Canadian group Stars is known for their intensely layered synthy sound, but their songs and vocals are great enough to stand without all the deep instrumentation – as shown by the Tiny Desk Concert they did recently for NPR, stripped down to just Torquil Campbell and Amy Millan’s voices with Evan Cranley’s acoustic guitar for back-up. Torq and Amy are always able to get across a lot of emotion, but it comes through even stronger here, and the haunting lyrics shine through wonderfully.

NPR’s First Listen might be my favorite thing right now. They select three or four upcoming albums at a time and stream them in their entirety for the week leading up to their release. So far I’ve gotten to preview several of my most anticipated releases this year, always deciding that yes, this is a way I want to spend my money. One of my most anticipated albums of 2010 is the new project from Rilo Kiley’s Jenny Lewis and her boyfriend Johnathan Rice – they’re keeping it simple and just calling the act Jenny & Johnny, but I don’t care what they call it, I just want to hear it. Jenny and Johnathan have been working together for several years, actually, touring together on each other’s records, and Johnathan is actually a pretty solid presence on Jenny’s 2008 release Acid Tongue.

So this feels like a natural progression for them, but it’s also really different sonically from most of her solo-credited work. It’s really upbeat and poppy, a very beach-friendly, sunny summer album, but with Jenny’s characteristically layered lyrics giving the songs a bit more of an edge than you at first expect (I think Johnny cowrote the lyrics, so I’m not meaning to leave him out; I just know Jenny’s style better and can see it here even more strongly, somehow, than in some of her solo work, where she was experimenting with different musical styles more than with lyrical depth). Basically if you like Best Coast‘s sound but think the songwriting is a little on the simplistic side (no disrespect, I honestly love Best Coast), then pick up I’m Having Fun Now when it comes out on August 31st. Well, you can give it a listen below first.

It took me a few times through Arcade Fire’s new album The Suburbs to really latch on to it, but now that I have, it’s easily emerged as one of my favorite albums of the year so far, and I’ll be shocked if it’s not in my top five come the end of the year. The Canadian ensemble hit The Daily Show With Jon Stewart promoting the album, and here they are performing “Ready to Start” and “Month of May.” I wish they’d done one with Regine on lead vocals, but hey, can’t have everything. There’s some cute interaction between Stewart and Win Butler at the beginning of “Month of May,” too.

via Pitchfork

Kathryn Calder is probably better known as the other female singer in The New Pornographers, the one who isn’t Neko Case. She’s the one who performs Neko’s parts on tours when Neko can’t be there, but she’s been given plenty of her own to do on the past couple of records, and it’s been great to see her come into her own. She’s also part of the band Immaculate Machine, and next week Kathryn is releasing her first solo album, entitled Are You My Mother? Well, to be completely accurate, Are You My Mother? releases on CD next Tuesday, August 10th, but it’s been available from digital outlets like iTunes and Amazon.com MP3 for about a month. I picked it up immediately, and I’m quite taken with it – it doesn’t have the wide-ranging quirk factor of The New Pornographers or the raw power of some of the other big releases out this year, but Kathryn’s voice is superb and she’s crafted a set of beautifully simple songs with unusual instrumentation (a lot of warm piano and clapping rather than normal percussion), yet with an easy willingness to drop in an epic section here and there that raises the ante and makes you pay attention more than you otherwise might.

The first single from the album, “Slip Away,” got a music video yesterday, a charmingly twee cut-paper animated affair that culminates in disco spaceship bunnies. Yeah, you read that right. I’m not entirely sure what about “Slip Away” suggests science fiction, but I’m not entirely sure I care, either, because disco spaceship bunnies kind of speak for themselves. In any case, it’s a lovely, understated song that captures both the minimalist and the layered sides of the album quite well.

Links:
MySpace
Amazon MP3 (available now)
Amazon CD (available 8/10)
Twitter

Canadian indie-pop group Stars are about to release their fifth full-length album The Five Ghosts on June 22nd, and yesterday they dropped the video for the first single, “Fixed.” It’s a heavily collaged and grungy-looking concert-style video that goes with Stars’ layered sound pretty well, I think, though as always, Amy Millan’s voice soars right over the top of it all.

Links
Official Site
Preorder on Amazon
Preorder on iTunes

This year has already had a lot of great new music, and it’s only continuing to add and promise more all the time. Today, after releasing a new single last week that had the internets abuzz, Arcade Fire announced that their next full-length album will be called The Suburbs, and will drop August 3rd in the United States. This is their first album since 2007′s Neon Bible, and it’s easily one of the most anticipated records of the year.

Here are the so-far released tracks, the single “The Suburbs” and its b-side “Month of May.” Some of the comments I’ve been seeing haven’t been too high on these tracks, and I’ll admit I’m not as in love with them as I am with Funeral or Neon Bible, but we’ll see. I’ve only heard them through a time or two. What do you think?

