Hello, Hello, I'm Back Again

It sounds as if there's a layer of scum or film on top of Smith Westerns' Dye it Blonde. The Chicago three- (occasionally four)-piece apparently borrowed Ariel Pink's murk filter for the follow-up to its self-titled 2009 debut, or maybe it's just a fashionable sonic pose at the moment to smother the vocals and everything else under a blanket of mung. Mufflecore, anyone?

But I wouldn't know, I didn't see a memo, and perhaps this is just what you get when a generation is raised on 128 kbps mp3s. Of course, the other thing you get is a band of American still-teens like Smith Westerns with a striking feel for something as theoretically alien to them as '70s U.K. glam. But ever since Al Gore or the U.S. military or DARPA or whoever the hell it was invented the Internet and accidentally liberated music from starchy radio playlists that insist all musical history boils down to "Brown Eyed Girl," there has been a marked increase in this sort of thing.

A greater casual knowledge of pop history, that is. A sort of musical singularity where every forgotten thing is likely to surface again at some point, context-free, no matter how debased it might have been in the first place. For Smith Westerns, this amounts to a new album in which every single track is traceable to Ziggy Stardust, Electric Warrior, and All the Young Dudes, but also less reputably to the Bay City Rollers, Gary Glitter, or the kind of marvelously obscure nonsense you get on a junk shop glam compilation like the great (read: awesomely shitty) Velvet Tinmine.

Not that anybody around here is complaining. You can stream Dye it Blonde over at NPR (it gets an official release on Jan. 18), and there's a good chance you'll be stuck on repeat for the rest of the day. Pitchfork chose to showcase the swooning and exclamatory "All Die Young" this week, and the single is (quite rightly) "Weekend," but we're going for "Still New" -- partly because it's a killer song, and partly because we're so happy to agree with the title.