After a five-year hiatus, Belaire return with their lushly realized sophomore LP, Resonating Symphony. It was most certainly worth the wait. more ›

When the band Frank Smith collectively pulled up their Boston stakes and landed in Austin back in 2007, the group fit right in. Their first local release, Heavy Handed Peace And Love, boasted a number of Texas sensibilities: loping rhythms, pedal steel guitar, and the twangy voice of lead singer Aaron Sinclair—in other words, not bad for Northeastern transplants. But since then, the group has looked to break out of that easy fit, and each subsequent record has remade the Frank Smith formula. They’ve hit a sweet spot with the upcoming release of their eighth album, Before You Were Born, which gets its own party tonight at the Mohawk. more ›

More than three and half years since the Great Recession began and two years since the start of a so-called recovery, the paucity of music that overtly addresses or in any way touches upon the all too common personal difficulties and stalled lives that, in part, characterize these times is rather astonishing. After enduring more than a few of their own trials and tribulations, Howth has released a beautiful pop-folk album that artfully illustrates common struggles, small pleasures and wistful longings for things once so commonplace that they were often taken for granted. Most significantly, it showcases Carl Creighton’s masterful songwriting skills, the likes of which have become all too rare in indie music. more ›

Early fans of Death Cab for Cutie/ Ben Gibbard's vocal stylings rejoice - Hospital Ships is here to reignite that passion for pop you once felt. Led by former Shearwater member Jordan Geiger and accompanied by a gaggle of talented musicians (including Shearwater's Jonathan Meiburg and Thor Harris), sophomore album Lonely Twin offers a much denser and instrumentally interesting experience than the essentially solo Geiger first release Oh, Ramona. The song "Galaxies" is where the comparison to DCFC really shines through, but there are many intricacies that allow these songs to stand on their own. Distortion and pitch bending lend a lo-fi quality to a well-recorded mix, tying back in to the sound that started Hospital Ships while allowing it to grow up and evolve. Released on Graveface Records June 7, the group recently performed some of the new songs on the ACL Satellite Sessions, available streaming here, to hear for yourself. more ›

If you’re playing metal in 2011 and not willing to be self-effacing or to court derision, then you’re just not being real with yourself. Metal has always been a spectacle; there have always been people - artists and listeners - who have taken metal too seriously. Some, like the Parent’s Music Resource Center in ‘80s, have set out to destroy lives and livelihoods, not to mention throw a wet blanket on some hellish good times. Fortunately, there are always a few bands who continue to expand the boundaries of the genre. With the release of their second album, Aesthethica, Liturgy has become one of the most innovative and proficient metal bands to enter the slipstream of indie music. more ›

It will take you about eight seconds into your first listen of Colour Trip, the debut full-length from local shoegaze-revivalists Ringo Deathstarr, to identify the band’s number one influence. It’s Loveless. My Bloody Valentine’s 1991 masterpiece was the big bang for the sound that became known as shoegaze - effects-laden, heavily-textured guitar pop with airy vocals and layers of noise, the aural equivalent of squinting into the sun. Colour Trip bears all the accoutrements of a classic shoegaze album, with pulsating reverb, squalling, seasick guitars and pummeling percussion adding up to a sonic maelstrom. There are quality melodies ghosting around the amplified fuzz, too, which serves as a reminder that Ringo Deathstarr, like their sonic progenitors, are something like a pop band at heart. more ›

Just a few days after summer ended, White Denim surprised just about everybody by releasing a 12-song collection culled from their summer spent in the studio. The album, titled Last Day of Summer, is available to download for free from the band's website, though donations are suggested. According to an accompanying note by guitarist and frontman James Petralli, the band doesn't consider the album their third LP - that's being wrapped up right now - but rather a "summer retreat from [their] ongoing work on the third full length." Perhaps it's not surprising, then, that these songs show off a totally different side of White Denim. The approach is more casual and free; it feels like the band is stretching their chops, cutting loose, just playing for fun. That jovial abandon radiates through each of these tracks, and the music certainly doesn't suffer for it. more ›

Even with only an earlier EP under their belt, The Authors' first full length release Get Haunted is a formidable thirty-eight minute force. The album was tracked at Elmwood Recording Studio in Dallas with Grammy winning producer/engineer Stuart Sikes at the helm, and, out just in time for Halloween, Get Haunted scares up some quality tunes. more ›

Pink Nasty’s pretty outstanding sophomore record Mold the Gold was a strong statement of purpose. The songs were smartly composed and often pretty, but they reveled in Nasty’s (Sara Beck) love of sick jokes, life crossroads that lead into dead ends, and romantic trauma. With her new self-titled record, Pink Nasty dives further into the fuzzy guitar pop that so strongly marked her last record, with songs that are even more referential to the bands she has loved, and to the perils and pleasures (but mostly perils) of dealing with love and lust. more ›

