One showcases, among other things, the smallness of the world. The musicians within hail from all over the globe: Australia, Belarus, Ukraine, the UK, Germany, the United States. Beyond that, the album boasts an inspiring ingenuity that reminds us, without having to say it, that music is as vital a force as nature; it will find release. Project Bluebird boasts over twelve writers.The twins comprising Aloe Up— a folk outfit with elements of breakbeat electronica— collaborate across an ocean, one in Denver, one in London. Tom Peel’s backing tracks come …

Supergroups are all the rave this decade.  Velvet Revolver.  Audioslave.   The Raconteurs.  Chickenfoot.  Next in line are the Monsters of Folk: Bright Eyes’ Conor Oberst, super-producer Mike Mogis, Retro-Nuevo troubadour M. Ward, and My Morning Jacket front man Jim James.  If the gold standard is the Traveling Wilburys—and it is—the Traveling Wilburys they are not, despite so many media types deeming them to be the next coming.  Nor are they folk in the most Woody Guthrie sense of the word.  Neither declaration is their fault– somebody inevitably has to label …

Jónsi & Alex is Jónsi Birgisson, Sigur Rós vocalist/guitar player-with-bow extraordinaire, and Alex Somers, musician and visual artist to, among others, Sigur Rós.  On their debut album, Riceboy Sleeps, they combine for one mother of a meandering glide through the subtleties of sound.  The album started as a side project between Sigur Rós recordings and that’s about the best place to start talking about it.  While Sigur Rós two most recent studio releases, Takk… and Með suð í eyrum við spilum endalaus are—dare I say—more accessible/less steam-of-consciousness than their predecessors— …

These days it’s getting harder and harder to find something to smile about. Grin, the second album of Toronto-based blueVenus offers itself for consideration.  Grin is a tale of hurdles; the overcoming of them, the outright avoidance of them, and the tracks of tears and smiles of the miles in between.
The album starts with the title-track and for a few seconds it sounds like you’re about to head down to O Brother, Where Art Thou? country.  But right before you get to the crossroads, blueVenus hits the breaks on Bourbon …

A strange question occurred to me as Backspacer drew to a close for the first time on my stereo; it was about halfway through what is certainly the band’s most mature song yet, the cinematic and winsome “The End,” a song both about death and the presence of life: what would Kurt Cobain be doing right now, at this very minute?
It isn’t stealing Eddie’s moment. And it isn’t a question that has occurred to me during any other Pearl Jam song to this point. Maybe it was the subject matter …

Joshua Bartholomew has no problem going where his heart leads him; this is clear on the digital EP that follows up his sprawling double-disc release, And So It Begins. it’s called Heart Headed, and it’s four unabashedly saccharine love songs performed with nary a twinkle of melancholy.
Heart Headed— in its title, brevity, and instant sincerity— strikes me as rather brave. Maybe it’s the concept of a love song in general that seems brave; the idea of being unafraid of vulnerability, of trusting the simple emotions we’ve learned to drown out; it’s walking naked …

Dredg is hard to dig at. Call them what you may—progressive, alternative, art-rock, weird—and it somehow never fits, like trying to squeeze King Kong into a pair of Abercrombie and Fitch jeans. Their fourth studio album, The Pariah, the Parrot, the Delusion, is heavy, the way things used to be groovy, or bitchin’, or rad. Inspired—at least in part—by Salman Rushdie’s essay, A Letter to the Six Billionth Citizen. The album is like a convention of higher thought; only fun: a new exhibit of paintings; only less pretentious. Rushdie’s essay …

Thrice is one of the best bands going. With their latest release Beggars, the band’s seventh studio album, they further establish themselves as a band who doesn’t allow its sound to grow complacent. Fresh off the experimental The Alchemy Index, Thrice has refocused itself on groove. Recorded in their garage studio, Beggars sounds like an album created in a garage. The songs are organic, as full of energy and enthusiasm as the oil stains and the tent-that-hasn’t-been-used-in-years intimacies of the garage they started out in. After The Artist in the …

She & Him have to be the wet dream of lovers-of-all-things-Indie. Zooey Deschanel, the actress you can’t help but fall in love with, and M. Ward, the troubadour you can’t help but tap your toes to. Together, on their debut album Volume One, they forge full steam ahead on the long trip back to 1970’s radio. Consisting mostly of songs written and sung by Deschanel, Volume One is a musical time warp; you didn’t have to live through Carly Simon or Dusty Springfield to hear that Deschanel and Ward did. …

British singer-songwriter Natasha Khan, better known as Bat for Lashes, created a buzz with the luscious fantastic landscapes of her 2006 debut Fur and Gold; think Tori Amos while she was writing Little Earthquakes sitting in the same room as Bjork while she was writing Homogenic while Sarah McLachlan and a band of gypsies listen on, all the while Talking Heads is playing softly the background. Her second album, Two Suns, is just as promising; it’s a microcosm of duality, at times a straight-out spiritual throwdown between Khan’s mysticism and …