Everybody Singing Along

United State Of Electronica “IT IS ON!” – Ideally, if one were to make sheet music for the USE, every note would be punctuated by at least three or four exclamation points. I was lucky enough to see the band perform twice over the past three days, and as a result, I’ve made the transition from being a casual fan to a devoted fanatic. USE is the most enthusiastic band that I’ve ever seen. When they play live, it seems as though there is no other music on Earth that they love more than the songs in their set. They are relentlessly upbeat, and are intensely focused on a single goal: to make every person in the room dance and have fun. They achieve this with amazing efficiency while still coming off as being loose, spontaneous, and silly. USE are a unique phenomenon, an unlikely fusion of twee indie pop and Daft Punk/Avalanches-style dance music which probably shouldn’t work, but does thanks to the band’s total, unironic commitment and abundance of instantly loveable songs. (Click here to buy it from Sonic Boom Records.)

Fox & Wolf “Youth Alcoholic” – As a service to the new readers coming to Fluxblog this week as a result of the SPIN article, Alex Balk’s NY Times Playlist, and the CMJ panel, I’m going to be posting some Classic Fluxblog songs over the next two weeks in addition to newer material. When I originally posted Fox & Wolf’s “Youth Alcoholic,” the readership of this blog was about one third of what it is now, so I’m sure that this will be new to the majority of you. It’s definitely one of my favorite songs to ever be featured on the site, and I think that in a lot of ways, it’s a good example of the kind of music that I’ve been trying to promote here over the past two years – catchy, upbeat, slightly weird pop music which ought to be huge, but goes almost entirely unheard in the United States due to the insular tastes of the indie rock world and the near total indifference of the mainstream media. I want to live in a world where a song like “Youth Alcoholic” is at very least a modest cult hit rather than a hopeless obscurity from an unknown duo from Sweden who may never tour outside of Scandinavia. (Click here to visit Fox & Wolf’s website.)