NOISE

So you've got indie-pop twins Tegan and Sara and gypsy-punk collective Gogol Bordello on this Unlimited Sunshine tour with you. I'm assuming the grouping of acts is about more than trying to maximize ticket sales.

It's actually about minimizing ticket sales, at least that's what we've been told. We're doing it to mix music around. It's what we enjoy doing anyway, so we may as well put on a concert like that. Tribally, these things are sort of antithetical. There's a big distance between a Tegan and Sara fan and a Gogol Bordello fan in terms of lifestyle choices, but I say music is music, and if you really love music you can listen to any genre and have a great time.

You also have Eugene Mirman on the bill. What does a comedian add?

This is an experiment, but I think it's working out pretty well. My contention is that it's hard to listen to just music nonstop for a period of time. The human ear stops listening, stops differentiating. Eugene Mirman is smart and funny and deserves a wider audience. And by mixing it up, I think it accentuates the qualities and differences of the different musics.

I reviewed Cake's first album, and as much as I liked it, I never would have predicted the band would be going strong 12 years later.

Things that happen in a certain time, when that time ends there's a mandatory expiration date. A lot of stuff gets flushed away; a lot of good music gets discarded because it's too directly connected to a cultural identity. And we never had to get bunched into that as the toilet was flushing. I feel like our lyrics were much more hate-filled than any of those proportedly angry or self-hating grunge acts at the time. In a way their muscular posture gave them away. You don't really hate yourself if you turn your amp up to 11. We thought it was more subversive to turn our amps down to three. In a culture of excess, like the United States, the most subversive thing you can do is turn it down.

A Few Covers We Like Better than the Originals*

• "Baby One More Time" by Fountains of Wayne instead of Britney Spears

• "Hazy Shade of Winter," by the Bangles instead of Simon & Garfunkel.

• "Seven Nation Army" by Hard-Fi instead of the White Stripes.

• "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction," by Cat Power instead of the Rolling Stones

• "You Really Got Me," by Van Halen instead of the Kinks.

• "Hotel California" by the Gipsy Kings instead of the Eagles.

• "The Kids in America," by the Muffs instead of Kim Wilde.

• "Eight Miles High" by Husker Du instead of the Byrds.

*Jimi Hendrix's "All Along the Watchtower" is grandfathered in.

The Lashes


Get It (3 stars)

This Seattle quintet sounds like every other indie rock band on the radio, like the Killers with more prominent guitars or the Strokes with extra keyboards. Singer Ben Clark has a bit of an Elvis Costello edge to his voice, and there are a few catchy tunes that will probably wind up on The O.C. As long as you don't mind the familiarity, this is a perfectly listenable debut.

INXS


Switch (1 star)

The bad news is clear from the opener, "Devil's Party"; it sounds just like "Devil Inside." New singer and former Elvis impersonator J. D. Fortune (who won the job on a TV show) now impersonates the late Michael Hutchence. The band should have stuck with original—and far more intriguing—replacement singer, Terence Trent D'Arby. "Pretty Vegas" offers painfully accurate analysis of INXS in 2005: "It ain't pretty after the show, it ain't pretty when the pretty leaves you with no place to go." Except Vegas; here they come.

THE TUNA HELPERS


I'll Have What She's Having (3.5 stars)

In case the Austin, Texas,-based female trio's stage show—featuring costumes, puppets and sign language interpretations of songs—doesn't sound singular enough, hop onboard for this wildly careening, 16-track carnival ride. Add a touch of Kate Bush's sorcery and a dash of Siouxsie and the Banshees' goth to the Fiery Furnaces' operatic cauldron, and the Tuna Helpers' peculiar sonic brew starts coming into focus.