Ponytail || Easy Peasy from Ray Concepcion on Vimeo. We’re not done getting excited about the upcoming Ponytail record, and you shouldn’t be, either. A surefire cure for indie placidity, the band unspools over and over in the space of their brain-liquifying rock songs. You can get a quick peek at the world of Ponytail [...]

I’ve been talking up the forthcoming Actor-Caster from New Orleans the Generationals for a few weeks now, with precious little proof that I am not completely crazy. Well, said evidence comes today from RCRD LBL, who are offering the ruthless lead track “Ten-Twenty-Ten,” the best entry into Caster‘s tightly-wound apostrophe rock. The guitars just scratch-scratch-scratch, [...]

Hey all…it’s a lightish week, but here are a handful of things International subscribers might be interested in checking out. The Dodos, No Color – The hyperactive folk-rock boys of The Dodos trimmed their delightfully short fuses at the wick with their last record, which resulted in the somewhat mannered and overly polite record Time [...]

(Editor’s Note: Tonight, the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame will add eight new members to its ranks. But while the Hall itself is located in Cleveland, the induction is taking place — as always — in New York. Here, eMusic employee and impassioned Ohian Stefan Diego Ravello weighs in on why the city he [...]

(it is comical what a terrible photographer i am) The chorus to one of the songs on Edwyn Collins’ new record Losing Sleep — his first after recovering from two massive cerebral hemorrhages in 2005 — goes “I can do it again/ I can do anything honey,” and to see him on stage at the [...]

Get it here It’s almost spring. Or rather, it is the first fake-out day of the long, grueling duck-and-feint that NYC does with spring. The first day this happens, “Spring music” pipes hopefully out of office speakers, like you could call it in quicker by playing its soundtrack. And, well, there is simply no better [...]

Last month, eMusic introduced The Essentials, a new program discounting some of the biggest and best-known albums of all-time. Now we’re going deeper. This month, through March 28, we’re offering classic albums from the past 50 years of popular music, from rock to jazz to pop to reggae to classical, from massive stars and unheralded [...]

When Thomas Bartlett (aka Doveman) and violist Nadia Sirota first became friends, they said they should collaborate to play music by Brahms “or something.” “This is the closest we’re ever gonna get to that,” Sirota said on stage last night at New York’s Merkin Concert Hall at Kaufman Center, before she and Bartlett performed that [...]

Michel Gondry directed a hysterical video for the Living Sisters (aka Eleni Mandell, Lavender Diamond’s Becky Stark, and the bird and the bee’s Inara George). (via)

Get it here The word critics most often use to describe Mike Watt’s music is “elliptical.” Which should give you some idea just how difficult describing his music is. Ever since his time as bassist for punk/funk legends the Minutemen, Watt has specialized in music of evasion. Most punk rock barrels forward; his is a [...]

Fourteen years ago, the Notorious B.I.G. was killed in a drive-by shooting in Los Angeles. He left behind one of hip-hop’s greatest bodies of work; the lyrical dexterity on Life After Death is astounding, the number of brain-bending rhymes he gets off in “Things Done Changed” alone indicating a kind of stakes-raising gamesmanship that seems [...]

We’re still a few months away from Okkervil River‘s I Am Very Far, but the group is ramping up their public appearances — they’ll be all over Austin next week for SXSW (I’ll be filing daily reviews for both 17 Dots and eMusic proper, and they’re certainly on my list of bands to see), and [...]

New on eMusic today, Blessed, the latest from Lucinda Williams. We asked Amanda Petrusich to review it a few weeks ago — here’s what she had to say: Blessed, Lucinda Williams’s 10th long-player, opens with a big, brassy blues lick — the kind of faux-raucous guitar curlicue you’d normally expect to hear on a Big [...]

OK. I’m not gonna talk anymore about R.E.M. after today. I promise. But as some of you may know, I was on Newtown Radio yesterday talking about them, and the show’s host played this incredible Beat Happening cover, which I’d never heard. And now, here it is on Soundcloud. It sounds like the Velvet Underground. [...]

Of all the unlikely bands to be signed to a major, Le Tigre is somewhere near the top. Led by ex-Bikini Kill frontwoman Kathleen Hanna, the band was all of the things major label bands aren’t supposed to be — they weren’t just “political,” they were awesomely, aggressively feminist in stance and outlook and pushed [...]

I’ve got to be the only person in the known universe who’s not completely put-off by the term “chillwave.” You guys know we used to have a genre called “cuddlecore,” right? Like, let’s reserve some of that ire for shit that actually matters. Genre tags are idiotic but necessary, so let’s all figure out ways [...]

Unfamiliar Fishes promises to be Sarah Vowell’s most star-studded audiobook yet. Narrators include Edward Norton, Keanu Reeves, Paul Rudd, John Slattery, Fred Armisen, Bill Hader, John Hodgman, Catherine Keener and Maya Rudolph. I would be thrilled to listen to any one of these people read the phone book. But even without this fantastic guest list, [...]

(Confidential to P Clark: We got a bunch of Mylon & Broken Heart records today. Oy.) Hey! Here’s the roundup! A couple of gems today. Do us a favor, though: if you’re looking for something that was supposed to show up today but hasn’t, please drop the artist name, album name and label name in [...]

SXSW is about a week away, a fact that has me freaking out a bit — in both a good way (it’s typically my favorite week of the year) and a bad way (I still don’t have a formal day-to-day schedule planned!) What we do have is a list of top-level picks — the 35 [...]

Label Profile: Fat Possum Records By Marc Hogan File Under: From raw, gutbucket blues to soul, rock and pop with a similar unspoiled spirit Flagship Acts: R.L. Burnside, Junior Kimbrough, Solomon Burke, the Black Keys, Andrew Bird, Band of Horses, Dinosaur Jr., Wavves, the Walkmen, Smith Westerns, Yuck, Tennis Based In: Oxford, Mississippi Like the [...]