Jenny and Johnny first started working together in Los Angeles in 2005, after being introduced by Conor Oberst. Rice had traveled to Nebraska to make his first record before moving to L.A., where Lewis was beginning work with Mike Mogis on her solo debut Rabbit Fur Coat. They both ended up playing on each others recordings, and struck up a lasting creative relationship. Rice joined Lewis’ band for the Rabbit Fur Coat world tour in 2006, and has played live with Lewis at every show of her solo career thus far. Jenny contributed both songwriting and singing to Johnathan’s Further North in 2007, and he was quick to return the favor as one of the producers of Lewis’ album Acid Tongue and again joining her on the road. During the Acid Tongue sessions, the band cut the song “Carpetbaggers” with Elvis Costello. The legendary songwriter was so inspired with the collaboration that he enlisted Lewis, Rice, their Acid Tongue crew, and the Imposters to help make one of his finest records of recent years, 2008’s Momofuku.

The Beautiful Girls, kick-started with a full-throttle, sold out tour of Brazil and huge shows at this year's Splendour In The Grass, Blueprint and Sounds of Spring Festivals, have begun work on the follow-up to 2007's Ziggurats. The rest of 2009 will see The Beautiful Girls writing songs and demo'ing for the new album, due out May 2010, on home soil, in between special appearances at festivals around the country.

With the electric plugged back in, the band is ready to deliver on the promises made on We're Already Gone and Ziggurats. "With the next album I want to be able to bring the whole thing together" Mat explains "to make sense of the music on all the previous albums."

The whisper is that TBG will drop a new single into the pool very soon so keep your eyes peeled!

Known for his work fronting the enigmatic rock band Pedro the Lion, David Bazan’s emotionally charged narratives, eye for telling detail, and mournful voice have more in common with J.D. Salinger's "Nine Stories" or Flannery O'Connor's "Wise Blood" than with the usual lyrical slant of popular music. Bazan is a gifted storyteller, weaving parables of spiritual conflict, suburban ennui, and personal surrender into magnetic, well-crafted songs.

His debut solo full-length album, Curse Your Branches (out now on Barsuk), is a masterwork by a modern American poet at the height of his powers. Paste Magazine called him one of the "100 Best Living Songwriters". This record is the deepest and most explicit exploration of his struggles with faith and the Evangelical world in which he was raised to date, and a meditation on all things passed between the generations.

Listen to "Night Jogger", Those Darlins' fantastic first new track since their debut full-length, at this link.

Those Darlins are Murfreesboro's southern garage rock band who set out in 2006 to get folks off with their rowdy, cheerfully sarcastic, booze-fueled show. Those Darlins' curious mix of classic country punk and ragged garage rock makes them one of a kind, eliciting comparisons like, "The Carter Family meets The Black Lips." In 2009, the girls toured feverishly around their critically acclaimed debut, playing 140 shows and sharing the stage with the likes of Dan Auerbach (of The Black Keys), Deer Tick, King Khan & BBQ Show, Wanda Jackson, and Jon Spencer. They made huge waves not sucking at SXSW, Bonnaroo, and Garage Fest. 2010 has already been full, with a Eastern headlining tour selling out many cities, including Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, Washington DC, St. Louis, Louisville, Birmingham, Nashville, and more.

On Sept 14th, they release a new 7”, Night Jogger b/w Funstix Party. This is the first music from Those Darlins since their 2009 self-titled debut and showcases the more rockin' direction the band is heading in. Advance copies are available now on thosedarlins.com and the 7" hits indie retail on September 14. Fans are hungry for more music and Those Darlins will be doing an extensive headlining tour around this 7" including a performance at ACL Fest.

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Ed Kowalczyk, widely known as the lead-singer, frontman, guitarist of the band LIVE, has built an impressive résumé with his bandmates that includes eight full-length albums, total CD sales exceeding 20 million, a huge international fan base and extensive touring all over the world. Live has been one of the most successful and enduring alternative rock bands of the 1990s and 2000s.

One of the main things that have enabled Live to maintain a devoted fan base is the substantial and durable nature of their lyrics, which have often reflected Kowalczyk's personal and spiritual concerns. “My approach as a songwriter is to write songs that are not finite and will resonate with listeners for a really long time,” Kowalczyk asserts. “Sixteen years after our first album, Mental Jewelry, I am still able to get something out of songs Live recorded in the early 1990s--and I think that one of the reasons why we have had so many fans for so long is that our fans are also continuing to find nuances in the songs.”

