Originally a one-man recording project in a Brooklyn apartment, in the last three years, Grizzly Bear has picked up three talented musicians and created an album of ghostly and experimental indie rock. Their 2006 album Yellow House (which was actually recorded in a yellow house in Cape Cod) has been praised by critics and other artists the world over, and the album's big song "Knife" has been covered, re-mixed, and mashed-up several times. Even......

Ace Fu buzz crew Annuals have come on strong in 2006, thanks to their luminous debut Be He Me and tours with The Dears and Calexico; besides that, they got a song on "Veronica Mars," and is there no surer indie taste-maker these days? Bassist/engineer Mike Robinson kindly spoke to us about, well, SXSW and everything: If you could open for any artist living or dead, in any era of their career, who would......

Folk music has become a term used fairly loosely in the independent music scene, partially because there are incredible artists making music that reflects the genre's origins, and partially because there's really no other way to describe the sound. Psychedelic folk ("freak folk", if you're nasty), however, sounds like something you make up when you've perhaps tied a few too many on and find yourself toying with the idea of cross-genre experimentation with instruments like a cigarette machine, or a vacuum. Yet, artists like Devendra Banhart, Animal Collective, Joanna Newsom, Espers, and DeVotchKa create music that beckons the memory of Donovan and T.Rex, giving shape to the term as we use it today. ...

After counting your blessings for not being pierced through the heart by a stingray over the weekend, you might want to stop by your local record store and check out what's new. Grizzly Bear Yellow House (Warp) Ed Droste's Grizzly Bear are back with a full band and a shimmering landscape of an album reminiscent of Brian Wilson's hey-day, old fashioned American harmony and lush layers of sound that combine folk, post-rock and psychedelia......