Pete & the Pirates - Little Death 2008

Music journalist Rob Sheffield famously described New Zealand pop band the Clean (famously among Flying Nun enthusiasts, anyhow) as what the Velvets would sound like if they "had ever been deported to an island of 6 million sheep." Pete and the Pirates, then, are the Clean if Kilgour & co. forsook their homeland's livestock-freckled landscape for a thickly populated post-industrial UK burgh. "Ill Love", lead-off track on the Reading band's inaugural LP Little Death could, with its babbling bass, rattling guitar, and infectious-as-ringworm melody be Dunedin, 1981, all over again.

Any Kiwi bloodlines, however, are diverted through the now-hegemonic channels of 1990s American indie rock. So as much as the album sounds like a lost tape from the Boodle Boodle Boodle sessions, that's probably only because it rings with scrappy, melodic Pavementisms, amber-toned Yo La Tengo chords, and the genial chug of Superchunk's brake-free singles. "Come on Feet", one of the year's most potent earworms dangles a couple shallow hooks before plowing into a tent revival of maniacal handclapping and late-night, lager-sotted ooh-oohs. Singer/guitarist Tom Sanders previously recorded "Feet" (as well as "She Doesn't Belong to Me", n