For some people, I’d imagine the Detroit Cobras would be their own personal Blueshammer—the crappy blues revival band Steve Buscemi has to endure in Ghost World while the blues legend whose performance he came to see gets no respect. The two bands aren’t entirely dissimilar in approach: take the original aesthetic, turn the amps up to 11, let God sort ‘em out. Except (and if you emphasize with Buscemi, better turn away) the Cobras do a pretty good job of spitting out some mean 60s garage rock.

The Cobras have been, up to now, a covers band. They’ve been taking old motown and rock n’ roll standards and making them their own, with Rachel Nagy belting out the hits and the band sounding larger than life, with guitars and harmonicas and sha-la-las all over the place on Jackie Deshanon’s “He Did It.” And dammit, it’s lots of fun, and no I haven’t heard the original, but I don’t begrudge the Ronettes for playing thirty years before my time, so why should people begurdge the Cobras for playing thirty years after motown and girl groups and garage?

I guess what I’m trying to say, then, is that Steve Buscemi should lighten up. I think.

One of the jokes I’ve heard about Sarge went something like the old refrain of “Alwayss the bridesmaid, never the bride.” Sure, they opened for every band in Chicago and then some, but a headlining spot? Which is a crying shame, because in the pop-punk sweepstakes of the late 90s, Sarge had the smarts, the hooks and, by the end of their career, the noise.

The adage about artists only becoming famous after they’re dead rings true here; arguably, more has been written about Sarge’s breakup album, Distant, than their other two albums combined. It’s only been in hindsight that critics and fans have come to realize just how affecting Elizabeth Elmore’s songwriting has been, just how propulsive they came to be on The Glass Intact, just how much they missed Sarge opeening for the next big thing in Illinois. “Detroit Star-Lite” would’ve made it on their next album proper, along with three other orphaned songs on Distant, had Elmore not decided to dissolve the band after graduating from law school.

Elmore has since formed a new band, the Reputation, and released two albums of glossy, more mainstream pop-punk. The new formula does seem to have given them more exposure, and the press from Sarge’s dissolution certainly helped. The slick sound, however, has arguably made the Reputation less notable than Sarge, and only on selected tracks like “Alaskan” does the Elmore of old shine through. Not that “Detroit Star-Lite” isn’t pretty slick itself, but at least you’d recognize immediately who it was if you ever heard it on the radio.

Reviews of Charlotte Hatherley’s debut album have made comparisons to her main project’s latest works, most of them good; Grey Will Fade is the indiepop companion to Meltdown’s return to the rock, and while not universally loved, Hatherley’s album seems to sit better with many of the people who fell in love with stuff like Free All Angels.

This, in a sense, is where it all began. Previous to this, Hatherley had written a couple of Ash b-sides and had done guitar duty in Nightnurse, but it wasn’t until “Grey Will Fade” that Hatherley seemed to find an audience for her own songs. The b-side became a fan favourite, and soon after Hatherley began thinking about her own solo release. Three years later, people are starting to make the Pixies analogy, Charlotte playing the Kim Deal to Tim Wheeler’s Black Francis. It’s a cute one, but Ash is no Pixies, and it doesn’t sound like the band will be encountering its own meltdown anytime soon.

Hatherley re-recorded “Grey Will Fade” for her new album of the same name; it goes down smoother, thanks to the slick production values, and it serves as a great closer to a lovely album. But in a way, the quieter, more tentative Ash version feels more legitimate, as if in adding layers of guitars and drums, Hatherley had lost some of the plain-spoken, vulnerable qualities of the original.

Music fans and critics, in their never-ending quest to make a place for everyone and put everyone in their place, have conjured out of thin air so many meaningless sub-genres that the world might indeed collapse under the weight. You can fool most people into thinking you’re an expert on music by following the same tried-and-true formula: take a style of music, say rock, and add any number of modifiers that don’t have anything to do with music. Hence the creation of trip-hop, acid jazz, speed garage, digital hardcore, post-post-rock (especially tricky, that) and the subject of today’s post, math rock.

What the hell is math rock? No one knows what the real defining characteristics are, since most sub-genres are coined by reviewers who want an easy shorthand to refer to a couple of similar-sounding bands without getting into why they sound similar. Admittedly, describing how one band sounds, let alone how two bands sound similar, is difficult. Lemme give it a shot with Polvo: odd melodies in unorthodox keys and strange rhythmic phrasing. And a bit of Eastern influence, sort of. That’s about as good an explanation you’d ever get for math rock, and as a description of Polvo, it’s adequate. But hey, that’s why you have ears, right?

I will guarantee you this, though; if you’ve never heard of math rock, chances are you’ve never heard anything quite like this, either. Today’s Active Lifestyles will open up a whole host of musical possibilities you’d never considered before, and you’ll come away thinking you didn’t know rock music could sound like this. Or maybe that’s just me.

Critics described Erase Errata as, among other things, a dancepunk band when their first album, Other Animals, came out in 2001. If you’ve actually heard Other Animals, this description won’t make any sense; how, exactly, were you supposed to dance to it? It’s obtuse, angular and noisy, sure, but it wasn’t exactly four-on-the-floor house. And while At Crystal Palace isn’t the next DFA spectacular either, at least there was more of a driving beat behind most of the tracks.

Not only that, there are sequences of sounds that actually sound like they might be hooks. Could it be the band’s left their roots behind? Not exactly, but songs like “Surprise, It’s Easter” show Erase Errata minus some of their more erratic tendencies. If you just couldn’t bring yourself to like them before, Erase Errata’s new material may be more to your liking.

Charming is a four-piece band from Charlottesville, Virginia with a virtual lock on the “doing the reviewer’s job for them” sweepstakes—they really are charming, aren’t they? In their first incarnation, Charming was a fairly straightforward guitar pop band with an inclination towards sounding like Velocity Girl; in those simpler times, the winning group put together Giant, full of little gems like “Mississippi.” Then they promptly vanished.

A couple of years later they resurfaced in New York with new members and disco fever; later tracks like “Downtown” and “Let Me Take You Out” bring the indie funk, which may not sound like a whole lot of funk, but hey, they’re trying. Now taking aim at the likes of Sissybar and Saint Etienne, their old guitar-wielding days seemed behind them for good. Alas, Giant is out of print, and sadly so. Until recently, you couldn’t even find MP3s of it anywhere, except for the first four songs. Thankfully, some time after MP3.com bit the dust for the first time, the band put up the full album on their own site.

Charming are now working on their third album; their second, Champagne and Magazines, seems to be on perpetual special over at Twee Kitten. A steal at that price, really.