A FRAMES
Black Forest(Sub Pop, www.subpop.com)
The Subterranean Pop label's most inspired signing since our mighty Constantines, Seattle trio the A Frames are totally my kind of band. Short, sharp and to the point, with elephantine bass lines and nerdy lyrics about ancient Sumeria and ocean trenches, these guys - and their songs - have got it all. You might call this robot-rock, like Devo if they did meaner drugs and got Steve Albini to produce them before they went all cutesy and "Peekaboo!" There really should be more bands like this, but then they wouldn't be so special. - JD
File next to: `80s college-rock, The Jesus Lizard, The Nein, non-wussy Sebadoh tunes.

BIRD SHOW
Green Inferno (Kranky)
Bird Show's latticework of a debut is without a doubt my favourite album of the year. So far, anyway. A collaboration between two members (Ben Vida and Liz Payne) of Chicago minimalist ensemble Town and Country, Bird Show combines a love of all things Brooklyn pixel-psych and far-out psych-folk with the chamber-group aesthetic and up-front intimacy of their big brother band into one infinitely intriguing, characteristically challenging and relentlessly rewarding mind-fuck of an experience. Drones, acoustic guitars, field recordings, tension and ease. Green Inferno's got it all with originality to spare. What else is there to say but feel the space it mysteriously invades and dig it? - KH
File next to: Charalambides, Black Dice, Smegma, Flying Saucer Attack, Metabolismus, the sound of your mind expanding.

BORN HELLER
s/t(Locust, www.locustmusic.com)
"Freak-folk" is on it's way to destroy psych music, and man, that's a shame. Before Devendra Banhart got onto the scene, groups like Bardo Pond and Ghost were tearing shit up with acoustic guitar ragas, droning, distorted guitars, and drugged out vocals that sang from somewhere in the background, not essential but still wholly part of the music. Now what is there? Joanna Newsom and her harp, that keening, earsplitting voice making you forget that the shit she's playing is, when it gets down to it, about as basic as possible? Devendra might be good, but like a lot of good artists, the music he's made has inspired a new set of fuckos to pick up acoustic guitars and get down. So, in comes Born Heller, yet another in a long line of terrible folkies who don't seem to understand the idea of restraint. Taking their cues from Joanna Newsom's school of singing, yet not even getting it together enough to write any decent lyrics, and sounding like a bunch of sixth graders at a talent show, they sure do know how to ride a trend perfectly. Please, doctor, hit me until I can no longer feel. - AG
File next to: SHIT THAT SUCKS.


BRIGHT EYES
I'm Wide Awake It's Morning/ Digital Ash In A Digital Urn (Saddle Creek, www.saddle-creek.com)
In true Use Your Illusion style, the latest releases from Bright Eyes are two separate albums with a common release date. Kinda a Sweat/Suit for the Seth Cohens of the world and the girls who wish the Seth Cohens and Conor Obersts of the world would notice they're alive. First, we've got I'm Wide Awake It's Morning. Though its first single, "Lua," is deceptively boring, all of the other songs make up for it. It's a collection of mostly Americana-style storytellings and lap steels, with Emmylou Harris providing backup vocals on three of its best tracks. Oberst takes it easy on the caterwauling histrionics until its closing track, "Road to Joy," where he goes apeshit all over Beethoven. Digital Ash in a Digital Urn is what's being touted as his "electronic, experimental album." Really, it's just a very nicely-produced Bright Eyes pop record with some synths and drum machines and that dude from Yeah Yeah Yeahs playing guitar. If you could imagine Oberst as an articulate recovering Nine Inch Nails fan who really digs The Postal Service record, that's pretty much what it sounds like. Though many of you had written off Oberst as a pretentious, overrated crybaby a long time ago, these could be the albums that make you begrudgingly refer to him as a talented songwriter. And for longtime listeners, both albums are rife with enough similes to have a new MSN name every day for the next couple of months. - SB
File next to:All-lowercase livejournal entries with <3's.

