Discovered this incredible Irish band via a Jango feed built on Camera Obscura. Their web presence is minimal, so here is their MySpace page. Three 20-something guys, they remind me of Tegan & Sarah's harmonization and folk-inspired tunes that soar but are grounded.

By far, my favourite song is Half Glass, which speaks to lute-like sounds and commiseration in a salt-water misty Doolin pub -- at least to me. Verbal Waltz echoes REM when they were good at music. Both songs are available on their MySpace page.

This is the Irish music I want; not Westlife (sorry kids). And as much as I like the Coors, there's a darkness and seriousness to Arrow in the Sky that takes me somewhere good.

What strikes me most though is that they're not even close to being big -- no Wikipedia page, 600 or so song hits. The band is definitely in the alt-folk/hipster channel of music, and is unlikely to meet Ryan Seacrest -- but I think they should easily be touring festivals and hopefully headlining 5000-person gigs across North America in a few years. I hope.

Maybe all the good bands, which seem to emerge from the British Isles now, can form a new kind of Lilith Fair and invade. Less Lilith, more introspective lads.

Good luck to ya!

Born the year Mulrony was first elected, Reagan was re-elected and Orwell was deferred, Welsh singer Duffy (her last name, but a good moniker) is 1970s disco/soul reincarnated. It's amazing when young people express old souls; some things you can package, but this girl could carry a SkyDome of Boomers as well as any Rod Stewart.

Rockferry -- easily her strongest single. epic, soaring, fragile. Perhaps written reading Yeats?

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,

And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:

Warwick Avenue -- poppy tear fest 

Mercy -- radio friendly with a video shot using Super 8 film preserved from the year her father started university.

Around 1997 everyone started dancing swing. I think Duffy's the vanguard of the new retro swing.

Hockey is a very non-linear game; football has discrete plays with small objectives -- moving the ball more than 3.3 yards per down. Baseball is even more controlled -- they count errors! -- with every motion governed by its own discrete moment of play: each pitch, hit, walk, or steal begins and ends with non-action. But hockey ... it's fluid and fast and violent. Errors are the rule, with incomplete passes, and violence is not part of the play, but part of a second tier of unpublished score-keeping.

Broken Social Scene is a Toronto band that channels latin orchestration into a white-as-folk hipster ensemble. BSS is everthing all at once, and where radio's formula is formulaic music, a band whose basic array of instruments are too complex to comprehend in real time -- nevermind all the other parts of music -- provides cool escapism, like being lost in a mosh pit and loving the ebb of sick sweaty bodies.

BSS is so tight at times ... so I'm not sure if you can classify them as polyphonic. Playing by Heart typifies the ensemble film style; at first you meet Jon Stewart, Sean Connery, Anthony Edwards and Angelena Jolie and some other people, then you get everything all at once. And it's satisfying, like cheese inside cake. Someone on wikipedia described or defined polyphonic literature in a similar way, as Ulysses with it's 18 chapters of differing style.

So, the Go Team -- from England in the Emsemble Kingdom -- makes some of the freshest music I've heard in years. Not since Kanye West in 2004 or Hawksley Workman and Sarah Slean in 2001 has music felt so not derrivative. Sometimes, I swear they sample Sesame Street and draw from whatever hip hop was in 1981. It's cool and retro and discordant, but most of all it feels like a polyphonic or ensemble-like wall of music ... everything all at once and not all of it tight. It's discordant and even the musicians' ethnicity looks like the band was assembled for a public school assembly on friendship. The band was actually assembled; it's the product of some guy named Ian Parton, but the lead singer, Ninja, and keyboardest/vocalist/guitarist Kaori Tsuchida, both stand out on stage.

Top picks:

• the wrath of marcie, for sure, for that layered, ensemble sound, ninja's energy and and Kaori's backing vocals.
• ladyflash is cool and easy to listen to; it's their only mainstream hit.
• milk crisis could have the greatest video of the last decade.
• grip like a vice -- i listened to this for about 5 months on web radio before figuring out it wasn't like Salt 'n Peppa from 1986.