Recently in Indie Category

If you've yet to hear the Heartless Bastards' last album, The Mountain, then stop reading this, log into your Rhapsody account and have at it, man. Or simply jam this little doohickey right here, then click on over for our Q&A with Erika Wennerstrom.
 

Music for Men is Gossip's coming out party in every sense of the term: It's their major label debut, their first album after becoming Kate Moss-befriending-hype-generators, and it's an announcement of their commitment to the alt-dance (life)style they first experimented with on Standing in the Way of Control. In short, this album is under a lot of pressure -- which it withstands rather admirably. The sleek dance beats -- this time drawing from both '80s pop and four-on-the-floor disco beats -- are polished to a pricier gold lamé sheen (courtesy of Rick Rubin), but are also more elegantly blended with their chicken-fried roots (see "Spare Me from the Mold"). Their melodies could do with a bit more variety: Beth Ditto either really enjoys a certain progression of notes, or her distinctive, full-throttle wail has a tendency to make every vocal line sound like, well, that distinctive, full-throttle Beth Ditto wail. And Kate Moss or no, the once-and-future scrappy garage punks are still probably a bit too queer (in all senses of the word) to hit the big-time Stateside. But they are in a rather fascinating position, poised somewhere between glitzy pop stardom and avant-garde underground. It's a position that makes for some very interesting musical choices: Though nothing on Music for Men really sounds like a conventional pop song, the album quotes from them liberally, couching, say, "I Heard It Through the Grapevine" in the gradually building, minimalist keys-and-beats of "Love Long Distance" or Salt 'n' Pepa's "Push It" in the straight-up hipster disco of "Love and Let Love." In fact, Music for Men is almost -- dare we say it -- kind of a camp, taking up and queering bits and pieces of a popular culture to which the band has an ambiguous relationship. In all, it's campy, danceable and political -- everything a fabulous coming out party should be.

Elvis Costello and Emmylou Harris will be at the Telluride Bluegrass fest. How 'bout you?

Bluegrass is popular all over the United States -- no doubt about it. But historically, it thrives in about three to five regions: Appalachia, the Ohio Valley, eastern Maryland/Pennsylvania, the Ozarks of Missouri and southeastern Kansas and, interestingly enough, Colorado. The Centennial State -- that's Colorado, yo -- is probably the major hub for groups that explore progressive bluegrass (a.k.a. newgrass, jamgrass, hippie bluegrass). I'm talking about bands like Leftover Salmon, Yonder Mountain String Band, The String Cheese Incident and Oakhurst.

Colorado is also home to one of genre's more celebrated multi-day festivals, Telluride Bluegrass, which is entering its 36th year. Located in the San Juan Mountains in the southwest corner of the state, there's no beating Telluride when it comes to dreamy settings. Humongous snow-capped peaks and lush, Rocky Mountain flora surround its mainstage. There are workshops for musicians, all night jams, performance competition, camping, hiking and a well-established emphasis on green-conscious business. It's pretty darn amazing.

Musically, Telluride has followed Bonnaroo's lead in opening its doors to alt-country types, world musicians and hip indie rockers dabbling in Americana and roots music. For this year's installment (June 18-21), the line-up features everybody from newgrass heavies Railroad Earth to indie dude Conor Oberst to mandolin legend Sam Bush to the luscious Jenny Lewis. And that's just the tip of the iceburg. Here's the complete line-up -- more or less:

David Byrne
Elvis Costello & The Sugarcanes
Emmylou Harris
Three Girls & Their Buddy
Béla Fleck & Toumani Diabaté
The Steeldrivers
Todd Snider
John Cowan Band
Peter Rowan
Jerry Douglas
Tim O'Brien
Yonder Mountain String Band
The Punch Brothers
The Lovell Sisters
The Greencards
Crooked Still
Greensky Bluegrass
Gaelic Storm
Zac Brown Band
Blue Canyon Boys
Kasey Chambers & Shane Nicholson
Mike Farris & The Roseland Rhythm Revue

This is an insane collection of talent for sure, but if forced to pick three can't-miss performances, I'd go with these:

1) Greensky Bluegrass
Not too many folks have heard these upstarts from Kalamazoo, Michigan, but Telluride just loves them. The quintet won the festival's band competition in 2006. In addition to the playlist up above, a great introduction to Greensky Bluegrass is their last full-length, Five Interstates, which has a real Jay-Farrar-meets-Dillard-&-Clark vibe. There's something very early '70s about this Greensky Bluegrass. They're basically classic singer-songwriters playing in a West Coast hippie bluegrass style.

