Passion Pit: "Sleepyhead"

Just a quick one to sweep up a couple more people who haven’t encountered this particular meme: there’s a chipmunk-soul Irish folk sample, tinkly-to-swooshy synths, and yelping vocals that find a comfortable home on top of the sad, stolen melody. The rest of Passion Pit’s songs can be a little too busy, uninspired, too up-with-people; MGMT or Cut Copy without the lapel-grabbing feeling of an essential genre truth being discovered or honed. But the dreamlike core of “Sleepyhead,” cannily decorated to sound like the end credits of a Satoshi Kon movie, is something completely different. The tropes of current indie rock—like wince-inducing earnesty and an unreasonable desire to punch the little buttons that Geologist does in Animal Collective—are breathed new life into thanks to the appropriation of Kanye pitch-shifting and the surely tough decision to give up on the guitars for a minute.

There’s almost something ridiculous about finally hearing it in the context of their upcoming album, a carefully crafted style and single with fairly conventional stuff all around it. I suppose it’s just one in a long tradition of bands who stumble across the perfect formula and forget it just as quickly, the lone hits infused with an enigmatic atmosphere of squandered potential. Perhaps it’s better this way: a too brief dream you don’t want to wake up from, a mysterious, expertly crafted piece of pop music (all the way from the fade-in effects at the beginning to the concise synthesizer solo at the end). “Sleepyhead” is built for future generations combing the mp3 rubble of our ruined civilization and finding a cracked USB disk with badly tagged files, a little elegy that in its own small way can mean as much as the discographies of better bands.