Wow. When I blathered earlier this month about the Bees as the band equivalent to RJD2’s record/laptop-based model of past-mining, I certainly didn’t expect The Deuce to come back and prove he could do the reverse. If you haven’t yet heard, The Third Hand is the album on which Columbus, Ohio’s own RJ [...]

There’s a profound sense of disorientation on Broken Social Scene’s three records, prominent enough that I’d classify it as a characteristic element of their music. Rhythms are dense but distant, interacting with chanted, multi-layered vocals to evoke an indistinct-yet-still familiar sense of pleasure and anxiety. If anyone out there has ever had a [...]

A Sunny Day in Glasgow is Ben Daniels’ musical project, and one for which he enlisted his two sisters, Robin and Lauren, to sing. And like any good brother, he’s done the aural equivalent of throwing several blankets over his siblings, forcing them to howl their way out (which they secretly love). Daniels (and [...]

Perhaps the next popular phase in rap/rock collaborations, following the (dubious) legacy of Run DMC/Aerosmith, R.E.M/KRS-One, Public Enemy/Anthrax, the Judgment Night soundtrack, Chuck D/Sonic Youth, Jay-Z/Linkin Park (or just Linkin Park by themselves), will be loquacious, bookish rappers duetting with British dance-punk bands. At least it might if Busdriver’s “Sun Shower” (mp3) has any say [...]

The Bees are probably still best known for their cover of Os Mutantes’ “A Minha Menina,” and fittingly so. The Mutantes were avowed fanatics of American psychedelic rock, folk, and avant-garde, but filtered through uniquely Brazilian sensibilities, and emerging as perhaps the most gonzo member of the Tropicalia movement (although Tom Ze might have [...]

The first half of the forthcoming Of Montreal record, Hissing Fauna, are You the Destroyer? was penned by Kevin Barnes during an extended Norwegian stay (to acquire health care for his recently born child). One song title includes the name of a Norwegian street, another lyric marks an event at a Swedish concert and [...]

1. “Lonesome Words” (mp3) spins like a zoetrope, and you look through the peepholes at a chocolate-and-bubble-gum Western landscape, where Rhys canters on a galloping mare and a nameless, black-haired woman howls longingly on an outcropping, mimicking the wind.
2. “LW” is Gruff Rhys and Joanna Newsom in a Baz Luhrman-directed/made-for-television movie about Julian [...]