We have a tendency to take consistency for granted. Like a sunny Southern California day, Pinback have delivered record after record of mightily addictive indie pop since their inception in the late 1990s. Perhaps too melancholic and thoughtful to function as escapist entertainment, that same sense of depth is what made them one of the most reliable bands in indie rock’s three-decade history.

On one hand, their fifth album, Information Retrieved, is the logical and accessible realization of a sound Pinback have been developing and refining for over a decade. However, that consistency that we’ve taken for granted is what makes Information Retrieved such a euphoric surprise; their finest and most fully realized album, a dozen years deep into a career that includes bona fide modern classics like “Good To Sea” and Summer In Abaddon. Simply put, this is better than we ever could have expected. They could have coasted on automatic pilot to another lauded album that likely would have made it onto plenty of year-end lists, but instead they shot the moon, and the result is a major triumph.

The touchstones are still there: Zach Smith‘s stunningly unique bass guitar acrobatics driving both rhythm and melody in lock-step unison; the incredible immediacy of Rob Crow‘s voice that could make a phone book sound compelling; and the musical and lyrical interplay between the two of them that made Pinback so special in the first place. The difference now is their exquisite control over dynamics and a greater emotional resonance throughout. It’s the most complete and soulful Pinback album by a fair distance, the finest moment in the career of a band whose unfettered brilliance we’ve come to count on, but will never again take for granted.

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Walk around Damien Dempsey’s patch of Dublin’s northside and the places and people are like ancient dolmens round his lyrics. Turn a corner near his family home and there still are the “factories, trains and houses” he sang about on Shots, albeit quieter now, and more subdued.

Tradesmen walk around mid-morning with rolled up tabloid newspapers under their arms. A generation lies idle in a community struggling to re-establish its identity and sense of self.

For Dempsey, people and place are King. His voice is Dublin yet wholly distinctive, almost clichéd to say it, but he is part of a rich bloodline of Irish singers from Luke Kelly to Ronnie Drew, Christy Moore to Andy Irvine. Their kin outside Ireland are Springsteen and Guthrie, Dylan and Marley.

In Almighty Love, Dempsey’s sense of place reaches out beyond Donaghmede and North Bull Island, where he first performed in public as a teenager, across the Irish Sea and further afield.

The locale is still in the lyrics. It’s there in the hauntingly poetical Chris and Stevie, a tribute to male bonding and grief. You can hear it in Canadian Geese - large migratory birds whose flight path took them past Dempsey's boyhood window. It’s there also in the references to railway tracks and waves, visible from the rooftops of Dempsey’s childhood home. Those railway tracks took Dempsey and his boyhood friends out into their own imaginations and he hasn’t forgotten.

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"Before, it felt finished. Now, it feels perfect. It's feels like a proper thing."

The proper thing on the mind of 20-year-old shooting star Charli XCX is an album long in the making, one which finally sees the light of day in 2013. The wait has been as agonising for Charli as it has been for her fanbase - rapidly swelling on both sides of the Atlantic - but patience has paid handsome dividends. The debut album she releases in 2013 - perhaps unlike the album she could have released in 2012, or even 2011 - finds XCX's vision fully realised. Sweeping synths, crunchy beats, emotive vocals, coy raps, spiky and persuasive lyricism and big ideas about life, love and everything else: The album tracks (and soundtracks) Charli's journey from teenager to young woman, but deftly swerves coming-of-age clichés.

"There were all these questions while I was making the album," Charli recalls. "Like how can I twist something mundane to something really amazing that's never been done before? How can I make beautiful pieces of pop? How can I just let my mind go and let all the colours flow out?" Many of the answers have only really appeared in the last twelve months as Charli's vision has finally come into focus. And now the album is finished, its ample vindication for one of Charli's most firmly-held beliefs: “We need to reboot British girl power.”

Honed during support slots for artists like Sleigh Bells, Santigold and Coldplay, Charli’s live performances, like her music, are raw but multi-layered, sometimes stark but with a clear beating human heart. Her collaborators - Ariel Rechtshaid (Haim, Usher, Alex Clare, Solange Knowles), Patrik Berger (Lana Del Rey, Robyn), J£zus Million and Blood Diamonds - have helped unlock a unique talent. All pop is here, from Siouxsie to Spiceworld, The Knife to Nirvana. To achieve her intricate, post-modern pop with its evocative titles like ‘Nuclear Seasons’, ‘Stay Away’ and 'You (Ha Ha Ha)' she is a lightning rod, pulling influences out of the sky and channelling them into the crunchy beats, fuzzy synths, bittersweet melodies and idiosyncratic perspectives that combine in the absorbing multi-media output of this compelling new artist.

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When it came time for the Dodos to begin writing their fifth LP, Carrier, singer/guitarist Meric Long wanted to start over.

The uncertainty of the band's trajectory as well as the passing of guitarist Chris Reimer brought about a reassessment of things within the band, and in particular Long's songwriting.

In need of a different vantage point, Long began writing words before music for the first time, enveloping himself in silence rather than sound.

When it came time to set these lyrics to music, Long started writing with only his electric guitar in hand — another first. The focus on this instrument was due in large part to the time Long spent with Reimer, the guitarist for Women who had joined Long and percussionist Logan Kroeber to become the third member of the Dodos throughout 2011 before unexpectedly passing away early the following year.

