On The Ground

Damien DeRose, the musician and songwriter behind the Peasant name, could be any hybrid of melancholy and charming—The Shins meets the late Elliott Smith—a consumable sadness that Wes Anderson will no doubt eventually co-opt for a postmodern movie soundtrack

Like It Or Not

If the latest slate of indie bands are to be believed, feigned disinterest and irony worship are so not cool anymore. It seems as though the hipsters think they've totally moved beyond all that. This season's must-have emotional response to your surroundings? Cutesy glee, couched within a three-word (preferably multi-syllabic) band name. Problem is, it still feels like an affectation, a pose that comes off just as hollow as those other two. Therein lies my biggest issue with Australian group Architecture in Helsinki.  They're fun and funky. They're danceable enough.

Elizabeth Willis

In Anne Sexton’s introductory note for her book of poems, Live or Die, she “apologizes for the fact that [these poems] read like a fever chart for a bad case of melancholy.

Snowflakes and Carwrecks

Once you’ve mastered an instrument, you have two choices: move on to another, or tinker with the one you know and love. No stranger to critical acclaim, German composer and avant garde pianist Volker Bertelmann’s work as Hauschka makes use of the latter technique.

High Places

The experimental, lo-fi, Brooklyn-based duo High Places could be considered an acquired taste. The vocals are whimsically distorted and much of the percussion sounds as though it were made in someone’s kitchen by rattling a silverware drawer (since their self-titled album was made in their home studio, this may actually be the case). High Places starts off awkwardly slow, and on first listen, the short tunes and chanting rhythms may fail to draw you in.

Ropechain

Grampall Jookabox, nee David Adamson, is as strange as his stage name would suggest. Adamson is from Indianapolis, Indiana, which is also my childhood stomping ground, give or take thirty minutes (in those parts, we count in minutes to be traveled, not miles). With an affinity for home that grows the longer I stay away, Ropechain fills a need in my life, a record that sounds clumsy and aimless when it is anything but.

Offend Maggie

Some people find Deerhoof unlistenable, with sometimes manic, screeching vocals over strange instrumentation. Some critics think they're twee, and some think they’re the best of noise rock. Most cannot slap a genre label on this expectation-bending band. There is occasional yelling and human-made sound effects, "Beep beep!" You have no idea where the songs will go, or when they will end.

Circus

In a past life, I put Brit-Brit tracks on my iPod for the gym. Manufactured sounds make my booty shake, and no matter how high-minded I may be about independent music, I can appreciate pop anthems and radio hits. In my present state, I have compassion for the ubiquitous starlet, her public breakdowns, and her compulsive need to set the record straight in her own tangled way. The spotlight is a heat lamp.

Common Reaction

Long story short, I was hanging around in the student center at school where a flat screen television soundlessly flashed images of MTVu. Since I had largely stopped watching MTV more than a decade ago, I was pretty much ignoring it. That is, until I saw a grainy black and white cartoon of an obviously lovesick man trailing a raven-haired beauty down the street. Intrigued, I resolved to listen to the song at home and made note of the band's name—Uh Huh Her. I had never heard of the group before, and Los Angeles-based Uh Huh Her is a long way off from household name status.

Saint Dymphna

Saint Dymphna is the patron of those stricken with mental illness or nervous system disorders, epileptics, mental health professionals, happy families, incest victims, and runaways. The saint was martyred by a recently widowed father. He’d made advances at her and she ran away to Belgium with her confessor, the court jester, and his wife. The elderly priest and Dymphna were slaughtered, but they don’t say what happened to the jester. St. Dymphna’s attributes include appearing praying in a cloud surrounded by lunatics wearing golden chains.

Girls and Weather

Rumble strips are those bumpy edges along the highway that essentially—hopefully—keep you from driving into a ditch. Did you ever start to doze off on an interstate freeway or make a turn too sharp off an exit ramp? Then you’ve probably rolled over a rumble strip. Not really similar due to their lack of grating and bumpy transitions, The Rumble Strips are a UK band with a lot of heart.

Caught In The Trees

Damien Jurado is no spring chicken. He’s been making music since the mid-nineties and indie fave record label Sub Pop produced his first four solo albums. His time with Sub Pop proved to be a much more musically experimental one compared to his previous tried and true time as a folky balladeer. Jurado united with Indiana-based Secretly Canadian in 2003 for his album Where Shall You Take Me? and returned to his folk sound, a task that he excels at.

O

The next greatest soundtrack to your decidedly indie rock life, Tilly and the Wall deliver nothing short of compositional greatness on their third album, O. Known for their youthful, glossy, happy-go-lucky doses of indie pop, this album takes on fun fare while addressing a few deeper issues. “Pot Kettle Black,” for instance, critiques girl cliques and name-calling all too familiar to women of all ages.

Lookout Mountain, Lookout Sea

The Silver Jews are one of those bands shuffling around in the back of the club, the members sort of trading places with each other, not sure which one should settle behind the front man, who takes the stage.