Who: Miami's Black Tide, a foursome of headbanging, Iron Maiden-loving underagers led by 15-year-old metal prodigy Gabriel Garcia.

Sounds Like: Everything you love about Eighties metal gods like Judas Priest and Guns n' Roses without all the irony. In a town dominated by rap and reggaeton, Black Tide began making their mark with blistering all-ages shows, eventually grabbing the attention of major labels like Interscope, who released the band's debut Light From Above.

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Every week, Hit or Hype wades through the most buzzed-about bands all across the Internet. This week: a few choice picks from the charts at BlogFreshRadio.

The Band: The Last Shadow Puppets
The Buzz: Alex from Arctic Monkeys & Miles of the Rascals.
Listen If You Like: Playing Parklife while watching The Good, The Bad and the Ugly
Key Track: "Age of Understatement," which sounds like an outtake from the soundtrack from some mod western, full of clomping percussion, twitching guitar and a string section that swirls like a lasso.

The Band: Frightened Rabbit
The Buzz: Scottish quartet finds catharsis through rock.
Listen If You Like: Sobbing along to the Frames while flipping through pics of the ex.
Key Track: "The Modern Leper," where a dry acoustic strum builds to a thundering, pleading chorus.

The Band: The Black Angels
The Buzz: Stonerrific psych rock.
Listen If You Like: Standing on your neighbor's lawn in a black cloak, lit torch held high.
Key Track: "You on the Run," which marries doomy guitars to even doomier drums.

Who: Islands, a Montreal collective that combines sophisticated indie pop with epic-sounding classic rock on their sophomore album Arm's Way. Leading the charge into the expansive widescreen and Technicolor compositions is frontman Nick Thorburn, formerly of the Unicorns.

Sounds Like: As songs splinter and converge, the more complex compositional urges of fellow Quebecers Arcade Fire and Wolf Parade float to the surface. Arm's Way also owes a debt to the rock operas of Electric Light Orchestra and the Who. "When I'm sitting at the edge of my bed and I'm working out a song, sometimes I guess I get bored with a part," Thorburn says. "I lose interest or I get distracted, and all these different ideas coming flooding out and I can't really contain them. Every idea has to have its moment."

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Every week, Hit or Hype wades through the most buzzed-about bands all across the Internet. This week: a few choice picks from the charts at BlogFreshRadio.

El Perro Del Mar: Another solo artist disguised as a band, Swedish chanteuse Sarah Assbring has been painting pop music blue since 2005. Her music is a coy inversion of the girl group format: take shoop-shoop vocals, hand claps, finger snaps and lyrics about love and longing and sloooowww theeeem dowwwwwwn. Assbring's voice goes way up high and on songs like "Jubilee," where she's cooing softly over a pan flute, it's almost as if she's imparting some kind of mossy, ancient wisdom.

Man Man: Is there some kind of "safe space" between "Hit" and "Hype?" Can we invent one? This Philadelphia quartet is astonishing in a live setting: full-on bonkers and unwound, pushing their music and their antics to the edges of acceptibility. On record, though, they've never quite captured that manic sound. Despite a new label (Anti-) and cleaner production, Man Man's latest still feels a little schticky and, well, polite.

Cut/Copy: The Australian band Cut Copy — essentially the brainchild of one Dan Whitford — is operating a solid twenty years behind everyone else on this list. The songs on their latest record, In Ghost Colours, are jittery electro pastiches that pluck up shiny shards of OMD and Depeche Mode and incorporate them into a sweet, pulsing whole. There's nothing wrong with that, but adopting a pose that's so insistently retro begins to seem less like a career-maker and more like a casualty.

Click here to watch the video, directed by John Paul Burgess & Scott West!

Who: Fronted by songwriter Craig Minowa and named after indigenous North American prophecies, Minnesota collective Cloud Cult blend songs of loss and redemption with environmental themes on their new album Feel Good Ghosts (Tea-Partying Through Tornadoes).

Sounds Like: The instrumental arsenal of the Arcade Fire mixed with the gentle electronic throb of the Postal Service. Feel Good Ghosts is the latest in a series of albums dealing with the death of Minowa's infant son Kaidin in 2002. "This album brings closure to a lot of the storylines involved in the grieving process and moves into a rebirth process," Minowa says. The album's running length and tracklisting is markedly shorter than previous releases because Minowa believes "people now have shorter attention spans."

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• The band is extremely environmentally conscious: They tour in a biodiesel van, record in a geothermal-powered studio and even printed their liner notes on recycled paper with nontoxic vegetable oils. "My parents drove it into my head that its important to focus on all the living things, humans, plants and animals," Minowa says, "That continued to reverberate through my life and became a natural process."

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Every week, Hit or Hype looks to wade through the buzz to determine which blog-favorite bands are the best of the bunch. This week: a few choice picks from the charts at BlogFreshRadio.

Lykke Li: First things first: it's pronounced "Lick-ee Lee." This Swedish vocalist has been gaining traction online for a while now, but enthusiasm skyrocketed after a series of sensational shows at South By Southwest. Her songs are terrifically coy, full of longing and hesitation. Take breakout hit "A Little Bit": the song consists of nothing much aside from a steady bass thrum and Li's fluttering voice, but the instant she starts skipping across that angelic chorus, it's curtains for your resistance. Verdict: HIT

The Mae Shi: This Los Angeles quartet has been kicking around for four years now but, like Lykke Li, they used this year's South By Southwest as a kind of self-contained tour, playing nearly 20 shows over the course of the week. Their music is blissfully chaotic, pulling equally from hardcore and schoolyard chants and computer-pop and built around gang-style choruses. They can be a bit obnoxious, but separate their songs from their demeanor, and there's more than enough memorable bedlam to satisfy. Verdict: HIT

Fleet Foxes: Recently signed to Seattle indie behemoth SubPop, this Washington quintet occupies that same intersection where '70s AM radio meets '00s indie rock (you can hear equal parts Neil Young and Rogue Wave in their music). There's nothing specifically wrong with Fleet Foxes, but haven't we had enough of cottony falsetto and twinkling acoustic guitars? The full-length could prove us wrong, but the songs on their EP are so wan that they're almost airless. Verdict: For now, we're saying HYPE

Who: Eli "Paperboy" Reed, a Boston-via-Delta South soul singer who, with his band the True Loves, conquered both street corners and punk clubs with a mix of grooved-out rave-ups and slow-burning ballads.

Sounds Like: Your favorite Motown and Stax Records livened up for the Winehouse era. On his new album Roll With You, "Paperboy" delivers classic soul and horn-heavy R&B soaked with the blues of Muddy Waters and Howlin' Wolf. "Southern music is really where it's at for me and it's really defined my sound," Reed says.

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Sounds Like: A platinum blonde synthesis of Britney Spears and the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' Karen O, except Swedish. With a team of songwriters and producers that include the Knife, the Teddybears and Kleerup, Robyn explains her new album is "pop music, but it's OK to like it." Singles like "With Every Heartbeat" and "Be Mine!" have already conquered European charts and seem poised to have similar luck here.

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