Savages: Silence Yourself

By Philip Cosores at 4:03 PM on May 7, 2013

If you go to Savages’ website right now, something strange happens.  read more

Primal Scream: More Light

By Mack Hayden at 3:42 PM on May 7, 2013

Every decent band evolves, morphs, changes and shifts their sound as years go by.  read more

Fitz and The Tantrums: More Than Just A Dream

By Ryan Reed at 2:34 PM on May 7, 2013

On their debut album, 2010's Pickin' Up the Pieces, Fitz and the Tantrums were retro-soul revivalists with new-wave panache.  read more

She & Him: Volume 3

By Tom Speed at 2:25 PM on May 7, 2013

"All I know is I’m tired of being clever/Everybody’s clever these days,” sings Zooey Deschanel on “Never Wanted Your Love,” from Volume 3, her latest release with M. Ward under the moniker She & Him.  read more

Mikal Cronin: MCII

By John Hendrickson at 2:09 PM on May 7, 2013

Mikal Cronin is a creature of his environment—sunny, foggy, fickle, evocative.  read more

Deerhunter: Monomania

By Nathan Huffstutter at 12:42 PM on May 7, 2013

Don’t blink—no mere mid-career album, Monomania registers as an absolute impact event, a massive dirty blast marking the moment Deerhunter’s steady trajectory spins out of control.  read more

Various Artists: Music From Baz Luhrmann's Film The Great Gatsby

By Philip Cosores at 12:10 PM on May 7, 2013

The Great Gatsby's newest film adaptation from Baz Luhrmann has pushed the soundtrack from executive producer Jay-Z as a focal point of the film’s marketing, certainly more than, say, Tobey Maguire’s role as Nick Carraway or even Carey Mulligan’s Daisy Buchanan.  read more

Vampire Weekend: Modern Vampires of the City

By Stephen M. Deusner at 10:07 AM on May 7, 2013

It’s been five years, three albums, an SNL appearance, countless festival performances and one lawsuit from an unwitting album-cover model since Vampire Weekend dropped its self-titled debut, and still the class thing remains the predominant talking point about the band.  read more

Denison Witmer: Denison Witmer

By Alex Skidmore at 4:02 PM on April 30, 2013

Denison Witmer has always had a knack for writing songs that seem extremely personal and completely relatable at the same time.   read more

!!!: Thr!!!er

By Ryan J. Prado at 2:17 PM on April 30, 2013

For their fifth studio album, Sacramento-bred dance-punk progenitors !!! wanted to develop a more fully honed patchwork of their striking hybrid of electronica, punk, funk and straight-up dance-heavy music.  read more

Guided By Voices: English Little League

By Beca Grimm at 12:11 PM on April 30, 2013

It truly sucks that the man who delivered us the near-perfect Bee Thousand almost 20 years ago is the same man who now is the butt of so many jokes.  read more

Vandaveer: Oh Willie Please...

By Stephen M. Deusner at 10:01 AM on April 30, 2013

New folk revival bands like Mumford & Sons, The Lumineers and The Avett Brothers reimagine old-time music as uniformly fervent and life-affirming and white, but there’s some fucked-up shit in the American songbook: odes to deviant sex that would make E.L. James blush, descriptions of crimes so brutal they make Grand Theft Auto look like Super Mario Brothers and existential crises so bleak they give new meaning to the term “Great Depression.”  read more

Frank Turner: Tape Deck Heart

By Eric Swedlund at 4:16 PM on April 23, 2013

Frank Turner, who once sang “music, it’s my substitute for love” (on “Substitute,” from 2008’s Love Ire & Song), now turns to music as not only his escape from the tribulations and fallout from heartbreak, but as a type of therapy session.  read more

The Postelles: ...And It Shook Me

By Mark Rozeman at 4:01 PM on April 23, 2013

The Postelles of …And It Shook Me feel as though they have less to prove. The result is a sound that leans more heavily on the band’s inherent strengths--constructing light, poppy hooks that augment singer Daniel Balk’s equally upbeat vocal stylings.   read more

Young Galaxy: Ultramarine

By Rachel Bailey at 3:25 PM on April 23, 2013

With their third record, 2011’s Shapeshifting, it seemed Montreal fivesome Young Galaxy had hit their stride after a rather lackluster first two albums.  read more

Allison Weiss: Say What You Mean

By Michael Garrity at 2:18 PM on April 23, 2013

Allison Weiss got her big break by leveraging the power of the Internet for self-promotion and successfully using Kickstarter to fund her first full-length album, …Was Right All Along, which was mostly made up of your standard guitar-and-drum pop songs and sentimental acoustic ballads characteristic of the majority of indie-rock singer/songwriters, meaning the album didn’t really do much to demonstrate Weiss’ unique personality.   read more

Phoenix: Bankrupt!

By Philip Cosores at 1:04 PM on April 23, 2013

Unless you are Thomas Mars, Deck d'Arcy, Laurent Brancowitz or Christian Mazzalai, it is unlikely that you ever thought Phoenix would be where they are right now.  read more

Stephen Malkmus and Friends: Can's Ege Bamyasi Played by Stephen Malkmus and Friends

By Philip Cosores at 12:48 PM on April 23, 2013

Record Store Day is traditionally more populated with reissues and singles than whole albums of previously unreleased material, but Stephen Malkmus has never been one to follow the status quo.  read more

Brass Bed: The Secret Will Keep You

By Mark Lore at 10:30 AM on April 23, 2013

If Brass Bed had released The Secret Will Keep You around the time “New Slang” was proclaimed the song that would change your life, they’d have been guaranteed to change a few lives of their own.  read more

Futurebirds: Baba Yaga

By Mark Rozeman at 5:01 PM on April 16, 2013

On their sophomore release from, Athens, Ga.-based group Futurebirds stand as a band confident in its sound and skilled in their delivery. Yet, they also come across as a band in need of stretching their boundaries.  read more