Ben Kweller's been a little off my radar. I mainly know about him via a mix given to me that contained "Wasted and Ready," which is a fine song. He's definitely someone I've been interested in, but I'm better at keeping up with movies than I am with music -- and so my awareness of Mr. Kweller faded into the background. Until now.

His new album Go Fly a Kite has been rocking my world since I picked it up this weekend on RSD and I seriously LOVE IT you guys. It's packed with power-pop goodness and great lyrics (take a listen to opening track "Mean to Me" below), and bonus! The box transforms into a diorama!!! Look at it. It's covered in super-neat illustrations by Josh Cochran and it's blacklight-friendly! 

And so -- this guy's live show kind of snuck on me, because it's this Saturday at Neumos. And I bet it's going to be awesome. Kweller is playing with Sleeper Agent, which upon a brief listen, seems like the perfect match. I'm diggin' their fun, jumpy pop vibe. More importantly: this show is all ages AND 21+, so you can bring some underage music fans with you. 

{Ben Kweller with Sleeper Agent | Neumos | Saturday 4/28 | Doors at 7pm | $16 ADV at Moe Bar or etix.com | 21+ Main Floor, All Ages Balcony}

Waiting for Record Store Day is the grown up version of waiting for Christmas. You know you’re going to get lots of cool stuff but it's so hard to wait until Santa comes. Well, guess what? Santa came!

Since Record Store Day is all about trying to get people to do something they don’t usually do – go to record stores and buy music – I think it’s best that the music be something the artists don’t usually do, too. That’s why the release I’m most excited about is Feistodon, the 7” split by indie-pop goddess Feist and American heavy metal royalty Mastodon. Both are at the top of their respective genres. They are rarely played in the same room, unless it’s my living room. There Feist’s single “1234” has been on heavy rotation since my toddler could ask for a song, sharing the speakers with Mastodon’s album The Hunter since their performance at the Sodo Showbox last November.

Topping the fact that these two incongruous acts put out a split together is that they cover each other’s songs. Mastodon do a nice, heavy cover of Feist’s “A Commotion” with more intelligible vocals than they’ve ever sung before; and Feist goes all dark and Nick Cave-y on Mastodon’s “Black Tongue” before literally adding bells and whistles to the more electronic final third of the track.

You can listen to the originals and their covers below, and read more about Feistodon here, but of course the point is for you to go out and buy the record at one of the lovely independent record stores we already talked about. And while you’re out there, what other goodies are you going to pick up?

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Spoek Mathambo's Father Creeper may be the sleeper of the year. It is disguised as world stew glitch brew, but its album cover somehow perfectly captures both the sturdiness and destruction: A glistening facade of a corporate building reflecting a fire and sinister Nomadic tribe leaving an accident or attack. In the face of the future, the mystery of the past destroys.

South African rapper-singer-gizmo grifter Mathambo has been criticized for relentlessness and lyrical jackassery in his mix of rock, hip-hop, and all those things rock and hip-hop fans can't easily identify. Sure, there's crunk bass and Krautrock squiggles surrounding lyrically rude and mocking low life rebellion ("We Can Work"), which actually reminds me quite a bit of a Black Rock version of best aspects of the first Shabazz Palaces EP (the self-titled one, not Of Light). It's all about shirking work and digging whatever cake is called down in SA.

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One of my favorite bands ever (that my awesome friend Carl introduced me to) is Smoking Popes—who, in addition to creating catchy, hyperkentic lovelorn tunes, totally kill it live every. single. time. they play—and they are FINALLY releasing some new songs!

On May 1, The Complete Control Sessions: Smoking Popes will be released on SideOneDummy Records, both digitally and in a limited vinyl pressing. Vinyl will be pressed in black, black w/gold splatter, and gold w/black splatter (fancy!).

This live EP will have classic Smoking Popes ballads "Writing a Letter" and "Grab Your Heart and Run", plus two new songs: "Let’s Call It Love" and "Hey Renee"—and a cover of the Les Mis song "I Dreamed a Dream." AWESOME.

Download the EP or order a record off SideOneDummy’s webstore on 5/1. I’m so excited! Who else is excited?

What's up, haterade-makers? Are you ready for the next Wavves or Coco Rosie to dump "comments" scorn on in this city of ciphers? Well, Claire Boucher (who is Grimes) sees herself as Phil Spector per Pitchfork, and the multiple internal personalities she evokes through her Nylon magazine collage of fashion-friendly-but-flirting with sounding roguishly ugly, J-Pop and K-Pop, and astrology-reading cassette-funk, is prime target for chillwave lads imagining their jittery jams have some sort of deeper meaning. (You can start that process by comparing yourself to Phil Spector and not sounding anything like Ronnie.)