2) The Steeldrivers
Much like the Infamous Stringdusters, the SteelDrivers are a pack of hot shot Nashville session cats getting all acoustic. That said, they're totally fiery, playing a brand of Appalachian mountain music that's fortified with brawny, swampy blues-rock. Singer and guitarist Chris Stapleton howls like Bob Seger had he grown up in, say, Bristol, Tennessee, rather than Detroit. Over the last year or so a Steeldrivers performance has become a pretty hot ticket in the bluegrass scene. So yeah, this will be a killer show.

3) Three Girls & Their Buddy:
Emmylou. Patty Griffin. Shawn Colvin. Buddy Miller. Need I say more?

They may have covered Katy Perry's ubiquitous "I Kissed a Girl," but the Ohio synth-core band is not just another pop culture-fueled blur in the metal/post-hardcore scene. Attack Attack mix heavy guitars and technical drums with electronics and Auto-Tune into an unorthodox clashing of styles that works so well it's being heralded as the next big thing in Warped Tour circles. Check out what drummer Andrew Wetzel cites as "stuff I've listened to that's changed the way I've played from middle school up until now." That "stuff" includes heavy bands Necrophagist and Job for a Cowboy, along with rock acts like Muse and Saosin.

It's been nearly three decades in Sonic Youth's saga, yet the band's art-rock blitz sounds as vital as ever on their 15th studio album, The Eternal. With DIY on the rise and a new wave of lo-fi making indie circles swoon, their influence is undeniable. The band itself has even ditched the major labels, releasing the record on Matador. The album reveals a wise maturity; while the cacophony of grinding, oddly tuned guitars remains a central element, there's a patient, poignant melodicism that lingers. Spacey drones and vocals slither around dead-on drums for a sound that remains as fresh as their name suggests.

Members Thurston Moore, Kim Gordon, Steve Shelley and Lee Ranaldo took some time out of their busy schedules promoting the album to give us individual playlists of their favorite songs. It's an interesting look inside the minds of each of them, from Moore's obscure punk picks and Gordon's My Bloody Valentine crush to Shelley's diverse oldie loves and Ranaldo's fondness for folk.

Play here, and follow along with their comments for each song, after the jump.

With a new record and a national tour ahead of them, Philadelphia experimental rockers mewithoutYou are geared up to take the college indie scene by storm this summer. Their fourth release, It’s All Crazy! It’s All False! It’s All a Dream! It’s Alright, showcases lyricist Aaron Weiss’ softer side. The choral chants and Dylan-esque acoustic rhythms present an ideal backdrop for Weiss to channel God’s messages through his lyrics. Weiss stepped away from prepping the band’s eco-friendly tour bus and shared some words with me regarding his deep connection to God and what exactly defines his deeply spiritual lifestyle.

When Baltimore's Rye Rye guested on Blaqstarr's "Shake It to the Ground," it wasn't what she sang but how she sang it that grabbed people's attention. High-pitched invocations to "Shake it to the ground/ Move it, move it, move it, move it" bobbed in the air like helium balloons weighted by lead ballast, imbued with the curious energy of the Chipmunks sucking on sizzurp. (It didn't hurt that Blaqstarr's woozy production served the weirdest aspects of the adolescent rapper's gangsta hiccup.) Rye Rye's distinctive delivery found its match on "Bang," a match-up with M.I.A. in which Blaqstarr's samba-school breaks spread like a nest around the singers' nasal birdcalls, and now Buraka Som Sistema and DJ Sega have remixed the track to sound even loonier. The "Buraka Carnival Remix" offers an explosive mix of soca-inspired drums, carnival whistles and gleefully cheesy rave stabs, while their "WTF I Asked for a Kuduro Remix" is a rave-y slab of breakbeat hardcore mayhem. Sega, meanwhile, strips back the backing track to nothing but rough-cut snares, the better to isolate Rye Rye and M.I.A.'s a cappella face-off.

