For a while, I couldn't understand why I liked electronic music. For a while before that, I didn't.

It hit me out of nowhere. Perhaps like you, kind reader, I was lounging with my wine and cheese and Decemberists, soaking in their Baroque strains and looking up words like "bagatelle" in the dictionary. Before I knew it I was blissfully lost in a blender of blips and bloops and lots and lots of fuzz.

And like that, a bookish, lyric-minded civilian was made a loopy marionette. I began craving more and more intricately layered drums, bass, synth, fuzz, frazz, floop, and thump. My head nodding increased 600%, particularly while driving.

Berkeley, California's Out Hud and London's Hot Chip approach this type of music differently, but their similarities bring out the best of the genre.

The opening salvos of Let Us Never Speak of It Again and The Warning mirror each other; the bands flex their sonic muscles hard, spewing among the most saturated moments on their respective albums. "This Just In," the 28-second intro on the Out Hud record, is like an action movie trailer. Within ten seconds they hurl out a breadth of sounds, from fuzzed to choked to metallic to organic. Then the track combusts under its own weight in an ecstatic human scream.

Hot Chip's "Careful" opens with a few seconds of Enya serenity, setting a launching pad for the blippy drum-and-bass beat backed by kick-drum explosions and human "Yeahs!" Although it's actually part of the first full song, Hot Chip uses the same intro method as Out Hud — a flash-bomb opening assault that quickly settles into the record's most accessible vocal hooks.

Those first 30 seconds are really what a first-time listener reacts to — it's like the sparks that flew out when Pandora's Box was opened, and everyone just stared and said, "Oh shit."

But most of us, hard-wired in pop music, still need a human voice to anchor songs. Even if it's crooning nonsense, just another instrument in the mix, I like to have something to mouth along to. And so do music video directors. Take Out Hud's "Old Nude." "They said you were very nice, but..." comes a repeating lyric. The melody line is low and accusatory, while focused drums help the music sound equally menacing. But during the snub, "But if you don't believe...," you can hear the mood lighten to carefree with sparse, plinky strings as the singer snickers at the subject of the song.