The best song this week is "Day Eleven" by The Life and Times

“No One Loves You Like I Do” is the dark and awesome and creepy new record from The Life and Times. It tells a story of sorts, of obsession and possession and obsession with possession, and love that’s not always the healthiest two-way love. It digs below the surface of sweet-sounding phrases like “I love you--forever” to the subtext of “whether you like it or not.” And it has a great cover.

I’d heard ahead of time from Wags: “Day Eleven -- you have been warned.” And oh boy, it delivers on that promise. Chris Metcalf puts in perhaps his finest drum performance in an already highly accomplished discography, a funky, bouncing kick drum pattern that gives me shin splints just listening to it. The robotic right foot pounding and the way he keeps the hats going through the technical but flowing fills display his virtuosity and his ability to play dead nuts in the pocket, leaving jaws slack but booties shaking. Keyboards plink and guitars pluck through the ascending theme that runs through a number of songs on the record, a musical reminder of the off-kilter declaration of love from two songs ago that ties together the loosely woven narrative.

Then the vocals start in, multi-tracked and haunting. Harmonies and melodies and countermelodies accumulate and build, floating in from all directions into a whirlwind by the end. The delay that comes in on the word “call” at 2:13 is so good it makes me uncomfortable. Then all of a sudden everything drops out except for some lone keyboard chords, and I’m almost expecting a segue into Underworld’s “Born Slippy.” But of course that doesn’t happen, Metcalf brings the groove back as vocals kaleidoscope and you’re like “yeah, this is sweet.” And then the layers fade, they put the drums in another room for a couple of measures, then cut them off completely and the song comes to a nice end.

Except for that the hi-hats say “wait, we’re not done yet!” and a cascading fill introduces the best moment on the record when at 4:09 THE FUZZ enters -- holy amazing tones, Batman. The riff is a descending exercise in heaviness with speaker-searingly fat, fuzzed-out tones. It’s huge. You’ll hear it plenty this summer wafting from my back porch over the Avondale neighborhood, and your ears will smile.

The best song this week is “Day Eleven” and if The Life and Times are coming to your town, which they probably are, you should go and see them play it live. And you should probably not go to the men's room just before they're about to play it or you'll miss the first minute or two of it. But who would be stupid enough to do that? Not this guy, that's for sure.

The best song this week is "Partners in Crime" by CSS

Never cared much for CSS’ aesthetic. Their singer goes by Lovefoxxx and she dresses in skintight psychedelic bodysuits? OK, I get that she’s Brazilian and things are different down there, but it’s still not something I’m going to seek out. And despite R.E.M. being awesome, band names that are just letters/numbers and such are generally a hurdle to be jumped rather than a harbinger of good music.

But then there was that cover of “Knife” on Grizzly Bear’s Friend EP, and man -- that was good. Better than the original? I think so. It was certainly more fun. And there’s a yearning in her voice that you don’t hear in a lot of electro pop. Those keyboard tones were right on, too.

So when “La Liberacion” hit the internet, I went ahead and put it on my iPod. The only CSS song I’d heard prior was the aforementioned Grizzly Bear cover -- somehow their earlier efforts had managed to avoid my ears, and I’d never felt the need to seek them out. I read some lukewarm reviews of “Liberacion”, got a bunch of other stuff at the same time, and continued to fail to seek it out even though it was right there in my pocket.

And then, of course, shuffle happened. Walking back to my car after work as some droney black metal fades out (I think it was Alcest), and this song catches my attention. It’s instantly hooky and fun, then at 1:36 the bridge kicks it up from fun into downright good -- the guitar/bass interplay amplifies the vocal hook, and all the while it sounds like Steven Drozd is vamping some latin-flavored piano twinkles; I'm digging it. The fact that the singer has a goofy was of saying "the" lets her get away with clunky lines like "I fall for it, oh boy, like butter on the mild heat!” It was CSS, and the song was “Partners in Crime.”

It’s a classic budding romance excitement song, complete with cheesy “ahhhh!”s and a total I-want-to-be-Kim-Gordon delivery of “You know what? Let’s do this!” The drums are bouncy, the guitar strums are nicely staccato and that piano rolls over it with an otherworldly quality that elevates everything else that’s going on. The coda is replete with classical flourishes and the whole thing shows a maturity that I really wasn’t expecting from CSS, and that you don’t find much elsewhere on the record. Not that it’s a bad record -- it’s got some cheeseball moments but it’s mostly pretty fun and effortless sounding; it’ll stay on the iPod and definitely see some spins in the summer months. But “Partners in Crime” will find its way onto playlists and road trip cds, and it’s the best song this week.

The best song this week is "Alter Ego" by Tame Impala

The shuffle function is the source of ~90% of my song obsessions. With a 160 gig iPod 98% filled, there are a lot of songs to choose from, and most of the time I just let the iPod play DJ. It did a great job on the way down to Champaign on Friday. We started off listening to Brian Posehn’s “Nerd Rage” but by the time we got out of Chicago, it was iPod song shuffle, full-steam ahead. The highlight was Tame Impala followed by !!! right around Kankakee/Momence (we’ll never forget....our Kankakee Momence).

I’d gotten that Tame Impala record (“Innerspeaker”) on a recommendation from Shiraz, but it hadn’t really ever gotten me. I gave it one headphone listen while wandering around the city, but nothing grabbed my attention. It just sort of hazed over me and my mind wouldn’t focus on the tunes. I think it’s time to revisit it, because “Alter Ego” is a true banger. Maybe it’s just too big for a headphones listen because it works so much better blasting from car speakers.

When the distorted drums kick in with a beat that reminds me of an amped up Dismemberment Plan, and the woozy keyboards swirl over bouncy basslines straight outta 1960s Detroit, my ears perk up and my head starts bobbing. There’s so much going on, it’s hard to tell what’s a heavily effected guitar, what’s a keyboard, what’s random soundwaves bouncing through reverb tanks. Then the vocal hook falls into place around 1:53, shooting out of the gauzy haze with an unexpected ‘60s British invasion vibe -- he’s got a bit of Monkees in his vocal chords, and I’m OK with that.

But it’s the drums that caught my attention -- the overdriven roomy sound is a perfect push under all the echo floating around. “Alright, cool, we’re walking barefoot in a stream, this is nice, let’s play some bass and make some keyboard squiggles and how about some drums, bud? Yeahhh, that’s the stuff. Smooth.” These Aussies got soul, man. The best song this week is “Alter Ego” by Tame Impala.