Well, that was unexpected. I was all set to lapse into ArcadeFirecentricity, with only an occasional Swimmers song breaking the monotony of my non-ticket-having despair. But then all of a sudden my sister appeared with AF tickets, and I unexpectedly found a bunch of other music to be excited about. And the Dismemberment Plan are playing a reunion show! Everything's great!

In fact I just got back from seeing Karmella's Game at the Black Cat with Yglesias and Catherine. It's been years since I last saw KG, but they were just as charming as I remembered — and now they had better songs to back up their overwhelming charisma. I really don't understand why these guys aren't better-known than they are. When a band performs harmonies with as many parts as it has personnel I take it as a very good sign. Well, if they pull it off, anyway, which Karmella's Game did.

So that bring us to this post's first mp3. Have at it (and my apologies to the band for hosting it — I wouldn't have, except your last.fm page is broken):

Karmella's Game – Safely Negative

Moving on! I stumbled upon The Wombats a few days ago. I know that their NME heyday may have already come and gone, but their new EP (leaked in December, apparently) seems stronger to me than their last album (although that's good, too — more mp3s here):

The Wombats – Backfire At The Disco

Caralyn posted about Patrick Wolf's "Accident & Emergency" a while ago, but at the moment I listened to it I was too exhausted/hung over/sick to really fall for it. But the track Stereogum posted this week caught me at the right moment, and it made me a believer:

Patrick Wolf – The Magic Position

And finally, the peak of the mashup fad may have crested, but there's still a lot to be said for combining two guilty pleasures into one plausibly-deniable whole. Check it out:

Team 9 – When You Were Starlight (Killers vs. Muse)

Okay! Music over! Tomorrow: Philly Arcade Fire tickets, DC D-Plan tickets, and maybe, MAYBE some graphs of congressional cosine similarity matrices. But only if you're good.