Following a hype train can be a dangerous thing. Follow the right one and you can end up discovering something new and revitalizing, like a Surfer Blood or a Tallest Man on Earth. Follow the wrong one and you could spend hours convincing yourself to like the newest Black Kids CD because, well, dozens of bloggers can’t be wrong! When precocious Long Beach young ‘uns Avi Buffalo released their anticipated debut earlier this year, they had all the prerequisites for their own hype machine: hot single(s), Pitchfork approval, a fairly surprising rating on Metacritic (82!). I listened to one song, judged them as an early Shins knock-off and promptly forgot about them. That’s the problem with hype - too much of it and you go into the listen expecting something utterly mind-blowing, something that will live up to an almost mythic status all this blogosphere talk builds up yet rarely matches. Avi Buffalo is not mind-blowing, nor is it even one of the best debuts I’ve heard this year. Simply put, it’s great, solid indie-pop music, music that merely portends the arrival of a band that has more potential than most their age and some pretty slick songwriting chops.

Oh how I love Milano! It is such an incredible city, the vibe is just incredible. Everywhere you look there are fashionable people walking around like living, breathing advertisements. For Spring 2011, Etro showcased its runway in a perfectly green environment, evoking those beautiful patterns that seem so natural to them. They reminded me of McQueen’s previous to last collection where all the colors of the rainbow came together.

My most cherished bands have always appealed to me not only with a sense of timelessness but with a feeling of placelessness as well, as if they could be from anywhere or, even better, if they evoke the sound of a region or era without coming off as copycats or sycophantic rubes. By only their second album, Delta Spirit is already rapidly becoming one of my favorite unsigned bands, thanks largely to their ability to pull off just that aura of sounding like a region whose music I unabashedly love (the South) while hailing from a place I’d love to visit (San Diego). These are two dots one would likely not be able to connect listening to the band - singer Matthew Vasquez’s whiskey-soaked voice calls to mind the Allman Brothers Band or the cracked rasp of Walkmen vocalist Hamilton Leithauser, while the band pumps out a genuinely raucous Southern-fried blues rock that has matured well since their 2008 debut. History From Below is just what a sophomore effort should be, equal parts a step forward and eleven songs stronger, all the red-blooded rock and soulful vitality of their debut while expanding on their trademark Americana sound.

It’s not easy to create a distinctive brand of music that the everyday listener can categorically describe as “yours,” but that’s what Brooklyn-based duo Ratatat have managed to pull off since their 2004 debut. That combination of Mike Stroud’s signature high-pitched guitar sound and Evan Mast’s fluid bass lines and break-beat drum rhythms is practically a trademark, having that rare ability to be heard and immediately attributed to these electro/house/indie rock/whatever practitioners even if one is barely familiar with them. It’s even tougher to sustain that kind of success in an instrumental genre, where ideas fly past their expiration dates even quicker than usual and bands with an innovative sound soon find those same ideas turning on them, sapped of originality and joie de vivre.

New Pornographers frontman Carl Newman recently told Pitchfork in an interview that “sometimes the songs are definitely about something, but sometimes I just like the sound of things.” If there’s a better logic behind the long and impeccably catchy career of this indie-pop “supergroup,” I can’t find it. From 2000’s Mass Romantic to Together, the band has churned out some of the best, most intricate indie pop this side of Belle & Sebastian, but with a hell of a lot more muscle than most of their contemporaries. And it’s never been about just what exactly Newman or Neko Case or Dan Bejar have been trying to say, but rather how they’ve said it: in Case’s throaty, powerful vocals; through Bejar’s quirky, avant-pop compositions; via Newman’s distinctive brand of hyper-charged, sugar-rush pop. It’s fitting, then, that the appropriately named Together shows the band working more in sync with each other than ever before, following more along the softer side of things that Challengers explored but beefing up the hooks that that record so often lacked.

It’s almost as if all those nine-minute-plus compositions, sung in a nonsense tongue and eventually swelling to musical and emotional heights that practically exploded with a mix of tension and joy, have been compressed into the perfect four-minute pop song. It’s still Jonsi Birgisson, it’s still a vast palette of sounds, and it’s still that same Sigur Ros message of love and inner peace . . . except with none of the restraint that other members of Iceland’s most famous band had on Birgisson in the past. Go is undoubtedly Jonsi, a being of such unrelenting optimism and jubilant celebration that he apparently has rainbows shooting out of the back of his head. It’s not really surprising, considering the increasingly poppy direction Sigur Ros was heading in, but here the best attributes of Sigur Ros and Jonsi’s effervescent personality have been magnified through a multichromatic array of sounds and feelings. That post-rock standard of tension and release has been transformed, filtered through the (relatively) strict dimensions of a pop song and made into something that just wants you to stand up and be filled with joy at everything around you.

The first step to accepting Justin Bieber is getting past his age. It’s everywhere on this record, impossible to ignore, and, frankly, if Bieber was simply a twenty-something white boy with an R&B fetish, My World 2.0 would be easy to acknowledge as a disposable adult contemporary record in the vein of latter-day Backstreet Boys. But Bieber is just following in the proud tradition of plenty of vapid pop stars before him, from the Mickey Mouse club to Miley Cyrus, and although his voice stubbornly refuses to conjure up images of anyone older than thirteen, it would be shortsighted and irresponsible to write off Bieber as a flash in the pan novelty.

Hot Tub Time Machine is a comedy that follows two friends Nick (Craig Robinson) and Adam (John Cusack) as they try to boost the morale of their suicidal friend, Lou (Rob Corddry), by planning a ski trip to the same resort they used to frequent in their heyday. They drag along Adam’s depressed nephew Jacob (Clark Duke), who prefers life in the virtual word over the real world.