Poptimist

Hockey is made up of four good-looking young men that often sport facial hair and are from the great Pacific patch of indie rock, Portland, Oregon. As of this writing, they are on tour with Portugal. The Man, and they play the kind of accessible meat-and-potatoes electro pop that nobody in their right mind would find even slightly abrasive.

They have enough of a new wave spring in their step to keep them from being too square to the ears of the folks in their demographic, and they even still paint

their own pleasingly amateurish, D.I.Y.-style record covers. 

The title of Hockey’s self-released album-turned-part of Capitol Records 2009 roster is “Mind Chaos.” Founding members Ben Grubin and Jeremy “Jerm” Reynolds coined the phrase “mind chaos” to describe the happenings in a University of Redlands course called “The Great Remembering: Evolving Beyond the Pathology of Modernity.”

This music isn’t going to make your head explode with a million valid revelations, but in the same vein as LCD Soundsystem, it’ll probably make you want to dance, just like founding members Ben and Jerm intended.