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.

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. Verdict: HIT.

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. Verdict: HIT in person, HYPE on record.

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. Verdict: HYPE.