Ed released his first solo album, ALIVE, on July 6th, 2010.

The story of Foals’ second album could not be told without the victories won by the first. One of the strangest, most exotic creatures to have seen the upper realm of the UK album charts this young century (debuting at #3 upon release), Antidotes was a special album. In the idiot clamor of retro guitars, its keen sense of dare and future marked the Oxford quintet out as a band keen to establish their own context: hurtling along on incessant, acrobatic fret-play and cymbals hissing with the bliss of exertion. It won them attention, and the chance to evolve in a space of their own.

Two years on from that impressive introduction, a choice has been made—rather than contort Antidotes’ lissom guitars into ever more elaborate patterns, Total Life Forever is the sound of a band settling into and surveying the decay of old protocols. The restless, woven guitar tattoos of their debut haunt its successor, remembered only in fragments. The pace is less breakneck. Foals have relaxed the formulas and diagrams used to build their early identity and stretch out, instead, in the sad, quiet chaos of rot.

The origins of Innerpartysystem can be traced in 2002, when drummer Jared Piccone and vocalist Patrick Nissley attended school together in Reading, Pennsylvania, an hour outside of Philadelphia. The town’s somewhat bleak, depressed nature (it remains the country’s sixth most-dangerous city) eventually inspired the harsh, mechanical tones of the band’s current music…although, ironically, the area’s local “scene” had little to do with IPS’s eventual sound. As the band puts it, “we were the only group in our area experimenting with dance sounds.”

The duo started writing songs together, inspired by both by their love of electronic music (The Chemical Brothers, Daft Punk, Nine Inch Nails) and hardcore punk. Although the intensity of the band, in all its forms, has stayed consistent, the group saw its style begin to morph over time, becoming less “rock” and more digitally based.

Things got serious around 2006. IPS’s music started picking up some serious hits on MySpace. Wanting to tour, Piccone and Nissley recruited some new bandmates, including Kris Barman, a former high school friend who had relocated to Florida, and Jesse Cronan, an acquaintance of the band. The addition of these two, who are more apt to play synths than guitars, veered the band further into samples and electronic direction.

Taking its name from novelist Jack London’s 1904 seafaring adventure, Sea Wolf has evolved organically from its hermetic origins in Alex Brown Church’s living room into a muscular, full-bodied musical entity with passion to burn. After adopting the sobriquet, Church burst onto the music scene in two-fisted fashion with the EP, Get to the River Before It Runs Too Low, and the subsequent full-length debut album, Leaves in the River, about which Interview magazine observed, “His music is both erudite and unvarnished, a blend of swirling melodies, literary balladry and damaged art-rock composition.”

Perhaps you havent been paying attention, but Bonnie Prince Billy is clearly one of the great American songwriters to emerge in the last decade. Listen more closely, and youll see.

Over the course of five albums and countless singles, compilation tracks, collaborations, live performances and material not intended for release, Bonnie Prince Billy has become a soughtafter commodity around the free world, as well as some of the uncharted, 'evil' parts of the planet. The Bonnie Prince got his start as the featured singer with the Palace Music band. He struck out on his own in 1998. His first expression was a curious one: 'I Am Drinking Again.' When had we ever known him to drink before When had we even known him at all Here, Bonnys black humor first raised its hoary head, and belched a good one. This record set the tone for that first year: four singles on four different labels from three different countries (Domino, Lowfly, Allcity and Palace Records). This delivered the message that Bonny belonged to no one man but conversely, to the whole freaking world.

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It's been three years since Klaxons burst onto the music scene, injecting a dazzling and much needed moment of rave hedonism into the midst of indie tedium with the truly original and enormously influential Mercury award-winning album Myths Of The Near Future.

Now they are back with the eagerly awaited follow up. Produced in LA by US rock legend Ross Robinson (Sepultura, Slipknot, At the Drive In, The Cure) and written over the course of a three year long musical journey, it's a brilliantly diverse and engaging alternative rock record.

We were given a taster of what to expect - or perhaps what not to expect -with the teaser track 'Flashover' being streamed on www.klaxons.net last month.

Now it's time for the full sonic explosion.

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The Swedish duo First Aid Kit comprises sisters Johanna and Klara Söderberg (born 1990 and 1993, respectively), hailing from Enskede, a suburb south of Stockholm. Yes, they are very young, but the pure music they create speaks of bygone times and old souls. The emphasis is on narrative lyrics accompanying playful melodies with intense, dense harmonies.

