Jason Quever combines anecdotal songwriting with lush folk-pop in Papercuts’ Can’t Go Back, out soon on Gnomonsong. The San Francisco based musician finds a unique balance between malaise and vigor on his new release. Moody narratives are married with layered orchestrations to conjure a somewhat manic depressive feel. The album opener, “Dear Employee” ends with resigned refrains of “I don’t need you no more” while the possibly tongue-in-cheek “Unavailable” repeats “He’s stepping out for a......

Death From Above 1979 Heads Up This reissue of the late, great dance-metal duo's first EP represents what little "rare" material there is to be had in the wake of the band's abrupt break-up earlier this year. Everything that made the 2004 triumph You're A Woman, I'm A Machine so massive is here: squalid distorted bass, caveman drumming, soulful shouted vocals, and just a touch of vocoder for old time's sake. DFA79 had the......

Check this week's IST list to see when these artists will be performing. Miranda Sound [mp3] Close Calls [mp3] The Lull of Youngsters [mp3] Midas Black Heart Procession [mp3] Not Just Words Peel [mp3] Moxy Blues Buttercup [mp3] Hot Love [mp3] We're Easy [mp3] Anti-Antarctica Diplo [mp3] Gold Lion (remix) [mp3] Bloc Party's "Helicopter" (remix) [mp3] Staring At the Sun (remix) CSS [mp3] Lets Make Love and Listen to Death From Above The Theatre......

We Are Scientists - "Nobody Move, Nobody Gets Hurt" (from their forthcoming LP, We Are Squalor ) Death From Above 1979 - "Black History Month" (Sammy Danger Remix) (from Romance Bloody Romance)......

All in all, we enjoyed this collection. But we also liked Stallone's performance in "Over the Top." (So compelling, that arm wrastlin' man!) During SxSW 2005, we stumbled (quite literally, as we were bendered and broken at the time) upon a Vice mix-CD of some sort. Grappling with the emotional mania that comes part-and-parcel with errant boozing, we fell in love with the first track, which fit our obliterated state of consciousness most neatly.......

We stumbled upon the work of Sarah Sharp through a coworker, and initially thought nothing of it. In our defense, people recommend flash-in-the-pan bands to us all the time, so we rarely put much stock in any real listening quality. Myspace has ushered in an unprecedented wave of half-practiced hopefuls who just met each other through Craigslist three weeks prior, yet somehow already have an album out. The time and effort put into that......

Last week, two of Austin's bastions of style jointly celebrated their second birthdays - FactoryPeople, purveyor of the hautest threads you'll find in Austin, and Youth of Tomorrow, a custom-fashion design house whose clients run the gamut from darling indie bands to elementary school chess clubs. As is typical of every soiree we've attended at FP this year, the decadent open bar and wicked grooves - provided by mixmaestros Black Madonna, DJ Shit Robot......

Über-hipster magazine, VICE, has a surprisingly large presence at this years music convention. Their party schedule features Bloc Party, Death From Above, and the creators of [adult swim]'s Aqua Teen Hunger Force. For some reason, we have an image in our mind of these parties being filled with drunk trailerpark residents with bad teeth and torn jeans, carrying jug bottles that say "XXX" on the side. Maybe this is because we've seen lots of......