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 electro-pop that orbits around monster hooks. He's not, in other words, the first musician you'd associate with a stripped-down 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 bare-bones arrangements of his best-known 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, Angelako