I don't know if any in the bloggy woggy boy glitchy gang has any scholarly Scott Walkers (crazy cosmopolitan craftsmen) compared to this expressionist Nico (who used cigarette-scarred vocals to paint romantic distance as Grimes uses sugar-stuffed pixie-sticks from-the-diaphragm sprays). I don't listen to their mates closely enough. I do know Visions is a very pleasant trip through Asian pop plagiarism meets Flying Lizards novelty rock, and if the deeper ideas Boucher espouses in interviews don't seem to quite make it into the sequence, there is historical precidence for enjoying weird stuff for just being weird stuff. Grimes for me falls somewhere far away from Tuneyards' ecstatic, erotic, energizing DIY cosmic body rock, and maybe a little closer to Amy Grant's cute, pure odes to some theocratic order based on a monotheistic editor. 

My utterly reductivist wife, walking through the living room while this played, was like "Oh, the new Cocteau Twins." That's a little shorthanded, but my wife really likes the Cocteau Twins, so you know --

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It was a great long weekend for sight and sound as we took in some goings-on around Seattle, the most notable of which was the release party for Damien Jurado's Maraqopa this past Friday at the Neptune. Sharing the bill with Gold Leaves and Bryan John Appleby, Jurado and the most recent incarnation of his band sold out our newest favorite venue to an attentive, appreciative crowd. Maraqopa {which is officially out today}, his latest brand of soundscape, is the perfect blend of everything we've come to love about Damien Jurado's work, packaged in a collective series of sounds we've never quite heard from him before. There's a little bit on Maraqopa for everyone: it's part singer-songwriter, part freak-folk, part guitar-shredding psychedelia heaven, and fourteen other different kinds of good. {Read a little more about what we've heard and adore about Maraqopa thus far here.}

Here's a few shots from Friday's show:

Another knock-it-out-of-the-park win this weekend was the screening of Fever Year, the documentary that followed Andrew Bird along for a seemingly insane 180-date tour a few years back. As avid fans, we've seen everything from those early 2000s shows where six fellow attendees stood in rapt appreciation to bursting-at-the-seams capacity nights from this most recent grueling tour {including a sold-out show at the Paramount and a set for a few thousand people at Austin City Limits in 2009} -- and it was an absolute delight to see every facet of Andrew Bird's career represented so brilliantly in this film. Historical flashbacks to his Bowl of Fire days fused together perfectly with recent tour clips and an incredible glimpse of his on-, off- and backstage life, all of which blended together into a gorgeously intimate eighty-minute portrait of the Andrew Bird of today. The mini-doc was warmed up perfectly by the screening of the Fleet Foxes' The Shrine / An Argument, an absolute delight to take in -- both visually on the big screen and as it poured out of the theater's state-of-the-art soundsystem.

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...when the tissue paper layers of his songs build to sufficient thickness, it’s impossible not to be swept away, as evidenced by Blues Funeral.

Blues Funeral is the first album released under the name Mark Lanegan Band since 2004’s Bubblegum, but don’t think Lanegan hasn’t been busy. He has released albums with Isobel Campbell, The Twilight Singers, Soulsavers, and The Guttertwins, in addition to making numerous guest appearances in the meantime. Despite eight years and nine albums separating them, Blues Funeral follows logically from Bubblegum. Blues Funeral is the more cohesive of the two, yet rarely dips into monotony. Guest appearances by frequent collaborators, Josh Homme, Greg Dulli, and Jack Irons connect the album to Lanegan’s other projects.

Blues Funeral is best enjoyed in its entirety in a darkened room, through headphones, with a bourbon in hand. Throughout the whole, lyrics are placed front and center, where, like the Man in Black, Lanegan yearningly explores unwholesome themes with only a flickering hope of Christian redemption.

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It appears as though the idea with Stars was essentially to avoid over-thinking: seventh track "Looking Through", for example, was recorded the day after it was written. The result is an album that immediately sounds familiar, not because it's a retread but because Nada Surf have so aptly captured the shimmering, lovely essence of what makes them so enchanting in the first place. Opener "Clear Eye Clouded Mind" bursts with punchy, high energy guitars and (of course) flawless harmonies. I suspect it will be a highlight of live shows on their current tour and beyond. "When I Was Young" is no less than an indie-riffic masterpiece, slowly building into a heart-wrenching instant classic.