The musical journey of Klara and Johanna began with singing along to the pop songs that leaked into their childhood home, radio hits by Britney, Christina and so on. However, it was not until happening upon the music of such venerable artists as Leonard Cohen and Bob Dylan, that the sisters discovered how music that could touch them in a way that those radio songs could not.

Klara describes her first encounter with the song ‘First Day of My Life’ by Bright Eyes as a revelation. With authenticity and honesty having struck a deep chord within, this is what came to characterize the music of First Aid Kit. It has the feel of forest folk songs, full of enchanting storytelling, and as on EP highlight ‘Jagadamba, You Might’ a sense of compelling, ancient mystery. Their music has much in common with artists like Vashti Bunyan, Devendra Banhart, Bright Eyes, Joanna Newsom, Karen Dalton or The Carter Family.

The times have finally caught up with acclaimed Denver quartet DeVotchKa. Not long ago when the band unloaded their instruments - a violin, a tuba and an accordion, among others - into a rock club, they were told they must be in the wrong place. They created music that was Grammy nominated (DeVotchKa created the soundtrack for the indie smash Oscar winning film Little Miss Sunshine) without the benefit of a huge promotion team or runaway budget, instead relying only on their own efforts by self-releasing their records. And they crafted gems of songs by mixing a beautiful blend of Eastern European bohemia, American prairie rock and distinctive indie and called it pop, rather than world, music. Now, the band is au courant, poised to shine on with their Anti- Records debut A Mad and Faithful Telling. From the cinematic richness of "Transliterator" to the modern pop experiment of "The Clockwise Witness," to the soaring and wrenching "Undone," DeVotchKa have produced a career-defining record and the world is listening.

The times have finally caught up with acclaimed Denver quartet DeVotchKa. Not long ago when the band unloaded their instruments - a violin, a tuba and an accordion, among others - into a rock club, they were told they must be in the wrong place. They created music that was Grammy nominated (DeVotchKa created the soundtrack for the indie smash Oscar winning film Little Miss Sunshine) without the benefit of a huge promotion team or runaway budget, instead relying only on their own efforts by self-releasing their records. And they crafted gems of songs by mixing a beautiful blend of Eastern European bohemia, American prairie rock and distinctive indie and called it pop, rather than world, music. Now, the band is au courant, poised to shine on with their Anti- Records debut A Mad and Faithful Telling. From the cinematic richness of "Transliterator" to the modern pop experiment of "The Clockwise Witness," to the soaring and wrenching "Undone," DeVotchKa have produced a career-defining record and the world is listening.

Lissie left LA, spent time in London and Tennessee, hankering a little for that Midwestern hometown in Illinois. Eventually she extricated herself from a long, troubled relationship and relocated to Ojai, CA, population just shy of 8,000. She rented an old farmhouse she had never seen, in a town she had never visited, “just because I sat next to someone from there on an airplane who told me it was nice.” She likes it up there. “It’s fairly slow, everything closes early and you can see all the stars at night. There are mountains outside my front door and it’s really quiet, which means I get a lot of work done and have time to myself which is essential for me to function. I can still drive into LA for some excitement when I want, going out and being around other people is equally important to me.”

“All these things,” she says, talking a little about her new hometown in CA, and a little about her music, too, “I do them without thinking. So much of my process is instinct and it’s natural. Even in photo shoots I won’t wear concealer, I don’t want to look like someone painted my face. Everything I do I want to feel natural; I want it to mean something to me. If it doesn’t feel natural I can’t do it. I can’t act. I’m not good at faking it.”

And this is the essence of Lissie, something straight-down-the-line, unaffected. “Now I’ve gotten older I really found myself recognizing the hometown Midwesterner in me and embracing it,” she says. “For better or worse it may not be all that tactful or that cool, but there’s no phoniness. It’s pretty direct. And I’m direct; I’m not hiding anything. I don’t really know what or why or who I am,” she says, “but I don’t know how to not be how I am.” Lissie is, you might say, ‘not heated, treated, whipped or spun.’

Since early this year, Lissie has largely been based in London, where Catching A Tiger was first released. Embraced lovingly by the British press, she’s been featured in Q, The Sun, The Sunday Times, The Mirror, Time Out, The Big Issue, and on the BBC and Later…with Jools Holland, among others; she’s played with Joshua Radin, The Local Natives, and Alan Pownall, in addition to performing at Bonnaroo in Manchester, TN, and The Great Escape in Brighton, England. She’s also picked up praise and support from a wide range of fellow artists, including Katy Perry, Courtney Love, Mumford & Sons, and Ellie Goulding, who joined her onstage to perform “Everywhere I Go” at The Great Escape in May.

