This Brooklyn-via-Missouri band is engagingly (and sometimes confoundingly) mutable. Their 2007 debut Fort Nightly now sounds like a Latin-tinged version of Vampire Weekend's indie afro-pop. But Tito Puente had left the building by 2009's It's Frightening, a dark-angled indie-pop affair produced by Spoon's Britt Daniel. Their third album deepens the rockist intentions with a track called "Heavy Metal" and a sound that's like Spoon or Fountains of Wayne dipped in distracted keyboard/noise-guitar ooze – power pop dis-empowered. Stephen Patterson's lyrics don't amount to much beyond a forlorn, transitory moodiness but they fit the music's shadowy impermanence. When he sings "I'm not me" you can't help but (vaguely) wonder which not-him he'll be next. 

Listen To White Rabbit's "Heavy Metal":

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• Photos: Random Notes

“V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.”

Quite a few musicians have utilized initials for song titles -- Michael Jackson's "P.Y.T.," Abba's "S.O.S.," Donald Fagen's "I.G.Y.," etc. But the more curiously initialed tune has to be "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F.," short for "Voyage to the Land of the Freeze-Dried Godzilla Farts." Fishbone's original guitarist, Kendall Jones, explained to Rolling Stone, "When Norwood [Fisher] wrote it, he introduced it to the band saying, 'Man, I've been hearing about all these Nazi right-wing groups on the news saying the Holocaust was staged. So what if America said it never dropped two atom bombs on Japan, that it was actually Godzilla popping a couple off?' Only Norwood would come up with something that out." The same year "V.T.T.L.O.T.F.D.G.F." was released, the film Godzilla 1985 appeared in North America.