Fischerspooner

Started as an arch “media experiment” but grown increasingly earnest and powerful in time, Fischerspooner came up staging over-the-top shows loaded with ’80s theatrics and an ever-fashionable distrust of fashion. Elaborate gigs in the past have featured alternately hot and grotesque dancers, wind machines, silver confetti, bad lip-syncing, forcefully corny jokes, and a funny fetish for anticlimax. It all seemed to amount to little more than a sham, but then came Odyssey, a 2005 album filled with sturdy electro-pop and lots more introspection than might be expected (not to mention a song by Susan Sontag). The duo's long-in-the-works follow-up, Entertainment, came out in 2009.

Updated 12/17/2009