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“Every day an artist gets up and knows he has to run. He has to run faster than the distant fragments of our time, faster than the voices hemming him in, telling him that however much he thinks,imagines, writes or comunicates, the system has already found a new way of drowning him out.

Faster than the army of pretentious pinheads boasting artistic bollox, screaming their cheapskate anger, selling out for twenty seconds of fame, filling their arses with gold so they can say I was there, applauding midgets dressed up as giants.

He knows he has to chase ideals that have packed their bags And run off to the nearest tourist haven or tax haven and chase gods that ask for a discount on the rent on olympus and apartments with a view of the clouds because, if they look down, they say they get an urge to throw up. Down here, it’s all ours, it all belongs to men and women, but it’s common knowledge that we’ve never had a particular talent for doing things well. Every day an artist gets up and knows he has to run. What he doesn’t know, perhaps, is that he doesn’t have to run …alone”

On Sale Friday, August 20th at Noon at Schubas.com

Avi Buffalo was once just the kid named Avi (short for Avigdor Zahner-Isenberg). He's now singing and playing guitar, but was then a vaguely aspirational skateboarder living in Long Beach, who figured between hip trauma and a never-quite-conquered fear of dropping into a half-pipe that he might need to come up with something else to do with the rest of his life. (Maybe journalist If there were gonna be any left) His parents never got around to getting him the Game Boy he wanted, so he turned to a handily local guitar. Years of 12-hour days attacking that (plus lessons-to-mentoring with seriously iconoclastic local blues guys) revealed a pretty preternatural talent for making a very special kind of bent but lovely pop song. 'You know why it's good Because it sounds OLD, but it's NEW!' said Blues Mentor, sparing the world more labored analysis. And that is the connect-the-dots story of how Avi Buffalo became a band-boy meets guitar. It's a good old story.

Then boy meets rest of his band at Millikan High in Long Beach-Sheridan Riley on drums, Rebecca Coleman on keys and piano and Arin Fazio (the old man at almost 21, whose dad was a session musician during L.A.'s glossier days) on bass. By the time you read this bio, they will pretty much all be out of high school. And that means we can push past the age thing into the music thing-yes, they're young, and yes, says Avi, they can effectively metabolize even the most ill-advised tourslops, and yes, many an article is gonna haul out a word like 'wunderkind.' But what can you do They're gonna graduate into a beautiful little album, and not everybody gets to do that. But even this young, it's been a long time coming.

2009 was a big year for Drop the Lime. He released two huge club hits, Devils Eyes and Set Me Free, the combined force of which helped him topple the likes of Phoenix, Florence & The Machine and The XX as “Most Blogged Artist on the Planet” (Hype Machine). Luca took his unique style of DJing around the globe, farther afield than ever before, crisscrossing North America many times as well Europe, China, Singapore and Australia. Videos of kids losing their minds to his unique sets, mixing rockabilly and club music with live vocals on top are all over youtube.

2010 sees him continue his quest to be one of the world’s leading DJ/producers, with a slew of singles and debut album about to hit in a big way. Keep your eyes on the Elvis Presley of dance music!

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Phantogram’s music sounds like it’s made by a band from the city. Electronic loops, hip-hop beats, shoegaze, soul, pop — each finds its way into their songs. Unexpectedly, the band doesn’t live and work in a major urban center, but rather calls the town of Saratoga Springs, NY (population 26,186) home. Despite the cultural influence of local Skidmore College (where fellow beat-experimenters Ratatat formed) and a relatively small scene of adventurous musicians and listeners, Saratoga isn’t exactly teeming with fans of J. Dilla, My Bloody Valentine or Serge Gainsbourg. But Josh Carter and Sarah Barthel, the duo that make up Phantogram and who grew up in the even smaller nearby municipality of Greenwich, have flourished in Saratoga. In fact, the town itself isn’t rural enough for their taste — they drive almost every day another 45 minutes into upstate farmland to a barn they call Harmony Lodge to write and record. Serving as their homemade studio/practice space/think-tank/bat-cave, the barn is equipped with various samplers, tapes, records, synths, drums, and both percussive and stringed instruments. It’s there that Phantogram allows their natural surroundings and metropolitan influences to meld together creating beautiful, beat-driven dreamlike pop songs.

