The Feelies, Crazy Rhythms and The Good Earth: Two quietly monumental indie-rock documents, made back when it was called “college rock,” resurface in 2009. All the words that writers normally fling at these guys: tight, constricted, jittery, repetitive, hypnotic — are all completely and totally apt: on Crazy Rhythms they fashioned a sound [...]

I just put this feature up today, and wanted to share it with everyone, because it’s wonderfully written…Richard Gehr, our regular columnist for all things world music-related, has just penned a killer retrospective on the fascinating, complex Congolese musician Franco. Reading and editing this kind of stuff on a daily basis is my favorite part [...]

Terrible news about the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir — quoting directly from Jim DeRogatis’s report in the Chicago Sun-Times:
Heading out on tour to celebrate the release of their new Bloodshot Records album “…And the Horse You Rode In On,” the members of Chicago’s celebrated ork-pop band the Scotland Yard Gospel Choir were hospitalized Thursday afternoon [...]

What do you get when you take a few pigs, a bunch of goats, some rabbits, chickens, turkeys and a ton of veggies, and you plop them right in the middle of a city? Novella Carpenter found out when she started a small farm right next to her apartment in Oakland, California. She writes about [...]

Way back when I remember raving on here about Teengirl Fantasy, this young dreamy DJ duo who had a single that Alex and I really loved. And by God we still stand behind that. But the praise that I gave to Teengirl I really should have reserved for Memory Cassette, a far superior group in [...]

OH HAI THERE, WE DIDN’T SEE U BECAUSE WE WERE TOO BUSY BEIN YOUNG AND TRAGICALLY BEAUTIFUL PLZ SIT DOWN
Nine million titles of note on the site — here’s a quick, sometimes-breathless run-through as many as I could find:
Girls, Album – I cannot get over this album, at all. Yancey wrote the review, and Yancey [...]

Nothing about Little Dragon makes sense. Nothing. They sound like some post-R&B electro group fronted by a soulful female voice, and yet they’re three Swedish dudes and a Japanese woman. Their best song, the ridiculously beguiling “Blinking Pigs,” was — until now — only available as a B-side. And they combine what you love about [...]

(photo by l_c_m_tt_)
What is the proper speed for heavy metal? Is it always fast and treacherous? Must is always raze and pillage? Can’t a group just chill out for a few minutes?
These were the questions posed by Nadja, the Canadian metal duo of Aidan Baker and Leah Buckareff, over the course of a restrained, frequently [...]

HBO is really taking care of me. There is an empty hole in my DVR now that the phenomenally trashy second season of True Blood is over, but at least I have Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse series (the show is based on it!) to tide me over. More importantly, HBO is filling the True Blood [...]

There’s no way we could match Joe’s epic New Arrivals post from last week; it was the War of Peace of NAs and we bow to its greatness. This week is simpler, and just a little slower, but there’s some good stuff buried under the rocks and sand. Let’s have a looksee at what sounds [...]

(crummy picture courtesy of iPhone + CameraGenius app)
Anyone who is Facebook friends with me already got this impassioned alert, but I’m telling you, if Strand of Oaks is not the Bon Iver of 2010, I will be wreaking some indie rock havoc.
On record, Tim Showalter’s songs are plaintive and folky, constructed from sturdy acoustic strumming, [...]

Ida No and Cameron Mesirow are two of our finest divas, Ida the haunted voice behind Glass Candy, Cameron performing as Glasser, a hypnotizing project out of Los Angeles that we’ve been championing since last fall. On Saturday night both played in Brooklyn — Glass Candy in a bowling alley, Glasser in a DIY space [...]

This guy first came to my attention a while ago, but the further he’s gotten in this project, the more fascinating it’s become. His name is Logan Walters, and he’s an artist/designer. In addition to his regular, paying work, Walters has taken up a little hobby project on the side: redesigning all of the Wu-Tang [...]

An exciting announcement today from our good friends and eMusic Selects alumni the Rural Alberta Advantage. They’ve partnered with the fantastic T-Shirt company Threadless (who I was spending large chunks of my paycheck supporting for a while there!) to give fans the opportunity to name a heretofore untitled song.
You can find out all about it [...]

The great Ewan MacColl
One of the most exciting new pieces to hit the site this week is Steve Hochman’s appraisal of historic British folk label, Topic Records, who are celebrating their 70th anniversary this year. Incredible artists like A.L. Lloyd, Ewan MacColl and June Tabor called the label home for years. Hochman’s thorough and considered [...]

Last month, we shouted out a record called Hymns from Rhodeisa from a band called Listenlisten, which will be arriving on eMusic on 9/22. I love this record, and I think you might, too. Haunting, apocalyptic Appalachian folk music. If you haven’t already, check out their song “Safe Home, Safe in Port” for an [...]

(photo by Here’s Kate)
I wanted to start this morning by giving you guys a little sneak preview of something we’ve been working on for the last few days. Please bear in mind that this is very much a “work in progress” — some sections are incomplete and some areas are missing text. But we thought [...]

(photo by Talie)
Finally! An avalanche of new releases today, the first real bounty in what looks to be an extremely exciting autumn. I’m gonna do my best to cover all of them in this post, but I’ll undoubtedly miss a few, so please point out my oversights in the comments! I’m going to break [...]

I have seriously been waiting since my first day at eMusic for this record to show up, so you can imagine how I gasped when I saw it in “New This Week” today. Cedric Im Brooks & the Light of Saba. There are days I refer to this as “my favorite reggae record of all [...]

Terry Riley’s A Rainbow in Curved Air is a record of two pieces, each roughly 20 minutes in length, that are extremely contemplative at their core. Both are rooted in an “om”-like hum (an elegant image of “curved air”) and they play off of it in very different ways.
“A Rainbow in Curved Air” tests [...]