I’d like to hear more Fucked Up or other intellectual punk crush coming from the speakers of philistines everywhere who are just starting to work their way into conscious clarity. Don’t take that literally, because if it happened, there wouldn’t be a comfort zone for really calm but secretly badass dudes who deliver pizza, speak three languages, and once competed on an episode of Jeopardy! but didn’t care enough about the $20,000 or the cut-and-dry format to buzz in.

These folks are way too mentally powerful to hold any position of corporate or political power, let alone morally corrupt enough to exploit the peasant classes for minimum wage. So instead they drive cars with smashed-in fenders, read a few books each night, and regurgitate the philosophical writings of Nietzsche in their fully colored dreams. When they deliver your pizza, they are kind and courteous, because they understand how the world works. They know we are all different. In the background blasting from their running car door, slightly ajar, you may hear Fucked Up. You may very well hear one of this Toronto sextet’s songs from Couple Tracks, a compilation of two-minute blitzkriegs already released on several different labels in multiple countries now conveniently compiled for you. Your pizza dude already has all of these songs on cassette from a friend network spanning the globe — but he will buy this collection too, so tip him well.

The brilliance of Fucked Up truly does lie in the depth of their social commentary. Working on motifs as obscure as a commentary on the Spanish War on “No Pasaran” to their most recent release “No Epiphany,” groups like FU speak up for those who just don’t want to talk anymore. If the pulse, the speed, and the heavy core of punk aren’t a fraction of your scene, then Couple Tracks isn’t your album. If you grew up listening to the legends of hardcore or were schooled on the classics by your older brother, you need to buy this collection now. And when you load Fucked Up into your digital rotation, it will most likely be filed right next to Fugazi. These two audio files can be inanimate friends, like Buzz Lightyear and Woody in Toy Story. Except this time, both parties will have the strength and bravado of an astronaut and the quiet leadership of a cowboy. By Will Tunstall

Los Angeles rapper Cookbook’s last album was a cheeky retro tribute entitled I Love The ‘80s, and his recent effort with L.A. Symphony colleague UNO Mas, C & U Music Factory, boasts a similarly clichéd title. But digging into the record, it’s clear this west coast duo boasts a breadth of lyrical talent backed up by a fun-loving attitude and strong production skills.

Opening track “Presente!” celebrates C & U’s Latino roots, while “Set It Off To This” is a nostalgic banger equally comfortable in the club and on L.A.’s bustling summertime streets. “When You Rock ‘n’ Roll” saunters lazily but contains a barbed message, as Evidence from Dilated Peoples joins Cookbook to call out rappers selling their soul for commercial success. And C & U’s jaunty sampling skills are on full display on the hilarious “Never Gonna Let You Go” and the epic rocker “Just-Us.” But Golden Age hip-hop rears its head again on “A.M. Radio,” which fits nicely into the Southern California driving music subgenre, before weepy reminiscences on “Song Of Our Lives” adds emotional depth to C & U Music Factory.

Fellow L.A. Symphony rapper Pigeon John turns up on the breathy ballad “Where Ya Been All My Life?”, eschewing the hard-ass hip-hop stereotype for four minutes of electro-influenced romance. But Cookbook proves he can handle lyrical braggadocio on “The Petty,” shitting all over the “whack rhyme disease” with lines like, “Petty MCs/Ahead of me please/Get ready to get shredded to confetti by me.” In short, Cookbook and UNO Mas prove on C & U Music Factory that you can be hard, soft, funny, serious, joyous, and emotional, all in the space of a splendid 58-minute hip-hop album. By Nick McGregor

If you’ve been privileged enough to sit through a middle school lunch since you graduated from the eighth grade decades ago, you probably noticed something wonderful about the experience: the kids start to file in and chatter until the room reaches a euphoric hum. They hum about boys and they hum about girls, and since kids still trade shit at lunch, they’ll hum about this and complete kiddie transactions. Occasionally there will be quick spurts of energy and then the hum will be restored, and you will still be sitting in a very small seat, forming a perfect circle. And you will feel good, because middle school students don’t judge wise men and women.             

All over the school there will be awesome visuals — kids will have Photoshopped their faces onto gloss paper for a student government campaign running for seventh grade treasurer. This, in essence or allusion, is We Are Wolves. The Canadian trio was spawned from collaborations between three visual artists who focus on stage presence and boast an ever-morphing sound. We Are Wolves’ music contains one constant that’s on heavy display on 2010 release Invisible Violence: humming electro/freak-rock wavelengths. All the intricate synthesizer layers and lyrical harmonies tangle into a comfortable buzz with nicely planted ups and downs. 

Invisible Violence is controlled chaos, much like We Are Wolves’ award-winning post-punk aesthetic. Make any middle school student eat alone and he will throw a chair at you, guaranteed. Put him with his or her friends and, like We Are Wolves, the raw rock hum will build, making everyone and everything a little more chill. By Will Tunstall

On first listen, Chicago experimental duo Pit Er Pat’s newest album sounds like a cobbled-together mish-mash of electro-rock that nearly falls flat on its minimalist face. But from the second listen on, The Flexible Entertainer shape-shifts, twisting and turning through a ridiculous number of genres before morphing into a wildly enjoyable album that relies a lot on your particular listening mood.

Butchy Fuego and Fay Davis-Jeffers wrote the record strictly for guitar, drums, sampler, and vocals, in order to minimize equipment for a European tour and allow for almost entirely live recording sessions. That playful spontaneity comes across, even on the icy “Water,” with Davis-Jeffers sounding like a lackadaisical M.I.A. as she sing-raps over Fuego’s perfectly matched beat track. “Nightroom” has the stuttering, slightly creepy feel of a mid ‘90s Portishead track, before it detours through the Mediterranean halfway through. And “Godspot” is equally detached and distant, with Fuego’s space-age guitar shards elevating the entire Pit Er Pat ethos into a new orbit.

Each song on The Flexible Entertainer increases its runtime as the album draws to a close, but the seven-minute “Emperor Of Charms” is by far the most intriguing, with tribal drums, a slithering melody, and a hopped-up time signature shifting the song into overdrive; Fuego’s psychedelic guitar solo also adds to the track’s primitive quality. “Chavez Ravine” goes in the other direction, relying on MPC beats and deceptive audio tricks, while the eight-minute closer “Specimen” is a ramshackle instrumental stumble that leads The Flexible Entertainer in confusing directions. Yet even with that slip up, Pit Er Pat still runs circles around safe indie-rock trends. If more bands were willing to produce albums as perplexingly listenable as The Flexible Entertainer, those tired 2000s tropes might just be left by the wayside in favor of new, futuristic methods. –NM