If you’re looking for boundless enthusiasm, look no further than a high school band—kids are always going on about why school sucks, or why dating sucks, or why dating at school sucks, but they’re always doing it in rocktacular fashion. Okay, that was all a lie, since no one under the age of 18 seems to even listen to anything with guitars anymore (and no, Hoobastank and Nickelback don’t count), but it wasn’t so long ago that you could rely on high school kids to play their instruments really well—and by really well, I mean fast and loud and stuff.

The Rondelles are the archetype for “awesome high school punk band” in that they sound like lots of stuff you’ve heard before. Think Joan Jett. Or, if you must, the Donnas. Or hell, think Pacific Northwest indie, because really that’s what the Rondelles are (never mind that they’re from New Mexico and now live in DC). Everything that matters is perfect: they’re fun, they’re sassy, they love the organ and they’ll blow your riot-grrl-lovin’ ass out of the water after you’re done dancing. I highly doubt the Rondelles are still together now, which is a crying shame—just as with really early Dear Nora or Tiger Trap, the world grows a little colder with the passing of every band like the Rondelles.

Once upon a time, there was a cute little twee-pop band called Call And Response. They played songs about bubbles and rollerskating, and it was really cool. They liked to play funk music too. It wasn’t real funk music, though. It was distinctly indie twee-pop funk music, even twee-er than COCO. But “I Know You Want Me” was lots of fun anyways, it doesn’t matter what the cool kids say.

They didn’t have enough money to record their first album the way they wanted to. That’s okay, though, because after a while they got popular enough that Emperor Norton wanted them, and so Call And Response left Kindercore and re-released their debut. They re-did four songs and resequenced the album, but it was still really cool because now “Rollerskate” was all peppy and funky like the other tracks. And I guess less cute. But “Blowin’ Bubbles” is still cute. Even when they do it live in Texas, like they did here.

The end. (Or is it?)

All was not puppies and butterflies for Call And Response, of course. While their debut was reasonably well-liked by the critics, it seemed that the band couldn’t shake one major criticism: that perhaps the band’s musical outlook on life was a little too rosy. The overly-twee 60s-influenced indiepop the band specialized in seemed too sugary for its own good, and perhaps a little faceless and anonymous—after all, this was territory the Free Design had plumbed decades before, not to mention a bevy of more current bands on the Kindercore label and elsewhere.

Sometime after their Emperor Norton re-release, the band apparently decided the critics were right, for they undertook a fairly sharp change in direction. They parted ways with Emperor Norton and left their rollerskates behind, eventually resurfacing earlier this year with Winds Take No Shape. To compare Call And Response’s two albums is to compare apples and oranges, so obvious is the shift in sound. For one, Simone Rubi has completely taken over vocal duties, and she’s surprisingly well suited to the band’s more subtle and inflected approach. For another, the overall atmosphere is far more downbeat and melancholy, with little hint of the exuberant joy that infused much of Call And Response’s debut. Minor chords abound here, as do gently-picked guitar lines and brushed drums. The arrangements and the higher-fidelity recordings also lend a professional quality to the proceedings.

In short, Call And Response are no longer the carefree adolescents they seemed to be on their debut; it’s as if ten years have passed rather than three. Their transformation into a Mature Band(tm) is an obvious move, but it’s also in some ways more convincing than the Cardigans’ recent Fleetwood Mac reincarnation, and just as successful.

You have to almost feel badly for Controller.Controller. They’re sort of dancepunk in that you can dance to their music, and it’s got lots of hard and fast guitar riffs and all, but they aren’t really a whole lot like !!! or the Rapture. But because the dancepunk association has been made—and to be fair, the band doesn’t seem to mind—they now have the dubious distinction of being the last to hop on a sinking ship. Hilarious, considering they apparently sat on their musical ideas for two years—imagine if they’d released History in 2002.

I say I’d only almost feel bad for the Toronto band, though, because despite the decline and fall of dancepunk, Controller.Controller is set to survive the wreckage unscathed. Just as bands like Goldfrapp simultaneously killed and saved electroclash by saving the best elements and merging them with something else, Controller.Controller takes the central spirit of dancepunk and actually does something different. There’s definitely more punk in the mixture, for example; the heavier riffs and insistent drumming make this an altogether more aggressive sound. And maybe I’m just biased, but snarling female vocals sound way cooler than hipper-than-thou whiny male vocals.

In a year where !!! and Radio 4 release disappointing and terrible albums respectively, it’s fair to say the kids will move on to the next big thing. Hopefully, some of them will look to Controller.Controller instead. Go catch them live; as good as the recordings are, I hear the shows are incendiary.

The Fontaine Toups are a band, much like PJ Harvey was a band for a while; the lead singer is also the band’s namesake. She was also the bassist for NYC’s Versus, an underappreciated rock band that seems to now be on permanent hiatus. That’s fine, though; considering the number of side projects the group’s members started up while the band was still together, it’s no surprise that many of the principals should be receiving words of praise for their new outfits as well.

James Baluyut’s +/- is probably the best known and most prolific of the Versus alumni projects, but it seems that the Fontaine Toups are set to catch up. Whereas early +/- can be (poorly) described as Versus laptop-style, Toups and co. are more like Versus with power-pop vitamin supplements—lots of guitar crunch, finely-tuned pop sensibilities and a lively quickstep pace. It increasingly looks like Versus will never record again, but thankfully there doesn’t seem to be anything to worry about.