Thursday morning is usually Nice Hits! morning, but Nice Hits! has been sporadic and infrequent lately, because there just haven't been nearly enough hits that I've been stoked on. That doesn't mean I haven't been getting my fix; pop music comes in many a form, Top 40 or Northwestern indie: if you opened this week's issue of SW to the Short List, you'll have seen a large photo of Portland's Pure Bathing Culture and the accompanying blurb I wrote:

Last year Brooklynites Daniel Hindman and Sarah Verspille, in between tours with Vetiver, for which he plays guitar and she plays keys, moved to Portland and started a dream-pop band called Pure Bathing Culture. Their first single, "Ivory Coast," floats on a breeze of soft synths and reverbing guitars and vocals, bearing little resemblance to the folksy sounds of Vetiver. Later this month, the duo will release their first EP, produced by Richard Swift, which will be followed by an "Ivory Coast" music video directed by Sean Pecknold.

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Possum Dixon guitarist Celso Chavez, who passed away yesterday.

I've been reminiscing about the 90's far too much lately, and in doing so, I've been revisiting a lot of the records that turned me on my head in high school and college. Amongst those records is a total underdog of a band worth championing, Los Angeles' Possum Dixon. Managing to blend The Cars' new wave, the raw jangle of The Animals, the hopped-up libido of the Violent Femmes and the Pixies manic unpredictability, Possum Dixon had some songs that charted well enough on college/modern rock radio but never quite found the right rhythm to sustaining it all. Almost 20 years after the release of their debut album, it still sounds like an out of control joyride through restless days spent in office jobs and nights spent in dingy nightclubs and crumbling stucco apartments.

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The Black Keys play KeyArena on Tuesday, May 8.

I get the reason people are interested in the Black Keys. Really, I do. In terms of what's being played on major alt-radio airwaves at the moment, their fuzzy, blues-y licks and alpha male moaning stick out like a sore thumb (in a good way) from the sea of processed sixteenth-note loving dance-rock bands that look more like Abercrombie models or soap opera stars than they do an honest-to-God rock band. The Akron, Ohio duo benefit from an undeniably charming backstory, too; a soccer team captain and a nerd from the rust belt meet in high school, play shithole bars and sleep on floors until they magically howl their way to arenas. On paper, the band sounds faultlessly great. It's hard to hate on that sort of real American success story.

Maybe it's the fact that, on that same paper full of a great story, lies a lot of facts that are just a little too eerily similar to a little duo from a garage in Detroit, another "face made for radio" couple known as The White Stripes. However, whereas Jack White has spent the past decade letting the general public know what a weird dude he is (I get the sense he probably sleeps in a coffin with a taxidermied bear, if he even sleeps at all), nothing about Patrick Carney or Dan Auerbach is strange enough for superstardom. Maybe there's something unique and haunting underneath all of that unremarkableness, but all I can see are a couple guys who look a lot more suited to the IT department than being rock stars.

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Not my child, but food for thought: does he either a. love what he hears, b. hate it and can't believe his folks made him listen to it, or c. feel bad that he just fudged his Huggies

Being the great new-dad that I am, lacking the mental capacity to try anything except loud music to make my kid stop crying, I've discovered some distinct patterns in the child's musical preference--and by preference, I mean, the songs which didn't spur a hailstorm of screams. Some picks I found surprising, but I think I was more shocked by the artists he gave the tear-treatment. Some notes thus far (and thanks to my son, Duke, for "agreeing" to take part in this study):

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Fans of the late Manchester, UK rock band Oceansize know that they primarily did two things well: they got their prog-metal on; and they painted eerie softer movements that crept into your subconscious. This new project from ex-Oceansize frontman Mike Vennart and former/current bandmate Richard "Gambler" Ingram (who played guitar and keyboards in Oceansize) British Theatre surfaces on the softer side of things with their debut EP...EP, but it's more left-field than the 'size's tangential, yet traditionally arranged rock.

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Artist: João Gilberto and Antonio Carlos Jobim
Album: Gilberto & Jobim
Label: Capitol Records
Release: 1964

I've been on a major bossa nova kick lately, and have been working my way through the latin jazz selections at the home base of local record-enabler Dave Voorhees, Bop Street Records.