Bloc Party's Intimacy Remixed shows how hard it is to give an entire album the remix treatment. For a band whose albums hew to the classic longplayer format, the piecemeal approach to different sounds — melancholy IDM, adrenaline-heavy electro, tech-y drum 'n' bass — is too disjointed. Face it: in the age of playlists, no one is going to listen to this thing all the way through.

Franz Ferdinand (pictured above) take a different approach with Blood: rather than recruiting a dozen buzz names to sex up Tonight, the band invited album producer Dan Carey to give selected tracks the dub treatment. If the resulting kaleidoscope of free-floating guitars, vocal fragments and echo-chamber drums recalls Mad Professor's elegantly convoluted rework of Massive Attack's Protection, No Protection, that's not entirely coincidence: Carey apprenticed with the respected dub figurehead. Eschewing teenage kicks, Blood invites a less frenetic engagement with the music, extending even to cryptic titles offering little hint as to the versions' respective sources. From the opening squalls to the final, fading echo, it's a surprisingly immersing listen, even (or especially?) for those who aren't necessarily fans of the Glaswegan dandies' jagged guitar sound.

Mark Templeton's Inland similarly gathers its full head of steam from the combustion of rock instrumentation meeting bewildering studio treatments. Electric and acoustic guitars and keening vocal harmonies turn to a fine mist when poured through the Canadian producer's software sieve; it's easy to hear references to Fennesz and Grizzly Bear in the songs' psychedelic high-tide lines, marked by a foamy trail of droning harmonies and glitched artifacts. It's just the latest in a line of excellent releases from New York's Anticipate label, which is responsible for albums from Nicola Ratti, Morgan Packard, Klimek and Ezekiel Honig. From this kind of digitally degraded freak folk to explorations of the Rhodes keyboard at its most liquid, all those releases are well worth your time.

Stephen O'Malley and Greg Anderson -- the grim, oft-hooded duo serving as the core of experimental metal outfit Sunn 0))) (simply pronounced "sun") -- are celebrating 10 years of ominous tones and fuzzy textures with their seventh album. Monoliths & Dimensions, a composition Anderson calls "the strongest stuff that we've done together," features longtime collaborators Attila Csihar (vocals, from Mayhem, Keep of Kalessin, etc.) and guitarist Oren Ambarchi, but the addition of brass, string and woodwind instrumentation under composer Eyvind Kang shows profound new Dimensions for the pair. On a fittingly rainy day in New York City, we sat down with Sunn 0)))'s permanent bassist and Southern Lord Records CEO Greg Anderson to talk about the new album and to learn about his journey as a musician, the statement he's making with his art, and the tricky balance of being your own label. See what he had to say after the jump.

Dear Classic Rock DJ:

In the past week, your station has played "Layla" 17 times. Now I love Derek & the Dominoes (Jim Gordon is a total monster behind the kit) as much as the next schmo. But your station's programming doesn't make a lick of sense. You call yourselves the "home of rock 'n' roll," yet you've been regurgitating the same 100 tracks since 1984. Why not inject some fresh blood into your rotation? C'mon dude, live a little!

This will surely come off as uber presumptuous, but I've taken the liberty of putting together a handy-dandy playlist and song-by-song cheat sheet for you to take back to your program director. It is packed with cool young artists whose jams would sound just dynamite alongside titans like Bad Company and Floyd. For example, I’ve been cranking this tune by Susan Tedeschi called “Talking About.” This nuclear-powered sexpot howls like a cross between pre-adult contemporary Bonnie Raitt and Jeff Beck group-era Rod Stewart. Then there’s this nifty little group from Philly who go by the name Dr. Dog. Their tune “The Ark” has Elton John, Supertramp, Lennon and even old school Hall & Oates tattooed all over it.

