There used to be a new buzz band for every season. A soft humming surrounded their obscure name, or an aesthetically-abstract lead singer, or a new use for an autoharp. Gradually, the hype would build, and their album cover would soon begin to look as familiar as a Stop sign. By that point, their name and singer and music concoctions were so well-known they booked Late Night with Jay Leno and appeared on the cover of Spin. (Because Rolling Stone was too busy with American Idol.)

So anyway, the buzz has a cycle and I was getting used to it. Keeping up, even. But this summer I noticed how hopelessly out of the loop I am. The cycle has condensed, I think I have clocked it in at a maximum 14-day turnaround.

At the beginning of July, as I anxiously awaited Ottawa’s annual Bluesfest, all I heard was THE DEAD WEATHER. Jack White’s latest endeavour with Alison Mosshart (The Kills), Dean Fertita (Queens of the Stone Age) and Jack Lawrence(Raconteurs, The Greenhornes). I was ready, I was the one  telling people Jack White – yes, the man, the myth and the legend-in-the-making – was going to be in town. I stood stage-side, enraptured during their smoky and bone-chilling set at the festival and afterward I vowed, as I wiped the drool from my chin, to purchase their album and make them my new favourite band.

This was when I noticed the cycle reach warp speed. Just the next day, I was swept into a whole new mode of anticipation: Guelph’s annual Hillside Festival (a.k.a. my reason to live.) I managed to delve briefly into the repertoire of The Dead Weather but was overcome by  Hillside’s performer roster.

There was Timber Timbre, Toronto’s latest creep-folk. Then Woodhands, another Toronto export of lively electro-rock. And even though I had all year to get familiar, I was hastily catching up on The Arkells. It was a busy July.

Not two weeks have passed and I had a difficult time crafting the above paragraph, as the bands that just days ago dominated my iPod have escaped my vocabulary in lieu of this week’s flavour. (Briefly: Discovery, Passion Pit, jj.)

Don’t get me wrong, I love the buzz. I love being able complain to DJs that they don’t have “Orange Shirt” and when you hear it at said club next weekend, you can scoff at it being old news. I suppose I just have a problem with longevity. When the old cycle existed – when Born Ruffians and Arcade Fire endured more than a fortnight on my playlist – I had time to get comfortable, time to fall in love with the music. These days, I’ve become hurriedly embroiled in a series of one-night stands.

Which brings me to my point: I’m going to see Passion Pit tonight, a romantically-inclined DJ outfit from Boston that I know you’ve heard of. It’s a big commitment – I mean $12 and a Wednesday night is no small price - but I guess I just want to make the most of our two weeks together.

Tune in later this week to see if it was worth it.

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It’s been a long time since I’ve purchased a brand new album on a whim. As a student, I have little disposable income so you had better believe I expect purchases such as this to pay off.

Well, my friends, I may have hit the proverbial jackpot. In the last two weeks or so, I’ve been carelessly shelling out my rent money for records, yet the return turned out to mean more to me than a roof over my head.

My purchases?

Regina Spektor’s Far. Manchester Orchestra’s Everything to Nothing. Grizzly Bear’s Veckatimest.

It wasn’t planned in advance, I didn’t wait in line outside the doors of HMV the day Grizzly Bear’s third album was released, and I actually didn’t even know Regina had been in the studio. As for Manchester Orchestra, it was more peer pressure that led me to buy it. Peer pressure and a steal of a deal at Sonic Boom.

The moral of the story, though, is the pleasant surprise that quickly followed the first few listens of each.

In a bold move, I declare Far my album of 2009. It is everything Regina Spektor has made herself – quirky, mouthy, melodramatic – but with the solemn edge that briefly reared its head on “Begin To Hope”, now fully-formed and reckoned with. “Laughing With” is an interesting choice for a single – a friend of mine has tried to call it her “What If God Was One of Us” – yet the lyrics miss soppy altogether. Its Regina’s artistic accuracy that take her piano pop to a different stratosphere than the Vanessa Carlton’s of the world. Like Ben Folds, this generation’s piano man, Regina has lip and a throat to back it up.

But before this blog turns to an album review, or an all-out love fest for my favourite Soviet songstress, let’s move on.

To the next big thing in scene-rock, a genre from which I had distanced myself after The Format broke up and phrase band names came in vogue. Listening to Manchester Orchestra, though, I was reminded of all the reasons I became a scenester in the first place.

Not only is this record positively drenched with angst, vocalist Andy Hull gets the point across without shredding his vocal chords. His pleading wail gives them an indie tinge, reminiscent of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, probably due in part to producer Brad Fisher who has been in the studio with ambient rockers The Shins and My Morning Jacket.

The album flits between dance-rock and epic ballads, all the time grungy but delicately so. (See “I Can Feel a Hot One”, almost a capella complete with an obo’s mourn drifting behind the sluggish tempo.)

It’s a rounded listen, addictive from front to back with lulls in all the right places.

And there is Grizzly Bear, almost all lull but a captivating kind of quiet. I hadn’t heard of this band until reviews for their latest album speckled every inch of my computer screen and magazines. When it was finally released, I was drawn like a moth to the beautiful flame of the album cover. Of course, I had heard “Two Weeks” and was totally enraptured by the percussive hook, which is incidentally the best example of the band’s penchant for genius rhythm, even if it’s not always danceable.

Now, I can’t say I actually love this album. It has its moments, “Two Weeks” is undoubtedly my song of the summer. And sure, there are other single potentials, but I prefer to listen to it in one sitting, allowing my imagination and attention to wander through its hazy soundscape. It’s the kind of album you would enjoy on a rooftop patio in mid-afternoon, possibly sitting next to a four-hosed hookah pipe and weaving a hemp bracelet. And while I can’t say that opportunity has yet presented itself, I’ve been enjoying Veckatimest all the same.

Obviously these albums are worlds apart from one another, but they share a common thread of roundedness – from front to back they flow, unwavering in each of their respective traits.

Maybe I’m only getting this impression because it’s the summer and I have the time to sit around and appreciate whole albums at a time. But I think even if it were the dead of winter and the very real potential of sleeping in the snowy streets of Ottawa lay before me, I would still have handed over my hard-earned pennies for all three of these albums.

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