The Songs We Can't Escape

ASHER ROTH
"I Love College"

Weezer's "Say It Ain't So" seems like an ideal track-jack for a white-boy newcomer who wants to rap lazily about his adoration of campus life's less-than-sober charms. "Do something crazy!" Roth frat-chants emphatically; he should've followed his own advice.

COOL KIDS
"Pennies"

There's just no tiring of these two '80s-rap-state-of-mind goof-savants, is there? The boom-bap track's as thin as an Olympic women's gymnast and as emaciated as a high-profile Calvin Klein model, yet the punitive theme is insufferable neighbors who want our boyz to turn their stereo down; it takes a few listens to unpack all the high-caliber lyricism, but it's more than worth it.

LINDSTROM
"Where You Go I Go Too"

Disclaimer: Techno and its assorted popular permutations ain't my bag, babe. Nonetheless, this slow-smoldering, half-hour head-trip is on the verge of taking over my consciousness in a way that no song has in a long, long time. How best to describe it? The sensation of painless cycling through the mountains, maybe, or flying unassisted over some anonymous city at night, or swimming effortlessly in a heated, lighted pool that goes on forever. Or I could raise the specters of Jan Hammer and the Orb.

OF MONTREAL
"Id Engager"

Whenever Kevin Barnes over-enunciates an overstuffed verse like "Ladies, I'm screaming out to you from the depths of this phallocentric tyranny," I'm reminded yet again that I wanna "Go Outback tonight." Also: Fuck disco revivalism.

STYLOPHONIC
"R U Experienced?"

Nothing to do with Hendrix, everything to do with those homoerotically creepy Dolce & Gabbana TV ads from earlier this year. "Experienced" resembles the extended wail of an especially chic alarm siren that's warning everyone that reality as we know it will be torn asunder in, oh, a few minutes: the tone worrying its way back and forth on some sort of sliding scale, contracting, expanding, coming so close you can almost touch it, then moving a bit into the distance as bass synths burrow and handclaps are repurposed as percussion. The announcer who keeps intoning "Dance music for people who want tomorrow's music today" doesn't lessen the overall sense of hypnotic, otherworldly intensity.