BOOK | I.O.U.S.A.
Patrick Creadon / Roadside
You want to know why you’re poor, can’t find a job, and why we’re all going to be generally fucked for the foreseeable future? Creadon’s gripping documentary is a great place to start. This enormously edifying and entertaining film features the most exhilarating portrayal of graphs and charts you will ever see—no joke. Grab a copy and educate yourself on why the national debt means that we’re all going to be taking it up the ass—HARD—in another 40 years or so. Then build a shrine to Clinton, who was, apparently, the only president who balanced the budget and produced a surplus in the last 100 years.

CD | A Society in Which No Tear is Shed is Inconceivably Mediocre
Yonlu / Luaka Bop
I love Luaka Bop, if only because Byrne finds these leftfield pop acts that would normally be relegated to the horrid “World Music” section at Amazon. Yonlu is his latest find, and it’s a gem. This is straight lo-fi boombox-to-brainstem Shrimper stuff here, folks—kind of like if Devendra Banhart wasn’t insane, suddenly found Elliot Smith like child molesters find Jesus, and took some séance-driven songwriting lessons from the late, great Bossa Nova legend Tom Jobim. This album’s pure gold, folks.

CD | The Law of the Playground
The Boy Least Likely To / Redeye
Lazier critics have hailed this English duo as the next twee sensation, inheriting Belle and Sebastian’s long uncontested wuss-pop mantle, but they share only superficial similarities to Stuart Murdoch’s sleep-inducing, axiomatic pastoral musings; instead, they’re the heir apparent to the Kinks, and this album sounds like The Village Green Preservation Society. And that’s a-fucking-okay in my book, because the Kinks are awesome.

CD | Fantasies
Metric / 02. Records
Mmm: tastes like the 80s, sounds like the goddamn Go-Gos, and—after enough Scotch—could almost be mistaken for Beauty and the Beat. Us non-Canuckistanians might know frontwoman Emily Haines better as part of BSS, but she’s a helluva songwriter in her own right; her solo torch song affair was a thing of staggering beauty, and these straight-up power-pop gems are fun and catchy. The album’s a little too sugary for regular consumption, but it’s also hard to resist.

CD | Everybody, Come Outside!
Pomegranates / Lujo
And it’s just a great week for the sad-eyed indie-popsters that are so endemic in sleepy little college towns like ours. I just can’t hate anything this week. Maybe I’m just growing old. Normally, with an album like this, I’d make some snarky comment about my testicles—but I just can’t bring myself to do it. Yeah, this is 80s British jangle-pop by the numbers, but it’s a great listen for anyone who still holds NME and their much-hailed C86 comp close to their hearts—all 12 of you. We should all get smashed and reminisce about how great the Pastels used to be.

When you write CD next to the headlines like that, it makes me feel like I fell into a time capsule and P2P and torrents don’t exist.