Sound is in love with Regina Spektor. There’s nothing it won’t let her do. She’s made her mouth into a synthesizer, morphed her lips into a kazoo-trumpet hybrid, made heartbeats and drumsticks their own instruments, rocked hard with an unamped electric guitar, and put a piano bridge in the middle of a punk song. At first, you might not recognize that adventurous spirit on Spektor’s most recent album, Far. Listen again. more ›

Nowadays we’re so used to the ubiquitous warmed-over nod to past pop forms that Swift’s out-and-out motown or vaudeville sounds can be bracing, especially encountered back-to-back as they are laid out here. But they are also transporting, straight lines back to Abbey Road and Tin Pan Alley. Even under the perhaps unfair impression that Richard Swift is merely playing Dr. Frankenstein on this album, we want to hear more from the monster he’s sewn together using lost limbs of disparate pop genres. more ›

The pressure’s been building behind Dave Longstreth’s meandering Dirty Projectors project for the last few years, and 2007’s excellent if somewhat mystifying Black Flag covers/“reimaginations” album Rise Above brought listener intrigue to a new high—could it be that idiosyncratic oddball and Yale dropout Longstreth was growing nearer to accessibility? It seems so, and, really, the career trajectory here is not at all unlike that of fellow 2009 darlings Animal Collective, in that both started out hyper-obscure and intentionally abrasive, with an emphasis on willful experimentation and defiance of gratification, only to slowly but surely move towards a refined confidence in heightened normalcy. And that’s not to suggest that either outfit has shirked their uniqueness; they instead have learned to channel their innovation in a way that produces complete songs that human beings will actually enjoy, rather than just fragmentary attacks on musical reason. For Dirty Projectors, that turning point is embodied in the sparkling Bitte Orca. more ›

Steve Garcia has a reputation in town, but not in the skanky sense - he's a familiar face at your local I Luv Video, and he has already made a name for himself rock-wise in the apparently defunct Black Lipstick. Stepping into the spotlight with Diagonals, Garcia has traded up from the catchy but often transparent licks of his past project and into a full-force psychedelic machine. more ›

Throughout its thirty-nine minutes, Actor demonstrates a continued development of depth and breadth for Annie Clark, as these songs are meaty in comparison to previous work. Also, the apparent disconnect between the sweetness of her purposely-exposed face (plastering it on the cover of an album is a good way for people to know what you look like, jsyk) and the often dark and foreboding subject matter is more present than ever—rarely does a song go by without something at least mildly disturbing to pull from the lyrics. Add on top of that a full-band willingness to rock out, with even occasional hints of Kraut to boot, and songs like the brutal “Marrow” and the propulsive “Actor Out of Work” are for the first time possible. But the big thing here is that asking a half dozen people which song on the album is their favorite may very well result in a half dozen different answers. more ›

Peter Bjorn and John, blessed as they can be, have for a while appeared to be dodging accountability for the unexpected leap into international fame caused by “Young Folks,” and that song’s ubiquity (think radio, think television, think McDonald’s, think JC Penny), put the somewhat awkward north-Euros into a spotlight their personalities weren’t quite prepared for. To PB&J’s benefit, they haven’t fallen asleep at the experimental wheel, as their clever post-Writer’s Block misdirection Seaside Rock (a slight make-up for Peter Moren’s hideously bland solo album) wandered through instrumental and field recording reels, thus refusing to whet the appetite of a legion of pop-fanatics desperate for another tune to whistle into the ground. But now, with Living Thing, it's time to pay up. more ›

There's something surely intriguing when the star-crossed "supergroup" label becomes affixed to three guys who just a decade ago would have found it nearly impossible to develop a following in the first place, let alone such independent fan bases that when they get together to screw off in the studio it elicits all sorts of anticipatory glee-shouts. Yet in these internet times, musicians such as Spencer Krug, Carey Mercer, and Dan Bejar do have a niche in which to survivably produce some of the most intricate and conceptually demanding albums of the last few years, and even afford themselves the spare time to work on the Swan Lake project, a project best described as what happens when three mad scientists meet at a mad scientist convention and decide to be mad scientists together. more ›

Marissa Nadler’s built a nice little scaffolding of critical acclaim from her last couple albums, and during this time she’s admirably filled the gap between the likes of Josephine Foster and Joanna Newsom on the ethereal side, and St. Vincent and Feist on the populist side. Her airy, controlled approach is on display once again with Little Hells, the excellently titled follow-up to 2007’s Songs III: Bird on the Water. more ›

Mirah surely still has that stunning voice: alternately coy and seductive, delightfully expressive, and always captivating. And it works very, very well here when she’s not cribbing melodies from her earlier albums, and is utilizing the strengths—bombast, playfulness, youthful energy, a variety of influences, and big production—that made her other albums so eminently replayable. If only those strengths weren’t so often forgotten here, only to be replaced with something a little too coffee shop to satisfy. more ›

