Tune-Yards is Merrill Garbus, a puppeteer-turned-musician with a flair for strange sounds, odd influences, and tape hiss. Created with little more than a ukulele and some rudimentary looping equipment, Garbus’ kitchen-sink folk recalls African street music, musical theater, and the kind of long-lost recordings found…
John Vanderslice is a producer, recording studio owner, and master craftsman of intricate, nuanced pop. His music juxtaposes high-gloss production with the kind of emotional immediacy featured in the songs of friend John Darnielle of The Mountain Goats, with whom Vanderslice has produced several records and toured. In…
Hexadecagon’s first listeners encountered a spectacle. They filed into a circus tent in The Octopus Project’s Austin hometown and took in an extended live performance through a surround-sound system, accompanied by eight channels of experimental video. As with The Flaming Lips’ Zaireeka, another opus that’s as much…
To a large degree, the Arcade Fire mythology has always been the mythology of Régine and Win. That’s Régine Chassagne and Win Butler, the husband and wife who are the original architects of their band’s sprawling sound. But the lineup has been stable for the past few years, and every new album reinforces the…
Musically, there’s nothing groundbreaking about Tomorrow Morning, Eels’ ninth studio album. Longtime fans will recognize bits and pieces from across the career of frontman/songwriter/shaman Mark Oliver Everett: affected drum-and-electric piano stomp, winsome folk, the static of an old transistor radio. What they might…
Free Energy stands a good distance away from the sort of indie experimentalism that’s worked out so well for bands like Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective, preferring instead a brawny take on classic rock that's larded with dueling guitar solos, lyrics about driving around the city all night, and maybe a little…
Xiu Xiu’s latest album is called Dear God, I Hate Myself, which so neatly encompasses the band’s ethos that it could serve as a title for a greatest-hits collection. For almost a decade now, Jamie Stewart and a rotating cast of musicians have released some of the least comforting music around, stocked with personal…
Where did jj come from? The Swedish duo, unknown and perhaps nonexistent until recently, put out two albums in the past eight months; both are very good and very cryptic. jj n° 2, last year’s concise (and counterintuitively titled) debut, offered poppy Balearic beats, guitars and keyboards that shimmered, and smoky…
“Disease, Injury, Madness,” an 11-minute song on Between The Buried And Me’s sixth album, last year's The Great Misdirect, has its fair share of technical metal: dueling pinch harmonics, breakneck drums, Cookie Monster growling. But it also offers an extended jazz-bass solo and an impressive section of Sabbath-style…
The music of Los Campesinos is simultaneously melodic and chaotic. It’s jam-packed with self-deprecating tales of lost love and middle-class misery, as experienced by a bunch of clever college students—in this case, seven kids from the University Of Cardiff in Wales. Their debut, 2008’s Hold On Now, Youngster…, first…
Weathervanes, the recently released debut album from New York band Freelance Whales, is a strange and ambitious attempt to translate childhood memories and dreamlike visions into a coherent musical narrative. It’s a document about transition: from adolescence to adulthood, from dependence to independence. Tellingly, …
“Disease, Injury, Madness,” an 11-minute song on Between The Buried And Me’s sixth album, last year's The Great Misdirect, has its fair share of technical metal: dueling pinch harmonics, breakneck drums, Cookie Monster growling. But it also offers an extended jazz-bass solo and an impressive section of Sabbath-style…
Vetiver's Andy Cabic has a surfeit of musical identities: He came up in North Carolina’s fertile music scene of the ‘90s, playing with college-rock act The Raymond Brake before decamping to San Francisco and immersing himself in the nascent folk movement that gathered around artists like Devendra Banhart. It was in…
Some band names bear a striking resemblance to one another. Black Dice and Black Eyes, Calexico and Califone, Sum 41 and Stroke 9—the list goes on. It’s not so often, however, that two acts with really similar monikers play the same venue within a matter of weeks. On Sunday, (Jan. 17), fledgling Chapel Hill…
Canadian violinist Owen Pallett—he used to perform as Final Fantasy until a copyright-related name-change late last year—has a reputation for compositional prowess. He’s arranged albums for Beirut and Arcade Fire, worked with Pet Shop Boys, and on Heartland, his third solo album and first full-length since 2006’s He…
Free Energy stands a good distance away from the sort of indie experimentalism that’s worked out so well for bands like Dirty Projectors and Animal Collective, preferring instead a brawny take on classic rock that's larded with dueling guitar solos, lyrics about driving around the city all night, and maybe a little…
It’s hard to describe the music of Pelican. The Chicago- and Los Angeles-based band—performing at The Rock And Roll Hotel on Friday, Dec. 4—makes hypnotic instrumental metal with enough atmosphere to mostly transcend the genre, which puts music writers in an awkward place. So they reach for some other genres:…
It’s hard to describe the music of Pelican. The Chicago- and Los Angeles-based band, performing at the Highline Ballroom on Monday, Nov. 30—makes hypnotic instrumental metal with enough atmosphere to mostly transcend the genre, which puts music writers in an awkward place. So they reach for some other genres:…
A selection of song titles from Real Estate’s self-titled debut: “Beach Comber,” “Atlantic City,” “Let’s Rock The Beach.” The seashore motif may be having a cultural moment, at least among the Brooklyn DIY scene in which the band cut its teeth. (See also acts like Boogie Boarder and Beach Fossils, not to mention…
John Darnielle is the impressively prolific musician behind The Mountain Goats, a name he’s recorded under since the early '90s. Until fairly recently, Darnielle was a kind of cult figure, recording songs on a boombox while toiling at any number of odd jobs. Beginning with 2002’s Tallahassee—his first for storied…
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