Oh hey, I'm LIGHTS--a fairly small-sized, Canadian girl who makes intergalactic-electro music. What do I mean by intergalactic? I'm glad you asked. I try to find sounds that seem like they could have been plucked from Saturn's rings or a meteor belt. Equal parts fantastical/epic/beautiful/emotional. As a kid I moved around a lot. To find some form of consistency, I had to find a place that always stayed the same. Concocting music became that world to me and I escaped there any chance I got. It started with just me and the guitar. Then, I moved on to drums, piano, and then the keyboard. When I started realizing the limitless possibilities that synthetic instruments presented, I invested in a little 8-track mixer. I was thirteen. I began the process of transferring what was in my head into something solid.

After drifting around and dabbling in different musical genres throughout my teen years, I finally landed on the so-called "electro-pop" planet I live on now. I unleashed a little taster of my work in the early months of 2008 as an EP but the songs kept coming...I couldn't stop them. And the more I made, the easier it became to convey how I felt through simple lyrics juxtaposed with sounds harvested from the far reaches of my alternate universe. Finally I sat back and listened to everything I had feverishly created over the past years, and I was happy. I realized I had discovered more about myself when I was just listening and creating music than from anything else. And for every minute of song that passed through my head, I was reminded of that realization, and it felt special. I called this first full collection of music, "The Listening." I hope that it makes you feel special too..

Most of the world might know Jose Gonzalez as a low-key singer-songwriter solo artist, but he's also fronted a Gothenburg-based rock band called Junip since the late 90s. And now Junip are ready for their close-up. They released a 7" in 2000 and an EP in 2006, but this year, Junip will release both an EP and an album. Those records will come out on four different labels-- Mute in the U.S., City Slang in Europe, Shock in Australia, and Ultra-Vybe in Japan.

The band has a few dates lined up for the spring and summer, including European festival appearances and a quick U.S. tour in June. We've got those dates below.

You can download the Junip song "Rope and Summit" on the band's website and hear a few more tracks over on the band's MySpace page. Fans of Gonzalez shouldn't be shocked; it's not like he's suddenly fronting Black Flag."- Pitchfork

In a world of increasing conformity and musical banality, Devin Townsend is among the few real personalities who have character, charisma and surprising innovative creativity. As a solo artist and producer, a member of the (by now disbanded) Strapping Young Lad, with whom he played Ozzfest and the main stage at the Download festival, and vocalist on Steve Vai’s album, Sex And Religion, – Townsend has always inspired fans and critics alike. The latest chapter of his extremely diverse career is entitled Ki and will be out in May/June 2009. “Ki is the first in a series of four albums under the moniker ‘Devin Townsend Project’. Each album is essentially a different band or collection of session musicians playing my music,” Townsend explains. “They were chosen based on what the theme of the album is and the vibe that the album is trying to project. The album Ki is very specific in this quartet of albums in that it controls its anger throughout, barring one song – ‘Heaven Send’ – and really is an exercise in having little to prove.”

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It was just about the last song Taylor Goldsmith wrote before Dawes hit the studio: “When My Times Comes,” a rousing declaration of his hunger to be better, wiser, sharper—as a writer, as a person, as the singer in a band. But now that Dawes' debut album has arrived, it's fair to say that Goldsmith's time is coming sooner than he'd planned.

A graceful and poetic set of Southern-tinged yet firmly El Lay rock'n'roll, the Jonathan Wilson-produced NORTH HILLS is an electrifying and accomplished freshman effort. From the ruminative opener “That Western Skyline” to the joyous twang of “When You Call My Name” to the harmony-soaked “Take Me Out of the City,” NORTH HILLS makes it easy to hear why Daytrotter's Sean Moeller has already called it “hands down one of the finest records of 2009... Dawes is a perfect band.”

The Los Angeles quartet—Goldsmith, 23, (vocals, guitar), his brother Griffin Goldsmith, 18, (drums, vocals), Wylie Gelber, 21 (bass) and Alex Casnoff, 22 (piano, vocals) […however, Tay Strathairn plays piano, vocals on the record] —shares DNA with Simon Dawes, Taylor and Wylie's teenaged band with Blake Mills, but is a vastly different, more creatively audacious beast. “I didn't have a whole lot of respect for what it really meant to write songs back then,” says Taylor Goldsmith. “They were more a vehicle to get to be a young guy in a band.” As Simon Dawes dissolved, he realized rock'n'roll was more than just a lifestyle choice—that even if he never got to be as brilliant as his favorite artists (a list that ranges from Nabokov, Fitzgerald and Rilke to Will Oldham, John Prine and Townes Van Zandt), that was where he had to aim. “I wanted to write songs that actually meant something to me,” he says. “Those guys helped shape my character, how I look at the world. We started Dawes with that intention.”