RICHARD BUCKNER
Dents and Shells(Merge, www.mergerecords.com)
Richard Buckner released Dents and Shells on Merge in what was a triumphant (and surely prosperous) 15th year for the legendary label; he's in good company with new signees the Arcade Fire and Lou Barlow, among others. Bucker's music has evolved over his six solo records, so although he mines some familiar territory with lost-love themes, he's using more sophisticated arrangements and more polished production. The end result is a familiar country-tinged sound that serves his melty baritone well, with his impressively impenetrable lyrics telling a story but never giving too much away. The vocals are placed high in the mix, often floating above the instrumentation, which at times acts to sever cohesion and take you out of the moment a bit, but he's a strong singer with interesting lyrics so that can be forgiven. Buckner does good work, but I think I would prefer this sort of heartfelt heartache music in a more stripped-down form. - JL
File next to: Big old house; whiskey, or maybe tea.

BURMESE
Men (Load, www.loadrecords.com)
Burmese are scary shit! I cannot stress this enough. Like their previous album, A Mere Shadow and Reminiscence of Humanity, Men plays on that terrifying, screaming, keening anger and misunderstanding and weirdness. I mean, the opening song is called "Rapewar"! That's crazy! Crazy! They're mining the same violence and evil vein as Combatwoundedveteran and Oxbow, and somehow coming up scarier than either band has ever been. If CWV are murder-rock, and Oxbow are sexual-assault-core (listen to their Evil Heat album and see if you don't think the same thing, coming away from it a little creeped), then Burmese are both. The vocals rattle around, guitars are sludged out to the point of losing proper tonality, the drums are buried. This shit is evil. Listen with caution! - AG
File next to: It's still great, though. Somehow.

DALEK
Absence(Ipecac, www.ipecac.com)
After two years of relative silence, Dalek return to bring the noise. And I mean that. From Filthy Tongue of Gods and Griots remains the most interesting hip-hop album I own, and one of my favourites. It combined the hard lyricism of Public Enemy and Aesop Rock, along with something like Faust's mid-period stuff. It was noisy as shit. The beats were so blunt that they bludgeoned. And holy shit, was it good. So now there's Absence. It's taken a while to get used to, but I can safely say it's as good as Gods and Griots. Well, almost. While the lyrics and flow aren't as clunky as they once were, the production is much less varied. There aren't the weird sitar jams like before, and now it's almost-solid noise. Yet, it remains excellent. After a little listening, the changes begin to present themselves, and while they're not as apparent before, in many ways, they carry more impact because of it. Hopefully this album sees Dalek getting the recognition they deserve. - AG
File next to: Krautrock meets New Jersey/New York.

DETACHMENT KIT
Of This Blood (Frenchkiss,www.frenchkissrecords.com )
Somehow, between now and then, Detachment Kit have gone from a post-punk band with nothing much to say, to a conceptually driven, dynamic and instrumentally adept group. Here it is: a concept album that could be likened to Richard Linklater's Waking Life; an album about dealing with death in unique ways. From the opener, "Night of My Death," a minute-and-a-half-long instrumental using a chorus, gentle acoustic guitar and trumpet as it's backbone, to the closing coda of "Spider," wherein it is learned that death is inevitable, etc, and to deal with it just par for the course. For most of the album, the idea of death is one to be avoided (check the chorus on "Skyscrapers" - "wondering how you managed to fly/don't touch the ground/no you'll never die"), or, approached with innocence (the drawings all over the album are childlike and crude, the lyrical content often approaching its subject with childlike reverence). It's hard, after only a few listens, to sort out what this album is actually about, but the themes are there. How did this band change so much? Is it a one-off case, like the Eels' Electro Shock Blues? Are these guys the heirs to the throne(s) of McLusky and Les Savy Fav? Is this the future??? - AG
File next to: The future?
ELUVIUM
Talk Amongst the Trees (Temporary Residence, www.temporaryresidence.com)
The new Eluvium album plays like the bright child of Brian Eno and Stars of the Lid. It's a thoroughly composed yet poppy ambient album that, while sparse, manages to get it's melodies stuck in your head. Plus it makes great make-out music. The first song, "New Animals from the Air" coasts on a three-note groove that would be annoying if the three notes weren't exactly the right ones. Meanwhile, it's further held together by the washes of ambient feedback and clicky keyboards. For over ten minutes it's the same cycle, but it's so good and so interesting that it never gets boring. Meanwhile, tracks like "Show Us Our Homes" and "Calm of the Cast-Light Cloud" use oceanic swells of melody and feedback to their full potential, generating waves of sounds that please. - AG
File next to: Eno, Stars of the Lid, Kranky, Labradford, Pan American.

