The best song this week is "World of Lies" by At the Gates

I haven't slept very well the past couple of days. And last week I just didn't have anything to write about -- I've been listening to sports on the radio in the car and the "best song this week" can't very well be a baseball game. Humber's perfect game might be the best thing that happened this past week, but that's neither here nor there.

The riff here is the kind of thing that when you write it, you just keep on playing it for hours on end just to make sure you don't forget it. Then you show it to the drummer and he writes this badass rolling triplet figure to balls it out and you all just sit there headbanging until the beer runs out and you're like "damn, we are some brutal effing Swedes." So what if this record spawned a million terrible metalcore bands? This is melodic death metal at its best, heavy as lead-coated sin but head-bobbingly catchy at the same time.

The best song this week is World of Lies by At the Gates and I'm going to bed.

The best song this week is "Fever" by Maps & Atlases

This one's a no-brainer. It'll probably be the best song next week too.

Most bands are lucky to get one song this good in their entire existences, and here's Maps & Atlases' turn. Songs like this, it's like the band didn't even write them. Sure, they're one of the best around, but this is perfection! Surely it was bequeathed unto them by some Illuminati maestro.

Confident, patient, otherworldly, driving, instantly catchy, tons going on but never sounding busy -- it's a perfect pop song. I've listened to it 30+ times in the past four days and while I've gotten through the whole record about 5 or 6 times, mostly I've just been going back to "Fever". When I try to get away from the record altogether, I come back to "Fever". When I hit the links, I had "Fever" running through my head. And I played well.

The production is timeless and yet so perfectly 80s in the drum sound. The distant keyboards and delayed guitars provide an epic sweep, and the hi-hat/bass groove is dreamy and locked in, a beautiful machine with a heart. At this point I'm too tired to write anything more. Maybe I'll expound more on it later. For now, just stream the whole album over at Paste Magazine, and buy it when it comes out.

The best song this week is "Tower of Silence" by Antarctica

I’ve been on a four-on-the-floor kick ever since I needed to block the world out and read in airports and on airplanes on a recent trip to Florida to kickstart the golf season. That meant a lot of The Field, which then made me go “ooooh, Antarctica.” And so despite the weather being warm and sunny and Antarctica being rather aptly named and perfect for frigid weather, I put on 81:03 on the flight from Norfolk to Jacksonville and the screaming baby three rows up was silenced -- good sound-isolating earbuds are key to successfully relaxing air travel -- and it made for perfect background music that occasionally pushed its way through the printed word and called for focus.

There’s something about the icy drum machines (or are those vdrums? or both?) with the icy guitars with that icy reverbs and the icy synths burbling in the background that makes everything...invitingly icy, in a sort of “winter is gorgeous” way. They’ve listened to plenty of The Cure, sure, but they axed some cheese and added some motorik rhythms under the distant, yearny vocals that might be annoying if they weren’t draped in reverb and drowned in the mix.

“Tower of Silence” combines all the best parts of these with an instantly hooky guitar/synth war in the intro and a beautiful guitar/synth peace in the coda. Listen now before the sun really heats up and makes this kind of music just not make sense at all until November rolls around.