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Clinic formed over easter in Liverpool '97. First single 'IPC subeditors dictate our youth' appeared that October, on their own Aladdin's Cave of Golf label. As an opener it set the stall out for how their unique sound would progress; pounding rhythms, heavily distorted organ and intense vocals, a cryptic mix of surf punk with a mutant house beat. The single was top ten in John Peel's festive fifty and ironically in both NME and Melody Maker. In an indie sense, the band had arrived (despite their ambitions lying elsewhere).

After two more Aladdin's releases (both voodoo based), Clinic signed with Domino in '99 and set about constructing the extreme dementia and peace that would become 'Internal Wrangler'. Their first album proper, 'Wrangler' easily delivered on the promise of the early singles, sounding like nothing else extant, your planet or mine. A London NME astoria show followed, with the band in full Pearly King gear playing to an appreciative audience. A true celebration of the capital.

“If this is the arena rock of the future, send me a ticket” - Pitchfork

“A triumphant, heavily riffed, primarily instrumental epic, whiplashing through six minutes of smiling prog jams, and as many tempos as passages, before settling into one last minute of uplifting chants.” — Stereogum

“Life-affirming prog guitar anthems.” – Seattle Stranger

Fang Island describes its sound as “everyone high-fiving everyone.” And, the Brooklyn quintet’s anthemic and soaring songs make it quite possibly one of few bands befitting such description.

Its finger-tapping guitar lines, chanted vocals, triumphant harmonies and overall perky songs hearken to the sort of “Total Music” of the Fucking Champs, Jay Reatard, Ponytail, Kraftwerk, Marnie Stern, Thin Lizzy, et al. But, perhaps more so, its songs are like the music in your head at that moment when everything feels just right: that first kiss, that high score on the video game, buying your first small nation in cash… you know, good stuff.

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Shearwater continue to explore the beauty, menace, and fragility of the natural world and that increasingly rare species, the indivisible album on The Golden Archipelago, the band's most absorbing and accomplished work to date. The new record is the third panel of a triptych that includes 2006's enigmatic Palo Santo and 2008's acclaimed Rook, albums linked by themes of environmental and personal decay and humans' impact on nature. In The Golden Archipelago, Shearwater turn to a portrait of life on islands a world of alternating lushness and austerity, numinous silences and sudden cataclysms, and the strange flowerings of plant, animal, and human life that only arise in isolation. These are intimate subjects for songwriter Jonathan Meiburg. As a researcher, he's camped on islands at the edges of the world, including the Falklands, Tierra del Fuego, the Galapagos, Madagascar, Nunavut, and New Zealand's Chatham Islands, and once spent a few surreal months in a remote Aboriginal settlement in northern Australia.

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barcelona's delorean mine a territory between dance music and independent pop, producing a sound that is distinctly theirs. this is the record it took delorean 10 years to evolve into, a fusion of dance music (including their native spanish balearic house) and contemporary pop music. the dance-club rhythms and airy melodies they've toyed with in the past are fused and textured, making for a deeply obsessive, hypnotic album that retains the easy appeal of great pop music. looking at 30+ years of club music history with fresh eyes, delorean have made an album that is dense and soulful. our first listen to subiza was exhilarating, every subsequent listen is a revelation.

Brooke Fraser is a singer-songwriter-person. She makes the kind of music that sounds like a pop marshmallow has dropped into a folk hot chocolate and become a warm, spicy chocolatey broth. She has two albums ‘What to Do With Daylight’ (2003) and ‘Albertine’ (2006 - NZ, 2007 - Aus, 2008 - USA) which both debuted at #1 in her home country and between them have reached 13 x platinum sales and achieved seven #1 airplay singles. 2008 sees the release of ‘Albertine’ in North America and Brooke touring extensively with her band of merry men (+ one woman) from June through September.

When the coke-shrivelled testicles of Brit-pop were still in full-swing, Idlewild were dropping out of art school and ingesting Fugazi, Superchunk “…and all those small bands on American indie-rock labels.” A few gigs, a few seven inch singles and then in 1998 they released their ‘Captain’ mini album via Steve to Lamacq’s Deceptive label (at the time home to Elastica) before signing to Food Records (then home to Blur). Then, when every new British band from Coldplay to Badly Drawn Boy trotted around with an acoustic guitar, they delivered their debut full-length of erratic punk rock, ‘Hope Is Important’.

Yet, just when it seemed like their time to crossover, the yanks with their bloated Nu Metal and skinny-jeaned New York cool hijacked the agenda and Idlewild were lost at sea making melodic rock with Scottish accents. Then, when rock-with-regional accents (Arctic Monkeys, Lily, Nash, et al.) was all the rage, their front-man moved to New York and took time out to make traditional folk albums (‘My Secret Is My Silence’, ‘Ballad of the Books’ and ‘Before the Ruin’) – which maybe is but probably isn’t quite as Great Jones Street as it sounds.

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