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Big Harp
"Nadine"

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More About

• Thom Yorke
• Stefanie Senseney
• Will Smith
• Modeselektor
• Crystal Castles

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Despondency, flight, new bruises: You've heard it all before, but with some ragtime piano magic and a little pep in their step, Chris and Stefanie Senseney make bad-news story-song blues feel almost new.

Faux-metal hysterics are the last thing you'd expect from no-hope wasters who pursued asexual puerility with such la-de-da aplomb with last year's "Lust for Life," yet anyway, here we are: It's happening, it's gnarly, and it only gets better after they've actually killed you and you're crowd-surfing the upraised suction cups of dozens of octopi.

So basically this is Yorke freestyling over the edgiest ephedrine synth-pop answering-machine music ever, if a category for that sort of thing can even be said to exist. Don't you remember that episode of Fresh Prince when Carleton overdosed on speed?

The only thing cooler than the idea of some celestial titan shaking the cosmos like a snow globe is the idea of a celestial titan shaking the cosmos like a snow globe while covered in glitter, doing "The Carleton."

Bands like this almost hand the U.K. music press its raison de etre: XX-chromosome impudence, some genuine TMZ-level controversy, volume, a hint of naughtiness. They're angry, they're angst-y, electro-clash never happened; that side needed its own Crystal Castles, we get it. Yet debut Whatever's got something going for it, something that's got a lock on my attention span; I just haven't figured out what that is yet.