These guys use a lot of electronic sounds and keyboards to make alternative music. And it sounds really good. These guys aren’t making dance records, but instead making the modern rock record: laced with beats and electronic sounds amidst the angst and dissatisfaction. We Are Match are new to the game, and I hope they stick around a while.

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It’s actually way too easy to throw around the indie rock or alternative labels around these days, because Speedy Ortiz is much more punk like. But not punk in the way that a lot of us recognize punk — the big, brash guitars and fast-paced breakneck speeds — but the subversive sort of punk.

If you like Mother, Mother, but wish they were just a little bit weirder these days, or think that punk music is lacking in originality these days, Speedy Ortiz should be one of your first stops. Chock full of huge riffs and just-slightly-unsettling tonal ranges, Foil Deer is an album worth listening to again and again and again.

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These guys are listed as plain old Rock as a genre, but they reportedly take a lot of influence from Swedish folk songs. Not being from Sweden, I can’t verify that, but it wouldn’t surprise me. Dungen’s music has an airy, almost mystical quality to it at times.

Despite it being sung in Swedish, Allas Sak still feels very inviting. And that might be the point. Singer Gustav Ejstes said that “he hopes people can create their own stories around the music” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dungen), and that sounds about right. This music invites you to use your imagination and make it your own experience.

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Black Violin is a couple of guys rapping with violins. It’s that simple. It’s also as awesome as it sounds. Where a lot of hip hop feels predictably tuned to the drop of a beat, Black Violin feels tuned to the violin solo. If there was ever going to be a Mumford & Sons in hip hop, Black Violin might be the closest thing to it right now.

That’s both good and bad: it’s good because these guys are an outrageous talent, with huge ideas and a clear mission to change the faces of the genres they love. But it’s bad because as often as these guys kill it with their violins, they turn back to the pop choruses that ruin so much potentially great hip hop.

So while this record is wicked, killer, totally awesome, it’s also a slight disappointment, because much like Mumford, these guys could be much more if they wanted to be. There’s so much raw talent on display here, just waiting to be mined.

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Matt Pond’s voice handily carries the record, and the band mostly exists to carry his vocals. There aren’t a lot of musical surprises, but everything is put together in a way that feels solid somehow understandable. Sometimes feeling familiar can be refreshing. I don’t know how Matt Pond PA does it, or how to explain it properly, but that’s the closest I can get: it’s familiar and somehow refreshing, which fits me just fine.

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