Gotye is a Belgian-born Australian with a Portuguese-looking stage name that he pronounces like a Frenchman ("Gauthier"). That's just the beginning of the cosmopolitanism on his bracing U.S. debut. Gotye crams in a little bit of everything: Turkish drums, West African thumb pianos, a bass line constructed from samples of an instrument called the Winton Musical Fence. (It's an actual fence in the Australian outback.) He pours these sounds into songs that run from buzzy garage funk to psychedelic neo-exotica to electro Motown. The result: ingenious, oddly touching, refreshingly emphatic bedroom pop. Think Beck with less irony, and more, um, fence.

Listen to "Somebody That I Used to Know":

Related
• Photos: Random Notes

“IRM”

Fashioned to mimic the sound of a magnetic resonance imaging or MRI, "IRM" (the French designation for the brain scan) grew out of Gainsbourg’s love of the sound of the clickety-clack of medical machinery. The IRM album project also marked the fulfillment of two goals for the singer: to document a traumatic experience, and to record an album with Beck. Though her co-creator and producer didn’t necessarily know the details of her water-skiing accident and resulting cerebral hemorrhage (which lead to the IRM of the song's title), he somehow knew how to handle the material. "Beck had a way of guessing what I was thinking and feeling without me telling him," said Gainsbourg. "We never discussed these things explicitly."