Discovery

The duo of Vampire Weekend's Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles, Discovery consummate indie rock's love affair with glittery French house and synth-heavy R&B on their debut album, LP. Like a cross between R. Kelly, Daft Punk and the Postal Service, Discovery specialize in swaggering crunk-lite beats, cheesecake keyboard layers and unabashedly saccharine vocals, complete with Auto-Tune. They're at their best on "So Insane," whose huffing organs, thick vocal harmonies and wanton tempo changes sound less studied and more willfully perverse.

Lately, the best young indie rockers have been showing a voracious appetite for anything
but indie rock: soukous, samba, techno, reggae. This one-off by Vampire Weekend's
Rostam Batmanglij and Ra Ra Riot's Wes Miles shows two pilgrims on a journey toward
Timbaland. These guys build R&B jams with hand claps, 808 whomps and T-Pain-style vocals
like hyperactive kids with a Lego set, piling up fragments into tracks that often d... More >