New-School Synth-Pop, from Tweemo to Crabcore

3OH!3
There must be a glacial reserve of crunk juice frozen somewhere in the Colorado mountains — what else would explain Denver’s standing as the world capital of crunk-core? 3OH!3, whose name references Denver’s area code, debuted in 2007 with a lo-fi fusion of swaggering raps, hard rock and bleepy electro. Their 2009 album, Want, is bigger, bolder and bawdier, with beats that sound more like the real deal, and hooks with the stamina of a keg-stand champion. Like Brokencyde, they wear their brutishness on their sleeves: “Shush girl, shut your lips/ Do the Helen Keller, and talk with your hips.” No wonder the brazen Ke$ha (rhymes with “hesher”) tapped them for her single “Blah Blah Blah.”

LMFAO
LMFAO’s M.O. is encoded in the Los Angeles duo’s very name, and the music is made to match: loud, brash and cheerfully irreverent. Dirty South-derived hip-hop forms the core of their sound, with its booming 808 bass drums and ravey synth stabs, but if these guys are O.G. anything, it’s more like Original Goofball, gleefully tweaking convention with a cartoonish fusion of crunk and nu-electro. Their strongest claim to credibility is, ironically, the thing that most makes them impossible to take seriously: members Redfoo and Sky Blu are, respectively, the son and nephew of Motown founder Berry Gordy.

Hellogoodbye
Huntington Beach’s Hellogoodbye are, in many ways, classic SoCal pop-punks — distant descendants of the Descendents, if you will. But the definition of punk has clearly changed considerably in the past couple of decades. Along with slash ‘n’ burn guitars and arrangements inspired by Jon Brion, Zombies! Aliens! Vampires! Dinosaurs! And More! features vocoders and Auto-Tune, drum machines and disco beats, even synthesizer pyrotechnics worthy of Yes. It’s pretty ambitious stuff — and, frankly, far more talented than just about anything else on this page.

Brokencyde
It was probably only a matter of time before someone fused screamo and crunk, but Brokencyde aren’t just some Hollywood elevator pitch. These kids from out-of-the-way Albuquerque were born late enough to have experienced alt-rock, rave and hip-hop well after their initial booms, and they go after their influences with an intensity that could only be described as Oedipal. Crunk and Euro-trance make for the unlikely foundations of their sound, but it also makes a certain kind of sense: Southern hip-hop producers have been stealing ravers’ riffs for years now. As for the nu-metal guitars, death-growl vocals and I.C.P.-style theatrics, they come with the territory: Brokencyde are the inevitable product of America’s festival landscape — the muddy, anything-goes mosh pit where the hip-hop, dance and rock stages meet. The Auto-Tuned vocals and Day-Glo getups are just a matter of course.

Brokencyde are putting it mildly, though, with the title of their debut album, I’m Not a Fan but the Kids Like It. These dudes inspire serious vitriol, and it’s not just a generational thing; most of it comes from within the scene. (My entirely unscientific polling suggests that those most fascinated with and amused by the band are 30-somethings who long ago severed their ties to any kind of scene whatsoever.) Statistical fun fact: Googling “Brokencyde” returns approximately 843,000 hits; adding “apocalypse” to your query narrows it down to 180,000. In other words, one in five web pages dedicated to the band links their existence to the end of the world. I’m not a betting man, but those odds make me nervous.

Attack Attack!
I remember thinking it was weird to hear Justice mixing techno with Rage Against the Machine’s “Killing in the Name.” But that was nothing compared to Attack Attack!, who combine grindcore with trance-infused dance pop, and without any apparent sense of irony. The Ohio band (not to be confused with Wales’ Attack! Attack!, who probably use their extra exclamation point to cudgel people who mistake them for their Ohio rivals) positively thrives on contradiction, alternating blood-curdling screams with beaming, Auto-Tuned choruses, and flipping between Christian lyrics and a cover of Katy Perry’s “I Kissed a Girl.” They’re also, apparently, a genre of one: crabcore, a sarcastic sobriquet that riffs on the musicians’ squat, bow-legged stances. How can you be mad at that? For those about to crab-walk, we salute you.

Breathe Carolina
Recording at home with GarageBand, Denver’s Breathe Carolina debuted on MySpace in 2007 and enjoyed a spectacularly rapid ascent, racking up 13 million page views by the end of 2009. Hello Fascination combines hardcore-tinged guitars and drums with dance beats and trance keyboards, offsetting screamo growls with an Auto-Tuned croon. For evidence of Morrissey’s influence on tweemo, try this sample lyric: “I want you to know I’ve been in your apartment/ This is the instrument I split your head apart with.”

LIGHTS
Born Valerie Poxleitner, this child of missionary parents took to music early on, first setting Bible verses to chords and soon recording her own original material: home-produced songs falling somewhere between Euro-dance and the Hot 100. Her 2009 debut album, The Listening, injects Owl City’s doe-eyed brand of electropop with a combined dose of Hilary Duff and Tiesto. The Juno Award winner’s image is decidedly girl-next-door, but it remains to be seen if that will work in her favor: one look at her cute-as-a-button press photos suggests that Lady Gaga could eat her for breakfast (and still have room left over for Brokencyde).

Breathe Electric
Not to be confused with Breathe Carolina, Illinois’ Breathe Electric released his debut album in the summer of 2008; this year he and his backing band (plus, presumably, a crew of stylists tasked with keeping their lanky, blowdried tresses mussed just so) bring his relentlessly peppy synth-pop to the Warped Tour. Prediction: charmingly anachronistic references to Latin freestyle will go completely unnoticed.

Nickasaur!
Nickasaur! writes songs so saccharine, he makes Owl City taste like black pepper in curdled milk. (Sample lyric: “You’re supercalifragilisticexpialidociously cute/ Sweeter than a 12-pack of Juicy Fruit.”) The title of his debut album, Rawr!, references slang from a scene called Scene, as do his ample bangs. (If you’re still unclear about what a hipster is, don’t even bother losing sleep over Scene: it’s like meta-, metastasized. Or, as Edgar Allen Poe might put it, if he had a guest column on Hipster Runoff: “Is all that we really seem/ But a meme/ Within a meme?”) Oddly, Nickasaur! is given to chaotic drum intros reminiscent of Kid606’s spastic Ritalin minuets. Perhaps Playskool could introduce a co-branded product line: Nickasaur!’s My First Breakcore.

Kill Paradise
This Denver duo recently signed to BreakSilence Records, the same label that Brokencyde calls home, but there’s nothing too threatening about The Second Effect, a peppy album full of major-key synth arpeggios and close-harmonized Auto-Tune. New Order and Alphaville are obvious stylistic influences, though you wonder if Kill Paradise know that. With their CD available exclusively at Hot Topic, their Scene cred is riding high as an Eraserhead frightwig.