LP

Technicolor Rainbow Supernova: they have held microphones towards it. Rostam Batmanglij of Vampire Weekend and Wes Miles of Ra Ra Riot took a summer sabbatical in the cosmos and have returned with the synth and stardust-sprinkled LP, under the handle Discovery. Tales of pleading love and the trains departing Neo Tokyo are cast in a mesh of Nintendo bleeps and Auto-Tune that remains remarkably warm and emotional. The first three songs of LP — giddy, swirling tufts of digital cotton candy — foreshadow a more immediate, palatable wave of independent music on the horizon. And while the happiness they’ve synthesized isn’t entirely sustainable, any lack of depth is made up for in cheerful buoyancy.

Whatever quibbles we level at bands we're unsure of, we should rejoice that albums which exhibit an almost terminal lack of redeeming features populate the release schedules with relative scarcity. Sadly, for Discovery at least, theirs is an album that defiantly shuns the trend.