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Signal Path formed in the mountains of Missoula, MT in 2001 where they forged a unique brand of EDM by splicing technology with raw instrumentalism and musicianship. Now thriving in one of the most explosive electronic scenes in the country, the Denver based band creates powerful studio work and wildly popular live shows.

Bending guitars, basses, drums, and keyboards around a core of unrelenting rhythm and massive low end production, Signal Path create live experiences as beautiful as they are intense. Adding a keyboard player in late 2012, SP is now performing live as a full quartet throughout the US.

In addition to releasing their critically acclaimed 2012 MIXTAEP featuring remixes of A$AP Rocky, Sleigh Bells, Shabazz Palaces, and Skrillex among others, SP released five albums of entirely original music between 2010 - 2011. This prolific band is at an all time creative high and will be touring extensively into the new year with a full length album scheduled for release in 2013.

All of Signal Path's music is available free through their website.

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Tickets: $15 for one (1), $55 for four (4) ticket family pack, FREE for non-walkers. If purchasing the four (4) ticket family pack, please note that one (1) ticket will cover entry for four (4) people.

Hundreds of thousands of kids aged 6 months to 6 years, dancing their little booties off (to real disco music!) at some of the coolest clubs in the world while their parents sip cocktails, munch on organic snacks and dance along with their kids.

Baby Loves Disco transforms the world’s coolest nightclubs into child-proof discos.

Make no mistake, this is not the Mickey Mouse Club, and Barney is banned. Baby Loves Disco is an afternoon dance party featuring real music spun and mixed by real DJs blending classic disco tunes from the 70s & 80s guaranteed to get those little booties moving and grooving.

The fun spills out from all corners of the club: bubble machines, egg shakers, a chill-out room (with tents, books and puzzles), diaper changing stations, a full spread of healthy snacks and dancing…LOTS of dancing.

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For audiences in the United States -- and, in fact, to the English-speaking world at large, the new album I Walk is an introduction to an artist whose music is fervent, personal and passionate, a singer-songwriter with stunning creative confidence. Which is perhaps to be expected, because, as one writer put it, Herbert Grönemeyer is “the biggest selling artist you’ve never heard of.” Not that he’s been invisible. Before he embarked on a musical career, he was seen on film screens in the breakout German film Das Boot, and more recently (2007), he was in the Anton Corbijn film Control. And in 2010, he wrote the evocative score for Corbijn’s arresting film The American starring George Clooney. But those intermittent appearances on the U.S. cultural radar are footnotes in the context of his musical career in Germany, where he has been the most successful recording artist of all time for the past three decades, where his album sales have surpassed 18 million copies, and two of his albums, 1984’s 4630 Bochum and 2002’s Mensch, have become the biggest German-language albums in history.

I Walk, then, is an introduction that is also a summation, a collection of songs from throughout Groenemeyer’s remarkable career, going back as far as 1985’s “Airplanes In My Head” and going forward to English translations of some of his most well-known songs, and two that are new to this project. As the website DIY wrote in October 2012 upon the U.K. release of I Walk, the the album is “Sophisticated, majestic pop, with songs ranging between love and lament, joy and grief, and always with a hint of melancholy even in the most glorious moments.” Listeners will hear sweeping and uncynical songs made to reach the upper reaches of the arenas that Groenemeyer has filled with ease, heartfelt anthems that at the same time have intimacy and emotional resonance. Even if you don’t know the narrative behind the lead-off song “Mensch,” written a year after devastating losses of his brother and his wife within a three day period, you feel the undercurrent in his performance, and in the lyric: “We lose and still we try,” he sings, and ends the song with a simple “I miss you.” On “Mensch,” Groenemeyer is accompanied by Bono, one of the guests on the album along with Antony Hegarty of Antony and The Johnsons on the dramatic “Will I Ever Learn” (“When he started singing, my skin went up,” Groenemeyer recalls) and guitarist James Dean Bradfield of the Manic Street Preachers on “To The Sea.”

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Some artists are able to articulate a vision at the very beginning of their career, while others hone their craft over time, growing into their vision as they mature.

"I am definitely in the latter category," explains Drew Holocomb, a Tennessee-born, duck hunting, French speaking, bourbon drinking, 1st edition book collecting, golf playing Eagle Scout with a Masters degree in Divinity from Scotland's University of St Andrews (he wrote his dissertation on "Springsteen and American Redemptive Imagination") who has spent the better part of the past decade as a professional musician -- recording, writing, and touring with his band Drew Holcomb & The Neighbors.

Since releasing their first album, 2005's "Washed In Blue," Drew & The Neighbors (Ellie Holcomb, Nathan Dugger, Rich Brinsfield) have established themselves as a formidable indie act, selling more than 75,000 records, playing more than 1,500 live dates, selling-out headline shows, and touring alongside such varied acts as The Avett Brothers, Ryan Adams, Los Lobos, NEEDTOBREATHE, Susan Tedeschi, North Mississippi Allstars, Marc Broussard, and more. Their songs have been used in countless television shows and commercials, most notably in TNT's Emmy Award winning 2011 Christmas Day "NBA Forever" spot, which paired the song "Live Forever" with a mesmerizing montage of past and present NBA video footage.

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