Lunar Youth

Lunar Youth’s songs are glorious celebrations of place. Over echoing guitars and cascading synths, Simon Berlin’s laid back, romantic croon tells of youth cults, forgotten nightclubs, and futuristic dystopias. Influenced by the glamorous aesthetic and sound of Roxy Music and the imagist poetry of Arthur Symons, Lunar Youth play slick, sheen pop rooted in young emotion. Singer and guitarist Berlin is joined by his bearded brother Adam on drums and the famed man about town Peter Davies on bass.

• Misfits

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Regina Spektor- Far

Regina Spektor writes the kind of crazy-quilt confessionals we used to hear a lot from 1990s alt-rockers but don’t get enough of these days. The Russian-born Lower East Side piano punk has the European yelp of Björk, the loopiness of Fiona Apple, the too-much-information torridness of Tori Amos and the slanted critical eye of Liz Phair. But none of those girls ever interrupted a song about long-term commitment to uncork a flurry of dolphin noises, as Spektor does on “Folding Chair,” one of the stranger — and catchier — moments on her excellent third major-label record.

The 29-year-old singer-songwriter’s 2004 disc, Soviet Kitsch, flaunted her exotic Old World accent on stark, ranting torch songs that followed a boozy logic. 2006’s Begin to Hope had fuller production and great one-liners about being a doomed New York romantic, like a Joni Mitchell for the post-Strokes era. Produced by Jeff Lynne, Garret “Jacknife” Lee, Mike Elizondo and David Kahne, Far matches Kitsch’s rococo flow with the follow-up’s pop smarts. On the jaunty, hip-hop-tinged “Dance Anthem of the 80’s,” she wanders lonely streets with her slip hanging out, “like a drunk, but not.” “Laughing With” begins as a meditation on God’s wicked sense of humor and ends collapsing in an existential freakout over a soft beat and weeping cello. Spektor is a woman who doesn’t need much excuse to have an emotional Chernobyl (in one song, it’s finding a wallet with a Blockbuster card in it). But she’s also the rare screwball who gets more universal as she gets weirder.

• Eet
• Laughing With
• The Calculation

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Bobby Bare, Jr.- The American Bread EP

American Bread is an absolute revelation. For anyone who digs his more punk, raucous numbers, you may find yourself scratching your head a bit at first. Produced and crafted with help from David Vandervelde, Bare’s vocal performance is his most reserved and restrained to date, but it also shows off a subtle power that can sometimes be hidden when he is shredding a tune like “Nothin’ Better to Do” or “The Heart Bionic”. The aforementioned, “I Need You” is the true standout performance, thanks to the restraint that hints at madness possibly lurking behind the seemingly calm facade of Bare’s vocal. While “A Horse With No Name”, which is well done in a minimal, almost trance like state, was an obvious choice to include on such an album – maybe too obvious, really – “Sister Golden Hair” is even more obvious. A version of Bare covering that track has made the “blog-rounds” in the last year or two, so it is interesting to see that Bare included two takes of the classic tune to close out the album. The “Alpha version” takes a laid back and gentle acoustic approach while the “Beta version” grabs that acoustic guitar and smashes it to peices with a plugged-in fervor that many Bare Jr. fans will recognize rather easily.

• Ventura Highway
• I Need You

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Ola Podrida – Belly Of The Lion

Headed by film composer David Wingo, Ola Podrida have performed their atmospheric, folk-tinged, majestic noise at sold-out headlining shows in New York, at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in Europe, and with like-minded contemporaries including Fleet Foxes and Beach House.  Chockfull of unsentimental love songs, Belly Of The Lion pulses with the burgeoning sexuality borne of feral adolescent summers spent in the sprawling suburbs of the South. It’s hard not to be wooed, as the songs gingerly lay to rest the calamities that inevitably befall an adventurous heart.

If Pink Floyd had been influenced by Bedhead and Flying Saucer Attack, they might well have crafted gorgeous shimmering gems like “We All Radiant” and “Monday Morning.” As tracks like “Donkey” swell, almost to the point of bursting, it’s easy to be reminded of Jeff Mangum’s heartbreaking croon. Alternately, the gently driving rhythm and fragile vocals on “Lakes of Wine” project a hypnotizing mood that seems to summon the spirit of Nick Drake, while “Roomful of Sparrows” with its pastoral shoegaze rock feels like the best song Kevin Shields never wrote.

