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In 2009, Neil Hannon took a break from being the Divine Comedy, got together with Thomas Walsh of Pugwash and started an intentionally short-lived new band called the Duckworth Lewis Method.
The Divine Comedy: Bang Goes the Knighthood
Originally from Adelaide, Sia Furler moved to the UK in the mid 1990s to launch her career as a downtempo R&B artist, gaining attention first as the voice of Zero 7 and then as a solo artist with the odd hit single. But over 10 years and four studio albums, Furler has slowly moved away from the effervescent ballads associated with songs like Zero 7's "Destiny" and her biggest solo hit, 2006's "Breathe Me".
Sia: We Are Born
Nina Nastasia: Outlaster
Though Nina Nastasia is known for writing sparse, haunted folk songs, none of her albums have ever sounded plain or unadorned. She's never limited herself to simply acoustic guitar and voice, frequently working with strings in some form on nearly all of her albums since 2004's Dogs .Julian Lynch: Mare
Julian Lynch first hit our radar last year with a few promising tracks on the first Underwater Peoples compilation, followed by Orange You Glad , his debut release (and first non-CDR full-length) for the Brooklyn-based experimental label Olde English Spelling Bee.
Singer Amelia Fletcher and bassist Rob Pursey's partnership dates back more than 20 years: they were both in the late-1980s twee-punk band Talulah Gosh, found a sound they could stick with at the beginning of the 90s with Heavenly, formed an alliance with multi-instrumentalist John Stanley in the late 90s as Marine Research, and have been calling themselves Tender Trap on record since 2002. In other words, they've been around a lot longer than the better-known band with the similar name. Dansette Dansette , though, is the first album they've released since the rise of the Vivian Girls and Dum Dum Girls and Brilliant Colors and The Pains of Being Pure at Heart-- the new generation of groups that are operating more or less in the barrettes-in-the-hair mode Fletcher's various bands have been occupying for a few decades.
Tender Trap: Dansette Dansette
Maps & Atlases: Perch Patchwork
Maps & Atlases released a few EPs before Perch Patchwork , their debut full-length, and the band has done a fair amount of growing up in the meantime.
Above everything else that defines them, the Roots are capital-P Professionals. That's why they're perfect for their "Late Night" job.
The Roots: How I Got Over
On their sophomore full-length, San Francisco's Magic Bullets take careful, well positioned steps to revive a sound that marries early 1980s UK guitar pop and 90s college rock.
Magic Bullets: Magic Bullets
Forest Swords: Dagger Paths
If there's any space left between micro-genres like witch house/drag, hauntology, hypnagogic pop/chillwave, and drone-step, Matthew Barnes has found it.Meursault: All Creatures Will Make Merry
Mp3 blogs are blamed for every music-in-the-digital-age woe: declining CD sales, blink-and-you-miss-it hype cycles, cavalier attitudes towards copyright, loss of paying music journalism jobs. What you don't hear so much is how these sites create and foster communities-- virtual ones, obviously, but geographical ones too.In April, Pitchfork's Nitsuh Abebe asked, "Have we reached some point where our knees jerk and we kick away anything any critic can write off as cutesy or 'twee' or associate with the wrong movies?" He had a point, of course. After a short burst of enchanting indie pop albums by Belle and Sebastian, Camera Obscura, the Boy Least Likely To, and many others in the mid-2000s, a cutesy sensibility has gone on to conquer the box office (Michael Cera, Zooey Deschanel) and the Billboard charts (Owl City).