• "Crazy" - St. Elsewhere, Gnarls Barkley

Gnarls Barkley's "Crazy" has the distinction of becoming the first single to reach the top of the British music charts based solely on online sales. "Crazy" came out online on March 13, 2006 and was Number 1 by the week of March 26. KQED music blogger Christina Nunez describes the sound of Gnarls Barkley's debut album St. Elsewhere as "an episode of Scooby Doo crossed with a Motown reunion." Read full review.

• "Something Already Happened Again" - Hand On String, Mike Andrews

Mike Andrews is the extremely quirky and talented composer behind the cult classic film Donnie Darko and Miranda July's eccentric Me and You and Everyone We Know now out on DVD. Read the Me and You review.

• "Hold On, Hold On" - Fox Confessor Brings the Flood, Neko Case

KQED blogger Alison Levy reviews Neko Case's latest. The punk rock diva delivers a strange and disturbing blend of gothic country tunes that has gotten her booted from the Grand Ole Opry and landed her on tour opening for Nick Cave. Read the full review.

• "There Goes the Sun" - Discover a Lovelier You, The Pernice Brothers

Arts section editor and film blogger Mark Taylor heard about The Pernice Brothers on KCRW's Morning Becomes Eclectic and went out and bought their album Discover a Lovelier You. "There Goes the Sun" is his favorite track.

• "Kevin Is Gay" - Hearts and Unicorns, Giant Drag

Taylor read about Giant Drag in the New Yorker and went to iTunes to download a couple of their tunes. Giant Drag sound very much like an updated version of The Swirlies, a fuzz-pop band from the early nineties.

• "Sea Ghost" - Who Will Cut Our Hair When We're Gone?, The Unicorns

It's such a drag that Neutral Milk Hotel made so few albums. They played in San Francisco back in 1998 with Olivia Tremor Control at the Ptolemeic Terrascope's Terrastock Music Festival. It was a great show and Taylor got to show experimental films behind each band as they played. While browsing around iTunes' if-you-like-this-band you'll probably like so-and-so feature, Mark found The Unicorns. They don't really sound like Neutral Milk Hotel, but they're still pretty good.

• "Bees" - The Milk of Human Kindness, Caribou

Who knows where this song came from. It is one of those slow-building pieces, which seems to keep coming to an end, but then snaps back in with another even groovier layer added. Be warned, if you are listening to this while driving on the freeway, there is a section in the middle that has a siren mixed in pretty deep. It can drive you crazy slowing down and looking around for the cops...

• "Pale Horse" - Cellar Door, John Vanderslice

This song kind of ties in to something listed earlier. In Donnie Darko, Drew Barrymore tells her class that a famous linguist once said that of all the phrases in the English language, the phrase "cellar door" was the most beautiful combination of syllables and sounds. Hmmm. A while back, we had a partnership with Noise Pop, who coaxed local musicians into making mix tapes for the KQED audience. Anyhow, local wunderkind, John Vanderslice made one for us. Check it out.

• "Wraith Pinned to the Mist and Other Games" - The Sunlandic Twins, Of Montreal

Over X-mas holiday a friend came to visit from NYC, he brought along several taped episodes of WNYC's music video program New York Noise. They showed some of the coolest, strangest music videos ever. The one for this tune is an animated ditty that looks like a video game, with really sweet looking (vaguely Hello Kitty) characters chopping off one another's limbs while smiling and pulsating to the beat. Funny.

• "Glass Ceiling" - Live It Out, Metric

Metric is another find out of the New Yorker club listings section. Everyone is so ga ga over the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, but we think Metric does that eighties new wave throw back thing way better.