Apparently nomads are favoring some sort of newfangled abstract art tents these days.

This week’s New Music Monday is perhaps one of the “newest” I’ve done yet, in terms of newness to me. We were out on the road somewhere in Northern Ireland (1 week left on this trip) and this song came on the radio. Now to be frank, the state of Irish radio as best as I can tell is not a terribly good one. There are a couple of NPR-ish stations that broadcast traditional Irish music, along with all-Gaelic commentary, and those are great when you’re in the mood for it, but aside from that there are mostly stations playing either current Top 40 dance-y music or ’80s British New Wave hits. We’ve been occasionally pleased to hear something like the Specials or some similar great songs that you don’t hear much on American radio but that were hits here. But overall, there’s nothing like the variety that American radio offers, at least when you live near an urban area.

So, to get to my point, when the song that I ultimately learned was “Default” by Django Django came on, it stood out like a cow in a field of sheep. (And I should note that we did indeed see such an occurrence a couple of times, where a single cow was hanging out with a bunch of sheep, or in one case a horse with a bunch of cows, and they did indeed stand out as unusual — so I can vouch for the metaphor being accurate.) It came on like a lost band from the Elephant 6 Collective, or even more accurately, like a song I’d never heard from the Lilys. I love the guitar sound and sparse beat and singing, and the twist of the injected electro-effects actually works very well. At the time, I was dismayed to have the song go unannounced by the DJ, so I had to just jot down a few lyrics to look up later next time I was at my laptop. (I would have used the great Shazam app on my phone, but I didn’t want to deal with international calling/data packages.)

Fortunately, my lyric snippets did the trick, and I found the song. I think I’ve seen the band’s name mentioned a couple of times in the U.S., but have completely missed hearing anything by them. I haven’t had a chance to check out their entire January 2012 self-titled debut album that this comes from yet, but it’s high on my musical priority list when I get back. I’m hoping there’s more where this came from — but if not, this is still one of my favorite songs of the year to date.