Jasmine van den Bogaerde, a.k.a. Birdy, is a 15-year old singer and pianist from Lymington, England, who cracked the U.K. Top 20 with a cover of Bon Iver’s "Skinny Love" even more dolorous than the original. On her debut, she repeats the trick nine more times, warbling sad-sack versions of songs by the National, Fleet Foxes and other indie worthies. (There's also one original, "Without a Word.") The songs stick to a formula: tolling piano chords, an "atmospheric" beat and Birdy' s mewling. The result is the most boring music ever recorded bya teenager. No one so young should have such flawless taste in Quality Indie Rock, or sound this bummed out. 

Listen to Birdy:

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• Photos: Random Notes

“The Everchanging Spectrum of a Lie”

The opener off the Welsh group’s The Big Roar album was an epic one, but the band was worried that track had polarized fans. “The first song is eight minutes long,” Rhydian Dafydd, the Joy Formidable bassist, said. “If you did that in the Seventies people would be, ‘Whatever.’ You do it now, people think, ‘Holy s---!’ Some people think it’s the f---ing greatest track on the entire album, and some people think it’s f---ing boring. It’s that element of needing to challenge people.” The band concluded through the song’s lyrics that love was the “everchanging spectrum of a lie.”