FLOSSIN
Lead Singer(Ache, www.acherecords.com)
Combine the skills of three intensely original luminaries: drummer Zach Hill (Hella), Miguel Depedro (Kid 606), and Christopher Willits. What you get is an intensely original collaboration, something like Nervous Cop, only listenable. Layers of tonal feedback, distortion, and laptop mutation are underscored with Hill's insistent drumming, which, as with the Hella records, mutates constantly through the atmospheric musical haze. What this totally sounds like is the too-short Bitches Ain't Shit But Good People album that Hella released a few years ago, except instead of the guitar, a layer of computer sounds, and like the EP, some great keyboards and processing. - AG
File next to: Supergroups?

HIGHROAD NO.28
Dynamite Introspection (www.geocities.com/highroadno28)
I wouldn't say that I particularly liked this album, but perhaps it's because I haven't really been exposed to semi-heavy music. Although the songs weren't really my idea of greatness, it would be unfair to say they were terrible. With songs such as "Time Desolation," it was evident that Highroad No.28 used elements of metal while still having songs that I could a) understand the lyrics to and b) hear actual rhythm in, and for this I congratulate them. If you're into heavy metal, and yet you have the itch for something less typical-metal, then I think you would like this band. - JB
File Next to: Long hair, beards, and electric guitars?

HINTERLANDT AND KARRI O
Sitting, Going Places; Departures and Arrivals (Abflug, www.abflugrec.com)
This is the third release from Finnish new media label Abflug, brainchild of graphic designer, Karri Ojanen. It's a new media label because each of the releases is an enhanced CD with audio and video files. In this case, Australian Hinterlandt composes four tracks of experimental electro-pop. The music is very hallucinogenic, a variety of disjointed, sometimes clashing sounds, freely floating, are snapped into cohesion by a solid rhythms and become pop songs for fleeting moments before dissolving into a void of sonic textures. The whole process is so subtle that it sounds completely organic, as if the elements made this music up in the clouds during an airplane trip. Karri O's visuals consist of a minimalist collage of air travel footage which are accompanied by delicate microtechno music composed by the graphic designer. This is the best release yet from this obscure little label, well worth searching out. - MJ
File next to: Electro pop and video art.

IRON & WINE
Woman King(Sub Pop, www.subpop.com)
I spent a lot of time with the songs from Iron & Wine's Our Endless Numbered Days. Sam Beam's stripped-down arrangements, so lovingly wrapped around his old-timey lyrics, accompanied me on a post-November 2nd tour of the Blue States. Somehow, that seemed apt. Hearing music that harks back to a time when words, meaning and heart mattered was comforting as the results of the election started sinking in. If you don't know Iron & Wine's past releases, the songs effortlessly mix in an iPod playlist with Sufjan Stevens, Joanna Newsom, Jens Lekman and Gordon Lightfoot. Iron & Wine's new EP, Woman King, (a title that caused producer Brian Deck to quip, "Wouldn't that be `Queen'?") picks up where Beam left off, but by the end of the EP he has added in some tasteful electric guitar, percussion and piano and probably some of the most resonant lyrics he's written: "Thank God you see me the way you do. Strange as you are to me." Despite the quiet, gentle nature of Beam's songs, there is nothing tentative nor restrained about his work. There is simply no need to clutter with excessive instrumentation nor to fill in the spaces between the words and the chords. A quiet confidence that gets better with each listen. - LM
File next to: Sufjan, Joanna, Jens and Gordo.