Though I didn't really need further convincing, Stars reaffirms Caws' place as perhaps the greatest writer of pop tunes in America (all due respect to Adam Schlesinger!). With Nada Surf, what you see hear is what you get. And in this instance, that's a beautiful thing.

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In a land where we are inundated by new music on a weekly, if not sometimes daily basis -- few things feel better than starting a nice, fresh playlist of tracks that have made the cut (in both the new-release new and new-to-me new ways). I like to organize mine by month, so at a moment's glance, I can see what's new when a friend is looking for something to woo her ear, or what to pull from for a DJ night. That first playlist in the first folder of the year holds special appeal for us over-organizing audiophiles, and while it's already starting to flesh out with some new-to-my-rotation tunes -- "For The One" / WATERS, "Goodness Gracious" / Heligoats, "The Dreamer" / Tallest Man On Earth -- one of the first outright new tracks of 2012 that's become stuck in my proverbial craw is Nada Surf's "When I Was Young".

Slated for release later this month, and undoubtedly one of the many songs the crowd will be set to swoon for when they take the stage at the Tractor on February 2nd, this song has the same kind of intimate-cum-cinematic appeal of Band of Horses' "Funeral" -- the kind of track you turn up because the opening strains start to pull at your heartstrings, and before you know it, you're thrown into this building, accelerating wall of indie-rock, while those signature vocals hold steady and soothing. If the rest of the album is anything like this, The Stars Are Indifferent To Astronomy will absolutely have a firm place in your top-ten list of 2012, local or otherwise. {band official} {preorder at Barsuk}

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There’s always a bit of melodrama involved when a indie singer/songwriter or emo type in his early 20s writes about his life-destroying breakup: Dudes, you’re in your twenties, you’re supposed to have a horrible romantic life. Things get a lot more devastating to listeners when the songwriter is White Town’s Jyoti Mishra, an indie-pop veteran in his mid-40s and he spends an entire album sorting through the wreckage of his personal and romantic life after a decade-plus marriage goes down the tubes on Monopole. It isn’t quarter-life odes to The One That Got Away, but lamenting the irreplaceable loss of The One. For a guy best known for his 1997 mega-hit “Your Woman,” it’s a startlingly direct look inside his personal life.

It’s not like Mishra hasn’t attempted to distract himself from his loneliness. He started (and dropped out of) sociology and creative writing programs at the University of Derby. He buckled down and Monopole as the second release from his own label, Bzangy Groink, handling virtually everything from song inception to fanzine-level press. Still, there are events that define a life, and it’s hard not to come away from Monopole, with its start-to-finish chronicle of his wrecked relationship, with the feeling that Mishra will never be able to truly put the past few years behind him.

TIG: After all the misery that’s helped inspire this album, does it feel like it’s behind you with the release of this album?

Jyoti Mishra: It’s been a weird process, as you know. It would have been a lot sooner, because the last album was 2006, 2007. With divorce stuff and my parents being ill, it’s been difficult to get a continued bit of time to keep working. It’s taken much longer than I would have liked. I’m not like through the thing of being through it yet. It’s still in the process. It’s not like it’s a past album yet. When it’s a past album, I’ll be able to draw on it. It still feels too current. Everything I’m singing about on it feels too now, you know?

Is that because you’re so involved in every aspect of it, handling all songwriting, performing, recording, album art and running the label, are you more immersed in the emotion tied into the songs?

JM: I think if I handed it off to anybody else, even down to the videos and stuff. I know it’s my own fault, because I’m too much of a control freak. I want everything to be right. It’s partially based on bad experiences before, which were a long time ago. I’m talking about EMI stuff. When you work really hard on something and get a graphic design back that’s just awful, it kind of puts you off to working with other people again. [Laughs] I know there’s probably great people out there that I could use, but I’ll just do it myself, even though I’m not really a graphic designer. I just knock up something that will do.

After having problems with other people in the past, do you get to the point where it’s just easier to do everything yourself than try to explain your ideas and struggle with other people?

JM: I’m not a trained graphic designer, so it’s always going to be worse if I do it myself, because I haven’t got that knowledge or craft, but it will be better than someone doing a botched job, like a slick botched job. The same with videos; I’ve already made a few short films. I’m not a filmmaker. I’m sure if I had the money and the ability to hand it over to a proper director, I’d get back the videos that were vector-edited and all that kind of stuff. But, A)  who can I find to do it, and B) I can’t afford it. It’s like you just do it yourself. It’s partially political, and partially no money.

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