Faux Hoax - "Your Friends Will Carry You Home". Pastiche means many things. Okay so Faux Hoax's "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" sounds like a pastiche of the music of BARR. And Faux Hoax are themselves literally a pastiche - pasting together members of Gang of Four (Dave Allen), Menomena (Danny Seim), Tracker (John Askew) and in this case vocalist Adam Gnade. But life is a pastiche, an aggregation of moments, most of them arbitrary, disconnected. "You will get drunk / and you will get sad / and they will sit with you on grey curbs under yellow streetlights / and they'll let you talk / your friends will carry you home / your friends will sleep with you once and you'll think of it often." Nothing inherent connects the getting-drunk and the thinking-of-him-often - it's only in the throughline of consciousness, will, reflection, story (or of songwriting). "Your Friends Will Carry You Home" offers life as pastiche, yes, but also collage, bricolage, a loose and ragged line of drums. [MySpace/buy]

Slaraffenland - "Away". Forget "Meet and Greet", the lead leaky MP3 from Slaraffenland's upcoming We're On Your Side; it's this track, released on a Hometapes sampler, that makes the best case for pre-orders, for love-letters, for sending Slaraffenland postcards reading WHO ARE YOU?. Burnished, melancholy, optimistic and forsaken; like a roll of film running back and forth behind a projector's lens. Handclaps, clarinet, horns, drums, piano, noise - without the National's self-sabotraging ennui, without Broken Social Scene's grassy haze. Slaraffenland make that perfect music for when summer disappears, vanishing under a string of black clouds. [website/buy other releases]

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The winner of our Royal City contest was... Billy. Go to the entry to read the winning submissions and the very capable runners-up. Billy, we'll be in touch.