THE LOST CAUSE
Memorial (SEJM; www.thelostcause.net)
I don't normally like to review bands that I know the members of, as it's kind of a partisan and slanted act, but since there's something comforting in the honest and upfront expressions of The Lost Cause that put me at ease and makes me feel I can say whatever I want about it, I'm gonna tell it like it is. The dynamic duo of Stephanie Earp (vocals/guitars) and Joel McConvey (drums) rock a thick line drawn between the tender confessions and vetches of indie pop and the heavier territory of rock-out duos like The Kills. The EP's raw recording brightens the rough edges of these five songs well and effectively keeps Earp's brazen vocals in the forefront. There are times, like in the awkwardly wordy Ani Difranco-isms of "I Knew This Would End Badly" when things don't feel as natural as maybe they should, but the solid, catchy pop assaults of "Document" and "Bring Your Light" make up for them with glory to spare. Catch them live to feel their full throttle energy ride through you. You won't regret it. - KH
File next to: Lisa Loeb, The Kills, complex relationships, drowning your regrets in beer-soaked poetry.

MAPS OF THE NIGHT SKY
Twilighters(Locust Mount; www.mapsofthenightsky.com)
I caught these cats live one night at a free music night and kinda dug `em. I liked the poetic depths they seemed to strive for, the Pavement-y feel to their song structures, the band's complete disregard for sickeningly typical indie cool posturing. They're doing their own thing and they're passionate about it, which is a hell of a lot more legitimate than contriving a post-punk band or jumping on some other bandwagon. Sure, there's this "dreary yet hopeful" sadness to their sound that isn't really my thing, but I can appreciate a little rain clouds sometimes This little five-song friend captures all of the band's plusses quite well. Definitely some promise here. - KH
File next to: Early Pavement on Prozac, Big Star, honesty, bearing heavy burdens.

MAXIMO PARK
Maximo Park (Warp; www.maximopark.com)
Although I only got a glimpse of this band, their two-song EP made me want to hear more. I mean, who can resist the combination of muffled guitars with a singer who has an English accent. Maximo Park's EP gave me the impression that they sound great on CD, but would be even better live. With the two songs "The Coast is Always Changing" and "The Night I Lost My Head," their tight sound is very poppy, and could definitely be compared to bands such as Franz Ferdinand or Razorlight. That being said, I think they have the potential to be something refreshing to the music scene. I recommend keeping an eye out for more tunes from these cool cats. - JB
File Next to: That catchy song you love to dance to.

HARRIS NEWMAN
Accidents With Nature and Each Other(Strange Attractors)
As opposed to following up his brilliant debut by plucking out more of the same mysteriously hypnotizing solo steel-string guitar work or moving further into ghostly psych-folk territory, engineer extraordinaire and acoustic guitar wizard Harris Newman moves into more spacey Constellation Records territory for large parts of his sophomore album, painting his down-home purist finger-picking with a broader emotional palette that creatively brings him back home again to the post-rock sound he helped create. There are still loads of solo guitar tracks here to keep fans of his first album, Non-Sequiturs, happy, but the added attention to band-style composition will appeal to those who appreciate Montreal's brand of harrowing protest. - KH
File next to:Hrsta, Jack Rose, John Fahey, Molasses, the Arizona skyline.
Catch Harris Newman live at Wavelength on March 6!

OH NO
The Disrupt (Stones Throw, www.stonesthrow.com)
Madlib. Stones Throw. Peanut Butter Wolf. This album is just soaked in cred, and it's hard to see why Oh No would pass that up - being that he's Madlib's little brother and all. And it's too bad about that, because once you know this, you kind of judge the music based on what Madlib has done previously. So I can say that it doesn't really compare in any way to the Madvillain album, to any of Quasimoto's stuff, or even to Yesterday's New Quintet. What's worse is that instead of even following in his brother's footsteps in the forward-thinking intellect-hop of recent years, Oh No is stuck in 1995, with weak rhymes and tons of shitty guest appearances. Ghostface tapped this vein to huger waves of success last year with Pretty Toney - go pick that up instead. - AG
File next to: What it wants to be but can't.

