Sure, bring your slick neon-tinged indie rock in here. I don't care that you sprinkled keyboards and saxophones all over in addition to the stabbing guitars, distressed vocals, and plucky bass. It just needs a beat we can dance to.

The name is a deft linguistic double-take, but if you like your music on the catchy side, I can assure you that Brad Sucks does not actually suck.

Opening track "Una Cumbia En Kinshasa" easily sets the stage for this transcontinental sound melange, a collaboration between Peruvian-born, Berlin-based Hop and Congolese soukous guitar player Bakorta. It's full of joy and weird production touches

Ale Bop and Titi Bakorta cook up a pan-global feast for the ears.

Call it what you will, Matt Pond PA makes music outside the natural lines.

No doubt about it, The Vandals are the masters of the punk rock rug pull. In this particular instance, what starts out as a merely updated take on the Grease classic suddenly devolves into hyperkinetic chaos. No matter. The show proceeds! New releases are starting again, and the year is off to a strong start.

The Mommyheads brighten the place with their craft and erudition.

I'm a big fan of cultural true crime — it rarely actually involves a crime, but it does feature the sort of obsessive fact-finding that feels like outright wizardry, weaving together a historical cloth from the thinnest of threads.

Maybe you know someone who is into modular synthesizers and have feelings about all the patch cables and apparently random knob-fiddling. If that's the case, proceed with caution as this browser-based programming language levels up the abstraction.