The British band . . . And the Native Hipsters had possibly the most awkward band name ever, and their silliness didn’t stop with that. Their first single, 1981’s "There Goes Concorde Again," pivots around a jazz bass that doesn’t walk so much as trudge, note by exhausted note. Bells and faint, woozy guitar effects attempt with limited success to follow it where it’s meandering. Eventually, Nanette Greenblatt, a/k/a Blatt, starts rambling in a dazed sing-song about fat women walking up a hill and thin women walking down. "What do they do down there that results in such an increase in size and weight?" Her voice is squeaky and wobbly, the voice of a dithering matron, not a singer; her timing is distracted and irregular. Then she spies something she likes: "Oooo, look! There goes Concorde again! Oooo, look, there goes Concorde again!" She remarks on the Concorde’s appearance over and over. She pauses for a minute (as the bells and whooshes hover uncertainly) before repeating everything she’s said, from the beginning. Then she does it again, trying to understand what she’s just said.

. . . And the Native Hipsters put out two even more obscure singles, and that was all anybody heard from them for 20 years. So There Goes Concorde Again (Mechanically Reclaimed Music), issued under the only slightly less insane name . . . Native Hipsters, is like a bag of cookies falling out of the sky: a greatest-hits by a wonderfully bizarre band who never got to put out most of it the first time around. "Concorde," it turns out, wasn’t exactly a novelty song by their standards; it was standard operating practice. Their songs don’t exactly have hooks, though usually there are sequences of notes or words that the band keep revisiting from different angles. Blatt’s tremulous voice is the impenetrable mystery that holds together . . . And the Native Hipsters’ lyrical and musical non-sequiturs, and sometimes they respond to it as if she were a singer in the usual sense, as when the men chime in behind her: "Muscle power, muscle power/Let’s try to understand." Once, in "Ten Small Men with Buckets," they hit a straightforward post-punk groove, and Blatt responds by chanting something about how "it IS eVEning in THE fifTEENTH cenTUry," sounding as if she had her eyes squinted tightly shut and her fingers in her ears.

The new Glasgow band Life Without Buildings have their own take on the idea of fronting a band with a non-singer. Where . . . And the Native Hipsters’ music is willfully eccentric, though, the instrumental sound of LWB’s remarkable debut, Any Other City (DC Baltimore 2012), is almost pugnaciously normal: fleet, crisp, edgy guitar rock in the lineage that starts with the Velvet Underground’s Loaded and passes through the Feelies and Versus. With an ordinary vocalist, LWB would be a solid example of the VU-inspired genre. But Sue Tompkins is nothing like an ordinary vocalist. Her voice is even less the voice of a pop star than Blatt’s: high and thin, heavily accented, cracking with stress, arresting and unlovely. Tompkins often sounds as if she were so angry that she’d lost control of language altogether and were just letting words pour out of her and fly back in and pour out again. "The right stuff/The right stuff," she declares (or accuses) in "PS Exclusive." "Monday exclusive, Tuesday exclusive, Wednesday exclusive!"

Tompkins is fascinated by the rhythms of ordinary speech and the rhythms of the band, and the ways they can be made to fit together. She almost never speaks a phrase just once; she grabs it in her mouth and worries it like a dog, repeating it and recasting its emphasis and rubbing at it until it ignites from the friction. "Looking in your eyes, I’m looking in your eyes, I’m looking in your eyes," she chirrups furiously on Any Other City’s peak, the scalding "New Town," gradually twisting the way she pronounces it back and forth, so that half the time it comes out "looking in your arse." And sometimes the torrent of language resolves into something unexpectedly gorgeous. "Sorrow," a musical cousin of the Velvets’ "Femme Fatale," finds her rehearsing something in her head, perhaps a break-up letter: "Eyes like lotus leaves/No, not even like/Lotus leaves." Then she says it again, and again, trying to understand what she’s just said.