Bear in Heaven have trapped echos, tremors, winds, and fading light. Theyve redefined time, and folded it. Theyve unbuttoned sound, and realigned it. Within four walls in Brooklyn, Jon Philpot, Adam Wills, Sadek Bazaara, and Joe Stickney mined the democracy of their collaboration, plus the endless hours of streamofconsciousness recorded documentation of rehearsals over the past years, to conceive the crystalline form of Beast Rest Forth Mouth, their second album, their exaltation.

A seed planted in the Southern US years ago (all members hail from Georgia or Alabama), Bear In Heaven began as the musical arm of Jon Philpot in 1998. Time eventually brought in a slew of players, like rickety scaffolding, that grew the sound and guided the group to morph from a 6to5to4piece. As a fourheaded organism, Bear In Heaven has now found a sonic stride unlike any in their history. Freely acknowledging the importance of the number four, the album Beast Rest Forth Mouth (think 'East West North South') was a conscious product of the four compass points, of the four makers, and of the inevitable confusion that manifests from that crossroad mentality: four directions could lead you anywhere and everywhere. Its the acknowledgement of what can go down at that convergence, at that dusty center, that drives Bear In Heaven and imbues the songs of Beast Rest Forth Mouth with something akin to both eternal peace and nervous urgency

The Morning Benders caught our eyes, ears and hearts in 2007 with their inspiring ambition to become an international band, while staying true to their hometown of Berkeley and building things the right way.

Over 2007, the morning benders - chris (vocals, guitars, organ, rhodes, pianos), joe (guitars, rhodes, pianos, organ), julian (drums, percussion) and dp (bass) - self-released 2 very raw but charming EPs. "Loose Change" was recorded on a laptop with one microphone and "Boarded Doors" was recorded at the bands home practice space in a basement. They began to build a passionate and loyal fan-base by feverishly gigging around the Bay Area and Los Angeles at everything from house parties to supporting noteworthy bands such as Yo La Tengo, Two Gallants, MGMT, White Rabbits, Au Revoir Simone, Yeasayer, The Long Winters, Oh No! Oh My!, The Deadly Syndrome, The Rosebuds and more.

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"Let's pretend the Beatles and the Stones where parts to a Transformer that could form a mega super pop rock 4 piece band of sex symbols that would make the Jonas brothers look like what we all know they are, what if the Harrison/Richards equivalent was also a modern day Jimmy Page? What if you turned on the radio and didn't have to hear that song about someone’s sex being on fire? What if you could have the sex, drugs and rock and roll and the talent for a change? What if rock and roll magazines quit putting our parents favorite bands on the cover of magazines? What if major labels put money into to future of rock instead of remastering Joshua Tree? ...then the Smith Westerns would be on the top of the world, RIGHT WHERE THEY BELONG." -Christopher Owens

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.

On Sale Saturday, September 18th, at 10 AM via JamUSA.com

"Songs, songs, songs, songs."

That was Mike Gordon's mantra as he worked on The Green Sparrow, the former Phish bassist's vibrant new solo album. Its ten songs are succinct and accessible, but they're also the unmistakable creations of Gordon's playfully idiosyncratic musical mind.

A rewarding year and a half of work went into The Green Sparrow. Gordon's creative journey found him delving deeply into songwriting, trying his hand at keyboards and other instruments, and experimenting with different programming and production techniques. His efforts yielded a bumper crop of songs. He winnowed down sixty of them to seventeen contenders for inclusion on The Green Sparrow. In economical, Weezer-like fashion, he kept cutting until he had ten that sounded like they were born to be together. "One of my goals was to have an up-sounding bunch of music," Gordon says. "I wanted the music to be sophisticated yet accessible. I also wanted the lyrics to be personally meaningful, to make sure I was getting out what was in my heart."

The Green Sparrow opens with "Another Door," a rhythmically sinuous groover whose lyrics herald a creative rebirth. It was partly inspired by Gordon's evolving emotions in the aftermath of Phish's disbanding in 2004. "The breakup was pretty traumatic at first," he admits. "But then it got to be an exciting time soon after, because I learned that choosing a particular door opens up all these other doorways. That's what the song is about."

Gordon accepted offers of work after Phish but came up with a notion that suited him better. "All these people were calling me up to play bass," he says, "but I decided to work on songwriting and hire myself as bass player."

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.