A decade ago, in an instantly notorious New Yorker piece called "A Paler Shade Of White," the critic Sasha Frere-Jones wrote sadly about how, as he saw it, indie rock had abandoned any sense of rhythm. Frere-Jones wrote about going to see Arcade Fire, when that band was at its most anthemic, and he wrote about what he didn't hear: "What I really wanted to hear, after a stretch of raucous sing-alongs, was a bit of swing, some empty space, and palpable bass frequencies -- in other words, attributes of African-American popular music." At the time, this idea was such a fight-starter that Rob Harvilla and I published an entire back-and-forth quasi-argument about it. Indie rock, as Frere-Jones heard it, had crawled up its own asshole, becoming unforgivably white and retreating into plodding insularity. Frere-Jones wanted something different, and I'm going to go ahead and guess that it wasn't Arcade Fire putting on giant papier-maché heads and glitter-ball uniforms to flirt with disco and Haitian carnival music. Maybe he was thinking of something like Sinkane.