Don't get me wrong: I love your station. You are the only folks in town who still play The Wall in its entirety, and that's totally awesome. But I just feel like it's time to hear some new rock 'n' rock from the "home of rock 'n' roll." Am I right or what?

The Norwegian singer Annie's Don't Stop has had trouble living up to its title, moving only in fits and starts toward release since it was recorded as a follow-up to 2004's Anniemal. First the album leaked, and then Annie split with Island. Pitchfork recently reported that the icy disco princess is promising a summer release for the record, most likely in updated form. As a teaser, this week she released "Anthonio" as the inaugural release on Richard X's Pleasure Masters label. Co-written with X (Sugababes, Kelis, M.I.A.) and Hannah Robinson (Ladyhawke, Rachel Stevens), "Anthonio" is a slow dance in a Subzero, with Annie's breath steaming up on great, glassy panes of synthesizer. When the ice-cream headache clears, things get weirder as you realize the song's a scathing takedown of a Brazilian lover-turned-absent father. Complicating matters, reports Prefix, one alleged Anthonio has now appeared with a MySpace page featuring his own response, the song "Annie." Musically, it's a wounded peacock strutting around in '80s Euro-pop trappings; it's saccharine laced with Novocaine. Call me a doubter, but this smells like viral marketing; I suspect that the Annie camp had great fun putting together this gaudy soundtrack to the backstory. But the impishness is infectious. What's pop without a little manufactured scandal, anyway?

Almost tipping the producers' hand, the EP's "Berlin Breakdown Version" recasts the song in the mold of Berlin's "Take My Breath Away," a pinnacle of '80s electro-sentimentalism; more remixes come from Vaughn E and the Designer Drugs. But the best of the lot comes from French house mainstay Fred Falke, who gives the song the brooding feel of vintage New Order. He goes so far as to smuggle a few bars of "Your Silent Face" into the breakdown, but no matter how clever the move — doubly clever, considering that Richard X made his name mashing up Kylie with "Blue Monday" — the winks never detract from the song's full-on gush. Pleasure Masters, indeed.

The curveball of the week comes from the U.K. producer Joshua Harvey, better known as Hervé or the Count of Monte Cristal (the former half of the Count & Sinden). Under those aliases, Harvey has become a key name in "fidget house," a kinda-sorta-real subgenre where jacking Chicago house, rave-y techno and bits of indie-rock, dancehall and hip-hop are spun together into a sweaty, manic mess. But wring out that T-shirt and mop your brow, because Harvey's all cleaned up as the Young Lovers, his one-man lounge-jazz band. For the most part, the Young Lovers' self-titled debut album hews to the familiar, smoke-wreathed forms laid out by acts like Tosca and Kruder & Dorfmeister, but there's also a tangible echo of the Mo' Wax label's glory days in the mid- to late '90s, with crackly, hip-hop-inspired grooves and a sumptuous spread of instrumental samples. (There's also a touch of Burnt Friedman's winking approach to "hypermodern" jazz.) "Love You Madly," meanwhile, is a down-home stomper with billowing britches and a rousing sax lead, and the dubstep-inspired "Shake Off the Ghosts" sounds more than anything like an homage to Burial; it's not hard to imagine the track as a jumping-off point for a whole new project for the alias-happy Harvey.

While we're on the subject of dubstep, we mustn't forget Boxcutter's fantastic new album, Arecibo Message, on Planet Mu. Mike Paradinas' label has been on fire lately, and this, the third album from Northern Ireland's Barry Lynn in his best-known guise, is no exception. Classic 2-step garage serves as the foundation for grooves that are lumbering and elegant all at once, but he indulges all manner of tempos and styles, from practice-space drum 'n' bass to vintage acid; "Otherside Remix" is laser-baiting dubstep, "Lamp Post Funk" a bizarre, seam-bursting tribute to Miles Davis via Prince. The standout track is "A Familiar Sound," featuring Kinnego Flux, which sketches the fluid, funk-infused outlines of broken beat in bulbous, cartoonish shapes daubed with juicy Clavinets. Rarely does soul music come across as quite so giddy.