• "Oh Dead Life" - Night Group, Dog Day

One of the first impressions created by indie-pop quartet Dog Day's debut full-length promo is a paragraph on the back of the liner brashly comparing the album to the The Smiths' angst-pop classic The Queen is Dead and Sonic Youth's Rather Ripped. Leaving the chutzpah aside, this particular track, titled "Oh Dead Life," has more in common with jangle pop classics like R.E.M.'s Murmur. With simplicity at its core, "Oh Dead Life" is rather brisk and breezy for a song that exclaims, "I'm in no rush, I'm in no rush." The guitar, vocals and backing vocals hew closely to the melodic line. A clanging guitar sound is paired with energetic percussion and topped with Stipe-esque vocals and doo-wah backing. Try ignoring this song for more than a couple of days. Soon you'll understand the meaning of the lyric: "Life is too short to ration out in portions, I spent my time, as soon as I get it, it's gone."

• "Murder Babe" - Wild Mountain Nation, Blitzen Trapper

Blitzen Trapper's lighthearted, lo-fi sound has been compared to middle-era Pavement and Beck. The Portland sextet lays down meandering and interweaving guitar solos on "Murder Babe" that loosen limbs like some of the peppier Grateful Dead tracks, but with the lighthearted pop frivolity of the Flaming Lips, Weezer or even Fountains of Wayne. Add in some seventies rock guitars a la T-Rex or Cheap Trick and an almost Zappa-like zaniness and you're getting a feel for Blitzen Trapper's unbounded sound.

• "River Phoenix" Â? Skuffed Up My Huffy, Japanther

If you've ever seen Japanther's live show, then it's no mystery to you how this Brooklyn punk duo creates such a driving and powerful sound. You no doubt saw the flailing limbs and the yelling into pay telephone receivers serving as microphones. And you probably had the guys' sweat flung all over you in the tiny venue where you caught them. But the reason for this particular song's existence remains a happy mystery, even to the faithful. The lyrics offer no explanation: "Sold your souls down in Hollywood/one by one/walking towards North Hollywood/now they know your name/River Phoenix." The song is largely fueled by snare-and-cymbal heavy drumming and vocals that sound like...well...they're being screamed through a phone, with less-than-crystal clear reception. But Japanther's ultra-low-fi, gritty and raw approach somehow ends up eminently danceable. And how could you not take a shine to a band that named an album Dump The Body In Rikki Lake?

• "Robots (Live)" Â? The Distant Future EP, Flight of the Conchords

If you have HBO, you may be familiar with New Zealand's fourth or fifth most popular folk parody duo, The Flight of the Conchords. Their rank depends on whether their tribute band "Like of the Conchords" has slipped above them this week. "Robots," as the boys explain in this live recording, is set in the distant future (borrowing from Conan O'Brien, the year 2000). It is marketed to robots functioning after the Robotic Uprising of the mid-1990s during which robots wiped the human race off the earth. Prepare for a tense and troubling account of the Robot Uprising, complete with a jaunty picked guitar, choppy robotic vocals, and lengthy robo-tangents about the word "affirmative" as well as the post-human world's remaining dances. The Bowie and Queen-influenced track features oddly impassioned vocals, given the target audience. Stick around for a speak-and-spell interlude followed by a "binary solo" and a funktastic coda. "C'mon sucker, lick my battery."

• "Dead + Rural" - Plague Park, Handsome Furs

Who knew that Canadian indie rock bands admired Bruce Springsteen so much? Not long after Arcade Fire echoed The Boss on Neon Bible, Wolf Parade guitarist and sometime-vocalist Dan Boeckner bares his affection for America's favorite everyman songwriter with plaintive and populist but anthemic songs, including this track, "Dead + Rural" on the Handsome Furs' debut album, Plague Park. "Dead + Rural" juxtaposes '80s synth pop with the rock anthems of the same decade, concurrently bringing to mind New Order and U2. Boeckner's expressive vocals and plain-spoken lyrics stand in contrast, but also coalesce somehow, with the artificial and regimented synth-and-drum-machine foundation of the song.

• "Rotten Hell" - Friend and Foe, Menomena

Arguably the hottest act this side of Amy Winehouse at this year's South-By-Southwest music festival, Menomena delivers a deliberately-paced but engaging track here, built around a striking but simple and buoyant piano melody. It's precisely its lazy, perambulating pace that makes the song so enchanting. The full, harmonic sound is just slightly off-kilter, as is the lyrical content when taken with the sleepy arrangement. "I've got a stranglehold on this decision, all those opposed can rot in hell." The song's slow build gives you the feel that the singer is gathering followers throughout until he has a full chorus backing him by the end, complete with hand claps, layered vocals and a crashing storm of cymbals. The creepy tinkling of a toy piano or mini xylophone and the persistent piano melody build tension, which is released in the triumphant final verse.

• "You Is My Hot Rabbit" - Dead Plane, No Age

This surprisingly tuneful and modestly conceived track shows that No Age's Dean Spunt and Randy Randall are comfortable enough with their talents to turn the volume up and down, making subtlety just as provocative as full-on discord. Whether they're classified as art pop, experimental skate punk or psychedelic rock, the bottom line is, they just plain bring the ideas -- and execute on them. Just a touch past straightforward, "You Is My Hot Rabbit" sounds like the laid-back Afro-Cuban grooves that the Surfaris laid down for Bruce Brown's Endless Summer soundtrack. To that, No Age adds a tantalizing hint of the sonic tilt that characterizes their more avant-garde and discordant songs.

• "Parting of the Sensory" - We Were Dead Before..., Modest Mouse

"Parting of the Sensory" has all of the bottled energy and scorn for the world that you would expect from a Modest Mouse song, summed up neatly in the rather catchy line "Who the hell made you the boss?" Isaac Brock, Johnny Marr and the band lend gravitas to the song via a mournful low-end bowed cello, apocryphal and heavily-reverbed guitar, and far-off backing vocal yells (like the distant voice of Brock's conscience.) Brock gets in some great lyrical digs "If you were the ship, who would ever get on." As the song grows more confrontational, it eventually becomes a lively Celtic battle march followed by an unraveling characterized by off-beat hand-claps, a rising energy in the vocals, a throaty demonic hiss and a devolution into repetition and muddledness.

• "Down to Rest" - Head Home, O'death

Part blues stomp, part country holler, "Down to Rest" begins with a creepy, tinny and echoing banjo. Shaky, screechy high lonesome vocals square dance with a fiddle, clackety percussion and what sounds like a choir of lost souls. In fact, picture it like a square dance among mutants in a graveyard. Tom Waits would be proud of the song's howling vocals and sinister edge. For the band's second album, four years into its existence, "Down to Rest" is a powerful effort -- a sinuous and spookily high-spirited jaunt through blues, country, gothic and punk carried out with a banjo, guitar, bass, percussion and even a fiddle.