Click to Listen to Cut Copy's Zonoscope

Australian synth-pop quartet Cut Copy do the Eighties eerily well. Too well, in fact. Cue up the band's third album, and you find yourself playing spot-the-influence. (That verse? So Depeche Mode. The chorus? Pure O.M.D.) Zonoscope opens with the New Order-like throb of "Need You Now," followed quickly by "Take Me Over," a spongy bite of Thompson Twins-style pop-funk. It's impressive ventriloquism, and the songs are catchy. But the lovelorn sentiments are generic, and singer Dan Whitford's baritone drone adds little to the proceedings. Relief comes when Cut Copy look back further: "Where I'm Going" adds some Spectorian grandeur to the band's drum machine clatter. Then there's "Sun God" — a 15-minute-long psych-synth opus whose delicious silliness almost wipes away the memory of the band's slavish revivalism.

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“Too Close”

Next was formed in Minneapolis when the uncle of Terry "T-Low" and Raphael "Tweety" Brown, who was a gospel choir director, introduced the brothers to Robert Lavelle "R.L." Huggar. Sounds of Blackness singer Ann Nesby groomed the R&B group before handing them over to Naughty by Nature's KayGee, who wrote and produced "Too Close." The idea for the song was sparked "from a conversation we had with several girls at a nightclub," explained T-Low. "It's talking about the club scene, with guys getting out of hand and the female telling him to back up, asking, 'What are you doing?'"