Ludo w/ There For Tomorrow, The Graduate and Tommy & The High Pilots

St. Louis pop-punks Ludo worked their way up from the bottom end of the Warped Tour roster and into the arms of commercial alternative rock playlists with the help of some major-label polish. Maroon 5 producer Matt Wallace gave the band’s 2008 Island Records debut You’re Awful, I Love You a modern-rock sheen befitting of a Killers album, and returned for the group’s new Prepare the Preparations, a party-pop record that lets the band’s adolescent imaginations run wild. That means heaps of Fountains of Wayne-styled quirk and songs about pirates, skeletons and robot-fighting cyborgs, as well as a single about sex as it only exists in the mind of a teenage boy, “Whipped Cream.”