“The Suburbs”: Arcade Fire – The Suburbs
“Month of May”: Arcade Fire – Month of May

You can pre-order The Suburbs on Arcade Fire’s website or presumably through the music purveyor of your choice.

(via lots of places, but primarily Pitchfork and One Thirty BPM)

Canadian group Stars are preparing their new album The Five Ghosts for release in June, and a few days ago dropped the first single from it, entitled “Fixed.” This will be their first full album since 2007′s In Our Bedroom After the War (they’ve been working on solo projects in the meantime, including Amy Millan’s Masters of the Burial, which I highly recommend for fans of Jenny Lewis, Neko Case, and other alt-country-esque singers), and I can hardly wait to hear the whole thing. This first track has Amy’s soaring vocals against a dense, poppy, upbeat synthy musical background – in other words, it’s what you expect to hear from Stars, but that’s not a bad thing AT ALL. If anything, it’s synthier and more layered than ever.

So enjoy “Fixed,” and look out for The Five Ghosts at the end of June, and for Stars on tour. The tour, incidentally, looks to be selling out in several places, so get your tickets while you can. For anyone in the LA area, the venue they’re playing here, Troubadour, is a FANTASTIC small spot – seeing Stars in such an intimate venue is going to be a treat not to be missed.

Tour dates tucked after the jump.

via Stars’ official site

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Can’t manage to get together a whole band? No worries, if you had one of these, a five-necked instrument that combines a bass, guitar, banjo, mandolin, fiddle, plus a harmonica. It’s owned by Saskatchewan country music artist Steve Puto, who’s currently loaning it to the Cantos Music Foundation in Calgary for their museum collection of instruments.

Personally, I’m still working on learning to play a regular old one-necked guitar, but this looks pretty amazing. CBC News has the full story.

Personally, I have no trouble wearing my love for everything Joss Whedon right on my sleeve, and fan remixes and reimaginings of his work are always welcome, too. This past week, an extremely detailed 8-bit videogame mockup version of Whedon’s web series Doctor Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog turned up online, and I gotta say, I’m impressed. This is only a video, there is no game version of this, but the translation into the old-school video-game look and feel (not to mention sound) is pretty awesome. So far it’s just the first act of the series, but I hope DoctorOctoroc finishes the rest of it!

If you haven’t seen the original series, it’s now available on DVD and on Netflix Instant Watch, and it’s well worth it. Whedon + Neil Patrick Harris + Felicia Day + Nathan Fillion + music + geeky story = WIN.

EDIT: What do you know, Act Two just went up today (the 15th), in two parts. Embedding those after the jump.

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I haven’t had a chance to catch local LA band Best Coast live yet, but they’ve been getting a good bit of buzz on both local and national music blogs and are about to embark on a quite extensive European tour. Led by Bethany Cosentino with guitar and drum support from Bobb Bruno, the band very clearly pulls its influences from 1960s surf pop with a bit of a lo-fi garage band undertone, which is kind of a good fit for LA this time of year as we start to move into summer and feel the call of the beaches.

The video for their single “When I’m With You” just came out, and it falls right into that pocket with an added dose of “huh”, with Bethany hanging out with a Ronald McDonald clone on the beach, then stopping by In N Out for a burger. Gotta say, part of me loves the idea that Ronald McDonald would go turncoat and eat at In N Out, and really, who can blame him?

Links
via Stereogum
MySpace
iTunes (they only have a four-song EP and a couple of singles; iTunes has the EP, but Amazon only has the singles)
Amazon.com MP3

One of my greatest joys in life is falling in love with a band I didn’t even know existed until I hear them at a live show and they hit all my buttons right off. It’s happened a time or two before, most often with local shows when I’m there to see an opener and stick around, or get to shows early and catch opening bands for the bands I’m there to see. In this case, I went spur of the moment to catch a casual friend’s band (Twilight Sleep, who are also worth hearing) and since I was already out, decided to stay for the headliner that night – a band called Seaspin doing a month-long residency at a small venue. I hadn’t listened to them before going to the show, had barely read their bio on the venue’s website. It was truly serendipitous, because I ended up falling and falling hard for Seaspin.

The band is the brainchild of Ronnie Washburn and Jennifer Goodridge, who worked together in the band Your Enemies’ Friends and shared stages with the like of Blonde Redhead, TV on the Radio, Mars Volta, and others. Together they’ve forged a potent mixture of shoegaze and dream pop, with intricate drum tracks punctuating Washburn and Goodridge’s noise riffs and Goodridge’s lush vocals overlaying everything. It took somewhere around thirty seconds for me to break out into a wide grin that didn’t leave my face all night, and I was back the next week to see them finish out their residency, this time having listened to their EP almost non-stop all week.

