Passion Pit: NPR Music Tiny Desk Concert

by STEPHEN THOMPSON Passion Pit s Michael Angelakos is a fussy sonic craftsman: A keyboardist and singer who started out working solo on his laptop, he now makes fizzily catchy electropop that orbits around monster hooks. He s not, in other words, the first musician you d associate with a strippeddown performance behind NPR Music s Tiny Desk, where Technicolor production tends to give way to unfiltered voices and bare instrumental essentials. But Angelakos, a gifted songwriter who s been publicly forthcoming and articulate about his battles with bipolar disorder and substance abuse, is no intellectual or musical lightweight. Angelakos clearly saw an opportunity in barebones arrangements of his bestknown songs his 2008 breakthrough single Sleepyhead and two hits from this year s Gossamer, Take a Walk and Carried Away that he couldn t explore with a full band. With only his own falsetto, an electric piano, and simple guitar lines from Passion Pit s Ian Hultquist, Angelakos gets to direct listene