio for them to listen to. It sucks and I empathize with his plight.

I mean, this is my former roommate—my best friend, with whom I initially bonded over our admiration for The Lox. He’s from New York. He lives and breathes hip-hop, but he’s a parent, so he’s got to pay attention to what his kids are absorbing.

Anyway, I’ll toss together a random mix, burn it and throw it his way from time to time. (Incidentally, he shares his birthday with my coworker.) Sometimes I’ll make a mix of songs that I know he’s been dying to hear and other times I’ll make it a theme. Since it was has birthday, for instance, I created a Cake mix.

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Emo now resides in the same social stigma bracket as an STI in a group of friends, and misspelt tattoos, all of which are awkward, cause painfully annoying yelps and squeals and make people scatter like a cloud of leprosy.

But isn’t emo the whiney great-grandson of punk?

Good old punk. Locked away in some kind of pop-culture purgatory and disallowed from resting in piece(s), instead grave-robbed and forcibly danced around like a meaty man-sized puppet. It’s dragged up as both an amusing, cringing anecdote of times gone by and a much vaunted milestone for that horrible, all encompassing term: “popular music”.

We all know punk died in 1979. Sid Vicious did a Bruce-Willis-in-Armageddon-style finale, taking out the big, bad, DIY musical asteroid with some Hollywood-sized, nuclear super-bomb: an overdose of heroin and a session of Spungen bludgeoning to avert the oncoming punk apocalypse. Ben Affleck returned to earth to marry Liv Tyler and we all got a happy ending.

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Grad school is hard, y’all. The sabbaticals I take from posting are merely because life has changed in some meaningful way for me and there is a period of adjustment to which I succumb. Beginning grad school, being laid off, dealing with unemployment on a weekly basis because of systematic issues with the program, continuing to look for a job and realign my career in the meantime, and maintaining a wonderfully blossoming relationship after the rough ending of the previous one; it all adds up to one thing: Drake sings too much.

I went from criticizing Wayne because of his whiny, gargling, Auto-Tuned voice being everywhere and then was introduced to his Halloween mixtape last year and was turned around. Not so much as to say that he is one of my top 10 or anything, but I definitely have more respect for him than I previously did. Think what you will. That being said, I kind of liked Drake, only I didn’t know who he was when I liked him. I mean, he didn’t say his name as often in his verses. I got my hands on a couple of compilation albums and he was featured a couple of times on a song and I liked his flow. Then I heard some more buzz from him on my frequently visited music sites so I was happy to hear that he was getting some airplay.

Then his single dropped.

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I’ve got a coworker whose birthday is on Sunday. She’s quite the character. We’re pretty much on the same page when it comes to matters of pop culture and even events at work. She’s certainly one of people that I’d miss if I ever left the place.

Oh, and she gave me the name for my vanity band when I’m a celebrity: Jumpsuit Sweatpants.

It stemmed from her constant inability to spit out a name. For instance, when asking if I’d heard a new song by a female singer songwriter her description was “y’know, the one who cut her hair” (The answer: Norah Jones).

So when we were talking about the Katy Perry/Russell Brand coupling, I remarked that I was surprised that she broke up with her ex. I was struggling to come up with his name and in an effort to aid me she said “oh, the guy from Jumpsuit Sweatpants.” At which point I promptly burst out laughing. It was the funniest thing I’d heard that day and it stuck with me.

Since her birthday is on Sunday I figured I’d make her mix and she requested songs by females. Here is that mix:

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Creature with the Atom Brain – Transylvania
The End Records (2/2/10)
Rock / Alternative

Chances are you will have heard this album a million times before, under different titles and by different bands. It’s not a terrible release, per se, for this Belgian quartet, but it also never achieves anything above mediocrity.

The vocals and guitar effects are a constant disappointment, sounding uninspired and added in for the sake of it. The songwriting often feels hollow and underdeveloped, dragging down the obvious efforts to project a sense of attitude and brooding charisma, which fall flat at every turn.

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