Welcome to my zone of total honesty. Here is where I slip off my colorful trousers, set my New Yorker aflame, use the extra matches to immolate every last vestige of pretension and calculated pants-related self-presentation I have on my person. Here is where I confess, without shame, that I have become the type of person who doesn’t really listen to much new music.

Don’t get me wrong: I have a vague idea of what’s happening. I know a band called Disclosure exists, and that they are doing revolutionary things in the field of dance music. (Or are making a number of underground dance music styles accessible to a wider audience, and for that reason are brilliant? Or criminal? It’s unclear.) I know that the band Deafheaven is supposed to meld metal and post-rock in noteworthy ways. I pondered the pronunciation of Chvrches with the rest of the cool kids, and even saw a Waxahatchee show in April.

But all that really means, of course, is that I read Pitchfork. Probably there are AARP members who know most of the above—who have even heard and have an opinion on Disclosure—simply by dint of their leaving NPR on around the house.

It wasn’t a conscious decision, this lapse into a life of surface scene-engagement, of desperate scrolls through backlogs of Best New Musics. Certainly it wasn’t the plan. The plan, as I remember it, was to transform myself into an efficient music-consumption machine. I wanted to point to whatever band was in the unprecedentedly large alt-spotlight and list six other, better acts doing it with infinitely more verve, and I wanted to then be able to list 36 further acts who had paved the way for those six acts’ verve-y ways.

I don’t know why I wanted this. Probably, at the time, I thought it had something to do with happiness. Surely for some people—people I respect and/or love, people whose breadth of knowledge and/or physiques I envy—it does. For me, it mostly turned music into a To-Do list that grew twenty feet longer each time I managed to place a conquering checkmark next to some new buzzband or historically significant post-punk act.

I still spend the same amount of time listening to music. I just tend now to listen to the same three or four albums over and over, like a toddler mystified by one of his Mom’s CD-Rs. So I’ve decided to treat this month’s column, my third, as a palate cleanser. I am simply going to write about some of the recent-ish music I have been listening to recently. Portals staff has come down hard. Our pieces need themes, consistent subjects. Cannot blame them. Until then, though: this.

The other day I played this song for a friend, who said it sounded like music to buy pants to. To which I say, “fuck yeah it does, find me a truck, I’m buying two tons of Levis!” Chvrches have got to be the most overtly commercial, aggressively enjoyable faux-alt act since, I don’t know—Lana Del Rey? Nirvana? This song sounds engineered, not written, and oh man please do not interpret that as an insult. Load me up with Splenda and dress me up in nylon, I am all about the artificial. What is authenticity anyway? I’ll tell you what it is: some fable Elliott Smith made up to sell records. This is the perfect synthesis of every blippy crossover indie act to strike big on the festival scene or mug in black & white for Converse; I’m pretty sure that if you go to the Chvrches Wikipedia page and look under ‘Band Members’ it just says ‘A Couple of Musical Scientists.’ Fuck, even the name is ingeniously calculated: It pops up in your feed, Trojan horses its way into your brain’s “indie band with annoying name” folder, and—once it’s firmly lodged itself between tUnE-yArDs and !!!—BAM, out pop a bunch of giddy Scots to lay waste to your feeble preconceived notions with their neon machetes.

I’m no good with concerts. Too aware of my own body. I’ll do a little hop, pause, wonder if the little hop looked weird, scrutinize the crowd for other little hops, conclude that my initial hop was an unforgivable transgression of various widely-known rules of cool concert conduct taught at some earlier, cooler concert I wasn’t invited to.

Which is all to say that, facing band-ward in a deli re-purposed to accommodate an indie-pop show, I was too deep into my routine psychic k-hole to really listen to Alex G when I had a chance. But enough got through for me to vow to check them out later.

They were difficult to track down. First Google hit brought up the “Alex G Music” Facebook page, which seemed promising but ultimately turned out to belong to a woman of indeterminate age who records insanely popular covers of Coldplay songs. In this light, their named seemed a bit of obfuscating meta-trickery—a variant on naming your band, like, Water. Then I found their Bandcamp. And an article about them, on a website that focuses on obscure Bandcamps. Turns out its one guy. His name is Alex G.

This album, Trick, is almost scary. Scary because I fear the implications of whatever technology they invented to reanimate and play around inside of the first Built to Spill album. Scary because there are allusions to buying wives in gardens and women with “big sharp teeth” where you’d expect to find typical vague indie-isms. And scary, also, because if Temple University’s newspaper is to be believed Alex G is only a junior in college. I fear what this dude is capable of. Please, please, download this album. It’s free. It’s made my summer, so far.

Reading the press surrounding this record, you’d think that the members of Small Black were small-time hucksters trying to milk the zeitgeist for a quick buck. You might also think, depending on what review you were reading, that they went into the studio with the intention of recording ten distinct songs but came out with an indistinguishable synth-blur; that what they wanted to do, with their previous record, was to finally take a genre invented by a satirical music blogger to “the mainstream”; and that their most recent album, Limits of Desire, isn’t the best dream-pop album of the last twelve months.

Maybe it isn’t? As stressed earlier, I don’t listen to as much new music as I should. It’s possible that these guys have been out-classed, dream-pop wise, by six new acts since I started this sentence. I think it is the best. But then again, I don’t really know anything. Either way, please, procure a boombox, and some sort of device that transfers mp3s to cassettes (or maybe the boombox can do that? Or maybe we can just get on of those boomboxes that plays iPods?), and meet me on the roof—it’s pensive sunset gazing time.