There’s a pretty good chance that by now you’ve heard the Morning Benders’ breakout LP Big Echo (and if you haven’t, I suggest you stop reading this and get it now). Produced by Grizzly Bear‘s Chris Taylor, the second effort from this Berkeley group is more developed than 2008′s Talking Through Tin Cans, and they’ve [...]

Happy to report that, despite what had been previously reported, we’ve learned that The National’s High Violet WILL be on eMusic US on its street date of May 11. It had previously been confirmed for other territories.

Jon Stewart and a monkey. Grand Central Publishing has really narrowed in on my sweet spots in designing the cover for The Daily Show with John Stewart Presents Earth (The Book), the latest Daily Show publication (it comes out this September), following America (The Book). And because I so desperately wanted to put the newly [...]

The young D.C. quartet True Womanhood have been compared to Sonic Youth and Radiohead, but this lush, slippery track from their debut EP Basement Membranes more closely resembles the hushed pastoral indie folk of their Baltimore neighbors in Beach House. All of the group’s members are in their early 20s and they’ve been playing together [...]

The Hold Steady Heaven is Whenever [Vagrant] Release Date: 4 May 2010 In years past, the Hold Steady were America’s most reliable “rock” band. They didn’t just play bar bruisers, they deconstructed them — pulled them apart, commented on them and put them back together using only the essential parts (namely, the riffs and the [...]

I first stumbled across Casey Dienel on Hush Records’ website in late 2006 and, on a whim, bought her debut record Wind-Up Canary, which quickly became my go-to record for the weird time between fall and winter. It’s smart, unabashed piano-pop, sort of in the same vein as, say, Regina Spektor. Dienel signed with Dead [...]

Super quick new arrivals post today, as titles were delayed by technical difficulties. Thanks for hanging in there. It’s all after the jump, so let’s do this already.

The first time I interviewed folksinger Anais Mitchell was just before the release of her beautiful 2007 LP, The Brightness, and she mentioned that she had written a folk opera based on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice that had already been performed live a couple of times in her home state of Vermont. [...]

Inspired by M.I.A.’s batshit, politically inscrutable new video for “Born Free” and Joe’s subsequent assertion that there has never been and will never be a successful redheaded male rock singer, we rebuke with a definitive list! Let the record show, Joe is wrong, and “gingers” can make damn good frontmen. Commence list. 1. Axl Rose [...]

Broken Social Scene Forgiveness Rock Record [Arts & Crafts] Release Date: 4 May 2010 A few years back, when the ever-growing Broken Social Scene reached an all-time high of 19 members, there were so many Canadian rock stars performing with the Toronto-based indie-rock collective, it was difficult to remember which ones, exactly, were in the [...]

Confession: I was really, really late listening to the Canadian singer/songwriter/composer Owen Pallett (formerly known as Final Fantasy). In fact, despite Pallett having played on and/or arranged strings for some pretty fantastic and influential records, my introduction to him was this year’s Heartland. His first release under his own name rather than the Final Fantasy [...]

The New Pornographers Together [Matador] Release Date: 4 May 2010 Together, the fifth record from interstate pop consortium the New Pornographers, is a masterpiece of construction, each little filigree, each rush of guitar, each organ speck perfectly placed. It’s drum-tight, and as effortless in its expertise as an Olympian. Which is another way of saying [...]

For decades now, Merle Haggard has been pining away for the past. He sang “Are The Good Times Really Over?” in 1981, and years before that, he was celebrating places where squares could still have a ball. In 2010, he’s still pining. I Am What I Am, released two weeks after his 73rd birthday and [...]

People seem to be responding positively to the Kissaway Trail, a Danish indie band that shares the same sideways approach to pop music as, say, Grandaddy. They make rushes at grandeur — check the slow-building “Beat Your Heartbeat,” but mostly favor a clamped-down, mysterioso approach. The band are also perfectionists: they had a whole record [...]

(photo by dusqueeze) We’ve got to be coming close to the point where the term “soul revival” gets filed alongside “electronica” and “alternative rock” as silly inadequate genre tags that might have worked for a few minutes but got stale the instant it became clear the styles they were describing weren’t just passing fancies. Flawless [...]

Today on eMusic sees the arrival of yet more from the Warner vaults, classic albums from the Bee Gees and the Eagles. A word of clarification: if you’re looking for Saturday Night Fever, you won’t find it here. What you will find, though, is arguably more fascinating: the albums the Bee Gees made before going [...]

New arrivals coming late today, due to a combination of technical difficulties and me being distracted by a news story that says construction workers in England have apparently found an unused stash of John Lennon’s acid. I had to spend about an hour blue-skying a buddy film in which four college friends embark on a [...]

I totally was not expecting to have my mind completely blown to pieces two nights in a row. That’s not to say I had low expectations for Kaki King‘s show at Music Hall of Williamsburg on Thursday (totally not the case), but I wasn’t necessarily expecting to be left speechless less than a minute into [...]

Last night at Carnegie Hall, I attended the U.S. premiere of La Commedia, a 100-minute opera about Hell. There were tumbling jazzy episodes; passages of stringent, chilly modernism; bursts of propulsive minimalism; a children’s choir; and a rambling spoken monologue by a racist, cranky old man. It was, to put it mildly, a bit of [...]

At last night’s Low Anthem show at Bowery Ballroom, the Providence, R.I., folk group tested out some new tracks, impressed with older favorites, and enlisted the crowd in the most incredible audience-participation act I’ve ever witnessed or been a part of. The band’s most recent effort, last year’s Oh My God, Charlie Darwin, alternated between [...]