• The Closest We Will Ever Be
• Donkey
• Roomful Of Sparrows

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Gavin DeGraw- Free

Free follows Gavin DeGraw’s eponymous second album by less than a year — a quick turnaround by any standard, but its swiftness is shocking considering that it took him half a decade to deliver a follow-up to his 2003 debut, Chariot. Free feels as if it were recorded quickly: it weighs in at a mere nine songs, including a reworking of the previous album’s “Young Love” and a cover of Chris Whitley’s “Indian Summer,” bringing the total of new tunes to an EP-length seven songs, every one given a treatment that’s decidedly looser and smaller in scale than the slick, overworked Gavin DeGraw. Such intimacy suits DeGraw’s new songs, which tend to be ruminative, but this subdued setting also shows the seams in his writing and performance, whether it’s his adoption of a mush-mouthed, bluesy growl for “Indian Summer” or how he stitches together clichés and naiveté on the spartan closer, “Why Do the Men Stray.” But between these two bookends is the most consistent music DeGraw has yet made — yes, he could use at least one hook as big as “I Don’t Wanna Be,” but Free manages to flow easily and warmly, something that couldn’t quite be said of the blue-eyed soul bluster of his first two albums.

• Indian Summer
• Lover Be Strong
• Stay

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Bob Dylan- Christmas In The Heart

After the initial shock fades, the existence of Christmas In The Heart seems perhaps inevitable. After all, the thing Bob Dylan loves most of all are songs that are handed down from generation to generation, songs that are part of the American fabric, songs so common they never seem to have been written. These are the songs Dylan chooses to sing on Christmas In The Heart, a cheerfully old-fashioned holiday album from its Norman Rockwell-esque cover to its joyous backing vocals. Apart from the breakneck “Must Be Santa,” which barrelhouses like a barroom, Dylan doesn’t really reinterpret these songs as much as simply play them with his crackerjack road band, dropping in a little flair — restoring “we’ll have to muddle through somehow” to “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” singing the opening of “O Come All Ye Faithful” in its original Latin — but never pushing tunes in unexpected directions. Many would argue having Dylan croon these carols is unexpected enough and, true, there are times his gravelly rumble is a bit pronounced, but nothing here feels forced, it all feels rather fun, provided you’re on the same wavelength as latter-day Bob, where the sound and swing of the band is as important as the song, where there’s an undeniable nostalgic undertow to all the proceedings. And, of course, there’s no better time for celebratory sound, swing, and nostalgia than the holidays, which may be why Christmas In The Heart is a bit of a left-field delight.

• Here Comes Santa Claus
• Do You Hear What I Hear?
• Winter Wonderland

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Hurricane Bells- Tonight Is The Ghost

Hurricane bells used to hang from the tops of seaside trees, heavy bells designed to ring out only when a storm approached. Fittingly, Tonight Is The Ghost, the debut album from the band Hurricane Bells, is a moody affair. A mix of somber undercurrents and chiming guitars, the album is at once plaintive and triumphant, bathed in echo and reverb. Yet there’s a looseness, hope, and soulfulness in its melancholic tempest; a late night thundershower with a new day on its heels.

Hurricane Bells is a new project from Steve Schiltz, singer and guitarist of Longwave for nearly ten years. After touring the better part of last year around Longwave’s fourth album Secrets Are Sinister – a critical success and arguably the best of the band’s career – Schiltz set up shop to create a new project with little else than his MacBook and an Mbox. He wrote, played, recorded, and mixed every note himself, arranging what would become Tonight Is The Ghost. Some songs were fully crafted within the past 18 months, while others are newly architected from pieces written throughout his years as a songwriter.

Vagrant Records released Tonight Is The Ghost digitally on November 10, 2009. A b-side, “Monsters”, appears on the soundtrack of the second film of the Twilight franchise, New Moon.

• This Year

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