THE OLD SOUL
s/t (Hand of God)
There is probably nothing better in this world than something beautiful. And The Old Soul is a beautiful record! We're talking beautiful like Dennis Wilson before the beard, we're talking beautiful like Bone Machine on headphones, we're talking beautiful like a shot of Jalisco Mescal, we're talking beautiful like Gina Lollobrigida in sepia tone, we're talking beautiful like Brazil (the country and the movie) - if it's beautiful, we're talking! The Old Soul will be on display at Wavelength 251, February 20, and no doubt it'll be fuckin' beautiful. Beautiful like ex-White Star Line front-man Luca Maoloni and his band of bocce players, who kick our cooperative asses with this collection of circus music-psyche-wedding song-post punk-oompah-noise-synth-rock pop-ballads. Surprisingly enough, it's pretty easy to listen to after the third or fourth time around. The Old Soul is catchier than strep throat and not nearly as painful. It's beaut-... ah fuck it! -
File next to: Terry Gilliam vs. Sophia Loren, Yosh and Stan Shmenge vs. The Pink Robots, el Mariachi vs. Big Top Pee Wee.

OUTRAGEOUS CHERRY
Our Love Will Change the World (Rainbow Quartz, www.rainbowquartz.com)
From the opening song "Pretty Girls Go Insane," it was clear that this band was going to be a throw back to the `60s. With guitar solos reminiscent of The Animals, this band is all about incorporating a quality similar to the sounds of the British invasion. On songs such as "Our Love Will Change the World," it is evident that Outrageous Cherry uses simplistic lyrical content and guitar solos - a staple in each song, to create pop songs with soul. This album has a great flow, and was put together in a way that makes it seem like one long song with various reflections that have created a different response. If you want a very mellow album that makes you feel like you're in a different era, then this band is worth listening to. - JB
File Next to: Biscuits and Tea.

PANOPLY ACADEMY
Everything Here Was Built to Break(Secretly Canadian, www.secretlycanadian.com)
Although they've been around for a long time, the Panoply Academy has never shown up on my musical radar. The reason for this: they do the same thing as a lot of other bands I like, but they don't do it as well. Trying to fuse the heartfelt with the crazy, coming off like Owls and Royal City at a jam, or Joan of Arc making a record with Clem Snide, only a few of these songs work. Chief among these, the popping "Nom De Plume," which sounds like the best elements of all of those bands stirred up into something original. The rest of the stuff doesn't really touch that opening track, which is too bad, but understandable; as this is a collection of singles from the past decade, it's hard to reconcile this with their other stuff (none of which I've heard). - AG
File next to: This album has awesome artwork; therefore, you can't judge a book by it's cover.

SUBTLE
A New White(Lex, www.lexrecords.com)
Adam Doseone Drucker has been making interesting music for a long time. As one third of cLOUDDEAD, he brought the outer reaches of experimental hip-hop together with lovely, blunted melodies. He's collaboration with Boom Bip was one of the strangest, most personal hip-hop albums of 2003, and his nasal, fluid vocals can be found all over records by Hood and Fog, among others. After cLOUDDEAD split up this year, it became pretty clear that Dose was the MC spirit of the band. Why? went on to record fairly middling, folky indie rock, and when was the last time anyone heard from Odd Nosdam? Sure, his Atari by way of a Maya Tone drum machine beats were cool, but there are other people out there doing it better. Which is what it comes down to with Subtle, the new group that Dose is heading. It's the logical extension of cLOUDDEAD, moving away from the suite-like nature of their pieces and into a more song-based form, though still kept by Dose's weird tone-poetry. A New White is a very good album, making it pretty clear that Drucker's got his head together when it comes to what he wants to create. - AG
File next to: Anticon and Lex. The oneness?

SB = SHAUNNA BEDNAREK, JB = JASMYN BURKE, JD = JONNY DOVERCOURT, AG =
ANTHONY GERACE, KH = KEVIN HAINEY, MJ = MARINKO JAREB, LM = LISA
MORAN, WJR = WESLEY J RAMOS