I almost always enjoy going out to hear local bands do their thing, but it’s not every time that one catches me as strongly as Seaspin has. They’ll definitely be a band that I seek out every time they play, probably to the extent that Jennifer and Ronnie (who are both extremely personable) will tire of me hanging around. And if you like stuff like Viva Voce, Sonic Youth, and The Raveonettes, you should definitely be keeping Seaspin on your radar. Filling out the band are Ross O’Carroll on bass, Isaac Carpenter on drums, and at least for this show, Liana Piper on keys.

Here’s an MP3 of the title track from their EP Reverser, which is available for $4.95 from both Amazon.com MP3 and iTunes. They’ve also got the entire thing streaming on their Facebook and MySpace pages. Plus, you can keep up with them on their Twitter and website.

Seaspin – Reverser

I apologize for the low quality of my photos; this is one of the darkest venues in town, and I only had my iPhone with me. There are some great shots on their Facebook, or check out these ones from Stereogum.

Congratulations, the follow-up to MGMT’s excellent 2007 debut Oracular Spectacular, hits your local record store and (legal-type) MP3 download sites today, and here’s the video for the first single, “Flash Delirium.” Now, you don’t press play on an MGMT video without expecting some weird and potentially disturbing crap to go down (remember their video for “Kids”?), and while “Flash Delirium” seems to start off pretty staid and normal, just wait.

hat tip Stereogum

Not all of this news is brand new, but it’s all worth knowing about. At least, if you’re me or like the same bands as I do.

• The Dead Weather Announce New Album Details – Jack White’s current project The Dead Weather is set to release their second album, following 2009′s widely-acclaimed Horehound. It will be called Sea of Cowards, and will drop May 11th in the US. Pitchfork has the cover art and track listing at the link.
• Tokyo Police Club Announce Sophomore LP – Must be the time for sophomore albums, because Toronto-based Tokyo Police Club are releasing theirs, entitled Champ, on June 8th. They’re also embarking on a pretty extensive tour, most of it with Passion Pit.
• The Libertines to Reunite for Festival Performances – The Libs were one of my favorite bands several years ago, and I always kind of hoped they’d get back together at some point following their well-publicized and not-particularly-amicable breakup in 2004. This isn’t any more than a couple of reunited festival gigs, no album or anything in the works, and I have a feeling even this has all kinds of possible badness in store for it – as much as I love Pete Doherty’s music, he’s not what you might call a stable person. Hope this comes off better than I fear.
• MGMT’s Congratulations Streaming on Their Site – MGMT’s new album comes out tomorrow, but it leaked early so they put the whole thing streaming on their home page. It seems a little more mellow than Oracular Spectacular, but I quite liked it. Not sure how long they’ll leave it up after the album’s out, so check it out while you can.
• Two More Broken Social Scene Songs from New Record – Two more songs from Broken Social Scene’s upcoming Forgiveness Rock Record have been released, and Steregum has the Flash player to prove it. I really REALLY like “All to All,” though “Forced to Love” needs some more time to percolate around my brain, I think. Forgiveness Rock Record is out May 4th.
• Jason Boesel Talks About In-Progress Rilo Kiley and Jenny Lewis Records – Now, when I heard that coming from Rilo Kiley drummer Boesel, I got REALLY REALLY excited; Rilo Kiley is my favorite band, and their last record together was 2006, before they all sort of amicably split up to work on solo projects. I’d like nothing better than for them to get back together and work on something new. This is not quite that. The Rilo Kiley record is a rarities and B-sides compilation, which is still worth excitement, because they have a lot of B-sides and songs they’ve only done live that I’d LOVE to have in studio-produced form. Jenny is working on a new record with her boyfriend Johnathan Rice, but it’s unclear from the interview whether that means he’s working on her record, she’s working on his, or they’re doing a dual one (they’ve both worked on each other’s records before). Boesel is encouraging, though, that Rilo Kiley may reunite for a new project in the future, something I certainly hope comes true.

Zooey Deschanel. In a 50s-style polka dot dress. With a hula hoop. That’s all you really need to know about this video for the single “In the Sun” off She & Him’s upcoming Volume Two. If you would like to know more, M. Ward is also quite adorable as the guy who’s ignoring her. Don’t mind me, I’ll be over here indulging my girlcrush.

(via Pitchfork)

Indie band OK Go is no stranger to viral videos (their “Here It Goes Again” on treadmills was a huge hit on YouTube, rocketing the band to a household name almost overnight), and looks like their newest video for the single “This Too Shall Pass” from their new album Of the Blue Colour of the Sky is set to repeat that success. One can only assume that “RGM” stands for “Rube Goldberg Machine,” since that’s exactly what this video is – a four-minute, single-shot capture of an intricate chain-reaction using complex methods to achieve a simple end. There’s so much going on I couldn’t quite see all the causes and effects, but it’s still quite the impressive set-up.