(From 4pm – 6pm EST today, I’ll be on Newtown Radio with several other people talking about why we still love REM. Hope you’ll listen!) R.E.M. Collapse Into Now [Warner Bros.] Just two songs into R.E.M.’s 15th — that’s right, 15th — studio album, Michael Stipe goes self-referential: “I think I’ll sing in rhyme/ I’ll [...]

(Photo by iamlukeryan) On Friday at New York’s Bowery Ballroom, fans were participating in the time-honored tradition of dress-up as moral support: the smoking area and both bars were packed with multi-colored tights and taut leather jackets, black lace dresses, high heels and blood-red lipstick. The Dum Dum Girls are notorious for sporting all of [...]

Peaking Lights – Tiger Eyes (Laid Back) from Know Phase on Vimeo. (via Prefix) I don’t know a ton about the band Peaking Lights, except that they’re on the great Not Not Fun label, which I mostly trust implicitly. Prefix posted the video for their song “Tiger Eyes,” which borrows liberally from the film Arrapaho, [...]

Danish pop singer Oh Land made her U.S. network TV debut this week on Letterman, a couple weeks before releasing her debut LP. We’ll have the full-length on the site March 15, but you can check out a few of those tracks here. “Sun of a Gun” (below) is great, and “Rainbow” is also super [...]

Last night, Lykke Li turned up on Fallon to perform her “Iko Iko”-channeling first single “Get Some” from the outstanding Wounded Rhymes which, if you don’t have it yet, you need to change. Watch her twist and menace above.

In about two weeks, the dodos will release their fourth album, No Color, an album that features the unbeatable vocals of Twitter marauder Neko Case on about half of the tracks. You can get an advance listen now via the player below, courtesy of the good people over at the Hype Machine. This will have [...]

Six Degrees of Nine Inch Nails’ The Downward Spiral By Aaron Burgess With his depressive outlook, innate pop smarts and composer’s gift for dynamics, Trent Reznor has always come off a bit like industrial rock’s answer to Kurt Cobain. Cobain, of course, hid behind lyrical ambiguities — we only truly learned how deeply the Nirvana [...]

Get it here Cruel Sister, a half-hour instrumental suite by Bang On A Can co-founder Julia Wolfe, is a cheery little number about jealousy, sororicide, and harps made from human bone. The grim story behind the music comes from an ancient English ballad of the same name: two sisters — one “bright as the sun” [...]

SXSW is staring us down like a boxer in a blind alley, and as thrilling as that can be, it’s also a bit overwhelming. Where do you start? Who do you see? And above all Who’s playing where and when? We’ll be unveiling our SXSW picks next week, but those of you looking to get [...]

Well, this is cool. Tea Sea Records, on the heels of that incredible mixtape in which they paired the Beatles and the Wu-Tang Clan, are dropping another crazy hybrid: classic jams by Mos Def, Common, Erykah Badu and more, set against a Bollywood backdrop. There’s a catch, and the catch is that you have to [...]

It’s been a long time since we heard from Death Cab for Cutie and, like most things in my life, I blame Zooey Deschanel for that. I kid. I blame most things in my life on James Franco. To an increasing degree, it seems. ANYWAY. Ol’ Gibbsy, as close friends and secret crushes call him, [...]

I’m still in the process of writing my review for R.E.M.‘s 15th(!) album, Collapse Into Now, which we’ll have on Tuesday. A few bullet points? “A Kind-of Career Overview,” “A Respectable Success,” “Genuinely Striking Moments,” “Builds and Expands on Accelerate” and “‘Mine Smell Like Honey?’ Really, dude?” I’ll fill in the blanks by Tuesday. I’ll [...]

Hey! Look! It’s these guys! True story: I had a dream the other night I heard the new Strokes record (I wish I was making this up). In the dream, I was like, “Wow, this is really synthy.” I was at a boardroom table or something, with a notepad. I also remember thinking it was [...]

By now, you should have downloaded The Mistress, the amazing album by the newest member of our eMusic Selects family, Yellow Ostrich. If for some inexplicable reason you haven’t, though, let us continue to convince you, with a video for gorgeous lead single, “WHALE.”

In the age of social media, it’s easy to share our thoughts, our opinions, our pet peeves and our dinner menus, our take on the Charlie Sheen situation. But social media hasn’t allowed us to share our voices until now. Yesterday, a new startup called Broadcastr launched in beta. Broadcastr allows its users to listen [...]

The big buzz around the most recent Iron & Wine record was how it represented a further sonic expansion for one-time folkie Sam Beam. eMusic’s Austin L. Ray, in his review, wrote: “Beam’s come a long way since the whisper-soft lullabyes of his 2002 debut, The Creek Drank the Cradle. Indeed, any song here would [...]

So obviously, the big focus today is on our new Selects band, Yellow Ostrich, but there are more releases for you to spend your money on once you’ve grabbed that album. I’ll walk you thru ‘em after the jump.

Today, we welcome the newest addition to the eMusic Selects family: Yellow Ostrich. The band is essentially the brainchild of one man, Alex Schaaf from Wisconsin, and his debut album, The Mistress we feel is a bona fide masterpiece, a new bedroom pop classic that channels Grizzly Bear and Neutral Milk Hotel. In my review [...]