This month, Radio Silence takes a break from its usual mandate of highlighting free, legal online music and instead examines a recent troubling trend in indie rock, recounts one of the best prom stories ever told and looks at yet another failed American war. Or not. It’s still actually all about the freest, most legal music the Internet has to offer. So, without any further ado….

The Rosebuds – Sweet Beats, Troubled Sleep (www.mergerecords.com/store/store_detail.php?catalog_id=536)

The phenomenon of the indie rock remix album has been a largely dubious one to date. Too many of these reinterpretations of the latest flash-in-the-pan act come off as shoddy attempted cash-ins that aren’t worth hearing more than once. There have been a few glimpses of quality, such as Bloc Party’s Silent Alarm Remixed, but most unceremoniously sprint their way to the forgotten shelves of bargain bins and used record stores.

The Rosebuds, however, get the indie rock remix album right with Sweet Beats, Troubled Sleep, a track-by-track reinterpretation of 2007’s Night of the Furies. Firstly, they score points for giving it away for free, which is a marked improvement from having to pay $15 to hear a bunch of people who shouldn’t be behind the mixing board chop up songs that didn’t need to be remixed in the first place. More importantly, though, Sweet Beats is a worthwhile listen. The various remixers provide tasteful tweaks to Furies’ sound without sacrificing its dark atmosphere or organic flow.

Highlights include Fire Hazard’s take on “I Better Run,” which throws a pulsating bass line and machine-gun drums underneath Ivan Howard and Kelly Crisp’s stellar vocals, and Portastatic’s version of “Silence by the Lakeside,” which turns the original into a Latin lullaby with ghostly strings.

James Pants – Music from the Forest (www.stonesthrow.com/podcast/stonesthrow_33_mftf_jamespants.mp3)

Imagine going to an after-grad party where the head of a well-known and respected label is DJing. Being that it’s an affair celebrating your high school accomplishments, and the discourse is thick with all the great things you’ll do in the future, chances are you feel pretty confident. So what do you do? You waltz up to the label head and ask to take him out record shopping. He accepts, and ends up so impressed by you that he offers you an internship and eventually a record deal. Sounds pretty unlikely, right? Well, that’s allegedly how James Pants got his in at Stones Throw Records.

To whip up excitement for his forthcoming debut album, Pants shows off his musical taste on Music from the Forest, a half-hour hodgepodge of awesome that allows Kraftwerk, Serge Gainsbourg and The Seeds to stand alongside Too Short, De La Soul and Cybotron. The mix is an absolute left-field blast as seemingly incongruous elements merge perfectly. It goes a long way to explaining how Pants was able to impress Stones Throw head Peanut Butter Wolf enough to turn a trip to the record store into a job.

The War on Drugs – Barrel of Batteries (www.scjag.com/mp3/sc/SC179.zip)

With a name like The War on Drugs, readers could be excused for dismissing this Philadelphia group as dopey stoner metal or irritating freak-folk, but they’d be missing out on a simple pleasure. Despite what their name suggests, The War on Drugs are more influenced by Highway 61 Revisited-era Bob Dylan than Kyuss or Devandra Banhart. In fact, the band could be criticized for drawing a bit too liberally from Dylan’s bag of tricks as even the vocals on Barrel of Batteries carry a familiar nasal timbre. Fortunately, the songs on this EP are strong enough that it doesn’t matter. Despite being familiar, the simple roots-rock and emotionally resonant lyrics at play on Batteries sound refreshing and would do so even without the subtle psychedelic hints, atmospheric segues and auxiliary drum machines.