My last find, the fabulous samba LP Quarteto Bossamba by Walter Wanderley (which is thankfully his lightest-on-the-cheesy-organ record), is one of the finest thinking person's cocktail-hour records you're likely to encounter. This time, however, I wanted to take it even easier, and trade in samba's bouncy melodies and rim-clicks for the nylon string rhythms and brushed percussion of bossa nova bliss. Gilberto & Jobim is just that. Surfacing the same year as prototypical genre-offering Getz/Gilberto (on which Gilberto's wife Astrud, having never previously sung on record, became an international star for supplying vocals on "The Girl From Ipanema"), this is a session that brought soft-voiced Brazilian guitarist João Gilberto together again with famed composer/bandleader Antonio Carlos Jobim (who also happened to write "The Girl From Ipanema").

More rambling after the jump...

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Technically, this new single from Weakerthans frontman (and old-timey Propaghandi bassist) John K. Samson's forthcoming solo album Provincial hit the tubes a couple weeks ago, but anything that comes out after the first week of December basically falls into the oubliette of year-end list making, forever to be forgotten, or at least until the New Year's Eve hangovers fade. If you're a follower of Samson's songwriting with the Weakerthans, you know what to expect here: literate and affecting lyrics, simple propulsive guitar hooks, a perfectly sticky chorus. In 1997, Samson's "Futon Revolutionist" was hanging a diploma on the bathroom wall; in 2012, he's still working on his master's thesis.

These are #firstworldproblems, but Samson knows his audience, and for a certain type of ambitious but idealistic indoor kid, the song's portrait of unfulfilled promise is as crushing as anything. These are the broad strokes, but Samson's gift is often for the smallest details: maybe he wrote this song years ago, and/but/so that line about "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" makes it sound, again, like this protagonist has been putting off this thesis for years. It kills me.

2011, like however many years before it, had no shortage of party rock anthems in pop music--big, wonderfully dumb champagne popping songs practically designed for the New Year's Eve party pictured to the right (or for the real NYE parties listed here). Songs so ubiquitous I don't even really need to list them here, although you can find a few of them in Maura Johnson's excellent Village Voice rundown of the 11 Most Infuriating Songs of 2011 . But there aren't really that many songs out there explicitly about New Year's Eve itself--certainly not as many as you might have seen unloaded on Facebook around Christmas last week. There's Death Cab For Cutie's wide-eyed yet deflated "The New Year," and the Walkmen's bleary but resolute "In the New Year"--and these are fine, even touching songs about unrealistic expectations dashed, about holding onto hope anyway.

But every year, no matter how many party songs come out, there's only one thing I really want to hear at midnight on NYE*:

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Steve Gullick

The Nevermind anniversary tributes have died down a bit, but not quite completely. This morning the Sub Pop-signed British trio Male Bonding--who released their second album, the Reverb Monthly-recommended Endless Now, this past August--announced on Twitter that they'll be releasing a split 7-inch via Rough Trade with Erika M. Anderson, better known by stage name EMA, that consists of one Nirvana cover each. You've probably already heard EMA's screeching take on Nevermind's hidden track, "Endless Nameless"--it appeared on Spin's Newermind covers compilation back in July.

Male Bonding's version of "Aneurysm," the B-side to "Smells Like Teen Spirit," and one of my all-time favorite Nirvana songs, is just now surfacing though, and it happens to completely kick ass.

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Federico Bolagno

The number-one record I recommend picking up next week? Definitely the Beets' Let the Poison Out. The New York trio's Hardly Art debut is a sprightly collection of rambling pop tunes with agreeably loose and easy melodies; the songs are tagged with wacky but sensible titles like "You Don't Want Kids to Be Dead" and "Eat No Dick 3." Let the Poison Out won't be out 'til a week from today--that's Monday, October 24--but in the meantime Hardly Art's already made two tracks available for listen. First up is the self-destructive first single, "Friends of Friends," which clocks in at a minute 32 seconds.

The Beets - Friends of Friends by hardlyartrecords

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