The album starts off with a couple stunners: “Pieces of You” builds a meditative dirge, a la early Akron/Family, from a nicely woven tapestry of repetitive percussion, and truly, while the entire song is almost absent of variation off its initial theme, it probably could have gone on for a couple more minutes without much complaint. “Fangela,” on the other hand, uses a more standard song structure and is almost strikingly poppy, while still confounding the listener a bit with interpretive possibility, and it’s these two tone-setting tracks plus first single “Tunnelvision” (which may or may not be the album’s best track), that make Here We Go Magic seem destined to take people’s minds off Grizzly Bear and Animal Collective for one godforsaken minute. more ›

After leading off somewhat inauspiciously, the album kicks into gear with the continuously enjoyable “I Want Some More,” a clattering, fuzzy, Doors-y joyride that plays best played loud, and it’s only then that it becomes clear that something more than a toss-off solo album is at hand. And really, it’s as if someone has blown new life into Auerbach, as the freedom to explore beyond the confines of the two-piece liberates him to return to what made him a talent in the first place: rugged vocals, entrancing guitar work, and an ability to write a memorable tune. more ›

Carey Mercer's Blackout Beach project gives him the opportunity to go, without checks and balances, absolutely apeshit. And that’s exactly what he does with Skin of Evil, a deliciously murky concept album built around Donna, the notion of the perfect woman, and her past and present lovers, most of them woefully scorned, yet loving her nonetheless—on a scaffolding of chiming but stark guitar and otherwise complementary instrumentation and backup vocals, rarely is an album elevated so greatly via a close inspection of the lyric sheet. Listen after listen, it’s astounding that a man could make such a romantic album seem so utterly startling. more ›

While Ward's recent career trajectory culminated in a back seat position behind Zooey Deschanel’s recognizable face for much of the past year, Hold Time sees Ward again taking the front of the stage, and one listen to the album demonstrates that while all the hullabaloo may have changed others’ impression of him, his approach remains comfortably much the same. And in terms of his career, that means Hold Time is a pretty solid listen. more ›

It seems like a bad idea to acknowledge to a potential significant other, right up front, that you are, in fact, the backup and not the starter—after all, shouldn’t you let your personality pave the way for you, and not your second-bestness? But Team B didn’t allow their sometimes charming nature to act as a bridge into the band, instead labeling themselves effectively subordinate as the second stringers, Team B’s lineup of bit players from Broken Social Scene, Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, and Beirut besides. But hey, at least they didn’t name the album Arcade Fire, LCD Soundsystem, Beirut, and Broken Social Scene Present Team B. That would have just been too much. more ›

This isn’t the type of thing that’s going to get every smirking college student buying into the hype, with its amalgam of funk grooves, big-ass instrumentation, and a distinct lack of lyrics you can sensibly sing along to, but that’s not to say that every smirking college student has impeccable taste. After all, Amadou and Mariam have been around the block with this music thing for about thirty years, and Welcome to Mali represents not an unaware headfirst dive into West African experimentation but rather the embodiment of a lifetime of refinement. Think The Rolling Stones if only The Rolling Stones were still making music anyone wanted to hear. more ›

Over the past couple weeks it’s become increasingly more difficult to discuss with any semblance of sense the latest release from Animal Collective. more ›

Midori Hirano feels like what happens when all the nerds in school get together and try to make pop music. It might not always be pretty, sometimes it’s just plain awkward, there are instances of pleasant surprise, but in the end, at least they’re giving it their best shot. And Klo: Yuri, Midori Hirano’s sophomore release, feels like the progressive culmination of all this, as its gathering of music theory books and computer savvy results in an academic and sometimes brutally modernist approach to post-classical music. more ›

There is a really great album dying, just dying, to escape from this 53-minute minefield. Because, sure enough, excellent sounds abound here, and perhaps even enough for an LP, but, unfortunately, they are burdened by a slew of headache-inducing sonic experiments no less than difficult to tolerate, let alone enjoy. more ›

Is all his crooning like an inebriated and discernibly less talented Jens Lekman, all his singing about a formidable cast of losers ranging from college town hangers-on to the unimpeachably woman-rejected to the despondently intoxicated, just part of a master plan to make people smile when listening to music, rather than wallow in the effluvious well of their own bourbonized misery? more ›

So when the name Mia Vigar scooted across the musical landscape under headlines of Newsom-ness, I braced myself for the slim possibility of being very pleasantly surprised, and the great likelihood that this new artist would find her music subject to the same shortcomings of virtuosity and intellect that have plagued others aiming to attain the mantle. more ›

Mellow Owl, released November 14 on Whiskey and Apples Records